Larry Whitten has declared his adobe-style Taos hotel a “no tilde zone” for Hispanic employees.
Whitten is getting hammered in the media over a series of demands that front line staff at his newly acquired hotel in northern New Mexico anglicize their names and refrain from speaking Spanish in his presence.
Oy vey.
According to an extensive interview with the Associated Press:
No more Martin (Mahr-TEEN). It was plain-old Martin. No more Marcos. Now it would be Mark.
Whitten’s management style had worked for him as he’s turned around other distressed hotels he bought in recent years across the country.
The 63-year-old Texan, however, wasn’t prepared for what followed.
His rules and his firing of several Hispanic employees angered his employees and many in this liberal enclave of 5,000 residents at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, where the most alternative of lifestyles can find a home and where Spanish language, culture and traditions have a long and revered history.
“I came into this landmine of Anglos versus Spanish versus Mexicans versus Indians versus everybody up here. I’m just doing what I’ve always done,” he says.
Aside from hotelier Whitten’s shocking lack of insight into Taos’ tolerant culture, pissing off the community and presuming, as he did in a CNN interview, that lily white guests from North Carolina would be flummoxed by the pronunication of “José,” the situation speaks to a larger issue across the Rocky Mountain West — diversity.
Where would we be without Giuseppe the coal miner, Matei the sheep herder and Kyoshi the sugar beet farmer?
Add to that “Marisol the desk clerk” and I suspect we wouldn’t be very far at all.
