Bertha Zúñiga had never felt as insecure as she does now.
She has been working at a mobile taco stand in Los Angeles, California, for more than 12 years.
But in recent months she has suffered constant attacks, the worst of them just this Monday.
The stall worker had just started her work in the morning when the woman in the green dress approached to order a burrito.
After treating her, she came back and told them that she didn't have money to buy anything else, but that she was hungry.
Zúñiga told her that there was no problem, but that she
would have to wait another five minutes for them to see her again
because they had to finish setting up the booth.
The owner of the taqueria, Rogelio Lozano told Noticias Telemundo, that when the woman arrived "she was drunk or drugged" and began to say: "I am very hungry (...) with profanity and bad words."
Suddenly, the client lost her temper and threw the trays full of food, the carafes of flavored water and then approached Zúñiga while some of the people who were around recorded her movements.
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At that moment, the woman punched Zúñiga in the neck, who recoiled from the force of the impact and immediately put his hands to the area of the blow, visibly sore.
"You can't do that, you can't hit her
," the man recording the video is heard saying to the woman in the green dress.
Bertha Zúñiga, an employee of South Taco's Stand in Los Angeles, California, is assaulted by a customer.GoFundMe
After beating Zúñiga, the aggressor continued to insult the other employees and before leaving, she served herself a plate of food and spat on the trays that she had not thrown on the floor.
"He leaves and the police do not arrive. All the disaster that he did here. He spat on all the meat
," lamented the man who uploaded the video on Facebook, identified with the user of Ubaldo Carrillo.
According to the owner of the place, it took more than an hour for the police to arrive.
"We don't understand if you defend yourself or call the police if they don't come anyway," Lozano said, adding that they lost $4,000 after the incident.
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Activists warn that crimes against street vendors in Los Angeles have been on the rise in recent years.
Most of the people who work in these semi-formal establishments are Latino immigrants.
Because many of them do not have documents proving their legal stay in the country, they are afraid to report the abuses they suffer daily, chef and activist Jimmy Saucez said in an interview with CBS.
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"That's why they're attacking them because they think they're not going to say anything. I think they're trying to get something for nothing and it's easy for them to steal and attack people to get what they want," he added.
A fundraising campaign for Zúñiga on the GoFundMe website has raised more than $5,000 for her from dozens of donors.