¡Esto es México! ¿¡Hablar Inglés!?
To legally hire a foreigner, an employer needs to certify that the position requires the foreigner to have a specific skill not available on the local market for one reason or another. As far as I know, though, restaurant servers aren’t in short supply, not even bilingual ones.
So… while I’m slightly dubious of the story, I don’t think this strains the plausibility test too much. As posted recently on “Tic Toc”, a patron at a Condesa bar ordered a daiquiri from the server, described as “blonde”, but nothing special (MEE-OWWWW!), only to be met with looks of incomprehension. After pointing to a photo of a daiquiri on the menu card, the server returned with two margaritas. At which point, the server had to call in another “blonde” server to try to straighten things out… requiring the intervention then of the security guard, who had to TRANSLATE the order for the servers… who apparently only spoke English.
The assumption the “X” poster came away with was (and I quote in translation):
The guard began to realized the waitress didn’t understand Spanish, and we asked him “how do they hire these girls?”. and he said, it’s “because they’re pretty and attract foreigners”, to which I replied, ” Yes, but this is a Mexican community, where you have to speak Spanish to work:”
It’s not always a requirement to speak Spanish for a foreigner to hold a job here… assuming the job requires a specific skill set your employer can plausibly show is needed for the position. And, I assume there are jobs were it doesn’t really matter when you’re speaking Nahuatl, or Spanish, or Bulgarian although one assumes those are the sort of jobs that could be filled from the local market without turning to foreign workers.
Then again, we’re talking Condesa, the gringo ghetto of Mexico.
Source: Milenio,
Tic Toc
mexfiles.net 