BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

''Oh, you're calling about the guys who were picked up in West Chester,'' Simon Talamantes says perfunctorily over the telephone, as soon as I identify myself as a journalist.

When I tell him that's not exactly the issue I want to discuss, he says, ''Well, what a nice, nice, nice surprise.''

Mr. Talamantes, a retired engineer who is now an interpreter with the courts and police, knows how it works. Hispanic workers are picked up in an immigration raid, and the phone starts ringing for Hispanic ''contacts.''

Twenty-four hours earlier - when jobs and immigration status weren't news - to the average Tristater, there were no Hispanic issues in the area and virtually no Hispanic ''community.''

It may be an embarrassing lack of curiosity on Cincinnatians' part. It may be an indication of how out of touch we are with our own demographics.

But it may also be a manifestation of an age-old, long-settled community attitude - who ''we'' are and who ''we'' aren't.

If the issues are race, ethnicity or regional differences, then Cincinnati is about blacks and whites and Germans and Appalachians. Everybody else is at the back of the line.

Hispanics have lived here in identifiable numbers since the turn of the century, when the area's largest employers and local universities lured professionals. Today, depending on whose numbers you use, the local Hispanic community ranges from 10,000 to more than 20,000 and growing. With the establishment of the Ohio Tristate Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, several newsletters, expanded cultural events and Hispanic business and social organizations, the community is better organized and more closely linked than ever before.

Has Cincinnati noticed?

Invisible community

For years, we were happy to let Hispanics remain invisible. They did not arrive in threateningly large numbers, and didn't live in concentrations. They were people who worked hard, learned our language and generally lived as we did.

They received our benign acceptance.

Have we been, up to the present day, insulting in our lack of interest and simple recognition of Hispanic people and cultures? Continually.

Bruny Rosa, an Anderson Township teacher and journalist, says the Tristate's Hispanic doctors, computer engineers, teachers, businesspeople are accepted here, but no one is free from some basic questions and assumptions.

''The first thing they think is that Hispanics have a low educational level, that they don't know English, that they are educationally or culturally challenged,'' she says. They expect bright colors and loud music. They assume everyone is from Mexico. And they subtly inquire about resident versus visitor status - even for long-time residents like Mrs. Rosa, Puerto Rican-born and thus a U.S. citizen.

But the slight distance, the lack of understanding, the subtle jokes about green cards turn into something far uglier when Hispanic is linked to jobs and deportation.

Then it becomes even clearer who is ''we'' and who is ''they.''

We vs. they

We are the people who built this economy. They are the outsiders taking it away. We are the people searching desperately for jobs. They are unprincipled foreigners who get our plum spots.

And, because they are transients, simple parasites who should trouble our thoughts no more, they are blamed, shamed and shown the door.

Without obvious questions about how they happened to arrive here, how they came to be hired, if they were recruited, what promises were made them.

No need to trouble ourselves. Those couldn't be things ''we'' had a hand in.

It is the uglier side of our lack of interest in anyone who is not one of us.

For years the Tristate has benefited from Hispanic professionals who brought brilliance, integrity and a strong work ethic to Greater Cincinnati.

Now it is time for us to take more than self-interest in another group of Hispanic workers. We do not have to condone their illegal working status to recognize them as human beings, caught in an exploitive economic system that - should we look far enough - will surely say as much about our greed as their need.

Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.

RAMSEY ARCHIVE