By Kelly Mclaughlin For Dailymail.com
Published: 13:44 EST, 17 May 2015 | Updated: 16:55 EST, 17 May 2015
89shares
26
Viewcomments
U.S. Rep.Loretta Sanchez's senate campaign is off to a rocky start after she made an offensive joke about the difference between Indian Americans and Native Americans.
Just two days after announcing her campaign to run for U.S. senate, Sanchez, of Santa Ana, California, was filmed on Saturday describing a pending meeting she had with a man of South Asian descent.
'I am going to his office, thinking that I am going to meet with a,' she said, placing her hand over her mouth and making an echoing noise. 'Right? Because he said Indian American.
Scroll down for video
U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez was speaking at a gathering of Indian Americans at the California Democratic party convention in Anaheim when she made the joke about the difference between Native Americans and Indian Americans
She was describing a pending meeting she had with an Indian American man of South Asian descent, who she had originally thought was Native American when they spoke over the phone when she lifted her hand to her mouth and made an echoing noise and referenced Native Americans
Candidate's disparaging gesture about Native Americans
'And I go in there and it was great. It was just great because he said "I want to get my community involved". Involved. And that was the first time that we saw the Indian American community really come. ...'
Her comments were made at a gathering of Indian Americans at the California Democratic party convention in Anaheim, and much of the audience reacted with silence, according to KCRA.
It seemed that Sanchez, 55, who has served in Congress since 1997, was trying to use the apparent Native American 'war cry' to distinguish between Native Americans and Indian Americans.
The man who filmed the comments, Uduak-Joe Ntuke, of Long Beach, said that many people in the room found what Sanchez said to be insensitive.
'I was shocked and appalled that she'd make the disparaging comments about Native Americans that way,' he said.
Sanchez's opponent in the Senate race, California Attorney General Kamala Harris, told the Sacramento Bee that 'there is no place for that in our public discourse'.
The audience responded to Sanchez's actions with silence, and one man who filmed the event said he was 'shocked and appalled' with what the U.S. representative had done
When asked about her actions, Sanchez explained her thinking behind what she had done.
She told the Bee: What I said was that I got a call from somebody from over the phone and he said I want to talk to you about having help from the Indian community, and I thought he meant the American Indian community, in the sense of the Native American Indian community
'I think that Native Americans have an incredibly great history, and a great presence in our country, and many of them are supporting our election.'
This is not the first time Sanchez has made headlines for political incorrectness.
In 2010, while speaking on Spanish-language TV, she said that the Republican party was joining forces with the Vietnamese community to take her congressional seat.
She claimed that her opponent, Republican Van Tran was 'very anti-immigrant and very anti-Hispanic'. Tran said that Sanchez's comments were racist.
Sanchez later said 'Native Americans have an incredibly great history, and a great presence in our country, and many of them are supporting our election'