The Great Divide : They’ve fled poverty and even wars in their homelands. Now, immigrant children face ridicule and exclusion by many of their U.S.-born Latino classmates.

Virginia Gomez wanted to share a story.

The 13-year-old eighth-grader and her friends--all American-born Latinas--were walking past three Mexican immigrant sixth-graders after school recently. One of the younger children was sipping from a soda can. Suddenly, one of Virginia’s friends bopped the bottom of the can.

“Wham! The soda spilled all over the little girl,” Virginia recalled. As she and her friends walked away, the immigrant student muttered a Spanish obscenity.

“ ‘What? You want to start something?’ ” Virginia’s friend asked the now-frightened girl. “ ‘Tell me to my face . . . Wetback!’ ”

“We’re all proud of being Mexican,” said Virginia--who was born in Los Angeles to immigrant parents--as she talked about the on-campus incident the day after it occurred at Nimitz Middle School in Huntington Park.

“But the thing is we see ourselves as different even though we have the same culture,” she said. “We’re American and they’re not.”

Virginia’s story embodies all the elements of a conflict that plagues many Latino students today: the alienation and prejudice that divide American-born Latino kids and their immigrant classmates. The students often segregate themselves during lunchtime, on the basketball court, at school dances, and while hanging out on campus before and after school.

A language barrier coupled with an unfamiliar teen culture--the culture of the popular American Latino kids who wear baggy clothes with Doc Martens or Nikes and listen to deep-house and hip-hop--adds to the problem of assimilation for immigrant students.

In most cases, students agree, it’s the American-born Latinos who ridicule the immigrants.

They make fun of the immigrant boys who dress in white buttoned shirts instead of T-shirts and high-water cotton trousers instead of oversized jeans. They ridicule the immigrant girls in their ruffled starched blouses and pleated skirts and braids tied with bows. They make fun of the immigrant children’s shyness, respectfulness and dedication to academics.

The U.S.-born Latinos call the Mexican kids “ quebradita people” because of their banda music and quebradita dances. They make fun of the immigrants’ “nerdy” Mickey Mouse-adorned backpacks and have even coined a term for them: “Wetpacks.”

They call the immigrant students other names--”beaner,” “Wehac” (a derogatory term for a Mexican immigrant of Indian descent) and tell them to “go back where you come from.” Immigrant students at Nimitz reported that when they run around the track in gym class, American-born teens shout “Corrale! Corrale! La Migra! La Migra!” (“Run! Immigration!”)

Brad Pilon, a bilingual school psychologist with the Los Angeles Unified School District, works with about 70 schools--most with a majority Latino enrollment--in the mid-city area, including Belmont High School’s Newcomer Center, which helps hundreds of recent non-English speaking immigrants adjust in school.

“These kids feel the segregation, they live it,” Pilon said. “They get beat up, get lunches stolen, are laughed at in their faces” by U.S.-born Latinos, he said. Often the immigrant student is too scared to report the harassment. Also, Pilon said, students soon learn that if they were to report such incidents, “nothing would be done” because overloaded teachers and administrators often aren’t aware the problem exists.

“The immigrant kids, especially the newest arrivals, are naive, open and most of all vulnerable when they come to school,” Pilon said. “When they first come here, like anybody who moves anywhere, they are faced with the problem of fitting in.”

For most, fitting in is their dream even though they often view American kids as lazy, unmotivated and disrespectful to their parents and teachers.

Ramon A. Gutierrez, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the University of California, San Diego, said this Latino rift is not something new. He cited a 10-year-old study conducted in the San Jose area, where a researcher found four Latino groups that segregated themselves from each other in one school--”the recent lower-income Mexican immigrant; the middle-class Mexican immigrant; the acculturated Chicano kids and the cholo kids, lower-income Mexican Americans.”

“There have always been tensions and stresses between individuals of a remote immigrant past and recent immigrants,” he said. “What it boils down to is discrimination based not only on immigrant status,” Gutierrez said, but also on language and social class.

“If you went to Beverly Hills High, you’d find lower-class white kids segregated from the wealthier kids. It’s segregation based on social standing,” he said.

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Rene Estrella, a leadership class adviser and biology teacher at Belmont High School, where 90% of the 4,500 enrollment is Latino, said immigrant Latino students “take the brunt of discrimination” from American-born students because “The people who are privileged to be born here think that they are superior to the person who was not.

“I think most kids who come to Belmont don’t have too much to feel good about, growing up in the area. They don’t get out of this area very much and anything they can hold onto to get a better identity, even if it means making others feel lower, makes them feel important.”

Estrella said storytelling sessions in his classes helped bring students together last semester, and he probably will continue them. For several minutes at the start of each class, students shared their lives with other classmates. Immigrant students spoke about their homelands, family members killed in their war-torn countries and their adjustment to life in the United States.

