Marisol Medrano

  A crew member of Mariposa Landscapes, Inc. working in Rancho Mirage, CA made international news last month simply trying to do his job. Why? Because he captured on video an unidentified woman approaching him and repeatedly asking to see his “papers.” Newsweek, NBC Palm Springs, TMZ, the Daily Mail in the UK, and many more have all posted the video and chronicled the incident due to its inflammatory nature. According to NBC Palm Springs, Juan Andrade has worked for the landscaping company for 10 years. The woman who questioned him at the Parkview Villas had reportedly approached him three months prior when she told him to “go back to his country.” This time, she was unmasked and the video records Andrade asking her to step back for social distancing and the contentious discussion continues as she eventually walks away. “When she was harassing me, I started to feel mad because I was just doing my work,” Andrade told NBC. While the City Attorney deemed it an “isolated incident,” an investigation by Parkview Villas, an affordable housing complex for those 55+ owned by the city, could lead to the woman’s eviction under the Housing Authority’s zero tolerance policy for harassment, reported NBC. Andrade told NBC he hopes his story can be a catalyst for change. Slightly less well known, but still news-making was another incident in July when a former New Hampshire conservative talk radio host at WSMN, Dianna Ploss, filmed herself yelling at a landscape crew in Nashua because ...