Dear Gabacha: A bit of context for the readers is needed before I proceed. Poor Confused White Girl refers to Fiesta San Antonio, an annual springtime celebration in the River City dating back to the late 1800s that, like the city, has undergone many transformations over the decades. It’s quite the spectacle but originally served the specific political purpose of romanticizing the city’s contentious past with its Mexicans, from that whole Alamo desmadre to the simultaneous romanticizing and demonizing of the “chile queens,” the original Mexican street food hawkers immortalized by writers as diverse as Stephen Ambrose and O. Henry.

Fiesta illustrates America’s eternal bowdlerization project with ethnics. We’re used to gabachos celebrating their vanquished wabs, from Olvera Street in Los Angeles to the cactus-leaning sleeping peons of Tucson to the Hispanic histrionics of Santa Fe and gabacha queens of Fiesta. But at least those civic boosters liked some aspect of us, no matter how twisted or “Spanish” their fantasy heritage for us was; that was better than the reverse whitewashing happening now, where we see the swarthy masses of the past now lionized as the anti-Mexicans: the immigrants who came to this country greeted with open arms and no discrimination because they were legal. The historical record disproves those narratives no matter how many weepy-moany chain e-mails Know Nothings send. Give me the gabacha Fiesta queens over any romanticized Sicilian any day of the semana.

Dear Wab: No, I think you meant Benjamin Tillman, the South Carolina Democrat who liked lynching the way Mexican men like gabachas.