In case people haven’t been paying attention, because you’re waiting for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, filling out your census, or like me, taking care of the off from school Spring Break children, in Suffolk County, Long Island the trial against the “alleged” killers of Marcelo Lucero continues.

The hate crime against the Ecuadorian immigrant for being a Latino immigrant has Jeffery Conroy taking the heat for the the stabbing death of Lucero in which at least 6 other young men participated in, now has it’s first Latino apologist with the media eating up one of the oldest racist defenses in the book : “But, he can’t be racist. His best friend was a beaner, spic, I mean Latino.”

Enter Will Garcia, the Ecuadorian friend of Conroy, who is quoted in the New York Times:

“How’s he going to be a white supremacist if he chills with Spanish people and he chills with black people? He’s my friend. He’s been there for me. I’ve been there for him. He wasn’t a racist.”

Now I am not attacking Garcia, a teenager, growing up immigrant in Long Island, like my own parents did in the late 1950′s. Garcia admits that he too has been on the receiving end of hate in a town where some of the young white men have admitted that they made a sport of hunting Latinos to attack and where the Southern Poverty Law Center said that a climate of fear pervades the immigrant community. Garcia reports that attacks on Latinos continue.

He said that both he and his father had been spit on by white youths, and that a few weeks ago, as his 14-year-old brother was riding a skateboard outside their apartment, an older white man in a yellow car slowed down, laughed and shouted that Mexicans don’t skateboard.

“I chased the car,” Mr. Garcia said. “I was so mad. There’s a lot of racism going on around here.”

Are people going to claim that the reality of the continuing and I say, growing hate against Immigrant Latinos, “ethnicized” as Mexicans, doesn’t impact how Garcia is portrayed in the media, how he portrays himself in the media, and how he negotiates surviving in Suffolk County?