Stories

The earliest immigration stories narrated by various ethnic communities coming to the young United States often revolved around Ellis Island in New York City. Ellis Island, aside from being the location where many immigrants entered the United States, was also where federal immigration policy was created and tested by officials vetting thousands of potential Americans. Yet, within the first decade of the twentieth century, a fairly robust configuration of federal and international immigration stations also processed the thousands of immigrants crossing into the United States from land and sea each day. The early twentieth century was an era when American officials were still actively formulating a cohesive immigration policy, and the Romani people who arrived in those years proved particularly vexing to a nascent federal bureaucracy – none more so than the family of Louis Mitchell. On May 15, 1905, the US Immigration Service Station in Montreal Canada sent a report to the Federal Bureau of Immigration involving this family of would-be immigrants.Footnote ³ Five days prior, three immigration inspectors, Martin J. Gorman, Terrance Conaty and Charles A. Shields, had chaired a Board of Special Inquiry hearing with the patriarch Louis Mitchell and his eldest son Tom Mitchell to determine their eligibility for entry. The inspectors subjected the Mitchells to a battery of questions about their immigration and citizenship status.Footnote ⁴ Their answers reveal how the character of their traversal through the immigration regime and strategic use of citizenship shaped their identity as American Roma. Their responses stimulated an internal conflict for immigration officials dealing with “Gypsies” at the US borders.

The showdown between the Mitchells and the Federal Bureau of Immigration opened with a grilling by the inspectors. Inspector Gorman began by asking Louis Mitchell his name, age and birthplace. Mitchell responded that he was 47 years old and born in Brazil. Gorman then questioned Mitchell about his children and their ages and birthplaces. Louis attested that he had seven children, including Tom (the eldest), Joe, Maria, Frank, Demetro, Avdocha and Mary.Footnote ⁵ Louis Mitchell reported that he originally left Brazil in 1885 and traveled to New York City, and that most of his children were born in the United States. In New York City, the Mitchells had lived near Castle Garden, which had served as an immigration depot prior to the construction of Ellis Island, where he worked as a coppersmith repairing items at candy, dye and varnish factories, or “wherever they had copper stuff.”Footnote ⁶ Working as a coppersmith while his wife tended to the children, Mitchell and his family then traveled to various locations throughout the East and West coast over the course of twenty years. In 1901 in West Virginia, Louis Mitchell stated, he and his eldest sons, Tom and Joe, had filed citizenship paperwork, since all three had been born in Brazil.Footnote ⁷ Inspector Gorman, however, was suspicious of Louis’ testimony about citizenship even with appropriate documents submitted to the board. Gorman repeated similar questions to Louis Mitchell, often asking about his travels and the length of stay in certain areas. He also asked repeatedly about his children’s names, hoping to catch Louis in contradictory testimony.Footnote ⁸

Why was inspector Gorman questioning this family so intensely? As it turned out, Gorman had a theory that Mitchell was not who he claimed to be – or more precisely, that those traveling in his party were not his family. Gorman was determined to reveal the conspiracy; Louis Mitchell, however, would not back down. His determination to reenter the United States clearly evidences this attitude. According to Gorman’s report, Mitchell and his family had been denied entry by US agents when they took the steamboat from Prescott, Ontario, to Ogdensburg, New York, on April 7, 1905, over a month before the hearing. When asked if they were citizens, Louis Mitchell stated that he told the immigration officer who had refused his initial entry into Ogdensburg that, “I have a citizenship paper you have no right to put me back. If you want to prove that those are not my papers that will be right. If you want arrest me and send me there where I got the papers, and the witness will prove that I was the man that got the papers.”Footnote ⁹ Despite his claim to citizenship, the inspectors informed Mitchell of his denial to enter the country where his children had been born and where he had lived as a naturalized citizen for the prior twenty years.

Upon his denied entry into Ogdensburg, a sympathetic fellow passenger advised that, should he be returned to Canada, he ought to hire a lawyer. Sent back to Canada, Mitchell did just that to secure confirmation of his citizenship from West Virginia and to locate a witness. Then he waited. After a month and $200 in room and board without a word from his lawyer, Mitchell grew desperate. Mitchell told Gorman at his hearing that out of desperation, he was fooled by an American man who promised US passage by crossing the St. Lawrence River at night in a rowboat. So it was that Mitchell’s second crossing was made exactly one month after the first. He arranged with the man for three boats to bring his twenty-six family members from Canada into the United States. After landing in Ogdensburg, Mitchell and his family embarked on a wagon to DeKalb Junction, New York. Here they encountered inspector Conaty, who demanded they return to Montreal via Ogdensburg for detainment and questioning.Footnote ¹⁰ Louis Mitchell stated forcefully that he had told inspector Conaty after being told to return to Canada again:

After Louis recounted this statement to Conaty, Gorman changed his line of questioning about the circumstances concerning Mitchell’s entry and instead abruptly asked: “What relation are you to Emilio Mitchell?”Footnote ¹² Louis, taken aback, stated, “He is not relation.” When Gorman asked if he knew Emilio [Emil] Mitchell, Louis replied, “I know the man but he is no relation.”Footnote ¹³ Gorman finally got to the heart of the matter: “Now are any of the people who are in this party, of those who are now at DeKalb Junction, the same persons who came with Emilio Mitchell on the boat and who were sent back?”Footnote ¹⁴ When Louis replied that none of the individuals were part of that group and that none had been on a boat, Gorman kept pushing, asking if his sons had been in contact with Emilio Mitchell and if they had ever been to Boston (where Emilio Mitchell was rumored to be). When Louis continued to answer Gorman’s questions, stating that indeed his son Joe had been to Boston but was not in contact with Emilio, Gorman pressed him further, asking, “Do you know where Emilio Mitchell is at present”? Louis again replied that he did not know. Eventually, after this grilling, the Mitchells were denied entry.

Reading this report over a hundred years later, one finds it difficult to resist the inclination to invert the interrogation and ask Gorman a simple question: Why were Louis Mitchell and his family detained and questioned? After all, if Louis Mitchell was properly documented as a citizen, then officials like Gorman had no grounds to stop him. Initially, the Mitchells had been told by US officials that their detention was due to an issue with Louis’ paperwork presented at his first crossing in April. That inspector had claimed that Louis’ papers looked tattered and well used, and this wear was enough to deny them admission. Rather than evidence that the paperwork had been handled multiple times and was many years old, the inspectors believed it was proof that Louis Mitchell had forged them. Despite Louis Mitchell’s protests, he and his family were forced back into Canada, where they had to hire a lawyer and wait for confirmation of his citizenship status from West Virginia. Weeks of waiting and financial pressure prompted Louis’ covert crossing. Only upon meeting inspector Conaty at DeKalb Junction (whether by chance or after self-declaration as was required) did his second illegal deportation ensue. What must Louis have thought?

What Louis did not know was that for months before his arrival, American immigration officials like Gorman and Conaty had been on the lookout for “Gypsies.” They had been placed on alert after several Romani groups had attempted to immigrate to the United States first through Ellis Island (such as the Estevanovichs, as described by Louis Takács, Chapter 5, this volume). When word got out about the risk of entry through Ellis Island, families such as Emilio Mitchell’s adapted by crossing the northern and southern US borders, something which had already been done many times in previous years. Louis Mitchell was therefore walking into something of a trap. Regardless of the merits of Louis’ case, immigration officials primed to intercept Romani people would not so easily permit him or his family to lay claim to the category of “citizen.”

On May 15, 1905, the report of Louis Mitchell’s case was forwarded to the Commissioner General of Immigration, Frank P. Sargent, in Washington, DC. “There are so many suspicious circumstances in connection with these persons and with the issue of the papers they hold, that it was thought best to forward the papers to the bureau for such investigation as may be deemed proper, the owners having been given a proper receipt to insure the papers return should they be found valid,” the inspector’s justification read.Footnote ¹⁵ Even after Louis Mitchell and his sons comprehensively accounted for their time spent in each location and justified their movements with specific and concrete rationales, the inspectors painted the Mitchells as “careless” and “wandering.” Never mind that Louis Mitchell and his family had lived in some places for several years and had provided witnesses and character references related to their citizenship; as far as these immigration inspectors were concerned, they were still “Gypsies” attempting to enter the United States by falsifying their claim to citizenship. Unsatisfied with denying their entrance and convinced that the Mitchells were cheating their way back into the country, officials had sent this missive to their superiors in Washington, DC to encourage further detainment. They emphasized that due to “the irregular procedure pursued in taking out the citizenship papers presented, and the fact the holders were willing to pay such a large sum to effect a surreptitious entrance into the United States, goes far, in the opinion of this office, to show that they have no legal standing as citizens.”Footnote ¹⁶

The Montreal inspectors would have to wait twelve days for a response from Washington, DC. When it finally arrived, the report must have shocked the inspectors. The Acting Commissioner General, Larned, admonished the officers for their continued harassment of the Mitchells, stating: “You were instructed to release these persons together with their families. The Secretary of Commerce and Labor made certain inquiries into the case and was satisfied that the certificates are bona fide.”Footnote ¹⁷ The Montreal officials were overruled by their superiors in Washington, DC who had found Louis Mitchell’s citizenship claim satisfactory. But even this did not end the Mitchells’ saga.

Seemingly freed from the bureaucratic limbo into which they had so capriciously been placed, the Mitchells were allowed to enter the United States per the Commissioner General’s memo. However, the agents at the border did not give up their attempt to pursue and expel them. On June 7, 1905, the Commissioner received another letter from the US inspector in charge of the Prescott, Ontario station attempting to appeal the Mitchells’ release.Footnote ¹⁸ This time, the inspectors had a new argument: the Mitchells had also been traveling with a second family with the surname “Zurka.” The border agents believed that this family had previously attempted to enter the United States via Saint John, New Brunswick, and had been denied on December 6, 1904, on the grounds that they were “Likely to Become a Public Charge” (LPC).Footnote ¹⁹

The inspector in charge at Prescott continued with his account by stating that “the Mitchells are determined to get [Mrs. Zurka] and her entire family into the United States.” The inspector then laid out his suspicions that, in fact, the Mitchells and the Zurkas were both repeat offenders and had devised ways to circumvent immigration controls by passing papers off as genuine and then claiming false kinship. The inspector intended to apprehend the Mitchells and the Zurkas for this deceit. He wrote Commissioner General Sargent for permission to pursue them: “If in your opinion these matters are worthy of your consideration, I would respectfully ask for authority to proceed to Watertown, N.Y., and if necessary, to Syracuse where, I am informed, the Mitchel family are at present and apprehend the entire party.”Footnote ²⁰ Sargent was not convinced, replying:

With that letter, the file on the Michells and Zurkas seems to have been closed – at least in the eyes of the Commissioner General. If nothing else, it proved sufficient to silence the overzealous American inspectors at the wayward Canadian stations, who seem to have finally backed off their pursuit of the families. Yet the letter from the Commissioner also highlights the possibility of future action by immigration officials, as the Mitchells and Zurkas could be classified as “likely to become a public charge” at any point up until 1907. Such a designation would mark them for deportation should they ever run afoul of immigration officials. The “Gypsies” who had “so greatly annoyed [the] officers for several weeks past in the vicinity of Prescott, Ont., and Ogdensburg, N.Y.” were allowed to enter the United States, but had to live under the threat of deportation by the seemingly paranoid inspectors who had proved more than willing to spend vast resources and overstep their authority to rid the area of their presence.Footnote ²²

Memories

Almost a hundred years after Louis Mitchell and his kin claimed American citizenship and challenged the young immigration bureau, another Romani family also made claims to aspirational American citizenship and belonging. The Ciuraru family, however, made use of the welcoming Cold War state to ensure their legal entry was not challenged as the Mitchells had been. Yet to get to the United States, the Ciurarus too would have to navigate not only international bureaucracy and policy, but also the experiences and memories of dealing with racist authorities.

Michael Ciuraru has few memories of his great-aunt Iulia. Yet there is one Michael remembers well. Even when she was busy taking care of her grandchildren, Iulia tended to leave doors open, face open spaces and insist on clear lines of sight toward exits. In 2022, years after she passed, Michael and his cousins reminisced about her life. They fondly remembered their great-aunt spending time with them while their parents were off at work, playing with them on the floor – and always keeping her eye on the door. Amid this reminiscence, one of Michael’s uncles broke the levity, for he knew the reason Iulia acted this way. The origins of this odd behavior could be traced back to her childhood in Romania. It was there, during the latter half of World War II, that Iulia was captured. Michael’s uncle relayed what he had been told of Iulia’s trauma: While the exact identity of the perpetrator was unclear, Iulia had been seized as a young girl by the Nazis, or (more likely) by Romanians aligned with the Nazis, near the western border of Romania. As David Crowe and other historians have noted, Romanians under the Antonescu regime were complicit in transporting thousands of Roma to Transnistria. Antonescu himself was known as “Hitler’s favorite ally” due to his fascist and genocidal views.Footnote ²³ Petre Matei further shows that although Antonescu and his followers in the state government were responsible for much of the decision-making, it was local officials and the local populace who made on-the-ground decisions on whom to transport without German input.Footnote ²⁴ Iulia and her mother, along with other Romani people from their small village outside of Recaş near Timişoara, were taken and loaded onto a train, well aware of the possible fate which could await them. Huddled together and frightened, the villagers whispered among themselves as the train began to move. At some point on their journey, Iulia and her mother decided to throw themselves off the moving train under the cover of darkness. Bruised and injured, Iulia and her mother trekked through the Romanian woods back toward their village, terrified of every sound emitted from the woods. When they arrived at their village, they found their home pilfered and abandoned. Decades later, long after Iulia had become a grandmother and great-grandmother, she continued to fear confined spaces, spaces which were reminiscent of the train car that almost sealed her fate.

Michael’s uncle proudly told this tale of Iulia, emphasizing her courage and tenacity, traits that allowed her to survive the horrors visited upon her and countless other Roma within Nazi-aligned territories. But Iulia’s story is more than just one of triumph and resilience: it is also a story of silence and trauma, a story of untold experiences and unspoken fears born out of countless generations of persecution in Europe. Countless Roma in Eastern and Western Europe were destroyed by the Nazis and their willing allies who had spent generations trying to rid their lands of “Gypsies.”Footnote ²⁵ Today, heroic efforts to remember and commemorate the Romani struggles during the war years remain hampered. Much of the history has been lost due to a lack of documentation and political will to face the continued effects that structural racism has had on Romani inclusion in Europe. Yet, many of these Romani stories survive in the United States. In the aftermath of World War II and the ensuing years of communist rule, Iulia, her husband Bustian and their kin made the monumental decision to relocate. They left their old homes to find new ones across the Atlantic. They were not alone in dreaming of a place free from the memories of the past. Now, her oral history and memory are a part of Michael’s American Romani identity.

