Introduction
In 1958, Antonio arrived in Brazil from Madrid via the Canary Islands. He would often wonder then about his new home where both the language and people seemed foreign and unfriendly. He soon learned of another place, Argentina, and upon traveling there, his business flourished. In Argentina, antigypsy sentiment was much less pronounced than in Spain. Although he and other Spanish Gitanos had started in poverty, today Antonio’s nephew, Eulogio, is a successful businessman and community leader. As Manuel, a Buenos Aires resident (via Mexico and Venezuela) and nephew of another early Gitano pioneer, has remarked, “[Those first years] were like New York! … How well people lived! Because we were Spanish, we were treated like gentlemen.”
As the above vignette suggests, the “American Gitanos” discussed in this chapter are cosmopolitan entrepreneurs who have inherited practices of transnational mobility, which they have reimagined to their benefit in the context of a modern, globalized world. Within social anthropology, cosmopolitanism has emerged as one framework for analyzing the transnational movement of people and cultural diversity under globalization.Footnote 1 This framework enables looking at the movement of cultural practices and individuals to capture processes of class, consumption, citizenship and transnational mobility. It is important in the study of cultural flows and interactions in a globalized world.Footnote 2 More recently, Anna KhaloninaFootnote 3 has offered valuable insights into the opportunities and challenges of exploring cosmopolitan practices that bring awareness to the connections between local and global perspectives, particularly in relation to global citizenship.
This chapter contributes to this growing literature. It explores ways in which Gitano groups in America have forged a diasporic consciousness and a cosmopolitan mode of existence by constructing a “presence” in the world and in history through culture.Footnote 4 It also provides an ethnographic case that runs counter to most other ethnographies of Gitanos, which tend to focus on communities living in situations of poverty and discrimination. The Gitanos whom I have encountered in Mexico and Argentina, who call themselves American Gitanos or American Calós,Footnote 5 have been migrating from Spain since the late 1950s to hacer las AméricasFootnote 6 – in search of opportunities. Their story is one of circulation and implantation in Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, Paraguay and the United States. It is also a story of how they have distinguished themselves over the years as members of the middle class with a distinct cosmopolitan habitus.Footnote 7
For the purposes of this chapter, “cosmopolitanism” is understood as certain sociocultural processes or individual behaviors, values and dispositions that manifest a capacity to engage with cultural multiplicity.Footnote 8 As Akhil GuptaFootnote 9 points out, it involves the ability to relate to diverse cultures while respecting the social, cultural and religious practices of neighboring groups, even in the absence of intimate social ties. Social consciousness based on cosmopolitanism is constructed from the experiences of significant past transnational or migratory events. The American Caló diaspora has created opportunities for social inclusion, modernization and the expansion of personal and collective horizons. Migratory practices have impacted Caló imagination in the context of globalization.Footnote 10 The Calós are historical agents – as well as narrators of their own history – and hold the capacity for social change. Their creativity transforms cultural practices that community members consider valuable.Footnote 11
In this sense, Calós project agency by creating and recreating culture to unite group members.Footnote 12 For them, authenticity resides in the roots of their culture and can be experienced in any place where they establish familial relations or pursue their fortune. They have maintained the spirit of community cohesion without disconnecting themselves from the cultural dimensions of modernity. If the Mexican and Argentine Calós think of themselves as cosmopolitan,Footnote 13 well-traveled and international people, as they like to point out, it is because during the process of migration, circulation and implantation their frameworks of cultural affiliation and belonging have expanded.Footnote 14 Their culture is constructed as a type of pluri-identitarian citizenship, encompassing multiple senses of belonging that are distant to the rigid identity framework of the nation-state.Footnote 15 The American Calós hold and make use of different passports (Mexican, Brazilian, Uruguayan, Argentine), which have been acquired through the diverse birthplaces of family members during their circulatory trajectories. Cosmopolitanism, then, is an attitude or disposition acquired through experience, especially travel, and also by the competence and ability to maneuver, listen and relate to other people’s symbolic worlds.Footnote 16
Today, American Calós historicize their experience as a collectivity through the memories of migration. They distinguish themselves from Gitano groups in Spain by considering themselves more international, more liberal and more cosmopolitan as a result of their having moved throughout the American continent. Their understanding of modernity and cosmopolitanism reflects dominant narratives created through colonial and imperialist efforts and geopolitical orders (civilized vs. uncivilized, developed vs. developing, etc.). My own approach in this chapter involves exploring their own ideas regarding their more advanced and modern condition,Footnote 17 as well as examining them through the lens of vernacular cosmopolitanism.Footnote 18 They construct their cultural and social identity by inhabiting transnational circulatory territoriesFootnote 19 as transmigrants who maintain activities and relationships with their countries of origin, including through remittances, visits, family bonds and symbolic connections.Footnote 20
Cosmopolitanism is intertwined with another key and multidimensional notion: that of diaspora. Carol Silverman considers diaspora as “a special kind of migration that involves some kinds of homeland, but not necessarily fixed ones.”Footnote 21 In her study, she adopts a transnational approach to ethnographically document the lived experiences in two diasporic Macedonian Roma communities in Belmont, the Bronx, New York and Šutka, a neighbourhood in Skopje, respectively. Silverman considers diaspora, transnationality, hybridity and cosmopolitanism as defining elements of the Macedonian Roma and shows that transnational roots and ties to one’s place of origin are reinforced through routes connecting the Bronx in the US to North Macedonia through music, dance and ritual, along with the movement of people and objects. In a similar manner, transnational diasporic practices are at play when members of the American Caló community in Mexico and Venezuela seek to bury their deceased in Spain and move back and forth across the Atlantic.Footnote 22 In contrast, in the Caló community in Argentina, the deceased do not usually travel and are buried in cemeteries in Buenos Aires and other cities. These differences reflect a history of greater or lesser rootedness and residential stability.
