Introduction
In La Tirana, a village in the heart of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile and in one of the driest regions in Latin America, thousands of Catholic believers gather each year on July 16 for the feast of the Virgin of Carmel. The “Fiesta de la Tirana,” possibly the largest religious celebration in Chile, famously draws pilgrims who express their devotion to the Virgin through dancing. For a full week, this small village swells with hundreds of thousands of devotees, tourists, music and dance. The latter is a communal affair with dancers organized into lay confraternities called bailes. Each baile has a unique history, organizational structure and style, with costumes, accoutrements, music and dances frequently inspired by different ethnic and historical communities – African beats, Inca sun ceremonies and miners’ clothes appear.
One such dance troupe is Las Gitanas, or Gypsy women. The dancers – who are non-Romani – dress in outfits seemingly inspired by those worn by some Balkan Romani women at the beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote 1 While a viewer might expect the Chilean women’s clothing to draw from an Iberian repertoire, this folk image of Las Gitanas instead draws its inspiration from Southeastern Europe. Las Gitanas’ dress even incorporates and preserves a small purse that had been worn by Romani women in Serbia before World War I, but which has since disappeared as part of their ensemble there.
Las Gitanas’ dress exposes a vestige of Romani migrations to Chile during the early twentieth century, a time when thousands crossed the Atlantic from Eastern and Central Europe. One large Romani group that arrived as part of these movements were the Horahane.Footnote 2 Indeed, besides the Balkans, Chile has become home to the second main Horahane community, whose language is now the main Romani variety spoken in Chile;Footnote 3 if Horahane Roma are living elsewhere in the Americas (such as in Brazil, Argentina, the US or Uruguay), they likely have their roots in the Chilean population. Originally mainly Muslim or Eastern Orthodox, most have converted to Catholicism and more recently to Adventism since their early twentieth-century arrival from what is today Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Macedonia.Footnote 4 Others came later, during and after World War II, escaping persecution. And while their circulation between Chile and the Balkans has not been constant, some families maintain transoceanic contact still today.Footnote 5
This example speaks of the connections that Romanies have been tracing across the Atlantic for generations. While neither Chile nor the Western Balkans touch the shores of the Atlantic, the case illustrates the expansive movement of Romani people and of ideas held about them across, throughout and beyond the Atlantic world. The Atlantic sits at the confluence of contemporary Romani people. Romani transatlantic migrations are a crucial piece of the ethnic diversity characteristic of the Americas. Though untangling this complex instance of cultural appropriation needs further study, as do many other topics introduced in this book, the case of Las Gitanas baile does show that one can only understand certain local details of the history and culture of a globally connected Atlantic world by considering the diversity of the Romani presence within it. More generally, centuries-old movements of Romani people, and the images and ideas related to them, though not identical or constant over time, mean that one also cannot write Romani history without considering the place of such transatlantic exchanges and circulations. These flows and reflows have impacted the character, identity and lived realities of different Romani communities past and present on both sides of the Atlantic – in Europe, the Americas and in Africa. Yet scholars have rarely applied the circum-Atlantic frame in ways that illuminate the lived experiences of Romani people.
To shift the attention, this collection recasts Romani people as an Atlantic diaspora. It enriches Romani history and Romani studies, as well as the scholarship of those regions that are a part of the Atlantic world, and even beyond, in many different ways. For instance, the interlinking constructions of European “internal Others” with the “othering” provoked by transatlantic encounters suggests racialization to have occurred across more broader geographies and throughout more expansive layers than prior scholarship has considered. Following from that, the policing needed to maintain such newly generated boundaries around groups of people became embedded as policy priorities even as the methods employed to do so shifted over time. With the consolidation of new nation states in the Americas, Romani people continued to be policed, even as the vocabulary used to do so – often drawing on and transforming European tropes – positioned them as a social problem, and thus hiding the racialization they experienced. The scale of their identities then responded to growing state power, even as with their responses different communities emphasized the local, the national or the global in distinct ways. Thus, people who have most commonly been viewed as “the largest European minority” have, in fact, always been part of the modern global world and have regularly interacted with a myriad of people and phenomena outside Europe. As such, a case can be made for their critical inclusion in the construction of modernity itself. This volume thus carves out a conceptual space for thinking “the Romani Atlantic.”Footnote 6
Never has Romani scholarship from throughout the Atlantic world been considered together as one body of knowledge. The disciplinary, temporal and geographic isolation of most previous work related to Romani lives throughout the Atlantic, some of it produced by the scholars included in this volume, has been positioned within other, typically nationally oriented, scholarly conversations. This does not mean that the topic is new to contemporary scholars. For instance, a small handful of American ethnographers from the 1950s through 1970s described Romani immigration to the US and Canada from Europe to illuminate questions of ethnic minority adaptation and assimilation to new societies.Footnote 7 However, because of their focus, the broader context and the broader movements of Romani people remained obscured. The benefit of scaling out as this volume does is twofold. It brings into relief ways Romani people have been actively and strategically engaging with imperial and national policies, institutions and states to shape meaningful lives across the centuries. At the same time, Romani people have continued to creatively cultivate Romani distinctiveness and build resilient communities with often novel forms of sociability and belonging. A consideration of the context of Atlantic flows and circulations with Romani people at the center, reveals how they helped construct the empires, nations and communities of which they were members. Though often deemed insignificant, important elements of their movements and interconnections – their labor, racialization, immigration and kinship practices, for instance – have been integral to the creation of the modern world.
Romani people stand out compared to many other Atlantic migrants, because they frequently preserved distinctive and deep social cohesion across generations within a context of widespread assumptions others held about them. As communities dispersed among more powerful majorities who viewed their presence as illegitimate or suspect, the crossing itself, creating new networks of relationships and ways of belonging, became for many an act of sociocultural affirmation and a way to maintain family continuity. Yet wherever they arrived, strong images and stereotypes about “Gypsies” already existed. As this volume aptly documents, while “the Gypsy” might be an expansive and shifting category, Romani people forged lives navigating the expectations associated with it. This collection narrates the many ways such processes occurred and were experienced.
Even more broadly important than telling Romani history within an Atlantic context, The Romani Atlantic positions Romani people within contemporary global social history. This is a place where they are seldom found. Historians of Europe and the Americas have only rarely considered Romani people in their work. We do not yet quite know how our understanding of colonization, migration or racial categories would look if Romani people had been consistently and systematically included in scholarship. Also unknown is how the picture of the emergence and character of global capitalism would look if it centered Romani economic practices, such as flexibility, niche specialization, peripatetic strategies and relational embeddedness in kinship as tools for autonomy and resistance and in response to marginalization.Footnote 8 Modern organization of knowledge has discouraged thinking about the relationship between a Romani diaspora and, say, settler colonialism in North America or African slavery. Such disconnect limits scholars of the Americas, Europe and Atlantic Africa. It also harms Romani people by placing them outside history.Footnote 9
The Atlantic Frame
The Atlantic world paradigm has been applied by scholars in multiple ways. Emerging from the work of early modern historians, its expansiveness has contributed much to other eras and methodological approaches.Footnote 10 Although a geographic region, the Atlantic world is helpfully conceived of as a sphere of circulations, interactions, connections and exchanges, as well as a zone of contact where identities interlace and transform. The focus on the flow of people and ideas, and the entanglement of geographically distant locales undergirds all Atlantic scholarship. At its best, the transborder considerations of Atlantic history and Atlantic studies can counter the limitations of the nation state as a frame for scholarly inquiry and enable a more accurate understanding of the defining features in individuals’ and communities’ lives. Though originally applied to the early modern Anglophone world, the Atlantic world frame expanded first geographically, through its application to African, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and French imperial contexts,Footnote 11 and then chronologically.Footnote 12 It has proven generative to understanding a diverse array of people, regions, eras and phenomena, and has brought into focus lives, experiences and histories of marginalized groups “without history.” In so doing, the Atlantic world as a system of analysis has opened new dimensions in the history of colonization, immigration, empire, forced labor, slavery and many other topics.Footnote 13
The Romani Atlantic borrows more than its title from Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic.Footnote 14 Indeed, this book, too, could have been called The Black Atlantic. Many Romani groups, in Finland, Wales, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Argentina and elsewhere, refer to themselves as “Kalé,” “Calen,” “Kaale” and so on, whereby in Romani “kaló” means “black.” In Central and Eastern Europe Roma are frequently racialized as “Black” and this is how many would refer to themselves in contrast to “white” non-Roma.Footnote 15 “We are negry,” a Romani man told Alaina Lemon to describe how Russians looked at him, “we are treated like [a] second class here, like your blacks in America.”Footnote 16 The Romani Atlantic, then, tells stories from another Black Atlantic, of a different racialized group within the same transoceanic frame, who at times might identify, recognize similarities and see interconnections with others bound up within global racializing processes.
On another level, this collection is inspired by the “changing same” Gilroy exposes through thinking with a decentered diaspora. His insistence on the embeddedness of diverse people into structures of modernity, the failures of nationalist paradigms to fully capture lived experiences and the limitations of both essentialist and antiessentialist theories and discourses, echo throughout the contributions in this work. Just as “the history of the black Atlantic yields a course of lessons as to the instability and mutability of identities which are always unfinished, always being remade,” stories from the Romani Atlantic suggest both the continuities and particulars that have shaped Romani lives.Footnote 17
Scholarship since Gilroy has made the Atlantic a more inclusive space and revised our understanding of the functioning of the Atlantic sphere. Most notably, works on Black, Irish, Jewish and Indigenous Atlantics position these groups previously excluded from the Atlantic paradigm within its domain.Footnote 18 Similarly, The Romani Atlantic shows how the Atlantic world looks different – and sometimes strikingly familiar – with Romani people in it. Specifically, our current understanding of the transatlantic circumstances that generated racialization, imperialism, nationalism, globalization and even modernity itself remains incomplete without a consideration of the ways Romani people shaped and were shaped by these processes.
Given the size and the character of the Romani diaspora and its position in relation to European history, it necessitates considering several “Black Atlantics” together. It invites considering, for instance, intimate connections between the experiences of Muslim Roma arriving in the Americas from the Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman territories (the story with which this introduction opened), alongside the “vanishing” of both Black and Indigenous populations in Latin American countries aiming to attract European migrants. The distance between the Balkans and the Americas turns out to be merely geographical since Balkan history has been directly connected, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, with the history of Atlantic space.
The genealogy of Atlantic history as a perspective includes the work of the early-twentieth-century American Atlanticists, such as Walter Lippmann, who reimagined a shared Atlantic community as well as a shared Atlantic history.Footnote 19 But as Piro Rexhepi has recently argued, the work of these scholars, along with politicians such as Woodrow Wilson, simultaneously led to the recasting of the Balkans as a borderland of whiteness and Christianity and as a frontier of Euro-Atlantic civilization.Footnote 20 A related promotion of the ideal of the post-Ottoman states of the Balkans as white and Christian led to the erasure of Romani and Muslim histories in that region, just as Black, Native and other experiences were being erased from several countries in the Americas through the promotion of racialized immigration schemes.Footnote 21 The Romani Atlantic thus also serves as an invitation to consider how the histories that define the Atlantic as a recognizable ecumene also entail histories of bordering, exclusion, enslavement and global whiteness, processes that conjoin and interweave experiences of different, and often geographically distant, subalternized populations. It is also a reminder to remain critical of the Atlantic framework itself that, in some of its iterations, might reproduce racial and colonial hierarchies.
Histories of Romani People
Atlantic history would benefit from the inclusion of Romani people and Romani history would benefit from a consideration of an Atlantic frame. We still need adequate conceptual frameworks to discuss the place of the Atlantic in the story of the Romani diaspora, and its role in the constitution and transformation of Romani subjectivities and collectivities. Romani-related scholarship has yet to fully engage in important debates on imperialism, ethnogenesis, racialization, cultural (ex)change and (post)coloniality. This is partly because European specialists, who approach Romani people through national (or European) frames and as a minority vis-à-vis various European majorities, rarely extend their studies to the people who left for elsewhere or consider relationships with communities and places outside Europe or the nation under study.Footnote 22 At the same time, historians of the Americas or Africa have virtually ignored the Romani historical presence on these continents.
When Romani people have been considered historically, which is rarer than one might think, they have nearly always been placed within a singular imperial or national experience. Important book-length works that have been published on England, Spain, