AITA for putting up a “Do not clean.” sign in English and Spanish for cleaners that were coming to the house whose racial and cultural identity I was not made aware of?
A Redditor from South Florida shared a story about putting up a “Do not clean” sign in English and Spanish for cleaners coming to their home. With no prior knowledge of the workers’ backgrounds, the user added Spanish due to the region’s large Spanish-speaking population. However, the boss of the cleaning service later accused the sign of being racist. Was this an act of cultural sensitivity or unnecessary assumption? Read the story below.
‘ AITA for putting up a “Do not clean.” sign in English and Spanish for cleaners that were coming to the house whose racial and cultural identity I was not made aware of?’
I live in south Florida, which across the board of general people and workers has a large percentage of Spanish speakers. I live with my father and he had informed me that there were cleaners coming by tomorrow that would be going room to room tasked with cleaning the whole house,
I had no prior knowledge given to me about the business, workers, etc. and we have had plenty of cleaners and general workers in the past who were and were not Hispanic.
My room was not to be cleaned in the job, so I put up a little paper sign on my door saying “Do not clean” and the same in Spanish which I had specifically verified as proper because google translate tends to mess up.
I met the cleaners briefly and treated them politely and respectfully and they spoke no word of the sign nor did they have any seeming issue with me. But then I get informed by my father the next day that the boss of the cleaning service business had called him and accused the sign of being r**ist because I had assumed cleaners would speak Spanish.
I won’t be hanging any more signs because of this incident but I fail to see how this applies, sure if the Spanish part of the sign was present in an area where Spanish is rarely found, I could see it as possibly assuming.
However as previously mentioned, I had no information on the workers at all and we have had people working in the house before that did not speak English but did in fact speak Spanish. If it matters, the boss and workers were white and Portuguese.
See what others had to share with OP:
MushroomRadiant4647 − NTA. I don’t think it’s r**ist to put a sign in English and Spanish. When I lived in Hawaii, many locations had signs or menu’s in both English and Japanese because of all the Japanese tourists. Is that r**ist? What about the people traveling from other countries? I think they are just trying to accommodate to the best of their ability like you were doing. Like you said, there is a large population of Spanish speakers in the area.
BoingBoingBooty − NTA. USA has no official language, English is the most popular language, Spanish is the second most popular. 91.2% of the population use one of them as their main language.. Portuguese comes in at 0.2%. Tough titties, his ancestors should have colonised harder.
mycatiskai42 − NTA, put up a new sign with English, Spanish, German, Japanese, Mandarin, and as many languages you can think of, except Portuguese.
ophidiomyces − NTA. The US has no official language but most often prints information in English and Spanish. It is not an assumption about each reader. It is a matter of practicality. It’s not like you only wrote in Spanish. You made the sign legible to a more generalized audience. The company is making strange assumptions.
benbever − NTA and a very weird accusation. Where I live, signs are often in English, Dutch, German and French. Sometimes Turkish and Arabic too.
Tinkerpro − Sometimes, people look for reasons to be offended. We had a sign in our kitchen at work about something. It was in English, then we added it in Spanish, still having the problem we added French, Chinese and Russian.
Basically, it became funny in a way and every few days, someone would add to the sign in a language they spoke. Finally the boss caught the cleaner doing the bad thing red handed and corrected the problem then and there. We left the signs up for years.
ResistSpecialist4826 − NTA and if anything the cleaning company was being r**ist. This gives off a very “how dare you lump us in with them / we are better than Mexicans who clean houses vibe” to me. I doubt their concern was anything beyond feeling like their white skin and Brazilian status was being lumped in with darker people from supposedly “worse” places.
Fierylatino69 − NTA. This is a very specific issue, mostly for older Portuguese people. Portugal is essentially very similar to Spain. Our culture is very similar, our climate is very similar, our socio-economical situation, our history (both ancient and modern). And we are neighbours too.
Issue is, Portugal is a smaller country than Spain in everything. Size, population, mediatic importance. You name it. So people (Not in Europe though) very often confuse us as part of Spain, and also just assume we speak Spanish (we do btw, but it is not our mother tongue. Just a bonus from living next door).
Older, or more conservative Portuguese people tend to take issue with this specific misconception. You couldn’t have known this, though. Also, good for you that you took that extra step to provide your sign in both English and Spanish.
LowBalance4404 − NTA. Sounds like the white boss is just looking for something to complain about.
LotsofLittleSlaps − NTA. you only made an attempt to communicate. It’s not inherently r**ist behavior. FWIW I’ve lived in a few countries and sometimes had to try three languages before someone understood me. it wasn’t my first language that worked, and it wasn’t their first language that worked. meh to this complaint. also could have said Daddy bucks, please don’t have them clean my room.
Do you think adding a Spanish translation in a predominantly Spanish-speaking area was reasonable, or did it make unfounded assumptions about the workers? How would you handle similar situations to ensure clear communication without offending anyone? Share your thoughts below!