Imagine my surprise the other day when I attended a social event and another attendee there accused me of being racist as evidenced by my columns.

The center of his rage and intemperate remarks was his belief that we "native-born Hispanics thought we arrived here magically in a helicopter that skipped Mexico."

In addition, we native Hispanos "wouldn't be here if it weren't for Cortez's bloody conquest of Mexico." And finally, relieving his spleen of all that misguided and stereotypical anger, he stated, "I'm sick of the racism of you Northern Hispanos against Mexicans."

Well, of course I'm the wrong person to mess with, as my career of dealing in Spanish-colonial documents puts me at a slight advantage. Many of those documents have never been translated, and backed by a lifetime of study, I returned his remarks with a double-barrel blast.

As I later quipped to one of my friends there, it really gets old having to defend your culture against culture vultures who have a smattering of history and think they know it all. But in reality, I was not surprised, as I have spent a lifetime trying to educate new arrivals to Santa Fe about historical reality versus politically correct or revisionist historical theories and myths, especially regarding Hispanos.

The fact is that many Anglo writers either have an ax to grind, are involved romantically with one culture or another, or like Ken Burns, ignore us completely as if we are invisible or don't exist. I don't know which position is worse; they are all bad and keep us all ignorant.

If my accuser had read my columns — more than 15 years of them — he probably would have controlled his emotions and spoken with his intellect instead.

For example, I was one of the first columnists in the U.S. to demand that the federal government return billions of dollars owed to Native Americans that the feds have misappropriated from their leases. In other columns, I have detailed our mixtures with blacks, mestizos, Visigoths, Celts, Jews and Moors. I was also one of the first to write about Isabela la Mulata in New Mexico. I have gone into great detail not only in columns but also in lectures and papers that I have presented not only regionally but also abroad about the intense diversity that the Spaniards brought to the New World.

Just the titles of my papers should be evidence of where I'm coming from. A paper delivered in Madrid was titled "Religious and Cultural Syncretism in the New World, or When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers went Underground." Another paper I recently delivered was titled "Social and Cultural Patterns in New Mexico at the End of the XVII Century: Peninsulares, Criollos, Negroes, Mulattos, and Indian Nations." I also have written and published on the Irish/Spanish Celtic connection for the University of Notre Dame Press.

All of these papers have detailed footnotes and bibliographies painstakingly researched, many from original, untranslated documents. So you can imagine my concern on this continued stereotypical and ignorant view of Northern New Mexico Hispanos.

However, I want to clarify a number of things previously mentioned. Many scholars are in agreement that the "bloody conquest" of Mexico would have been impossible by Cortez's small band of men if it hadn't been for the fact that the Aztecs and their human sacrifices and enslavement of other tribes had driven those other tribes to join Cortez to defeat the Aztecs. Allied tribes used Cortez to defeat their enemies and were as much a part of the conquest of Mexico as was Cortez.

As for us "magically arriving on a helicopter" without having been in Mexico is as ridiculous as saying that all light-skinned people are Anglos. It is true that many peninsulares married other peninsulares. But the Spanish were the first to marry Indians and blacks in the New World. That's way before it was popular among Anglos to have an "Indian princess" in their family.

It is also a fact that New Mexico was Spanish from 1598 to 1821 and Mexican from 1821 to 1846. And native New Mexicans are not Mexicans or Mexican Americans.

We also have a distinct culture that we cherish and protect, but that most of us discriminate against Mexicans is another divide-and-conquer ploy and an attempt to romanticize cultures.

When I was in graduate school, I asked one of my professors, who was Mexican American, what he meant when he called me manito and manitos for people from New Mexico. He responded by saying it was used by Mexicans as a term of endearment meaning hermanito — little brother. Many of us feel the same way about Mexicans.

Writer/historian Orlando Romero may be reached at nambe1@aol.com.