RACISM IS ALIVE AND NOT WELL.

Byline: MARIEL GARZA

ONCE upon a time, I believed that racism was virtually nonexistent in the greatest, most evolved country on Earth in the 21st century.

If it existed at all, it was just some lingering institutional racism, which progressive efforts had already essentially dismantled, or in some town that had been cut off from the normal flow of time due to an accidental fold in the space-time continuum.

I knew racism still existed but certainly not in my enlightened state. It's why I tended to agree with those who suggest the need for affirmative action had waned. Hey, we're the country that built the Internet; surely we're beyond hating people just because of the circumstance of their birth.

What a Pollyanna I was.

Though I am a daughter of a Mexican immigrant (yes, a legal one) and have an easily identifiable Hispanic surname, I am a blue-eyed, white girl with a permanent tan. You wouldn't know about my ethnicity until you got to know me, at which point you would be helpless not to love me even if you found out that I had accidentally killed your cat.

So if I have been the victim of discrimination as an adult, I didn't know about it.

That was until the letters began and my shiny, happy illusions were shattered. In September 2003, I started writing a weekly column, and not long after that the hate mail began. Anyone who dares to enter the world of public opinion knows that part of the deal is frequent and often startling personal abuse at the hands of people they've never met. It's generally balanced by an equal amount of fan mail.

So I expected - and got - both fans and foes. But what I didn't expect to find was that so much of the correspondence fell into the ``dirty Mexican'' category.

That is what I call the letters I get from people who use the column as an excuse to rage against me for being an uppity Hispanic (probably illegal, too!) with an opinion. And there are plenty of them. Reader mail varies from week to week. On controversial topics, I can get as many as 75 messages and letters. On lighter topics, just a handful. But in every wave at least a third include some sort of racial slur or slight directed at my heritage.

Often there is gratuitous disparaging of the Mexican diaspora - legal or not - as a bunch of dirty, ignorant people whose only goal in coming to the USA is turning it into a mirror image of the messed-up country they left.

Here's one from the mail bag:

``I see your people defecate in our parks, piss behind the walls of our homes near bus stops and I see them deal drugs. I don't want them here and you don't fool me a bit. You smell as much as they do. You're not honest. They don't come here and raise their own standard of living. They dilute our standard of living. Have you ever seen one blade of grass in front of an apartment where (they) live?''

Then there are other folks who just throw in the intolerance casually, like the reader from Thousand Oaks who writes to me frequently, always addressing me as ``Affirmative Action Idiot.'' And whether I'm writing tongue-in-cheek about California seceding from the union or the over- air-conditioning of Southern California, these folks never miss a chance to tell me to ``go back to Mexico.''

Like this from another reader, ``Go home Ms. Garza if you don't like it here, then you can speak your foreign language and work to improve your own Country instead of being a rude lieing (sic) thief. ...Take your mexican flag and STICK IT''

As well, my Mexicanness is like a magnet for readers to vent all their frustration about illegal immigration, which I do not defend. But it doesn't matter that I'm not from Mexico, that I was born in the Midwest and raised on the Brady Bunch, Cap'n Crunch and Kool-aid punch. What these readers see is my name - then see red.

I imagine John Howard Griffin had a similar revelation. A white journalist and essayist who wrote on race issues, Griffin had his skin medically darkened in 1959 and lived as a black man in the Deep South as sort of an experiment. He recounted the troubling tale of racism and intolerance in the groundbreaking book ``Black Like Me.''

As illuminating and dispiriting as his experience was, it was diluted by the knowledge that it wasn't his true self that was being discriminated against, just the idea of him. At the end of the project, he would go back to being his old white self - just like I do every day when I leave the office.