’)
Larry Whitten doesn’t workers speaking Spanish in his presence, because they might be talking about him. And he wants them to Anglicize their names. After taking over a hotel in Taos, New Mexico, Whitten says he’s doing what he’s always done.
After he arrived, Whitten met with the employees. He says he immediately noticed that they were hostile to his management style and worried they might start talking about him in Spanish.
“Because of that, I asked the people in my presence to speak only English because I do not understand Spanish,” Whitten says. “I’ve been working 24 years in Texas and we have a lot of Spanish people there. I’ve never had to ask anyone to speak only English in front of me because I’ve never had a reason to.”
Some employees were fired, Whitten says, because they were hostile and insubordinate. He says they called him “a white (N-word).”
Fired hotel manager Kathy Archuleta says the workers initially tried to adjust to his style. “We had already gone through four or five owners before him, so we knew what to expect,” Archuleta says. “I told (the workers) we needed to give him a chance.”
Then Whitten told some employees he was changing their Spanish first names. Whitten says it’s a routine practice at his hotels to change first names of employees who work the front desk phones or deal directly with guests if their names are difficult to understand or pronounce.
I wonder what he would have told an employee named Barack Hussein Obama to do.
