IDENTITY CRISIS RISING LATINOPHOBIA DOES AMERICA INJUSTICE.

Byline: MARIEL GARZA

MAYBE it's just that summer came early this year and everyone's already in that irritable hot-weather mood, but it feels like there's some bad blood brewing. Not just in Los Angeles, but across California and the country.

It's a nastiness that's been simmering for years, but has started a rolling boil of late as Americas begin to collectively realize how many of the country's faces are now a few shades browner.

In Los Angeles, the tension is at times palpable. It's all over the Web on political sites, in academic debates, in chat rooms. (``Damn Mexicans. Pinche Gringos.'')

You can read it between the lines of news stories about the debate over President Bush's immigration reform plan and driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. Academics are using big words in articles and books to mask the underlying alarmism of the Latino effect on America's culture.

The timing couldn't be better for Friday's opening of ``A Day Without A Mexican,'' a satirical look at the rising Latinophobia. The premise of the movie is that one day all the Latinos - not just Mexicans - simply disappear, and their absence brings all facets of the state's society to a halt.

The point of the mockumentary, produced by two Mexican filmmakers, is to show how deeply embedded Latino immigrants are in the social and economic fabric of the state. But even this comedic take on the issue added fuel to the fire - and that was before the movie's release.

Apparently the cryptic billboards hyping the movie around Los Angeles (``On May 14 there will be no Mexicans in California'') were taken by some to contain a racist message. That prompted the billboard company to remove some of the signs - perhaps not surprising given the current atmosphere.

But what's not so funny is that there are plenty of people who would like nothing more than for all of the Latinos to disappear, blaming ``the Mexicans'' for everything bad that happens to America. And there are plenty of Latinos who have an equally dim view of Anglos, blaming ``the Gringos'' for everything bad that's happened to them in America.

Don't believe me? Just check out the chat forum on the movie's Web site (www.adaywithouthamexican.com) for some pure, in-your-face intolerance.

The United States in general and California in particular are becoming less white. It's nothing new. Study after study confirms that immigrants from Latin America - both legal and not - have transformed cities from Los Angeles to Chicago over the past couple of decades and continue to do so.

A report released this month by the Brookings Institution found that between 1990 and 2000, the 10 major urban centers of the United States saw dramatic racial and ethnic changes. According to the report, ``Living Together: A New Look at Racial and Ethnic Integration in Metropolitan Neighborhoods: 1990-2000,'' those 10 cities are now predominantly nonwhite. Over the course of the 1990s, the number of exclusively white neighborhoods dropped by 30 percent.

There's no argument that the white majority is shrinking. The debate is about what it means.

Also out this month is Harvard professor Samuel Huntington's controversial book about Latino immigrants ``Who We Are: The Challenges to America's National Identity.'' In the book, which was excerpted in Foreign Policy magazine earlier this year, Huntington gives in to Latinophobia. He sees Spanish-speaking immigrants as a threat to the Anglo-Protestant culture like no other large influx of immigrants in the country's history because Latinos, he says, don't assimilate.

This is a questionable stand at best.

Huntington's evidence, essentially, is the existence of businesses such as Vallarta Supermarket and Telemundo - that allow Latinos to continue to cook food from home and get news in their native language. Do people have to shop at Ralphs and watch CNN to become true Americans? Many studies contradict this argument, showing Spanish-speaking immigrants to be highly motivated to assimilate, to intermarry, to fight and die to protect the American way of life.

As this type of hand-wringing over immigrants became a bigger part of the national debate, it has been answered with an equally racist, though more private, reaction from the immigrant side. ``You don't like us, fine - we won't join your community,'' thus adding legitimacy to the otherwise outlandish idea that immigrants were going to turn parts of the country into Mexico North.

No one wants the USA to be Mexico, least of all those who left the country because they had no opportunities in the society of institutionalized corruption and economic inequity.

It's an empty fear, behind which is hiding something else: The fear of change, fear that the dominant Anglo-Protestant culture will be forever and fundamentally altered by the darker hued and heavily Catholic hordes from down south.

Or, to put an actual face on it, the fear of me.

As a child of a Mexican immigrant father and an Anglo-Protestant mother, my siblings and I are perfect examples of how Latino immigration is affecting the country. You bet I have a different cultural outlook than my maternal extended family, perhaps in ways that Huntington and others would disapprove of. But just as much, I also have different values and sensibilities from my paternal family still in Mexico. I am something completely different, both a damn Mexican and a pinche Gringa.

Yes, the country's culture will change and is changing, as it always has. You can fear it or embrace it, but short of some horrible violent upheaval that tears apart the country, there's little to be done about it.

I just hope I'm wrong about the bad blood brewing, that the invective will get louder and uglier as the national debate over immigration continues. Maybe it is just the heat, stirring up the hackles of everyone in this big old melting pot.

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(color) Movie director Sergio Arau and his wife, actress Yareli Arizmendi, co-wrote ``A Day Without A Mexican,'' and sparked a firestorm.

Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press