Urban Taqueria/FacebookHanif Mohamed, the owner of a New Mexico restaurant, isn’t a Donald Trump fan.
His establishment, Urban Taqueria, has come under fire for ‘offending the whole community’ with their menu, featuring delicacies like ‘The Immigrant’ vegan taco and a burrito called ‘The Wall’.
Based in Albuquerque, Mohamed has named its menu items after a number of classic President Trump soundbites, such as ‘Fake News’, ‘No Collusion’ (with reference to the Mueller report), ‘Lock Her Up’ and ‘Bad Hombre’. Nasty.
Urban Taqueria/FacebookThe tasty items have riled up some people; such as Patricia Perea, a University of New Mexico professor, who says normalising vitriolic catchphrases often used in widespread hate speech is too much of a risk.
As reported by KOAT, as per Fox News, Perea said:
It seems fun, it seems like you can make fun of this and maybe make it lighthearted, but you really can’t, you’re offending a whole community.
It’s normalising the terms and potentially turning them into funny or humorous terms, and the more that you do that, the more likely people are to repeat them and perhaps forget the contexts in which they were said.
Urban Taqueria/FacebookEven a customer aired their concerns. Juan Hernandez said: ‘The way things are right now. It’s not good… we need to have respect for others and have limits.’
Mohamed, an immigrant himself, only opened Urban Taqueria six weeks ago, and has hired a number of immigrants to work in the restaurant.
His reasoning for the quirky menu names like ‘The Republicans’, ‘Outsourced’, and ‘Wikileaks’ is sound – Mohamed wants to keep the conversation going around the president’s rhetoric.
Mohamed told KOAT:
99 percent of the people who walk in, more than 99 percent, don’t seem to have an issue with it.
The menu’s not designed to insult people or hurt people, but it’s just meant to keep the conversation going as to what’s happening around us.
Urban Taqueria/FacebookAnother customer, Christy Garcia, backed Mohamed’s names, saying: ‘To me it’s not offensive. I just think it’s interesting that they decided to be so bold with the names.’
I, for one, would love to bit into a loaded ‘Fake News’ taco – maybe Mohamed could rustle up a side of ‘covfefe’ to go with it.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.