The Ciurarus’ long journey to the United States, however, provided its own tribulations. Michael recounts how Iulia and her family faced many obstacles. One of Iulia’s in-laws, a man named Costa, worked to provide for his extended family by buying and selling anything he could. Roma throughout the region of Recaş were skilled tradesmen whose ancestors had been enslaved and produced many of the trade goods and home items for use by non-Roma before emancipation in the middle of the nineteenth century. After World War II, the Romanian government aligned with the Soviet Union and worked to create a communist state. Under the communist regime, the government restructured the rural economy, and demand for the skilled trades of the Romani diminished.Footnote ²⁶ Costa, Michael’s great-grandfather, had spent his early life collecting and trading in scrap metal, glass and feathers, and repairing pots and pans. Eventually, Costa and his family began to establish themselves as capable traders and businesspeople providing goods often not available through official avenues. Over time, Costa and his extended family became well-regarded gold traders and managed to live a comfortable life with land and a large home in Recaş. Michael recollects that much of the story he had heard about his great-grandfather’s epic fortunes came from not only his grandfather, but through various family members who often proudly repeated the tale.

Sometime after Nicolae Ceaușescu took control of Romania in 1965, however, Costa and his family ran into trouble. Ceaușescu, who styled himself as a nationalist hero, implemented various policies which aimed to increase the population of the country, increase industrialization and repay loans from the West.Footnote ²⁷ As a result, significant economic growth and distance from Soviet policies made Ceaușescu’s Romania walk something of a tightrope between Western aid, Soviet-style politics and Romanian nationalism. By the 1970s, Ceaușescu’s cult of personality and repressive policies made Romania one of the most totalitarian and oppressive places in Eastern Europe. Austerity measures in the early 1980s also produced their own challenges. Costa and his family were not immune to such difficulties. Although they had managed to protect most of their wealth, matters took a turn for the worse. Allegedly, Costa’s brother was mistakenly identified by the police as a person who had committed a crime – an eventuality that the family assumed was either due to their common name, or perhaps simply due to his Romani identity.Footnote ²⁸ Either way, Costa was warned that the police were coming. Costa took his life savings of gold and other valuables and somehow managed to trade, bribe or otherwise secure passage out of Romania into Western Europe. The lack of details and specificity of the arrangements that Costa made is why the story endures and has made his shrewdness legendary among family members and the community. No matter how it had happened, Costa, his family and the extended community of kin (including Iulia and her family) had become the much-feared “nomadic Gypsies” in Western Europe. The irony was not lost on them, considering they had been happily settled in Romania for generations.

The large Ciuraru family was placed over the years in asylum housing in Italy, Germany and France. Life in those camps was difficult; the Ciurarus were often reliant on aid workers for information about where to go next. Housed in small apartments, long group shelter blocks or small rooms, they attempted to gain temporary asylum in each country. However, their ethnic and racial identity as Roma, to say nothing of the size of their party, meant that each country only ever offered Costa’s immediate family temporary asylum. Unwilling to leave behind relations such as Iulia, the Ciurarus kept moving on to the next country to claim asylum again. While doing so, the family would take trains to the end of the line before finding a place to stay; sometimes, the station bathrooms were their only resting place. Throughout their time in Central and Western Europe, the Ciurarus were often housed with diverse other European asylum seekers. And so, their network grew as they conversed and interacted with others also seeking reprieve. During these years their mobility, represented as an inherent racial trait by outsiders, became their most powerful currency, keeping the family together and dreaming of the West.

Their travels finally bore fruit in the late 1980s. In France, Costa’s kin met missionaries who were helping refugees from the communist bloc immigrate to the United States. Costa was told about the possibility of getting sponsorship from a US church that would ensure his people received visas and assistance to naturalize as US citizens. Costa and his kin decided to take the missionaries’ offer and began the visa process. Eventually, a church agreed to sponsor the large family, and Costa, Iulia and his family – including Michael’s mother Angelica – crossed the Atlantic. After the violent death of Ceaușescu in 1989 and the uncertainty and turmoil during the end of communism across Eastern Europe, extended family members began to utilize the same church and whisper networks that the Ciurarus had established to gain entrance to the West; sometimes this was done legally, and sometimes not. As anti-Romani violence began to increase in Romania, many of Iulia’s and Costa’s kin remained in close contact with each other, building their transatlantic nodes of communication. Starting in the late 1990s, some Roma who had made it to the Americas eventually returned to Romania, hoping to rebuild what they had been forced to leave behind.

The memory of Iulia’s and Costa’s journeys to the United States has been repeated within the family for many decades yet supporting details about the events are often missing from the retellings. Partially, this is because both of the individuals who anchor these stories are no longer alive to tell or correct the tale. Nevertheless, each successive family member remembers and narrates the story based upon their own memory, building the story from multiple perspectives and imbuing it with multiple meanings. Michael’s uncle remembered that Iulia had barely escaped the ravages of the Nazi regime, while other cousins and uncles proudly told the tale from the triumphant perspective of Costa and the prestige and wealth the family possessed. Each complicated piece of the tale is thus a part of everyone’s memory, coalescing into a story which expresses many different themes and characters. In Iulia’s and Costa’s memory, long after their passing, the family strove to fulfill the hopeful aspiration of becoming “American” while remaining Romani. Their claims to Americanness are tied, in part, to the memory work performed by the family, retelling the story of their immigration, struggle and hardship while proudly asserting their tenacity, creativity and survivance. Opaque immigration controls and the memories of the individuals who traversed these regimes function as the central force through which the Ciurarus claim their American status and Romani identity. The Ciurarus’ memory-filled story of immigration triumph also highlights the “right way” to immigrate as Roma. They arrived with documentation verified by an outside party willing to vouch for their worth. Being placed into the category of dependents of the compassionate state that highlighted their work ethic, unfair treatment and victimhood under communism, provided a recognized path to the United States.

Identity

Placing the stories of the Ciuraru and Mitchell families together across time is generative and allows for comparison of the nature of American Romani identity formation in response to immigration policies and practices. Each of these stories elucidates both the cultural and legal categories into which Romani people were forced to conform as they immigrated to the United States, and the persistent memories that this negotiation might have produced. Of course, there are many differences: The memories and stories about the Ciurarus are from the viewpoint of the Romani individuals carried forward in oral accounts from the 1980s, while the Mitchells’ story comes from the perspective of 1905 immigration officials. Each tale is full of contradictions and archival and “objective” weaknesses – each is based either on outsider perspectives or second-hand accounts and retellings. But both accounts are linked through the pragmatic choices that were made by individuals and families who sought to make a new home in the US by utilizing their mobility, kinship networks and American discourses around citizenship to assert their belonging. In their telling, each story illustrates Romani people asserting their identities as desirable “Americans-in-waiting” pushing back against their representations as fraudulent or potentially unworthy citizens.Footnote ²⁹

Each family also chose to highlight aspects of their Romani identity to navigate American immigration regimes intent on keeping them out. For the Mitchells, the documented claims to citizenship and the emphatic cries of “belonging” in the United States confirmed their American identity and rights under the law, while in the Ciuraru case the claim of social persecution and the reformulation of American Cold War discourses led to their sponsorship and classification as asylum seekers from communism. Yet in each case, the individuals were identified and self-identified as “Gypsies,” albeit with different national origins. While it may have been more difficult for the Mitchells to “hide” their identity due to the directive that went out in 1904, they still chose to be open with their identity. In fact, Louis Mitchell stated several times that he “did not want to tell a lie” in response to questions he did not know and highlighted that his people were “good Americans” and productive “Gypsies” who had money and skills to contribute.Footnote ³⁰

The cases of the Mitchells and the Ciurarus further highlight how immigration controls and policy have changed over time. In the case of the Mitchells, the immigration policies were still in their infancy. When they were detained by US officials, inspectors such as Gorman were using procedures created to enforce Chinese exclusion and to reject the poor and racially undesirable. Agents and immigration inspectors employed by the Department of Labor and Commerce were often working together on cases which blurred the lines between departmental authority and complicated federal oversight. Consequently, these policies were prone to broad interpretation by inspectors on the ground. In 1905, when the Mitchells and Zurkas tried to cross into the United States, the language around exclusion was largely aimed at Chinese and Asians, with some later additions to this 1882 act concerning anarchists, poor folks, disabled persons, diseased persons, paupers, felons, prostitutes or those convicted of a crime of moral turpitude.Footnote ³¹ As Margot Canaday has argued, inspectors wielded great power to classify all manner of people attempting to cross into the United States. In so doing, they made conceptual categories socially real – Romani people were no exception to this practice.Footnote ³² When immigration inspectors encountered the Mitchells, they were primed to be on the lookout for “Gypsy” fakers; when they harassed Mitchell, they made real the expectations of Gypsyness. Subjecting Mitchell and his family to that experience must have shaped their subsequent interactions and complicated the ways in which their American identity was legible.

When the Ciuraru family entered the United States, they did so as asylum seekers sponsored by a church. Immigration controls did not cast them as fraudsters, but as homeless, dependent and piteous individuals escaping the dreaded communism of the East. Laying claim to American identity in both cases, then, was a way for these families to counter these meanings ascribed to them – a kind of refusal hidden in an otherwise assimilatory American embrace.

However, the Mitchell case also reveals how inspectors at the Canadian stations drastically overstepped their authority to exclude a Romani family from the US. In Sargent’s intervention, we see not only the maturation of a federal hierarchy in immigration bureaucracy, but also the institutionalization of the more informal means by which inspectors had grown accustomed to excluding families like Mitchell’s. Two years after the Mitchells encountered the immigration inspectors, Congress acted and passed a more comprehensive immigration act that further excluded people and broadened the authority of inspectors to determine if immigrants were likely to become a public charge (LPC).Footnote ³³ The added language around “likely to become a public charge” lowered the threshold for inspectors and allowed for broader-based exclusion. Several cases involving Roma in the subsequent years show inspectors’ disingenuous or outright racist attempts to target Roma for exclusion based on LPC.

By the time the Ciurarus successfully navigated the US immigration regime, the system had been reformed several times over. By far the largest change was the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which reformed racial restrictions and quotas. The new act introduced new categories. As historian María Cristina García highlights, Cold War policies around refugees, asylum seekers, “defectors” and “parolees,” combined with the United States’ signature on the United Nations Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees, symbolically tied US immigration policy to a moral authority which protected the world’s persecuted.Footnote ³⁴ By 1980, Congress was concerned about judicial overreach and possible loopholes in the refugee system and passed the Refugee Act which clarified and standardized a pathway for refugees. García notes that the symbolic power of the refugee arrangements also had a substantial impact on the acceptance of those individuals as potential Americans. Many of these immigrants were educated and skilled workers who were seen as utilitarian additions to the American experiment.Footnote ³⁵ This political economic value was further supplemented by the appeal of defectors and asylum seekers from communist countries. The Ciurarus utilized their status as potential refugees from Communist Romania in the later 1980s, and their persecution based on their ethnic identity and religious beliefs to maximize the strength of their case. Yet in doing so, they gave up much of their generational wealth, left their home country behind and chanced finding a sponsor to help them navigate a brutally complex and opaque system.

Neither the Mitchells nor the Ciurarus navigated these immigration regimes alone. The Ciurarus and Mitchells had networks, connections, kin and nodes of information to rely on which aided their immigration to the United States. Romani families and groups who crossed into the United States – whether from a land border or an ocean port of entry – often had been in contact with others already in the Americas about their journeys. They shared knowledge about how to circumvent immigration controls that aimed to keep them out in everyday practice. While inspectors might interpret this knowledge as deception, it was a survival strategy employed from long before their US arrival. However, Romani people also proved adept at leveraging citizenship claims to pass through immigration controls. When his citizenship was called into question, Louis Mitchell was ready to emphasize his honesty and adherence to an imagined American virtue of moral citizenship at a time when immigration inspectors had great latitude to exclude individuals. In claiming he “did not want to tell a lie,” Louis Mitchell was challenging the inspector’s ability to exclude him and his family based on his character; he pushed the inspectors to justify their claims and asserted his belonging to the United States. Moreover, his strategy illustrates that he knew the machinations of the immigration system and was willing to point out its incongruences. The Ciurarus did not have to point out the inherent issues with the system, but instead had to rely on the narrative of the state to compel their case as worthy potential-Americans immigrating legally.

Nevertheless, officials both in 1905 and the 1980s were surprised by the Roma. Their stranger status and unknown national allegiances appeared contradictory to prevailing ideas about the moral white majority. Indeed, Roma challenged the notion that families could be connected in kinship and relations outside of the properly documented nuclear family; at times, their hidden networks seemed tantamount to criminal dealings. Yet both the Ciurarus and the Mitchells used their networks to assert their belonging. What would become American Romani identity was asserted through those networks and stories, and often anchored by their experiences with immigration regimes. The barriers constructed by non-Roma facilitated those meaning-making connections between Romani groups and helped establish America as the ideal place for the “Gypsies.” Over time, however, American Romani identity became tied to not only their histories, stories and memories of these immigration trials, but to their adherence to a discourse about the United States which cast worthy individuals as hardworking, loyal and contributing to the social and economic well-being of the nation.

Conclusion

In 1929 when Irving Brown rendered this judgment, Roma originally from Eastern and Southern Europe had indeed been coming to the United States for many decades – the Mitchell family was just one example. Brown and other early “Gypsyologists” associated with the Gypsy Lore Society (GLS) saw Roma in the United States not as problems but as fascinating exotic people among the masses of immigrant populations. Of course, the same “Gypsyologists” also romanticized and racialized the Roma they wrote about, often slipping into problematic and downright racist commentary about the differences between groups and individuals. At the same time Brown, like many others interested in “Gypsies,” highlighted their “foreign relations” and often observed their strategic maneuvering around immigration restrictions placed on their nationalities. Those “foreign relations” also aided in their ability to negotiate American citizenship laws and overzealous inspectors as evidenced by the Mitchells, and immigration statuses and policies as shown with the Ciurarus. While these “Gypsyologists” often interpreted Romani strategies to navigate immigration control as pathological, they were mistaken in their meaning. Roma are not static individuals or groups, nor are they, as another GLS member classified them, “the last primitive people.”Footnote ³⁷ Instead, the long history of Romani groups migrating to the United States includes countless examples of their dynamic and pragmatic choices which shaped their subjectivities as Americans.

