Latina Ejected at Meeting for Not Using Interpreter

A group of about 40 people stormed from a City Council meeting in protest after the council refused to let a bilingual woman translate her address from English to Spanish without using a city interpreter.

Mayor Robert Cunningham ordered two police officers to escort Teresa Sanchez from the council chamber when she balked at the council order to use the translator.

The outburst was just one in a growing number of clashes between the Bell Gardens council and the mostly Latino community. As Sanchez was escorted from the chamber, a group of Latinos currently seeking the recall of four of the five council members followed her out in a show of support.

City Council members, four of whom do not speak Spanish, recently adopted an unwritten policy prohibiting anyone who speaks Spanish from directly addressing the council through a microphone. The Spanish speaker must talk to an interpreter who then translates into a microphone.

Outraged Latinos who left the meeting called the policy a violation of their First Amendment right to freedom of speech and said that Spanish speakers in the audience had a right to hear what the speaker said to the council in his own language.