A woman has been charged with a misdemeanor hate crime after she allegedly punched a McDonald’s manager in Mountain View after she refused to wear a mask or leave, and profanely insulted Mexican people during the confrontation and to police afterward, authorities said.

Alena Jenkins, 40, of San Jose, also faces a misdemeanor battery charge following her arrest early Saturday morning at the restaurant on El Monte Avenue. Jenkins, who Mountain View police described as unhoused when she was arrested, was scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday.

“Targeting people because of their perceived ethnicity is not just a shame, it’s a crime,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a news release Wednesday.

Jenkins was inside the McDonald’s without a mask, violating restaurant policy and prompting an employee to ask her to leave. Police and prosecutors say that spurred her to yell, “F—ing Mexican! Go ahead and call the cops!”

That was followed by Jenkins allegedly shoving a plexiglass shield and sign at the employee. When the restaurant manager tried to intervene and asked her to leave, prosecutors contend she walked around the front counter, called the manager a “stupid Mexican,” and “used her fist to strike him on the arm and shoulder.”

After responding police officers arrested her, she reportedly continued her verbal barrage against the McDonald’s employees to the officers, insulting their race and English literacy.

It was the second hate crime filed this month involving a Mountain View eatery. On March 8, a Marin County woman was charged after she allegedly spat on an Asian man dining downtown while yelling racial slurs at him and a companion.

The most serious hate crime charged in the county this month involved a San Francisco man charged with attempted rape after he was seen violently thrashing and yelling anti-Asian profanities at a woman at Diridon Station in San Jose.

It was part of a rising swarm of violence against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic that has surged in recent weeks and peaked with a series of serial spa shootings in Atlanta that killed eight people, six of them of Korean and Chinese heritage.

Asian American communities and anti-hate groups across the country have galvanized to call for both law-enforcement, legislative, and policy solutions to curb anti-Asian sentiment fueled in large part by the repetition by prominent voices — chief among the former President Donald Trump — of debunked linkages between Asian people and the coronavirus.