While the cases of the Mitchells and Ciurarus allow for a more thorough reckoning of American Romani identities, memories and stories, more work needs to be done to uncover the transnational connections between Roma; these have only continued to solidify throughout time. At the same time, American Romani identity is diverse, heterogeneous and hybrid. For each Romani community, American identity is something different and emphasized or deemphasized in certain settings and for specific audiences. Similarly, there are also a multitude of ways to be “American.” For the cases included here, we aimed to highlight not only that diversity across time and space but also the continuum of groups, no matter where they hailed from, carving out their own spaces. Even though the efforts of pundits like Tucker Carlson, “Gypsyologists” like Brown and overzealous inspectors like Gorman decried an incompatibility of Romani lifeways with American values, we see another path forward. This path is lined with stories, memories and dreams of a more expansive and inclusive America, and therefore a more complex Romani Atlantic.

Migration Frameworks since the 1970s

In the 1970s the prevailing American framework for interpreting migration employed the concepts of immigration, assimilation and acculturation. This model was severely flawed because it was unidirectional and ignored multidirectional mobility, creative mixing and revitalization within immigrant cultures. Diaspora, a very old concept referring to religious or national groups living outside a singular homeland via unidirectional migratory spokes, gained renewed currency in the 1980s. William Safran’s definition of diasporaFootnote ⁴ fits Roma in terms of historic migration from India, but does not fit in terms of migrants’ consciousness of a homeland. Macedonian Roma throughout the Atlantic refer to Macedonia as “home,” although home is also wherever their community is; they are people-oriented more than place-oriented and their community is embedded within multiple locales. Since the 1990s foregrounding of globalization, diaspora studies have significantly overlapped with transnationalism, which emphasises how people’s practices, attitudes and identities are linked across nations. Romani migrants are transnational because they “live some or most of the time separated from each other yet hold together and create something that can be seen as a feeling of collective welfare and unity, namely ‘familyhood,’ even across national borders.”Footnote ⁵ In the last decade, the mobilities/immobilities framework has further decentered transnational studies from fixed sites to processes. Mobility and transnational studies, however, have been criticized for deemphasizing the nation-state. Yet states matter, especially considering policies of regulation and exclusion. Policy manifestations of power relations must be highlighted – the granting of visas is particularly significant – because Roma have historically been seen as undesirable migrants, as many chapters in this volume attest.

Insights from diaspora studies as well as transnational and mobility studies can be fruitfully combined via the Macedonian Romani case to ask: “Who travels when, and under what circumstances? What socio-economic, political and cultural conditions mark the trajectories of these journeys? What regimes of power inscribe the formation of a specific diaspora?”Footnote ⁶ Underlining historical power inequalities, the Roma case highlights erasures and exclusions. Transnational and border studies reveal how migrants form social relationships in the context of discrimination and how kinship operates across borders. Diasporas are “lived and relived through multiple modalities,” as “differentiated, heterogeneous and contested spaces, even as they are implicated in the construction of a common ‘we.’”Footnote ⁷ For example, sometimes community members identify as Roma and sometimes adopt other labels, as I discuss below; these negotiations are informed by historical discrimination and stereotypes.

A mobility framework widens the analysis of the Romani Atlantic as a complex whole.Footnote ⁸ Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic we can eschew older linear models in favor of analyzing the multiple modalities of Romani circulation throughout the Atlantic. We can recast binaries such as fixity/rootlessness and origin/destination in favor of processual and strategic approaches. Diaspora emerges as a decentering project that rejects essential identities in favor of pluralities. Gilroy’s anti-essentialism helps us understand that New York migrants, for example, are simultaneously Roma, Macedonians and Americans. The Romani Atlantic, thus, highlights transnational “structures of feeling, producing, communicating and remembering.”Footnote ⁹ Like the Black Atlantic, the Romani Atlantic underlines the transnational structure of “cultural and political exchange and transformation”Footnote ¹⁰ among Romani peoples who do not fit strict nationalist and ethnic boundaries.

The politics of identity configured in multiple transnational locations, as well as the integral role of music in the articulation of identity, occupy central roles in Gilroy’s analysis. It is no accident that Gilroy devoted much space to performative genres such as music because they articulate a changing diasporic historical identity.Footnote ¹¹ Rejecting the essential binary of African versus Western origins, Gilroy insists that music expresses “a changing rather than an unchanging same.”Footnote ¹² He shows that although music is a vital element in the “connectedness” of Black Atlantic communities, it also embraces “borrowing, displacement, transformation and continual inscriptions.”Footnote ¹³ What, then, does the Romani Atlantic sound like? What role has music played in shaping, defining, and constructing the Atlantic as a historical space for Macedonian Roma? How can we interpret the spaces, networks and practices of diaspora in terms of performative moments of creativity in relation to processes of adaptation and change?Footnote ¹⁴

The enactment of identity via performative genres, especially music, is a visible and audible symbol in the Balkan Romani diaspora. Through performance, identity is conceptualized: “the imagination of diaspora is constituted … by a compelling sense of moral co-responsibility and embodied performance.”Footnote ¹⁵ Some genres of music and dance have become veritable emblems of identity in the diaspora. As Thomas Turino wrote, music (along with other expressive cultural forms) enables a “rich semiotic field that has the capability of producing particularly complex effects,”Footnote ¹⁶ thus making it especially effective at representing, generating and configuring diasporic identities. “Music is one of the ways in which people recognize their relationship to the larger world. … Sound, and music, informs our sense of place and our relationship to the past. It also connects us to the present and addresses the cultural dislocation of migration, economic deprivation, structural inequality, and a panoply of histories.”Footnote ¹⁷ For Gilroy, “black music provided me with the means to gain proximity to the sources of feeling from which our local conceptions of blackness were assembled.”Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly, for Macedonian Roma, music is central to the texture of their lives and charts their historical trajectory.

Migratory Trajectories since the 1960s

Before addressing the contexts of music, I will illustrate the migratory trajectories and experiences of Macedonian Roma.Footnote ¹⁹ The center of Macedonian Romani life in the United States is the New York City borough of the Bronx, more specifically, the Belmont/Arthur Avenue neighborhood. I estimate that today over five thousand Macedonian Roma live in the New York region. During the past sixty years Bosnians, Montenegrins and Serbs, as well as Albanians and Hispanics have moved into this historically Italian area. Macedonian Roma began migrating to Belmont in the late 1960s for many reasons, including unemployment and prejudice. At that time, the Yugoslav government sent “guest workers” to Western Europe, the United States and Australia to receive hard currency remittances that bolstered the economy. This process, termed gurbet, meaning working abroad, found its way into many song texts in all Yugoslav languages.Footnote ²⁰ When these work programs ended, many Yugoslavs stayed, and the sponsorship of relatives continued. The wars in Yugoslavia (1991–2001) brought economic crisis to the entire region, causing another wave of emigration. Since the 1990s Roma have sought asylum in Western Europe based on claims of persecution, including police brutality, health disparities and institutional violence.Footnote ²¹ These claims have had varied success, dependent upon changing policies. (Macedonian Roma have very rarely sought asylum in the US.) Because North Macedonia is not in the European Union, current rules allow only a ninety-day visit of Macedonians to the Schengen area (Germany, France, etc.), although many people ignore these rules and work illegally.

The trajectory of one family between the 1980s and 1990s illustrates some transnational patterns from this era.Footnote ²² In 1988 I met Osman in Belmont; his natal family consisted of a brother who lived with their aging mother in their hometown, Prilep, a brother in Germany, and a sister, Aiše (see above) who had married Ali and lived in Skopje. Osman invited me to meet his wife Jasmin and his sister Aiše who was visiting Belmont to attend Osman’s sons’ circumcision party and to earn some money. Short visits were common in the 1980s whereby migrants (mostly undocumented) often worked in a Belmont wallet factory. After Aiše returned to Macedonia, one of her brothers came to Belmont to briefly visit and work. His son also came to visit and later emigrated (he was eventually deported after living in the US for decades). Another brother emigrated from Germany with his wife and children. In 1992 Aiše’s oldest son Ramo arrived in Belmont via Mexico, and then Aiše came again in 1994. During all these extended visits, Osman and Jasmin were generous hosts, housing and feeding family members in their small two-bedroom apartment and helping them find work and social connections.

During numerous telephone calls, family members talked and cried, concerned about loved ones in the diaspora. Kinship means everything, and so people feel deeply when family members disperse as they must. Aiše and Ali had two sons of marriageable age. In 1995, Ramo planned to marry a woman born in Prilep who lived in Belmont. Meanwhile, Rifat (still in Skopje) became engaged to a Romani woman born in Toronto whose parents were from Prilep; she was visiting Macedonia for the summer. Aiše and Ali wanted to make a double wedding for their two sons in Belmont, but the celebration couldn’t take place because Ali could not get a visa for the United States. Rifat easily received a visa for Canada and could travel freely to the US because of his wife’s legal Canadian status. Aiše and Ramo, however, could not leave the US because they were undocumented; thus, they couldn’t go to Toronto to see Rifat and his new bride. The only solution was to wait and keep applying for a US visa for Ali. After over a year, Ali finally received a visa in 1996 and the wedding was held.

Examining this situation from both American and Macedonian viewpoints helped me understand how Roma negotiated across the Atlantic during these decades. Members of the Bronx family frequently spoke with kin in the diaspora via telephone, gave me gifts to bring to Skopje and instructed me to take copious photographs and videos. Whereas Aiše hadn’t seen her husband in over a year, other relatives who traveled saw him, brought gifts and shared photos and videotapes (some of which I had filmed). I was recruited as part of a large communication network consisting of relatives traveling back and forth, visiting, working temporarily and looking for spouses. In the 2000s the family’s transnational ties multiplied significantly. Almost all of the children of Ali’s brothers and sisters in Šutka have married Macedonian Roma in Western Europe. Rifat and Ramo now have cousins in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands. Today, social media plays a major role in supporting communication across the huge network of diasporic Macedonian Roma. YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and so on are employed daily to communicate and exchange information, photos, music and videos, and to find spouses.

Family, Community and Marriage

Belmont is a family-oriented, multigenerational community where kinship is extremely significant; the community’s kinship network is increasingly transnational, with many nodes. Similarities can be drawn with other transnational Balkan Romani communities, such as the Romanian Roma studied by Juan Gamella and Vasile Muntean.Footnote ²³ Elders occupy venerated positions; younger family members kiss their hands and bow as a sign of respect. Female elders sometimes work, but they also care for the children. In the early decades, a typical Belmont household was multigenerational; ideally, in one apartment lived a son, his parents (and perhaps his grandparents), his wife and his children. Girls still live at home until they marry, when they move in with their husbands; a few young couples are now insisting on their own apartments.

The community is still extremely close-knit; everyone knows each other by sight, sees each other often at music-filled celebrations (see below), and socializes almost exclusively within the community. What defines the field of social relations for these diasporic families is a “very high level of interpersonal and intercommunal investment and trust – economic, social, emotional and moral.”Footnote ²⁴ Community members “define their subjectivities as moral individuals through long-term relations of sociality such as marriage, family, and community.”Footnote ²⁵ As Leila, a respected middle-aged community member, explained, “Family values … are very important. My family was everything to me … . This was always the main issue growing up.” She saw family as defense against a world hostile to Roma:

Kin orientation, then, is an adaptive mechanism in a world filled with threats against Roma. Relying on one’s own family has been a way to ensure trust to counter the threats from a mistrustful environment.

Marriage in this community is expected because it underscores the significance of the family. In addition, because visa regimes are so strict, currently the most realistic path of migrating out of North Macedonia is through marriage. Traditionally, the elders looked for appropriate spouses within the local community and the children acquiesced. Today, children are more assertive and intermarriage occasionally occurs. Parents still investigate the reputation of the prospective spouse’s entire family, including their economic standing, level of respectability and how the family has treated its brides in the past. Women, more than men, cultivate this “people knowledge.” Thus, although men may be the public face of the patriarchal family in marriage negotiations, they rely on women for the information that makes marriage negotiations possible.Footnote ²⁷

Because the local Belmont community is relatively small, and because parents and children prefer spouses who are Macedonian Roma, transnational ties are often activated. If a young man or woman cannot find a suitable spouse in New York, usually the family takes a trip to Macedonia to “look around.” Of course, only people who have legal status and sizeable income can travel abroad. Word goes out “back home,” in Prilep, for example, or in a diasporic location such as Vienna, and relatives network to arrange meetings with prospective spouses. These trips can be very stressful, considering the condensed time spent in any one locale. Leila, who met her husband on a three-month trip to Prilep, commented:

Leila is somewhat of an exception because she was twenty-five years old and in college when she married. Despite her family’s insistence on education, she knew she needed to find a spouse. She had an aura of self-confidence and honesty that were rare for young women of the 1980s. Her philosophy has carried through for her children:

When I organized a focus group in 2009 on the topic of marriage with Leila’s 18-year-old daughter and her friends, they agreed that these stressful trips should be avoided. Yet all these young women ended up marrying Romani men, some local and some from Macedonia. Parents warn that because Macedonia is so poor, everyone wants to leave – they all “line up” when a prospective match arrives from abroad, making it difficult to trust anyone. Leila said that “I would not let a girl child go back there alone, especially when she’s of marriage age, because they will play with her … I’ll go with her.” Nurija, a 19-year-old, commented: “It’s the same for the boys … They don’t want to go back home and just marry anyone, because they’re marrying you just … for the money and to come to America. It’s like we have a passport written on our backs. It’s their way out.”

