O.C. can you say ... `anti-Mexican'?

I TEND TO SNORE during plays, but my peepers didn't flutter once when I attended a staging of "The Mexican OC," a new play highlighting the history of Mexicans in Orange County. Though the vignettes jump from the 1892 lynching of a Mexican laborer by Santa Ana civic leaders to the student walkouts of this March, the theme remained the same: If you're a Mexican in the county of milk and Mickey, expect mucho discrimination.

"The Mexican OC" retells many familiar yarns -- about the Minutemen, gentrification battles, Mendez vs. Westminster (the 1945 legal case that desegregated schools in Orange County and that Thurgood Marshall cited in arguing Brown vs. Board of Education). My only complaint with the play was that it only scratched the surface of my county's bizarre history of hating the Mexican.

For instance, it didn't mention the late INS Commissioner Harold Ezell, a Newport Beach resident and local GOP stalwart who once told reporters that "illegal aliens shouldn't be deported; they should be deep-fried." Or the recent incident in which a Rancho Santa Margarita woman accused three maids of stealing her purse and got the Orange County Sheriff's Department to help deport them before officers determined that this Desperate Housewife had left the purse at a McDonald's.

Truth is, Orange County is the Mexican-bashing capital of the United States. Our racist sneezes become national hurricanes.

County residents birthed both the notorious Minuteman Project and Proposition 187, the 1994 initiative that scared us with images of shadowy Mexicans crossing the border and spawned copycat measures nationwide. Costa Mesa Mayor Allan Mansoor and O.C. Sheriff Michael Carona are seeking to transform their respective police and sheriff's departments into \o7la\f7 \o7migra\f7, a plan other municipalities across the country are considering. And members of our Republican congressional delegation -- some of whom boycotted President Bush's recent amnesty-touting speech in Irvine -- played a crucial role in crafting the notorious Sensenbrenner bill, HR 4437, which would make assisting an illegal immigrant a crime. Orange County is even home to the headquarters of Taco Bell and Del Taco, the worst apings of Mexican culture since a brown-face Charlton Heston hammed it up in "Touch of Evil."