The transnational space within which Gitanos travel has emerged alongside the global, transnational and translocal spatial transformations produced by the economy of late capitalism.Footnote 23 In the present context, American Gitanos cultivate transnational relationships by constructing their frames of reference in terms of standards, experiences and concepts that are not circumscribed to one nation, but to the broader global context. This savoir faire, as Adèle SutreFootnote 24 observed, is related to a substantial mobility capital that the Calós treasure, as well as the competencies they have acquired in the processes of intercultural interaction and communication.
These factors alone, however, do not explain the complexity of Gitano migrant implantation in America. The racialization of migrants contributes to their status as variously desirable, undesirable or marginalized subjects.Footnote 25 In the American context, this means that the desirability of a migrant group or individual is directly related to the place occupied by these migrants in a web of power relations, which correlate to colonial and late imperial hierarchies. The processes of ethnoracial recognition of Romani people in Latin America and the Caribbean reflect forms of ethnic recognition different from European models.Footnote 26 Historically, as other chapters in this volume demonstrate, authorities in countries such as the United States, Mexico, Colombia or Argentina have had their own racialized concepts about who can or cannot enter the country and about who can live in their territories.
The social status of the American Calós is therefore linked to the existing sociopolitical context of each country. Above all, however, it is related to the practices employed by group members in their social, political and economic interactions in the various urban environments which they occupy. In the case of Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Caracas, the experiences of and knowledge gained from urban cosmopolitanism are expressed in a whole socio-spatial propaedeutic,Footnote 27 that is, in the management and use, in the Caló way, of metropolitan urban public spaces. This space management reflects differential class habitus and the aspirational desire of the Calós as members of the middle class.
This chapter is based on fieldwork that took place intermittently from 2009 to 2023, with Gitano interlocutors from Mexico City and Buenos Aires. Through conversations and everyday exchanges in bars, cafés, restaurants, squares, streets or the home, Calós told me stories that connect cosmopolitanism, migratory trajectories and implantation. These narratives of cosmopolitanism are not an objective history, but rather history-making itself; they show how the Calós think and speak about themselves while historicizing their cosmopolitan experience.
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:
My uncle Antonio used to say, crying, in Brazil, “Why did we even come here?” And they said, “Let us give it a shot.” They had arrived in a country with black Payos [non-Roma]; the language was different. Their world fell apart “in this land … The way they talk, it’s like dogs barking.” They tried to find fabric to sell and they had a hard time. They stayed almost a year, and two Calós said, “There is a country that I have learned about just across the border [Uruguay]. But there is another one, Argentina, which is more like us [in Spain] and has a lot of money. Let us both go, take some money, try it, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll come back.” They arrived in Buenos Aires, and saw that it was a land of plenty. They went out selling loads of merchandise. And they called São Paulo on the phone and said, “Come on, you guys. We’re in paradise.” And people started coming from all over Spain.
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:
These Calós who were stranded in Brazil asked, “And which country is it bordering?” “There is a country bigger than Bolivia, where Spaniards live and run shops. Argentina.” And two of the men went to Buenos Aires. It was like New York. A marvel. They bought the fabrics for us. We went to cabarets, hotels, restaurants – the fruit was great. How well people lived! Because we were Spanish, we were treated like gentlemen.
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:
The treatment they were given here was very different from the one they were given in Spain. Here [the Gitanos] came with a suit to sell, and when they entered the door they were told, “What do you want, sir?” He was the Spanish gentleman who had come to Argentina, not a Gitano as in Spain. The American Gitano was molded and acquired education. And he became cultured. Why? Because here the Americans did not know the Gitano; they believed that he was a Spanish person who had come to their country.
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:
The Argentines treated us like gentlemen. That’s what a man like us had to do: go to a four-star hotel, because the Calós came to the hotels to sell in the town. Everyone was well dressed, and you had to comb your hair, put perfume on yourself, and look like a gentleman. The Calós began to talk to the Argentinian people. Their culture grew rapidly.
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:
I remember that town of the three borders, Uruguaiana. I was born in São Paulo and then I went to Bolivia during the time when the Gitanos were there. After three years, we returned to Brazil and stayed four years, from 1990 to 1994, and then we moved to Paraguay. In my house we used to speak common words in several languages. I was born in Brazil, my parents were Spanish, and my father would say as normal, “Bring me the jornal [newspaper].” Or he would tell my mother he was going to take a bath [by saying], “Mama, put me in the bucket.” We called a dessert “bolo.” We were so small that on the beach in Brazil we used to say, “Let us make a buraco [hole] on the beach.” Several of us kids used to talk like that.
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:
My mother was entrepreneurial. She would go with friends, cousins, sisters. She would go with Aunt Enriqueta, Aunt Juana, Aunt Consuelo, and Aunt Transi, her sister-in-law. They went alone, and on one of these trips, before arriving in Mexico, they arrived in Lima; then they passed through Quito, Panama City, San Salvador, and Guatemala City in 1975. The destination was Mexico, but on the way they were working country by country.
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.
Later we went to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and they would go to La Paz, Cochabamba, Tarija, and all of Bolivia by plane. These Calís traveled by plane, and the only good country was Mexico. In Ecuador, they sold, but there were not as many skyscrapers; it was not as cosmopolitan as Mexico. My father was more of a settler and preferred to stay in places. They [the women] traveled a lot.
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:
I am Argentinian and American. I’m going to name all the countries I’ve been to. I’m an American Gitana and that’s it. I have just spent my childhood first in Argentina, and then in Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico. We are from all over America. Let’s put all the flags where we’ve been! Not everyone is as lucky as we have been to be in all these countries.
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.
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