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NORTH CENTER — A longtime Mexican restaurant received numerous racist phone calls last week, the owner’s daughter said, describing a wave of harassment that followed President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Taqueria El Asadero, 2213 W. Montrose Ave., has been in the North Center for the past 31 years, serving Mexican staples like tacos, burritos and tamales to neighbors as well as elected officials. Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel became a fan after visiting the family restaurant in 2019.
But last week, according to Jazmin Flores, the owner’s daughter, the restaurant began receiving harassing phone calls after Trump was sworn into a second term as president.
“We have been getting a lot of private and anonymous calls,” Flores said. “It’s people just saying some racist a— sh—.”
Flores posted about one of the incidents on the restaurant’s social media last Wednesday, noting that Taqueria El Asadero “has been bombarded with racist weirdos calling in” since Jan. 20. Flores wrote that she called one anonymous caller back and the man resumed cursing at her.
“Not knowing who we are and the work we have done for our community. In some sort of way I pity the person — not only for being weird (and probably ugly) but also full of hate and anger,” Flores wrote in her post. “It must suck to live a life like that.”
Ald. Matt Martin (47th), in a statement to Block Club, accused Trump of trying to sow division among communities, adding that the president “wants us to blame each other for the massive wealth inequality in America while he surrounds himself with billionaires and near trillionaires.”
“But we won’t buy it,” Martin said. “From the German beer halls to the taquerias, immigrant-owned businesses built our neighborhood.”
Flores said this isn’t the first time the restaurant became a target of harassment, noting that it received similar calls after Trump’s first electoral victory in 2016.
“One call that kind of stuck with me was what sounded like a group of people, and you could hear them cheering, ‘Build that wall, go back to Mexico,’” Flores said.
Flores said she thinks the phone calls are inspired by the president’s rhetoric disparaging immigrants.
Trump announced his 2015 candidacy by singling out immigrants, accusing Mexicans of being “rapists” who bring drugs to the country. During his Jan. 20 inauguration speech, Trump claimed that certain immigration policies in the country as providing “sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals.”
Since returning to office, Trump signed a flurry of executive orders and memos that have left Chicago’s immigrant communities fearful of deportation, even if they are in the country legally.
Trump’s “heated rhetoric” was associated with a surge in reported hate crimes across the country during his first presidency, according to a 2018 research paper from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Loyola University.
“We use historical hate crime data from the Federal Bureau of Investigations from 1992 through 2017 to show that President Trump’s rise to the presidency was associated with one of the largest upticks in hate crimes in recorded American history — second only to the spike in hate crimes after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001,” according to the researchers.
The increase in incidents of harassment, intimidation and violence after Trump’s first election was dubbed “The Trump Effect” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Neighboring businesses told Block Club they had not experienced similar harassment since Trump was inaugurated.
Flores said the harassing calls stopped coming in after she wrote about her experience on social media. But the family remains vigilant, she said.
“I’m just glad my dad wasn’t the one answering the phone,” Flores said.
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