That’s the way it is in California. I was in Northern Cal this weekend in a town called Morgan Hill. Stopped at McD’s, and we were the only white family in the restaurant at the time. Everyone was speaking Spanish— employees and customers. It’s like that a lot in the farming towns. I live in a farming town, so I’m used to it.
However, I was in Davis earlier in the weekend, and I didn’t see very many Latino folks, even though it’s a farm community. There seemed to be different crops there, requiring less manual labor, so I surmised that might be a reason.
If this was the McDonald's off Monterey Highway, they were well known for hiring kids of all colors. And at that time (pre 1986 amnesty), Morgan Hill had even more agricultural activity, the illegal aliens mostly working in the fields. Around twenty years ago, the service businesses in Morgan Hill abruptly replaced the kids with Latino immigrants with limited English skills. This happened so quick, it's almost as if the business community got together and decided to make the transition at once.
Yeah, there's a reason. It's called the University of California at Davis, one of the largest universities in the U.C. system. College students often work at these type of jobs, and you have to speak decent English to be a student there.