In the last thirty years, with cell phones and through social media such as Facebook, young people are prolonging transnational marriage negotiations and becoming more cautious. Nurija explained:

Bringing grooms to America is more complicated in cultural terms than bringing brides because it contradicts the expectation of patrilocal residence; nevertheless, it regularly occurs out of necessity, as with the case of Rifat above. Moving in with the bride’s family is awkward for a man who must depend on them for language, employment and legal status. Leila explained: “When he’s a zet (groom) in the house, they are made aware of it from the moment the marriage is announced. They’ll get the comments … Your wife will command you … And, they’ll get that cruel stare.” The stigma, however, is often balanced out by the opportunity to emigrate. One recent case involved a middle-aged, divorced woman who met her future husband through relatives via social media and trips to Macedonia; she brought him to the US after waiting a year for a visa, but there was little stigma because of her mature age and financial independence. This case also underlines how visa delays often prolong marriage negotiations.

Visas also determine the circulation of musicians, who are crucial to family ceremonies. When a Belmont family asked me in 2016 to help bring over a band from their hometown of Prilep for their son’s circumcision celebration, securing visas was the main challenge. We opted for a Q cultural exchange visa and programmed a public show with the New York club Drom, perhaps the first time a Balkan Romani wedding band performed in a public site.Footnote ²⁸ Voice of Roma, the nongovernmental organization that I work with, has been successful with P3 visas sponsoring many Macedonian Romani musicians for its annual Herdeljezi (spring renewal ritual) festivals. Today the migratory flow of all Roma, including musicians, is totally dependent on visas.

Transnational Music and Dance

Multiday ritual celebrations featuring music and dance are the glue that binds transnational Romani families together.Footnote ²⁹ In an insecure world filled with prejudice, life-cycle ceremonies and calendrical events serve as markers of identity – a space where they can display and perform being Roma; they also provide a secure space to evoke memory. Moreover, in the diaspora, ritual accomplishes identity work by demonstrating core community values, such as respect for elders and women’s ritual knowledge. At work, a Romani migrant may need to pass as Mexican American or Serbian German to avoid discrimination, but at a wedding, Romani ethnicity is proudly on display.

Weddings, in particular, bring into focus gender and kin relationships. With live music, multiple days of dancing and elaborate ritual symbolism, weddings performatively enact the significance of family in diasporic locations via gender, status, age and class roles. Many dramatic moments are highlighted, reputations are established, conflicts and alliances emerge and individual and family status are negotiated. Weddings have a long symbolic life: Community members save money for years to pay for them, plan them well ahead of time, watch their videos over and over and discuss them long afterwards. They figure clearly in how Roma performatively conceive of their identity and how they distinguish themselves from both non-Roma and other Romani subgroups.

Celebrations, moreover, are motivations for and manifestations of migration. For example, if they have the means and documents, Belmont families travel to Germany or Macedonia (and vice versa) to attend weddings. Furthermore, guests from the diaspora are honored during weddings with public announcements and by being called up to lead dance lines. Conversely, diasporic guests are expected to give expensive gifts to the sponsoring family and to pay for part of the ceremony, such as the music or decorations. Several Belmont families have held their family celebrations in Prilep because of its affordability.

In addition to weddings, Roma celebrate other life-cycle rituals such as circumcisions, which are structured much like weddings and now take place in banquet halls. In Macedonia, calendrical events such as large New Year’s Balls have taken place for approximately twenty years, sometimes sponsored by Romani politicians. In the last thirty years, Belmont Roma have added more celebrations with music and dance, such as anniversaries, graduations, baby showers, March 8 (International Women’s Day) parties, sweet sixteen parties, elders’ birthday parties and New Year’s Eve. Girls or women are often the focus of these newer celebrations; thus, traditional ritual forms are molded to new settings in the service of newer values, such as honoring girls’ birthdays or valuing female education and accomplishment.Footnote ³⁰

Celebrations are meticulously documented and continuously replayed via media channels. In a contemporary home anywhere in the diaspora, a large screen displays a wedding, and people of all ages watch and evaluate. In the 1980s, I was often the only person filming but by the 1990s families began acquiring camcorders or hiring professional videographers; the resulting videos (sometimes containing personal greetings to relatives) were carried by hand to relatives in the diaspora. In this manner, people saw and learned about their relatives in transnational locations. YouTube, which began in 2005, dramatically increased the ease of accessibility of music, dance and ritual, as clips could be posted immediately. Hundreds of Romani wedding videos appeared, and Roma started viewing the events of distant relatives plus those of unrelated Balkan Roma. Hiring a videographer is now ubiquitous and clips made by both guests and professionals are shared via Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Some Belmont Roma own successful wedding videography businesses. Thus, mediated ritual celebrations with music and dance serve as the background to daily life.

In addition, Macedonian Roma across the diaspora constantly listen to Romani music in their cars and homes; they inhabit a media soundscape that is saturated with music. The newest hits released in Macedonia or Western Europe by Romani musicians are instantly performed everywhere in the diaspora. Musicians must remain current in this pan-diasporic repertoire, plus know hundreds of older songs and melodies. The transmission of music is facilitated by both social media and the migration of musicians, who are often the most mobile members of their communities. The best wedding bands in Macedonia often travel to perform in Western Europe, and (if they can get visas) in New York. Some bands maintain apartments in Germany for the winter season, and many musicians have migrated to Western Europe. Macedonian Romani musicians who legally live in Germany regularly travel to Belmont to perform on tourist visas. A typical wedding lineup in Belmont might include a guest melody player and singer from Europe paired with local backup musicians who come from diverse Balkan regions. These locals sometimes come from musical families and sometimes perform for other non-Romani Balkan groups. Often Belmont musicians have second jobs.Footnote ³¹

Class, Work and Religion

There is a strong work ethic in the Macedonian Romani community; having a job is the norm and laziness is condemned. Everyone believes there is work to be had, even if it is unskilled or menial. Unlike in Western Europe, few Macedonian American Roma are officially refugees, so they are not entitled to social services. They view welfare as somewhat of a stigma and prefer to support themselves. Work was coded by gender in the early decades, as in Macedonia. Some common male occupations, such as electrician, construction worker, car mechanic and tailor, transferred well to America. Other occupations, such as metalworking, did not transfer as readily. Ali (see above), born in 1948 to a family of blacksmiths had a home workshop plus a stall in the Skopje city market where he sold his metalware and traded clothing, employing five languages. After emigrating to Belmont, he crafted fences and ornamental wrought iron for private homes, but his earnings declined, and he did not want his sons to continue his profession. Many electricians, on the other hand, have successfully trained their American-born sons to take over the family business.

Men of the older generation sometimes combined and switched jobs, such as factory and janitorial work, security guarding and delivery driving. A creative combination of trades is very characteristic of Balkan Roma. Ali’s well-educated son worked his way up from a meat deliveryman to a manager of a meat distribution company. He also trained as an insurance agent, opened a restaurant and became a real estate agent. Several professional musicians combine music with day jobs such as driving or delivering. No woman is a professional musician because of the stigma of performing in public.Footnote ³² Several Roma have invested in real estate and made substantial profits.

Female employment is a necessity in almost all families, although the ideal is a sole male breadwinner. If there are small children and no older women to care for them, mothers stay home; day care centers are rarely utilized. The middle generation of women worked as cleaning ladies in office buildings, as cutters in the clothing industry, as salesclerks in neighborhood shops, as caretakers for the elderly in their homes, as food managers in nursing homes, and as hair stylists and cosmeticians. These US jobs were like those in Macedonia, although in the latter case, they were often government positions that offered stable pensions and vacation benefits. The US provides little employment security and few benefits and much depends on one’s legal status. Those who are undocumented remain extremely limited in their job prospects. In the 1980s, for example, Roma worked in a neighborhood plastics factory for $4.00 per hour. Undocumented workers have no job security, no vacations, no pension plans and no medical insurance; they are constantly afraid their employers will report them.

Yet, during the last two decades, most families have attained middle-class status; and with the increase in demand for celebrations, local musicians are doing well. Many Roma have moved into private homes in the suburbs. This means that face-to-face street socializing in Belmont has declined and social media contact has replaced it. Because suburban dwellers do not see each other regularly, they value celebrations with music even more. With higher incomes, regular vacations and legal documentation, some families travel frequently to North Macedonia and to other sites in the diaspora. When they visit, they are expected to bring gifts, attend weddings and tip musicians generously; this is a huge financial responsibility that informs decisions about whether and when to travel.

Educational gains are notable in the younger generation. Women, even more than men, are attending college and entering professions such as nursing, teaching, computing and accounting.Footnote ³³ Some men still do manual labor, but there are many business owners, musicians and videographers for weddings. Only a few parents have allowed their children to attend college out of town and live in dormitories. Elders monitor girls’ mobility more than boys’, emphasizing female honor and modesty, although many girls now drive and socialize unchaperoned. The marriage age is increasing, and women are waiting longer to have children and having fewer children, which increases their independence. As thirty-year-old Suzana explained to me, “We want to be modern but keep certain values”; when I asked her what she meant by modern, she explained: “We’re more lenient – there are fewer rules; for example, our daughter and sons will be treated equally.”

Language change is notable; multilingualism was the norm in Macedonia – the older generation often spoke Romani, Turkish, Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian. The Romani language is, however, on the decline in Belmont; the trend is to retain Macedonian/English bilingualism, but even Macedonian is on the decline. Belmont Roma are relatively isolated from other Roma and thus have little need to speak Romani. The texts of songs, however, keep the Romani language alive. For example, even though Bronx Roma may not speak Romani, they are familiar with the lyrics and meanings of Romani songs and sing along with them.

The Muslim religion has historically been a cultural identification point but the level of practice has increased dramatically. Until the 1990s, Roma were not very observant; even today, some eat pork, and many drink alcohol and do not pray. In the 1990s, conservative forms of Islam began to spread in the Balkans and the diaspora, and mosques proliferated. In Belmont, both the Muza Mosque and the Islamic Center became vital community foci. Some women are covered, and many men pray at the mosque; quite a few have made the hajj to Mecca. Increasing Islamization has directly affected ritual and musical life both in the Balkans and in the diaspora. Some hodzas (Islamic teachers) instruct Roma to stop celebrating “non-Muslim holidays” such as the spring Herdeljezi celebration of renewal and fertility. Most Belmont Roma no longer celebrate Herdeljezi, although in 2023 and 2024 there were small gatherings with music. In addition, some circumcision ceremonies, especially if they are funded by mosques, are now celebrated without music and dance. Quite a few weddings happen without alcohol and most weddings feature a ceremony in the mosque. On the other hand, many covered women dance regularly. But for some Roma, Islam has become their most important public identity factor.

Negotiating Identity

Most Belmont Roma feel different not only from the majority of Americans but also from other Muslim Balkan ethnicities and from other Roma. Identity issues arise because of several intertwined issues: prejudice against Roma, the pressure to “be more American” and pride in Romani culture. These Roma experience the tension between American individualistic values and the collective family values of their community. Living, working and going to school alongside non-Roma makes them aware of what they claim distinguishes Roma from others: their family orientation, respect for elders, ties to Macedonia, Muslim religion and culture, including languages, customs, rituals and especially music and dance. Most relate to Macedonia as their home. This, however, is a discursive trope, a reference point. Many community members have rarely traveled home, and some younger members have never been to Macedonia. Home is wherever their community is because they are more people-oriented than place-oriented. For example, when people speak of travel to Macedonia, it is often to see specific people, and experience the music, but rarely “to be there.” I was surprised to hear how often people said they did not need to visit Macedonia because “everyone was here [in the US].”

Community members not only identify as but also are proud to be Roma, but exactly what that means is variable. For the older generations, it may be language and customs and for the second generation, it may be finding appropriate spouses for their children. Second- and third-generation Roma, who were born in the US, always mention music and dance to define their culture. One unmarried girl told me she does not really know what or who she is: “I’ve never been to Macedonia, so am I Macedonian?” On the other hand, another who had “never been home” said she is anxiously awaiting the opportunity to go there to attend parties and be immersed in the music. How one constructs one’s identity for others is often a different issue than how one feels within one’s own community. Certainly, this is true for musicians who are forced to deal with marketing images that are usually created by non-Roma.Footnote ³⁴ But all Roma are forced to deal with their public identity whether they want to or not, because of the stigma associated with it. In the Balkans, non-Roma readily stigmatize Roma by where they live, what language they speak, how they dress or the color of their skin.

Because of discrimination, Roma exhibit a diversity of attitudes about revealing their ethnicity to non-Roma. In contrast to the Balkans, in the United States Roma can hide their family history; they do not live in an exclusively Romani neighborhood, few Americans can pinpoint their foreign language, and there are other dark-skinned people around. In the United States, stereotypes about “Gypsies” center on the dichotomous poles of romantic fantasy and criminality. On the one hand, Gypsies are supposedly nomadic, passionate, talented, magical, artistic and musical, and on the other hand, they are shifty, cannot be trusted and will “gyp” you.Footnote ³⁵ There have been many television programs about Gypsy criminality and police forces in several cities have divisions specializing in “Gypsy crime.” Because of these pervasive stereotypes, American Roma from all subgroups often hide their ethnicity.Footnote ³⁶ Leila told me in 2014: “We have to teach our kids to not be ashamed to admit they are Roma so that people … can see we are ‘normal.’” She said that her parents often claimed, “we’re Turkish, to avoid not being able to find an apartment, a job, to avoid the whole issue.” In Belmont, Roma are sometimes mistaken for other people of color in their neighborhood; they are racialized even if they consider themselves “white.” A Belmont Roma worried: “We are very cautious. If you say you’re a Gypsy people begin to look at you. They think you steal, you can’t be trusted. We would lose our jobs.”

One woman explained:

A college-educated married woman living in Toronto explained: “Whether we say we are Roma depends on whom you talk to. You really have to pick carefully who you tell because they can throw it back at you. Some of my friends and co-workers know and some don’t.” Similarly, Ramo told me, “I’m proud that I’m a Rom, but others hide, they say they’re Turkish, whatever. I hate that. A lot of people think that we steal, that we don’t work. Where I used to work, I told them I am Gypsy and they didn’t believe it – they said that is impossible, you can’t be Gypsy. Most people think we live in tents.”

In the 1990s, several musicians refused to play in a prestigious concert for non-Roma when they learned that they were identified as Roma in the program notes. These same Roma are extremely proud of and involved in their music when it occurs in all-Romani contexts, but they shy away from the Gypsy label in mainstream American contexts because of the stigma.

