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Mercury Staff

A board member at David Douglas School District was arrested last month at a MAX station, and the ACLU is crying foul.

On March 13, Ana del Rocío was stopped at the Old Town Chinatown MAX station and asked about her fare. As Emilly Prado reported for the Mercury, a police report from that stop says del Rocío activated a digital pass on her phone before stepping off the train, but Del Rocío says she had left her paid annual TriMet pass at home and “was willing to take the citation and own that.” She was arrested for refusing to provide identification and charged with Theft III of Services and Furnishing False Information to the Police, though the theft of services charge has since been dropped.

Del Rocío is being represented by the ACLU, which plans to fight the charge. Del Rocío goes by a different name than her legal name—Rosa Valderrama—which is the crux of this false information charge. It’s common in the Latinx community to go by a different name than your legally given name, and some argue that she should not be charged for doing so. TriMet has posted its own version of events, but uses her legal name instead of her preferred name throughout the narrative.

According to Portland Monthly, “Del Rocío says she was asked to provide more identifying information than legally mandated.”

The case has drawn a lot of attention on Twitter because of the racial implications of the case. A new hashtag has sprouted, pushed along by a Medium piece comparing this arrest to the recent arrest of two Black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks. Writer Glenn Fee points out that he is able to avoid detection when he rides without fare on TriMet due to the benefits of his white privilege: “I’m not proud of skirting the law, but I had the luxury of doing this because I am white, and I was confident that my race would protect me.”

Dozens are now tweeting about riding TriMet using #TriMetWhileWhite.

5 replies on “The Arrest of Ana del Rocío and #TriMetWhileWhite”

  1. Since we aren’t going to solve the problem of racism amongst Transit Police anytime soon the right solution is to just take the entire system fareless. This could be done using a nominal utility fee for all residents. Corvallis did this a few years ago and saw a 50% increase in transit ridership, that is what we call a Win/Win.

  3. Clearly the ACLU is hanging on Ana’s status. Not the fact that this case is fucking humiliating to Latinos by claiming Latinos are too dumb to remember their fucking name. Being of any race, does not make it any more or less difficult to remember your name. This case is literally being based on the notion that Latinos are too unintelligent to remember their own goddamn name!! State and city police are bad in Oregon. They are almost always totally biased. All the more reason a person of color would remember their own God dammn name!! This is the second time I have ever questioned the ACLU. The other time was when they were against requiring treatment for arrested drug addicts in Multnomah. They took that stance around 4 to 5 years ago.

  4. New Portland Mercury drinking game: for any article on someone with a vaguely latin name, take a shot for each time they use “latinx”.

    If it’s capitalized (why???), take two.

  5. But really, this is just so fucking stupid. For personal reasons I go by my middle name instead of my first, and have for decades, but have never bothered to get it legally changed. Many people don’t even know that it isn’t my first name, and I cannot even recall the last time I was addressed by my legal first name. This is not so uncommon in catholic communities (including, but not limited to, latinos) where most people have at least one more name than the typical WASP. Yet, I have never once “forgotten” my legal name when asked it in an official context/form/etc. Why should any official functionary (police, etc.) have to care what you call yourself or how you identify? They just need to check that your paper matches up. FFS.

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