'I Want to See Your Papers': Woman Ignores California Landscaper's Distancing Request

A woman was filmed demanding a landscaper show her his “papers” while he mowed a lawn at a housing complex in Rancho Mirage, California, on July 15.

In this video, shot by Juan Carlos Andrade Mendez in a housing community named Parkview Villas, the woman blows him a kiss before circling around his ride-on and placing herself in his path. Mendez can be heard in the footage telling the woman, “I’m doing my work, can you move?”

He asks her several more times to move from his “work area” to no avail, and eventually he turns off the machine.

“Can you stay away?” he asks her. “You’re too close to me right now and you’re not wearing a mask. Can you step away?”

She ignores Mendez’s repeated requests to socially distance and says: “No, I want to see your papers.” The woman later calls him a “peeping Tom.”

Mendez told Storyful the woman has previously interrupted his work at the same location. “I am landscaper, and I go to that property at least twice a week,” he said, adding that he recorded this interaction to show the manager of the housing complex.

Speaking with NBC Palm Springs Mendez said, "Like any other complex I was just doing the work for all of them, mowing the lawn. I passed by her apartment and when I turned around to do the second round that’s when I saw her standing.”

He told NBC that three months prior to this video being shot, this same woman approached him and told him to “go back to his country.”

In the same report, from July 17, the city attorney for Rancho Mirage, Steve Quintanilla, as well as the city’s housing authority manager, Marcus Aleman, said they will initiate an investigation process regarding the incident. Credit: Juan Carlos Andrade Mendez via Storyful