Community members claim that non-Romani Eastern Europeans are often the most prejudiced Americans. In 2010, a young mother said “I don’t tell anyone I’m Romani. I am afraid of the stereotypes – they would think I steal, I travel, I tell fortunes. I told my son not to tell his teachers, but he did and now his Polish teacher looks at us differently.” One Romani teacher hid her ethnicity and stayed off Facebook because she worked in a school where East European American teachers told “Gypsy jokes” in the lunchroom. In 2012, a controversy arose when some Roma joined a pan-Balkan New York City association run by Turks, but other Roma saw their Romani ethnicity being ignored by this same association. A young woman explained that we “feel excluded as a group and a race … we feel inferior … Shouldn’t Romani issues be addressed? … The world and the Balkans don’t like Roma … therefore Roma need to do what we need to do on our own and represent our own.” Another young woman responded to her: “Thank you … for waking up all our people – finally realizing they can’t run from who they are. … A lot of people that are now finally calling themselves Roma who would die before ever saying so. … Everyone was Turkish for a good minute … they don’t have to be ashamed anymore …”

Those Roma who experienced racism in Macedonia or other diasporic locations were the most afraid to admit their ethnicity in America. Leila narrated: “In the 1970s, I was afraid because my parents were afraid; I would say I’m Macedonian or Yugoslavian. If someone would ask how come you’re so dark, I’d say we’re Turkish. While we were in Vienna … the people we were living with advised us, ‘don’t speak the Romani language because if people find out we’re Gypsies, they’ll deport us.’” After a while, however, Leila realized that she could not reject her ethnicity:

The comments expressed above evoke Paul Gilroy’s use of the concept of “double consciousness,” which he referenced from W. E. B. Du Bois, who articulated in 1903: “this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.”Footnote ³⁷ Although specific to African Americans forced to see themselves through the lens of majority white Americans in a racist society, the concept also resonates with Roma. They display internal struggles to reconcile the outsider pejorative label “Gypsy” with being Roma; they thus must situationally negotiate identity disclosure. Migration also figures into this issue – Roma often pass as more acceptable migrants to avoid discrimination, something rarely available for transatlantic Blacks. Gilroy underlines the tension between Afro-diasporic and American positionalities and the emergent possibility of resistance and creativity. Similarly, Romani musicians sometimes creatively enact, adopt and exploit the Gypsy stereotype as a marketing tool for non-Roma, because racialized “Gypsy music” sells. On the other hand, as noted above, other musicians, who are proud to be Roma, reject the Gypsy label in mainstream American contexts because of the attached stigma. There are, then, a range of responses among Belmont Roma regarding revealing their identity: while some hide, others boast, some strategically pass and others harness stereotypes. Inside their own community, however, pride is strong and often centers on music and dance.

Conclusion

Gilroy’s analysis of the Black Atlantic as a “rhizomorphic” formation highlighting the circulation of ideas, people, and sounds helps to elucidate the transmission of music across and within the Romani Atlantic.Footnote ³⁸ Macedonian Romani American music, like African American music, is inherently hybrid, informed by the cosmopolitan trajectory of migrants. Gilroy approaches

Like African Americans, Macedonian Roma in diaspora combine elements of older traditions with newer innovations that do not dilute but rather reinforce and even create their identity.

The lived experiences of migrant Macedonian Roma have changed since the 1960s as they have responded to varying socioeconomic contexts. Macedonian Roma in New York are now well integrated into institutions such as schools and regular employment, and many have reached the middle class. They have become more religious than in earlier decades, more mobile and more gender egalitarian. But all migrant Roma are aware of exclusions and stereotypes. They cultivate strong ties to relatives in North Macedonia and other diasporic sites, such as Germany, and they regularly visit if funds and documents permit. These Roma maintain dynamic transnational communication not only via travel, but also through social media, often related to musically rich ritual celebrations. Their identity as Roma stems in part from shared exclusion and in part from shared culture, specifically transatlantic music.

Settling in New Countries

There is a growing body of literature on the Romani presence in the Americas.Footnote ²⁸ As Martin Fotta and Mariana Sabino-SalazarFootnote ²⁹ emphasize, mobility across the Atlantic has had an impact on many Romani communities – on their character, ethnogenesis and identity – and is a constitutive component of the modern Romani diaspora. And as SutreFootnote ³⁰ shows in her study on the transnational movement of an early twentieth-century kin group, the members of this particular family crossed borders with relative ease across three continents, since they were familiar with and mastered the rules of transnational circulation.Footnote ³¹ These Roma, similar to the Calós, must be considered as part of the historicities and migratory mobilities between Europe and America, marked by large numbers of people who have traversed the Atlantic in both directions.

The Calós form a nonclosed community shaped by transnational migratory processes. These dynamics have impacted the composition of family networks through a dynamic, fluid and flexible process of permanent reformulation of local kinship groups. The mobility of these family networks has developed for more than three decades in the framework of globalization. Moreover, the mobilities and circulations between Spain and Latin America have been of a multidimensional nature related to labor, health, marriage and residential desirability.

In the Americas, Romani presence has produced a series of popular projections that obscure the distinction between widely circulating stereotypes and Romani self-understandings. In Mexico and Argentina, the Roma have historically been devalued in relation to nation-building processes. They have often been viewed as outsiders in European and American societies due to specific national stereotypes related to their mobility and criminalization. This pattern is especially pronounced in the case of the Calós in Mexico. Nineteenth-century Mexican nationalism was based on the vindication of the pre-Hispanic past, in Creole opposition to, and differentiation from, Spain; the Romani people have not been part of this genealogy of the nation. The perception of their territorial elasticity and lack of autochthony or historical depth positions them against “true” or original Mexicans. At the same time, malinchismo,Footnote ³² the cultural code based on an exaggerated admiration for the foreigner, plays a key role in the construction of Mexican nationality. By mobilizing this code and asserting their Spanish identity, the Calós have distanced themselves from the cultural and Indigenous heritage of the Mexican state as well as from anti-Romani assumptions.Footnote ³³

In Argentina, the gap between Romani aspirations and the state’s views is not translated into national regulations but becomes revealed through the discretionary interpretations and actions of state agents across different layers of government. This is in line with a larger societal view that supports and promotes practices of structural violence: the personal stories of Romani families recount an immense amount of aggressive discrimination by security forces, health and educational institutions and public officials.Footnote ³⁴ The Calós were part of a massive migration from Spain, particularly Galicia, during the late Franco era due to famine, political instability and the search for better opportunities. Many of them were low-skilled migrants with high illiteracy levels, but who nevertheless managed to escape poverty and settle in urban areas. Here they worked predominantly in service industries such as restaurants, cafeterias, bars and so on.

The Calós in Mexico City and Buenos Aires reported that the first community members to arrive in Brazil were four men, originally from Madrid, who came from the Canary Islands in 1958.Footnote ³⁵ Several months later, they continued their journey to Argentina, where the most important Caló community in the Americas would eventually emerge. The first goods that these Caló immigrants sold door-to-door were fabrics: bedspreads, sheets, table linens and suit fabric. The Caló vendors lived in hotels or rented apartments. They sold fabric in the form of a lote (batch), that is, a set of items that were not sold individually. Manuel, who told me this story and who is now in his seventies, is the nephew of one of these four pioneers. Another nucleus formed in Caracas in the 1960s and, a few years later, in São Paulo. In 1978, about twenty families migrated from São Paulo to Mexico City, giving rise to the current Caló community there. In Bolivia, a small Caló community existed from the early 1980s until it dissolved in the late 1980s.

Manuel himself arrived in Argentina in 1960 and later lived in Mexico and Venezuela until 2000, when he returned to Buenos Aires. There, he finally settled down, bought properties and formed a big family. He had previously met the first Calós, who had departed from the Canary Islands and had spent a short time in Brazil: “They were salesmen. But after three months they were crying. ‘What kind of country is this? There are Blacks and they don’t speak Spanish.’” These door-to-door sales pioneers did not like the country, mainly because of the language, and tried to find another country to prospect – at least, this is how their relatives explain their settlement in Argentina.

Eulogio (67 years old) is a Caló from Buenos Aires who was born in Madrid and migrated to Argentina in the late 1970s. He recalls that during his youth, his family went through many hardships in the Caño Roto neighborhood, a suburb of Madrid, where they lived in a shack and were often going hungry (pasando hambre). Today, he is one of the most respected Calós and the one to whom Caló families primarily turn to fix problems (arreglar). He is dedicated to buying watches, gold and antiques. During my stay in the city, I would usually have breakfast with him at a confectionery near Plaza del Congreso. During one such meal, he told me:

The lack of cultural affinity and the difficulty of the language were obstacles to the implantation and expansion of the Calós in Brazil. This is how Manuel describes the impact generated by the arrival of the first Calós in Buenos Aires after spending several months in Brazil:

Shortly thereafter, word spread by telephone to relatives and friends they had left behind in Spain: “Come on, come on, there are fortunes to be made here!”

Thanks to these invitations, many more families began arriving by boat to Buenos Aires. Some families subsequently moved to Mendoza and later to Rosario. At the beginning of the 1960s, several families started to travel to the bordering countries – Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay and Peru – and stayed for various lengths of time. “They went to the countries where people spoke Spanish,” Manuel explained. At the time, the informal economy was common in many Latin American countries, so that in some places and countries, poverty and inequality led people to resort to the informal sale of gold to earn income. This facilitated the itinerant purchase and sale of gold by the Calós, which was much desired, in a market without regulations or controls. In the historical memory of these families, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and Bolivia, in particular, stood out as niche markets for the street purchase and sale of gold.

Argentina meant a radical change in the life of the Calós thanks to a combination of several factors: the facility with which they could conduct sales, the prestige attributed to Spaniards, a generally high standard of living and cultural and historical affinities. All these played in their favor. “The continent gave those of us who are in America today a new outlook and made it possible to live more comfortably,” María (53 years old) told me. Intense mobility across Spanish-speaking America, in turn, facilitated further development of the social skills that were necessary for Calós to relate to people as they traveled to towns and cities of varying sizes. In their narratives, Calós commonly contrast the treatment they received in Argentina with the experiences of racism and discrimination that they had suffered in Spain. As Alex (41 years old), an evangelical pastor from Buenos Aires with whom I frequently interacted in cafes and restaurants during 2018, commented:

Alex also provided an emic explanation of how this type of transformative experience of mobilityFootnote ³⁶ gave birth to a new traveling habitusFootnote ³⁷ that reconfigured Gitano behaviors, tastes, dispositions and values:

Through trade and travel, they came into direct contact with different cultures, social classes and professional groups. For Calós, the cosmopolitan aspect of interacting with diverse individuals and the change in socioeconomic status brought about by their arrival in Argentina served as a foundation for exploring other countries. One family, for instance, went to Chile a few months after settling in Buenos Aires in 1959. According to their account, for three months they tried to work – first in the capital, Santiago, and then in the towns and cities around the capital. Although they made some money, their biggest problem arose with the police, who demanded documentation from the peddlers and an explanation of their economic activities. Due to this police pressure, this family, along with a few other families already there, decided to leave the country and settle more permanently in Buenos Aires.

Lima, too, was a place where people went in search of opportunities shortly after arriving in Argentina in the early 1960s. The Calós explained to me that there was a lot of sonakay (gold) and that they could exchange their goods for gold as a form of payment in the homes where they did their selling. Later, they would resell the gold or melt it down for resale if they had purchased pieces of gold (pedacería). “They stopped in Lima and then Ecuador in 1959. Others stayed for a while and moved on to Brazil or Argentina. They brought Inca coins and gold,” Manuel told me.

In Venezuela, the implantation of the Calós occurred early. Manuel recalled when they started selling lotes (batches) in the early 1960s: “Some Italians in Caracas had a store and we bought tablecloths, cutlery, paintings, crockery to put together a batch of products that we carried in a suitcase.” Venezuela was also a country that allowed for Gitano social ascent. “In Venezuela, we had American cars, automatic cars. And in Argentina they were behind because they had cars that were not as good as Renault,” explained Manuel. He remembered how Calós from Buenos Aires would emphasize that “Venezuela was a wonderful place to sell watches. Nobody would mess with you. It was a paradise.” As people earned a lot of money, they spent some of it on good hotels. As Manuel recalls, “Every Friday I went to the beach, to the Sheraton Hotel. We had a connecting suite. One for me and one for the children.” Some spent their money on good restaurants, parties and cars, while others saved theirs for investments in Buenos Aires, especially in property.

As a symbol of the social ascent he experienced in Venezuela, Manuel showed me a Christian Dior silk trench coat: “Everything was imported and worth one hundred dollars. It was a gift. Here [in Argentina] it was worth two thousand dollars. I still have suits at home that I have not worn; I don’t want to exaggerate, I have fifteen suits. All brand names. I have a closet full of them and never wear them. For me, it has been the best country in the world.” Because the country was an oil producer, money was plentiful. Manual continued, “There was more money, and they gave you amounts of gold. People became multimillionaires. And we sold them telas [fabrics]: tablecloths, a bedspread, a quilt. They carried many things because people had to make their table. You gave them their Christmas Eve tablecloths, their Santa Claus tablecloths. So many people came there and lived like kings.”

The Calós I spoke with frequently emphasized the strong Venezuelan currency with a favorable exchange rate against the dollar, the friendliness of the people, the beauty of the landscapes and beaches, the quality of the food, the climate, the imported products and the variety of the nightlife and entertainment on offer. Manuel told me, “In Venezuela, a five-star hotel was a gift. We always went by car to the richest areas and the best discotheques. We went in with Christian Dior suits.” However, due to the 1992 coup attempts against President Carlos Andrés Pérez, the Caló community began to disintegrate and return to Argentina, Spain and Mexico. Still today, the Calós refer to Venezuela with nostalgia. In their collective memory, the country became a symbol of the golden age of the Calós in America.

Such international circulation and transnational experiences are linked to a cosmopolitan sense of self. Take, for example, Uncle Antonio, who was born in Argentina and whose family moved to Brazil; he found himself working on the street selling fabric in São Paulo with his parents. In 1972 he returned to Buenos Aires with his parents but frequently came back to Brazil to work in Santos, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Curitiba. He also traveled to Bolivia, where he stayed in Santa Cruz for several weeks. In 1973 he settled in Caracas, and after almost thirty years as a resident of Venezuela, he had earned enough money to invest in the purchase of some Buenos Aires apartments in 2000. But he did not stay in Argentina for long. In 2005 he moved to Mexico, where he stayed for five years. From 2010 he resided again in Buenos Aires, and in 2012 he returned again to Mexico for one year. These comings and goings show the ability of Calós to cross borders and adapt to different American countries.

In addition to Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia, Calós explored still other countries for opportunities. From Argentina, some families migrated to Bolivia, which emerged as a prominent center of Caló implantation. From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, a network of related families worked in the city of Santa Cruz and the rich region surrounding it. The first families to arrive in Bolivia prospected the country from Salta, an Argentinian city near the Bolivian border. As a base town, Salta became an important center for the Caló community, who used its strategic location to make short stays in Bolivia from several border crossings.

Another example comes from Juan, a 64-year-old Caló from Buenos Aires who, along with Eulogio, is one of the great men of respect (hombres de respeto) in the community. He is approached for help, advice, mediation, money and with other requests. Juan has a very large family, is dedicated to the purchase and sale of antique clocks and is related to the pastor of the evangelical church, which gives him social power. He lived in Bolivia for several years and earned a lot of money, stating, “We would go out to sell in the morning and quietly make three hundred dollars.” They sold sheets, bedspreads, tablecloths and other textiles, the same batches they had been using since arriving in Brazil and Argentina in the early 1960s. He explained, “We knew, we ate, we spent our money, we had a resident card, like Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador of Mexico.”Footnote ³⁸ These first Calós who explored Bolivia quickly found the distributor who sold these fabrics wholesale in Santa Cruz through importers who brought the merchandise from Brazil. “In Bolivia there was a lot of coca and money. They had very good fabric. You always came out ahead; the suit cost me six dollars at the distributor,” Juan remembers. One of his cousins, Pepe, allegedly sold one hundred suit cuts to an army chief in a barracks after shouting upon arrival, “Where is the lieutenant general?” Pepe had a strong personality, and personal qualities were important when selling merchandise.

In Mexico, the fabric business expanded rapidly when Calós started buying quilts from Spanish manufacturers in Mexico City and Puebla. In the late 1980s, a group of families innovated by starting to manufacture jackets. They invested their profits, bought homes and reached a much higher standard of living than they had in Spain. One family, who continues to live in Mexico City with significant means from this textile wealth, legitimately identifies itself as being a core familyFootnote ³⁹ of the local Gitano community in Mexico City. The greater socioeconomic position of this family facilitated their residential anchorage in the neighborhood, as well as an enhanced network of marriage alliances. A larger community grew around this foundational nucleus, which attracted more families from Spain and Argentina to their middle-class neighborhood west of Mexico City’s historic center.

A few families, including Miguel’s, have spent more time in Paraguay, a lesser-known country to many American Caló. Miguel, a 46-year-old married father of two from Buenos Aires, was born in Brazil, but recalls a childhood spent in various countries. Over the years, he has accumulated important economic capital as a commercial distributor of personal care products, cosmetics and perfume. He also sells these products to Caló women, who then resell them on the street or door-to-door. Although ostracized several years ago for infidelity, he has been slowly gaining back the respect of the community. In his discussion with me, Miguel highlighted the fact that he has been able to handle several languages since he was a child:

This ability to handle different languages and to code switch is valued still today and offers significant advantages. For example, a young Caló man from Buenos Aires explained to me that on one occasion he went to buy a watch in a villa in the Buenos Aires suburbs. Most of the slums and neighborhoods in the suburbs are inhabited by poor people, and there can be pockets of delinquency. The young man entered a house in a dangerous villa and was threatened by his client. When he realized that his client’s accent was Venezuelan, the young man changed his pronunciation, began to speak with a Venezuelan accent, and made typical Venezuelan gestures, which allowed him to avoid a possible robbery and gain the trust of his client.

Changing Gender Roles

Transnational mobility is also key to Caló women’s (Calís) resistance against gender subordination, as well as a symbol of class and status distinction. Above all, it is a crucial component of a new habitus linked to travel. Cosmopolitanism is defined by a new dispositional orientation, including modes of practice and competence.Footnote ⁴⁰ Calís incorporate new attitudes and practices, forging a new habitus; in fact, they think of themselves as más internacionales (more international) compared to other Gitano women. This is evidence that some social practices have significant political, economic and cultural dimensions. As workers outside the domestic sphere, Caló women enjoy greater mobility throughout the territory, as well as the broadening of horizons. By resisting stereotypes related to machismo, they obtain greater levels of power and autonomy beyond the home and childcare. Work outside the home influences gender relations, facilitating the erosion of subordinate relationships and the reorganization of women’s daily lives. Cosmopolitanism thus provides the basis for Caló women’s emancipation: a broadening of horizons, transformation of subjectivity and resistance to gender oppression.

The case of Mexico is unique due to the significant role that Gitano women have played as entrepreneurs, particularly in exploring sales opportunities in new countries. Although the emergence of a stable and permanent Caló community in Mexico dates to 1978, the Calís of Buenos Aires had already arrived in Mexico by plane earlier in order to prospect the country, or as the Calós say, to test (probar). The first expeditions in 1975 were composed solely of Calís. They were a flexible group of four or five middle-aged Calís, as Luís, one of their sons, recalled:

This group of women explored commercial opportunities in Mexico by drawing on contacts they had with other Calís who had come to Mexico with artistic dance and flamenco companies, married Payos, and did not return to Spain. These dancers provided them with information about where they could buy merchandise to resell. After returning to Buenos Aires and with a sizable amount of money from the sales, this group of women shared the information with the wider Argentinian Caló community, stimulating new expeditions to Mexico. Information about the possibilities offered by Mexico had also reached São Paulo through their contacts in Argentina. In 1978, several families from São Paulo left for Mexico City following an episode of violence in their neighborhood.

Luís also recalled how these pioneering women, upon returning from Mexico, also made trips to other countries such as Bolivia in 1980.

Transnational mobility is therefore a key aspect of Caló women’s cosmopolitanism, shaping their self-perception of class and marking their status.

Two more examples illustrate this point well: that of María, on the one hand, and Carmela and Tina, sisters and members of a flamenco duo, on the other. María, a 49-year-old divorcée from Mexico City, enjoys a significant influence and charisma among Calís. Her divorce gave her greater autonomy and freedom to express her opinion. She frequently uses social networks to communicate her feelings and affirm her support for the activism of Roma women’s organizations. María generally dresses more flamboyantly compared to other Calís in the community and wears more modern clothes, such as leather jackets, which give her a certain air of rebelliousness. She explained to me, “We have seen the world, we have another culture, and we are international. We know how to relate to all kinds of people. We are ladies in America. And they do not look at us as vulgar Gitanos like in Spain. We, American Gitanos, are more advanced.” Cosmopolitanism is translated in this instance as internationality and further evidence that social practices have political, economic and cultural dimensions.

María sees in plurinationality and the traveler ethos a distinct Calós feature:

Working outside the domestic sphere served as the basis for María’s emancipation as a woman. This has historically been made possible due to favorable structural conditions for the social, economic and cultural reproduction of immigrant Gitano groups in American countries. Practical reasons played an obvious role, such as the greater ease with which women could work in street vending: “When they first came to the Americas, men were afraid to go out to work because they feared imprisonment or deportation. They had sent the women to work because the Payos looked at them differently. That is why there are such good saleswomen.” But their social and communication skills in relation to street vending also grew their business acumen – as in the case of Aunt Cana, “a Calí who made a lot of money and set up a job in Venezuela selling Lladró porcelain and cutlery.” Her nephew Manuel recalled that “this batch that you bought from Aunt Cana, we earned four thousand bolivars for the batch, which was a thousand dollars.”

However, the role of Caló women does not hide the inequalities that Romani women have experienced or the processes of intersectional discrimination, as Romani activists point out. The relationship between gender and ethnicity produces intersectional discrimination, with women facing both sexism and anti-Romani racism experienced by Calí.Footnote ⁴¹ Today, the interdependence between social reproduction, the reproduction of gendered labor expectations and the regulation of biological reproduction leads to unequal power relations within domestic groups. Caló women endure double exploitation: as an external worker and as a domestic worker. Because a woman’s work as a salesperson is a crucial guarantee of regular income for the household, especially in the case of economic activities carried out among the Calós of Buenos Aires, women have a very important productive role.

The case of the aforementioned sisters, Carmela and Tina – members of the famous flamenco musical duo Las Grecas – is astonishing. It has to do with the art of flamenco, which can also be seen as a dimension of cosmopolitanism related to contact with other cultures, new skills and, above all, cultural creativity. Throughout the twentieth century, Argentina and Mexico have been the destination for flamenco artists and companies from Spain. In turn, this has generated cultural exchange and influenced the artistic environment. In the mid-1960s and early 1970s Carmela and Edelina “Tina” Muñoz Barrull lived in Argentina and Brazil. During their childhood and adolescence in South America the sisters listened to local music. One of the songs they listened to was “Namoradinha de um Amigo,” a 1969 song by Brazilian singer-songwriter Roberto Carlos, which began with the following lyric: “Estou amando loucamente” (I’m loving you madly). Upon hearing this song, the sisters created the biggest hit of their career with the song “Te Estoy Amando Locamente,” which started with the verse “Te estoy amando locamenti.” Las Grecas intoned the word “locamente” as “locamenti,” imitating Carlos’ Portuguese accent and tone of the song, flamboyantly giving rise to a hybrid style called “Gypsy Rock,” the title of their first album (1974). The sisters also listened to songs by Sandro el Gitano (or Sandro de América), Leonardo Favio and other singer-songwriters of the time in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, adapting them to create flamenco melodies. This is an example of a cultural process that PiasereFootnote ⁴² defines as “degaggizare” – which could be translated as removing the Gadjé (non-Roma) understanding of the world – and GomesFootnote ⁴³ calls “gitanización” (“gypsyfication”) – the process of creating new meanings from those already existing in the materials, objects, goods and spaces of the Payo world.Footnote ⁴⁴

The history of Las Grecas illuminates how cosmopolitanism, new contacts, and intercultural interactions are also projected through new artistic practices. A cosmopolitan attitude, new modes of practice and novel skills adopted by Gitanos in America have stimulated cultural creativity within flamenco art, leading to a new fusion style that has also influenced music in Spain, their country of origin.

Conclusions

In this chapter, I have tried to capture the experiences of a unique group of Spanish Gitanos who moved around South America during the Franco era and, in the process, started to think of themselves as different and more cosmopolitan. “American Gitanos,” as they eventually ended up identifying themselves, established internationalization and cosmopolitanism as indisputable and authentic facts, recreating a heritage that added layers of meaning to their diverse trajectories and migration histories. In doing so, they demonstrated the conscious reinvention of the history and culture of the Gitanos themselves.

Mobility, travel and transnational experience gave rise to a cosmopolitan habitus among the American Calós. Through transnational contacts and interactions, they have experienced a broader range of social and cultural contexts than other Spanish Caló groups, developing fluid and mobile forms of cultural identification. Their regular mobility and familiarity with other cultures contributed to the formation of an international cosmopolitan habitus apparent to other Calós. The Calós of Buenos Aires recalled that when they would travel to Spain – especially to Madrid – to visit relatives, the Spanish Calós were surprised by their wealth and their polite and respectful way of speaking: “Are you Calós? You don’t sound like Calós, asking for things by saying, ‘Please!’”

American Calós have also become wealthy, which provides more options for them than for Spanish Gitano groups locked in segregated neighborhoods. Their travels, contact with different cultures and transnational experiences in American territory provided Calós with an opportunity for upward socioeconomic mobility in terms of class and standard of living. Today, the Calós in Buenos Aires and Mexico City make daily use of cafeterias, coffee shops and restaurants. They shop in malls, take vacations and purchase prestigious brands of cars, cell phones and clothing. Their extensive disposable income is spent on aesthetic services and nightlife. These new tastes, behaviors and dispositions, compared to other Gitano groups in Spain, reflect a traveling and cosmopolitan habitus.

Calós’ diasporic consciousness and knowledge of the territories beyond borders, as well as the personal talents of individual Calós, have shaped their cosmopolitan habitus alongside the transnational dimension of their economic activities. While there are various types of connections within the Caló diaspora in the Americas, the ethnohistory of their implantation in Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil reveals a degree of flexibility and differentiation that are important to gitaneidad, the Gitano style.

The American Calós also resisted the racialization of the new societies by identifying as Spanish, a privileged category in the racial hierarchy and opposite other racialized categories such as Indígena (Indigenous), Cholo,Footnote ⁴⁵ VilleroFootnote ⁴⁶ and so on. In Mexico, where the Calós have settled as Spaniards since the late 1970s, they have experienced greater social prestige than other migrants coming from poorer countries or in relation to the country’s own Indigenous people. The advantage of belonging to a European country with strong cultural connections due to a common history, gave them greater economic opportunities and tolerance in the face of racism within Mexican society.

The Calós acquired ways of thinking and acting in the American context by navigating intelligently the cultural norms of the societies around them without renouncing their traditions and roots. The direct contacts Calós made with other cultures in America generated new cosmopolitan tastes, behaviors and experiences. This differential habitus represents a Bourdieusian distinction, marking an upward move in terms of class status with respect to other Caló groups in Spain. As an elderly Caló from Mexico City pointed out, “America cultured us.” For the American Calós, life on the American continent generated favorable inclusiveness, elevated socioeconomic status and enhanced civic and social equality, allowing freedom from the racism and oppression of Franco’s dictatorship as well as from its racial legacy.

Unlikely Border Crossings

On March 31, 2023, Akwesasne Mohawk police announced in a press release that their officers had found a capsized boat and the lifeless bodies of its passengers: “The eight individuals were from two families of Romanian and Indian descent, with the two children having Canadian citizenship.”Footnote ¹ For several days, all eyes were on the Indigenous territory bisected by the Canada–US border.Footnote ²

Soon, journalists noted that there was more to the Romanian family, stating that they were “members of the Roma minority,” who had arrived to seek asylum in 2018, and that the father had a “history of illegal crossings into the United States and a troubled immigration history.”Footnote ³ The lawyer in charge of their asylum application, Peter Ivanyi,Footnote ⁴ explained how the family’s desperation led them to cross an unfamiliar river on a motorboat by emphasizing the poverty, systemic violence and discrimination that push Romani groups out of their countries of origin in Eastern or Central Europe. The family had been denied refugee status in Canada and was in line for deportation. In May 2023, a memorial was held by the TAIBU Community Health Center and Toronto’s Roma Community Centre, lamenting the tragic loss of their lives.