“Hearing each other’s stories united the students. It made the American-born kids understand the struggle so many of the newcomers have experienced and the struggle they still face, especially when they are segregated,” Estrella said.

“We are oppressing each other and that bothers me,” said Lupe Simpson, principal of Nimitz, the second-largest middle school in the country. The school has an enrollment of 3,200 students--97% Latino, one-fifth of that number recent immigrants.

Simpson said she is deeply concerned about the “anti-Mexican” feelings of some of her students as well as the isolation and disaffection immigrant children deal with daily. “But I don’t see this as a defeat,” she said. “It’s a challenge.”

She hopes students will embrace her plan for a buddy program that would pair native and immigrant Latinos so they could help and learn from each other. Another idea she is exploring is to have award assemblies for the whole student body, instead of the English as a Second Language students having their assemblies separately, as they do now. And she wants to speak to teachers and administrators about integrating students in classrooms, during sporting events and at school dances.

“We have to do something so the kids can see that that kind of thinking prevails in their lives and where does it end? We have to start ending it with ourselves. We have to show our kids that we are more alike than we are different,” she said after listening to some of the students express their feelings in recent interviews at the school.

Gabriela Rico, 13, a Nimitz eighth-grader from Mexico, said she is mocked in gym class because she doesn’t always understand the games.

“The Chicanos don’t speak to us at all. They don’t try to teach us. That’s what we want most of all-- to learn the games, to learn English, to be like them,” she said, as other immigrant children nodded.

“I know they make fun of me,” Gabriela said, her eyes on a book on her lap. “I tell my mother and she tells me not to be like them and show off, not to place value on materialistic things like clothes or shoes or to care too much about appearances.”

Julio Bejarano, an 11-year-old sixth-grader also from Mexico, said he gets along fine with kids in his neighborhood, many of them American-born. But at school, it’s a different world. He said he is not accepted “as a friend by the Latino Americanos,” never invited to join in a game of basketball or to sit with them at lunchtime “because they think we are inferior to them because we were not born here.” His eyes water. The room is silent for a few seconds.

Language is the biggest obstacle, he said, even though it should be the key to bridging the communications gap because an overwhelming majority of the American Latinos are bilingual.

“We talk to them in Spanish because we don’t know English and even though they know how to speak Spanish, they talk to us in English. Why don’t they want to communicate with us?” Julio said.

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Nancy Garcia, also 11, said she has an American Latina “good friend,” but still there’s no escaping the prejudice. “My friend tells me that she is superior to me,” Nancy said, even though Nancy’s grades are better.

“I don’t know why she says that.” Nancy paused. “I think she might be envious of us because we are so proud of our culture.”

Still, she said she yearns to one day be accepted by her American-born Latino classmates because “I love the get-togethers they have at school, the way they dress, the way they dance, their music.”

Image, said American-born classmate Lisa Moreno, 13, plays a big role in the self-imposed segregation at her school. “You have to know how to dress so you can be in the ‘in-crowd.’ Immigrant girls wear Payless shoes.”

Peer pressure keeps them from befriending the immigrants, students said. “If I were to hang around with them, then I wouldn’t be in the in-crowd anymore,” explained Lisa.

Said Virginia Gomez: “Straight out, we haven’t welcomed the Mexicans with open arms. We’re like, ‘You want to be with us? I don’t think so.’

“It shouldn’t be this way--two groups,” said Virginia, who is student body president at Nimitz. “But what can you do to stop it? Some people are not going to change no matter what you do.”

Rudy Lopez, a Los Angeles-born 13-year-old Latino at Nimitz, agreed that both groups should be united, especially “when they haven’t done anything to us to treat them bad.”

That’s a sentiment shared by several students at Belmont.

Sandra Flores, 16, a 10th-grader born in Los Angeles, said, “I have newcomer friends and it’s very hard for them. I think they are afraid to talk to U.S. Latinos because they are expecting us to put them aside, you know, ignore them. That’s why they come to their own little groups.

“It’s sad to see us segregated like that, especially when the immigrant students have such a big enthusiasm for learning, for having better futures. They are really smarter than us,” she said.

Ernesto, a 16-year-old Guatemalan (who preferred not to use his surname), said he chooses to remain a loner because he doesn’t want to be rejected as he was last year in junior high school.

“We get rejected because of the way we dress, talk, the way we are,” he said. So he and his immigrant friends hang out together, encourage each other, lift each other’s spirits. As a group, they are secure and safe. It’s what gets them through the day.

Still, it’s unfathomable sometimes to Ernesto and other immigrant young people that they have left one war to face another.

“We come from war-torn countries,” he said. “Our families have struggled to come here for a better future and then we still have to struggle with people who are from our own race.”