The drama of this Romanian Romani family lent to my previous fieldwork in Toronto a sullen prescience. This recent case had certain similarities with past cases, that in 2012 had compelled the Canadian government to enact reforms to its Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, collectively known as the Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act.Footnote ⁵ Jason Kenney, then Minister of Immigration, justified the adoption of more restrictive asylum legislation and the creation of a list of safe countries of origin with promises to keep away alleged “bogus refugees” that he said were taking advantage of Canada’s generosity and displacing “real” claimants who deserved to stay.Footnote ⁶ Coming from an allegedly “safe” place, Romani families traveling from the European Union were, and remain, at the center of these debates, as antigypsy stereotyping and anti-immigrant sentiments join in an occasional perfect storm of visibility that has been utilized to further local and national political interests.

This chapter focuses on Romani migration processes to the Americas from a Canadian perspective. In the 2010s, an upsurge of academic scholarship captured the moment when Romani visibility emerged entangled in CanadianFootnote ⁷ and East-Central EuropeanFootnote ⁸ politics. It is time to build upon this short-lived scholarly burst to understand cases like the Iordache family’s unfortunate passing. To do so, this chapter first emplaces this prior scholarship into a wider contemporary Atlantic context to bring awareness to the persistence of a Romani presence on the North American continent. I then rely on ethnographic fieldwork to paint a picture of the interconnected diasporic communities who continue to make Canada their home.

Determining the precise number of Romani people in Canada is difficult. In 2011, the most recent data from Canada’s National Household Survey placed the number of Romani individuals at 5,255.Footnote ⁹ Unofficial population estimates, however, range as high as 80,000 or even 100,000 people,Footnote ¹⁰ even though comprehensive census data is unavailable. This numeric variability makes it necessary to consider two additional factors: passing tactics that have allowed Romani groups in the Americas to go unnoticed, as well as the thousands of asylum claims filed each year over the past two decades.Footnote ¹¹ In the 2010s the majority of European Romani families who made transatlantic crossings arrived in Canada’s main cities: Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Arrivals from Czechia and Hungary were the most visible and numerous, especially from 1997 to 2009 for the Czechs and from 1999 to 2002 and 2009 to 2012 for the Hungarians.

In each instance, a combination of new visa restrictions and modifications to Canada’s asylum policies led to a sharp drop in acceptance rates and fewer transatlantic crossings, along with a significant decline in media attention and public visibility.Footnote ¹² An overview of Romani histories of migration and border crossing in Canada can lay the base for a more grounded approach to a phenomenon that has otherwise been treated as fleeting. To do so, I highlight the historical continuities that have usually been set aside to emphasize periods of higher visibility. My argument relies on a critical understanding of migration as border crossing and mobilities as meaningful movements that are intrinsic to human experiences.Footnote ¹³ Mobilities are the embodied interplay of movement and stasis that discourses try to signify.Footnote ¹⁴ In my past work I coined the term Romani Atlantic, borrowing from Paul Gilroy’s elaborations on the Black Atlantic and the double consciousness of holding a position both inside and outside of discourses aiming at universality.Footnote ¹⁵ As Canadian cases brought in this chapter will show, the movements of Romani people have usually been seen through a binary lens that divides “nomad” from “sedentary,” “bogus” from “real” and “national” from “foreign.” Such reductions gloss through the complexities of both migratory journeys and mobile lives.

For this specific piece, the Romani Atlantic refers to the awareness and enactment of Romani diasporic connections, which are both made possible and constrained by nation state border-making efforts. Lives and trajectories have not only been shaped by Atlantic geopolitics, local realities and the connections established by families and individuals, but also by very real attempts to manage movements that are seen as out of control and dangerous. A Romani Atlantic lens complements other perspectives on Romani migration that have focused on policymaking, legal moments of high visibility and push vs. pull migration factors to and from localities defined by national borders.Footnote ¹⁶ Gilroy’s focus on the middle passage also informs the chosen methodology, which prioritizes connections, networks and frictions that both enable and constrain Romani lives.Footnote ¹⁷ The intention is to denaturalize nations as the starting point of migration,Footnote ¹⁸ inspired by the historical and anthropological works that have used concepts such as circulation and mobility to describe Romani transatlantic journeys.Footnote ¹⁹

This chapter grounds the Romani presence in Canada by decentering national borders while prioritizing individual and collective journeys chronologically.Footnote ²⁰ It focuses on the role that mobilities have had in the lives of migrants to Canada and identifies “mobility capital,”Footnote ²¹ or the specific skills, resources and knowledge that have made individual and family journeys possible. Descriptions center acts of border crossing, which migration regimes structure and constrain.Footnote ²² In so doing, it contributes to the transatlantic and translocal perspectives in Romani studies to better explain Romani history in the context of the complex mobilities that have shaped Romani lives in the Americas.

The following section focuses on how Romani histories have been built through transatlantic crossings. Given the better documentation of the twentieth century, I will prioritize the continuities that can be identified in the available sources, and the effects that moments of visibility of Romani arrivals have had in Canada. The argument relies on the recognition of the continual presence of Romani people in North America, evidenced by the narratives of Romani protagonists themselves. It also notes key transformations that have occurred throughout specific historical periods, divided here into the turn of the twentieth century, the post–World War II era, the Cold War era and the current post-socialist times.

Turn of the Twentieth Century

The late Ronald Lee, a Romani Canadian author and intellectual, preferred to talk about the “North American Romani” population instead of limiting his analysis to specific countries like Canada, the US or Mexico. He claimed that British Romani families, like the Stanleys, the Stokes, the Lee-Adams or the Wilsons, who had come during colonial times, had either assimilated into the Gazhe (non-Romani) or intermarried with the Kalderash Roma from the Balkans and Eastern Europe.Footnote ²³ Members of different Kalderash vitsi (kinship-based groups), such as the Lovária, Churária, Bashaldé, and Rusurja,Footnote ²⁴ had crossed the ocean following the late nineteenth-century abolition of slavery in Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia, forming extensive kinship networks throughout the Americas.Footnote ²⁵ Sinti and Romungere Roma families also arrived during these decades, from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, respectively.Footnote ²⁶ Such evidence points to the multiplicity of migration trajectories within the Romani diaspora.

During this period, the Canadian government opened its doors to European settlers, some of whom were Romani, attracting not only migrants new to the Americas, but also families who had previously migrated to the United States and Argentina.Footnote ²⁷ The Immigration Act of 1869 initiated open immigration, connecting “immigration and colonization of unsettled lands.” It pushed for the documentation of immigrant arrivals and assessed their potential for developing “uncultivated lands.” Yet it also blocked the landing of disabled and “pauper immigrants” and allowed migration officials to exercise discretion over who they judged to be a desirable migrant.Footnote ²⁸

The first archival evidence of Romani people in Canada comes from an 1862 Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, prison log documenting naturalized Romani citizens who had been jailed for loitering.Footnote ²⁹ Media impressions of Romani groups in Canada also depicted their arrival at Montreal’s Canadian Pacific Railway station in 1899 and at Toronto’s Yonge Street in 1900. They had arrived from the United States, Mexico and even Brazil.Footnote ³⁰ The mobilities of these families were not frictionless and speak to the importance of border crossings and labeling. This includes encounters with US inspectors in Montreal, who were excluding Romani arrivals in 1904 because of their appearance, as well as Romani interactions with border guards at main ports of entry. During the latter, families were asked for their occupations and itineraries, which resulted in their categorization as “Gypsies.” One immigration official noted: “From the manner of dress, appearance and evidence submitted, I am fully convinced that these aliens are in reality what are termed ‘Gypsies.’”Footnote ³¹

Such accounts point to traveling lifestyles (making use of tents, horse carts and later motor cars) that enabled economic activities, such as fortune-telling, smithing and horse breeding, among other trades. Sources focus on encounters visible to the general public and foreground the complicated relationships these Romani people had with authorities. The mobility tactics of these families labeled as “Gypsies” by authorities included carrying large amounts of money, relying on mobile trades, connecting preemptively to lawyers and officials and knowing how to operate in bureaucratic spaces.

Oral histories record Romani families living in Canada since the early twentieth century. Michael Butch, current president of Toronto’s Roma Community Centre and leader of the music group The Gypsy Rebels, explained:

Here, Butch probably referred to the Dominion Lands Act,Footnote ³³ in effect from 1872 to 1930, which reduced Indigenous lands and gave financial incentives for “desirable” settlers to purchase up to 260 acres if they lived on and farmed their plot. He also hints at the relaxed border controls between the US and Canada at the time. Importantly, Canadian state policy impacted these early migratory movements.

Butch also provided information about his family’s cross-border mobile practices between Canada and the United States:

In North America, cases such as the Butch family’s also show how regional configurations shaped mobilities throughout this period. Romani immigrants who owned farmland dealt with a sharp urban versus rural divide that compelled them to head to the cities to trade. They also made choices based on distinctive national circumstances in order to stay connected to their relatives and secure better living arrangements. Families’ reasons to seek better places related to personal circumstances and health. They were also motivated by their perception of a site as beneficial to raise a family and do business, even if it meant moving across borders to a new city, state, province or even country. Some families might have attempted to replicate mobile economic strategies they had used in EuropeFootnote ³⁴ – Butch’s family, for instance, first landed in New York, then moved to Alberta where they acquired and then sold their land, only to move to Montreal and then Toronto (with numerous stops between). The new social and economic contexts both enabled and constrained their possibilities.Footnote ³⁵

World War II and the Hungarian Revolution

The mobilities of Romani groups in Central and Eastern Europe have been intertwined with governmental attitudes and policies.Footnote ³⁶ These have included “betterment” processes that aimed to reduce, evangelize and re-educate so-called minorities within Europe.Footnote ³⁷ By the end of the nineteenth century, racial ideologiesFootnote ³⁸ supported the transformation of “betterment” programs into security-driven policies. In Central Europe this shift led to the creation of entire investigative branches, such as the German Nachrichtendienst in Bezug auf die Zigeuner (Gypsy Information Agency), as well as international police agreements between numerous countries.Footnote ³⁹ By the 1930s “Zigeuner” were subject to policies of expulsion and settlement which combined with more “traditional” policies of segregation, eviction and even internment.Footnote ⁴⁰ The persecution reached its zenith in 1938, when Himmler called for a “resolution of the Gypsy question,” initiating deportations to ghettos and, later, concentration camps.Footnote ⁴¹

Forced displacements reverberated throughout Europe and the Atlantic. Lajos,Footnote ⁴² one of the oldest members of the Board of Directors of the Roma Community Centre in Toronto, and a Lovara Roma from Hungary, recalled the period of the government of Regent Miklós Horthy (1920–44), even before Nazi occupation, as characterized by persecution and starvation. He also associated Horthy’s successor, Ferenc Szálasi (1944–45), with ghettoes, death camps and the extermination of Jews and Romani peoples:Footnote ⁴³

Such family movements were necessary to survive troubled times and stay together. Across the Atlantic, Canada itself was known for being unwelcoming to displaced racialized populations escaping the war. Decades of immigration policies that barred specific undesirable groups from entry,Footnote ⁴⁴ under the guise of choosing immigrants perceived as useful,Footnote ⁴⁵ resulted in instances in which Jewish and other refugees were turned back.Footnote ⁴⁶

Most Romani survivors came to Canada later, once migratory policies responded to Cold War politics and the 1951 Geneva Convention. One of these policies, the 1952 Immigration Act,Footnote ⁴⁷ barred disabled individuals, although it did not mention ethnicity or race. It did however, grant immigration officials discretionary power to block or deport those they considered undesirable.Footnote ⁴⁸ Meanwhile, in Europe, with the foundation of the International Refugee Organization (IRO), people labeled as “Gypsies” were briefly seen as deserving of institutional support for having been victims of racial discrimination under Nazism.Footnote ⁴⁹ When the IRO’s mandate ended in 1952, national authorities assumed its responsibilities, developing migration policies based on the perception of “Gypsies” as a “social menace.”Footnote ⁵⁰

A European postwar environment where most productive systems had been dismantled forced countries such as Hungary to incorporate Romani individuals into the labor market. Lajos continued: “So I don’t have a choice. The Romas did good because, at that time, they sent them to work, and they earned money.” However, the impending turn toward authoritarianism prompted him to leave: “Until the revolution [1956] … We are going back to the same system that had been before, probably it’s going to get much worse. We had experience.” The Lovara elder escaped the subsequent invasion of the country by Soviet troops and left for Red Cross refugee camps first in Augsburg and later Eindhoven. He then traveled to the port of Rotterdam, where, after working for the Holland American Line as a waiter, he finally decided to relocate to the Americas.

In 1958 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) tallied the total number of displaced people who left Hungary at 200,000;Footnote ⁵¹ about 37,500 of these arrived in Canada after a transatlantic voyage by boat.Footnote ⁵² Lajos had managed to navigate the new postwar geopolitical landscape and be declared a displaced Hungarian refugee: “[After that] we landed in the Ville de Québec, Quebec City. So, after they call[ed] us by name one by one … and they give us anyway the landed immigrant papers. … That was a different story because we were political refugees. When you [as a] refugee were coming up here there was different.” These refugees from the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution who arrived in 1956 and 1957 were some of the first people given expedited passage into Canada; they were only preceded by Palestinian refugees in 1955.Footnote ⁵³ Some of their descendants would later become well-known Romani activists. Gina Csanyi-Robah, educator and founder of The Romani Alliance, an organization in British Columbia, descends from these refugee families. Her musician grandfather and her mother lived in the enclaves created by Hungarian Romani refugee families.

Many of these new arrivals correspond to Lee’s classification of “sedentary Hungarian Romungere, mainly of the Bashaldé or musician groups who arrived as refugees, lost among the mass of non-Romani Hungarian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of 1956.”Footnote ⁵⁴ However, even Lajos’ story does not correspond neatly to this characterization, since he was a Lovara, a member of a more mobile vitsa that had a history of travel around Europe. As more life stories become the subject of inquiry and documentation, the distinctiveness of each case shows how the mobilities of individuals, families and groups often defy generalizations.

The Cold War

During the Cold War, the political division of Europe between the United States’ and the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence brought a certain lull, but never a full stop, to transatlantic migration. The legal protection defining a refugee was not enshrined in Canadian law until 1976, the year a new immigration act was ratified.Footnote ⁵⁵ This legislation sharply shifted Canadian policy to fulfill its international obligations to protect displaced persons and asylum seekers and to encourage family reunification. It would, however, double down on exclusion based on health and disability.

During this period, Romani groups did not experience the Western and Soviet blocs as hermetically sealed from one another. Connections from before the Iron Curtain fell extended to include new asylum seeking and allowed mobilities from the East to the West.Footnote ⁵⁶ Nazik Deniz’s migration from Bulgaria, when she was ten years old, is one example. Deniz would later also become the director of the Roma Community Centre and an educator. She clarified a reason fewer people may have risked the journey during the Cold War: “In many ways, it was somewhat better for the Roma [back in Bulgaria under Communism], because at least at that point you were counted as a human being.” Conditions under communist regimes were arguably better for certain Romani groups that did not rely on mobile trades, as they had access to employment and education. However, they would need to adapt to the “stereotype role of the citizen of the Socialist order,” downplay their ethnic belonging and emphasize a working-class background.Footnote ⁵⁷ Ronald Lee would also refer to this:

The groups that were already used to moving across borders in Europe, which he calls “traditional,” continued to do so, adapting to the new context. Although it only became popular in the 1990s, the term “Gypsy refugees” was first adopted precisely to signal this passage as Romani people searched for ways to move between socialist countries (such as Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia) and countries in the West (such as Sweden or West Germany).Footnote ⁵⁹

Under protections enshrined in the 1976 Immigration Act, claims to refugee status also became a rare but possible path to Canada, especially for those from countries under communist governments. For example, some Lovara refugees who landed in Canada in 1973 told Ronald Lee that they had left Russia for Yugoslavia, escaping forced settlement. They then traveled to Italy as refugees and then lived in West Germany, the Netherlands and France, before crossing the Atlantic. Group elders recruited Lee, Lajos and other Romani intellectuals with experience with the legal system to provide counsel and support after a failed attempt to cross into the US. When turned away at the border across from Plattsburgh, New York, they had to camp in Brossard near Montreal. These families then became the center of migratory politics involving Roma in Canada.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Brossard encampment became a proxy of conflicting political forces, as the central government in Canada and the Parti Québécois (PQ) clashed over immigration issues. The PQ advocated for Quebec’s autonomy to allow them to stay, while the federal government pushed for their expulsion.

Canada’s own internal social and political conflicts and processes continued to affect the trajectories of those who had already made the country their home.Footnote ⁶¹ As noted above, Michael Butch’s family moved to Toronto during Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, a process unfolding throughout the 1960s that introduced significant liberal, secular and nationalist reforms to the province. This period laid the groundwork for future independence referendums in 1980 and 1995, which aimed at the emancipation of French speakers and a push for social democratic reforms. Others moved to Toronto after Quebec’s threat of independence in the 1980s, including Lajos:

Even members of groups not known for their mobility crossed the Iron Curtain to the Americas at this time. Deniz elaborated on how her family managed to travel from Bulgaria:

In other instances, elite musicians, such as Lache Cercel, were able to leave Ceaușescu’s Romania by leveraging their musical renown. Cercel, a violinist and interpreter of folk music, defected with his family during an invitation to play in Canada.Footnote ⁶² In the 1990s the fall of the Berlin Wall would open new possibilities for those looking to make the transatlantic leap.

The European Union

Academic literature on Romani migration to Canada has mostly focused on the two decades that followed the fall of communism. Reasons for this include the increasing number of Romani migrants to Canada and their widespread visibility. Ronald Lee referred to this phenomenon as “Roma refugees from democracy,” hinting at the inherent contradiction of refugees coming from Central and Eastern European countries as they shifted toward democratic institutions.Footnote ⁶³ The cases of Czech and Hungarian asylum seekers are the most representative.

After visa restrictions for Czech citizens were lifted in 1996, the television documentary Na vlastní oči (With Your Own Eyes) aired on Czech TV Nova in August 1997. It portrayed Canada as a “Gypsy paradise,” where families would no longer encounter the exclusions they experienced in daily life. Although the image transmitted was later labeled a “distorted reality” by Canadian authorities,Footnote ⁶⁴ a desire to leave matched the material possibility of travel for some families. What followed has been described as the first “wave” of Romani families arriving from Czechia (and later Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia),Footnote ⁶⁵ with the documentary as one of its main triggers.Footnote ⁶⁶ This also made their identity as “Roma refugees” visible. However, as scholars have noted, Romani exclusion and the rise of extreme nationalism and racist violence were crucial backdrops to such movements out of Central and Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁶⁷ This avenue lasted until Canada reimposed the visa requirement on Czech nationals in 1997, blaming an increase in applicant numbers.Footnote ⁶⁸ After Czechia became part of the EU in 2004, visa restrictions were lifted again in 2007 as part of reciprocity agreements between the EU and Canada. This second moment lasted until 2009, when travel privileges were withdrawn once again. Asylum seekers who were considered “economic migrants” were cited as the reason for such restrictions.Footnote ⁶⁹

Hungarian arrivals followed this pattern after visa requirements were lifted.Footnote ⁷⁰ The highest number of claimants was registered in 1999 and again in 2009, with drops after the above measures were enacted. For a while, Hungary was listed as the number one source of asylum seekers for the Canadian system. In the Czech and Hungarian cases, transatlantic migration was a constant, even in the years when targeted policies were enacted.Footnote ⁷¹

The father of the Szalai family, whom I interviewed in 2013,Footnote ⁷² talked about his family’s early life in Hungary: “the strange thing is that we had to move all the time, you know? At first just in Szekszárd … and then around small villages, and then to Budapest. We were always trying to find a better place to live … because most of the times we had these racist neighbors who just can’t stand Roma.” Describing this family as “sedentary Roma,” or focusing only on their transatlantic crossing, underplays the displacements that threw this family into a marginalized situation in the first place. In Hungary, the rise of right-wing extremism and nationalism led to a more hostile environment. For Szalai and others violent attacks escalated to a breaking point:

Despite such experiences, Canadian officials tended to understand these arrivals as motivated by economic forces.Footnote ⁷³ They failed to consider other factors that guided decisions to migrate. Arriving in Canada at a moment of visibility also subjected Romani migrants to a particular treatment: “Some officers were standing there and one of them asked me what the reason is, why I came. So, I told him we are seeking refugee [status]. And you know what? The first thing he said was something like: damn it, one more refugee family.”

Once in Canada, they were again subject to a precarious and uncertain bureaucratic asylum process. The long wait included hours filing their claim, standing by in the airport, scrambling to fill out personal information and laboring to quickly find a lawyer.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the end, they could only hope that the paperwork they procured would work as evidence for their case. For this family, this meant two years of doubt (from 2010 to 2012) while their hearing took place.

During this short window, only a few selected families and individuals were granted asylum. It was given based on the merit of their specific cases and by weighing their experiences of discrimination, violence and persecution. Toronto’s Roma Community Centre, located in the city that received the most claims, played a vital role in some of these legal processes. The Szalai family appealed the original negative decision in their case, lost again and then applied with a Pre-Removal Risk Assessment which was accepted several months later. Most applicants were not that lucky and were deported or chose to abandon their claims, given the odds stacked against them.

Asylum Policy Change and Deportation

By 2013, the situation for Romani asylum seekers had already started to change; the Canadian Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration attempted to curb new arrivals.Footnote ⁷⁵ Jason Kenney, then minister, labeled Roma refugees as “queue jumpers” and “bogus refugee claimants,” to justify swift and drastic changes to asylum policies, which resulted in an amendment to the current law referred to as Bill C-31.Footnote ⁷⁶ Kenney himself traveled to Hungary to assess the situation and used the Hungarian national media to deter newcomers. During the peak in Hungarian migration, the city of Miskolc (where many of the asylum seekers came from) woke up to a billboard, written in Hungarian, which warned of risking a trip to Canada. By reproducing the Hungarian government’s narrative of inclusive democracy, Canadian authorities sought to discredit allegations of racial persecution in Hungary.Footnote ⁷⁷

Human rights activists in Canada responded by issuing reports, calling for rallies and creating documentaries countering anti-immigration strategies. Activists and scholars noted that Bill C-31 reflected a larger pattern of exclusion from the asylum path.Footnote ⁷⁸ The legislative changes included a list of Designated Countries of Origin (DCO) deemed safe and therefore less likely to generate refugees. Criticism of these measures did not undo the asylum system changes; Romani families increasingly found it difficult to find refuge in Canada.Footnote ⁷⁹

Policy and media portrayals reduced Romani lives and experiences of migration to stereotypical tropes that appeared whenever observers conjured “Gypsies.” Binary ideas, such as “good” versus “fake” refugees, became enshrined in policy and legal categories, creating “deportable migrants.”Footnote ⁸⁰ After several generations in Canada, Michael Butch and other Kalderash were conscious that local governments in Canada had a history of profiling Romani families. Witnessing the cases of asylum seekers who were caught shoplifting, Michael and others knew that these actions would “raise the heat” and “put us on that stereotype kind of world,” especially with the authorities. Police in North America regularly profiled Romani families, as a series of highly criticized seminars detailing “Gypsy crime” exemplified in 2016.Footnote ⁸¹ The term “bogus,” so widespread during the Canadian government’s reaction to Romani arrivals, related to these assumptions of criminality that became evident at the time. One television program noted: “A shiftless group of hoboes that doesn’t believe in property rights for themselves, they are nomads, or for others, they rob people blind! Now this scourge has come to Canada through fake refugee claims, over 5000 of them in the past five years are from Hungary.”Footnote ⁸²

Such representations circulated around the Atlantic together with the people themselves. Families had run-ins with border patrols even before getting to Canadian territory, including at airports in both the UK and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Czech and Hungarian media reproduced public discourse that blamed Romani people for Canada’s visa imposition on Czech or Hungarian nationals.Footnote ⁸³ Behind hundreds of rejected asylum claims were both structural discrimination and widespread lawyer malpractice.Footnote ⁸⁴ An important number of journalistic pieces would publicize research findings, which spoke of stacked racial and class biases against Romani asylum seekers during their engagement with the legal process.Footnote ⁸⁵ Despite this, only a small number of claimants were able to benefit from asylum; the Pusuma family, for example, who lived months under the protection of a church through sanctuary before being deported in 2014, was able to return with permits based on humanitarian and compassionate grounds in 2016.Footnote ⁸⁶ Yet the following year, headlines promulgated more anti-Romani stereotypes just prior to Bulgarian and Romanian visa requirements being removed.Footnote ⁸⁷ The so-called spike of asylum seeking that followed, however, was minuscule compared to former ones, attesting to the effectiveness of the measures generated by the disproportionate fear of an “invasion.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Families that attempted to claim asylum at such times of heightened visibility were rarely as lucky as the Pusumas. Although some abandoned their cases after concluding they had no hope of approval, others waited hoping for a positive ruling, only to be deported. One of these deportees explains how returning to Hungary was a double risk, as even arriving at the Budapest Ferenc Liszt International Airport meant being profiled:

Despite such a contrast, stereotyping persisted even in Canada, such as when Toronto dealt with a short-lived “panhandler scare” in 2018.Footnote ⁸⁹ These brief moments of visibility were usually a harsh lesson for families that were able to stay in Canada. Quickly, they learned that their means of sustenance and daily behavior needed to not feed the “stereotype kind of world,” in M. Butch’s words, that can be so counterproductive. Understanding the logic of a system that undermined asylum claims illuminates the conditions and sentiments that compelled the Iordache family to cross the Saint Lawrence River by boat, the story with which this chapter began.

Atlantic Connections

By centering continuities in transatlantic migration, this chapter provides a more comprehensive way to understand the Romani diaspora beyond descriptions limited by national borders or centered on population waves. The Romani Atlantic can be both context and method; following the very set of connections and relationships that make possible the diasporic reality of Romani lives provides a grounded approach to histories of their presence in Europe and the Americas. Such an approach, in this case from a Canadian perspective, puts forward the continuities of Romani presence in the Americas and highlights Romani mobilities, border crossings and mediated representations.

Focusing on moments of high visibility limits the potential to describe and understand Romani diasporic formations. This includes studies of high-profile Romani arrivals to the continent, such as asylum seekers to Canada between 1997 and 2012. Such moments must therefore be seen as part of the wider historical context, which points to Canadian policy as a driver of moments of intensive visibility and during which the labels that were used (including “refugee,” “Roma” and “Gypsy”) had the potential to either open doors or close them.

A century-long perspective allows for a deeper analysis of how moments of heightened visibility impact the broader continuities of Romani presence in Canada. Such circumstances are better seen as outcomes of policy decisions and geopolitical developments than as the result of actions by those directly affected. From a Romani Atlantic perspective, arrivals and deportations are still part of the Romani experience in Canada, including experiences that engage with transatlantic networks of mobility and exchange. As Audra Simpson notes about the Mohawk who live at the bank of the St. Lawrence River, such networked mobilities enact the knowledge of being connected as kin.Footnote ⁹⁰ It was this connectedness, combined with rising anti-asylum sentiment and policies, that led to the Iordache family’s tragic passing in the same river, while trying to reach relatives in the US.

Although many families arriving to the Americas fulfilled lifelong dreams, this often came with a cost. This cost might have been resources, time, family or even their lives. For most recently arrived Romani Canadians, lifestyle migration, defined as looking for a “better life,”Footnote ⁹¹ is often motivated by feeling the need to take refuge. In this context, “a better life” cannot be expressed by separating work opportunities from safety and survival. These dimensions are intertwined in individual and collective decision-making, which are in turn intimately linked to the feelings that guide families into taking calculated risks and moving to unfamiliar lands.

In 2024, I caught up with the Szalai family in Toronto. Crossing the Atlantic had meant that beyond occasional video calls, they lived disconnected from their kin, who had remained in Europe or had returned to Hungary from Canada. The COVID-19 pandemic further fractured the few connections they had with activist initiatives in Toronto, which had already waned after the 2012 asylum policy change. Although they had managed to navigate the complex system of Canadian asylum policies and achieve Canadian citizenship, their ties with family and friends have been strained ever since. Border crossing from Europe to the Americas can be a risky and trying gamble. Even in seemingly successful cases, the consequences of mobility remain challenging.

Dedication

In memory of the Iordache family and other Romani migrants who lost their lives to their dreams of better places, together.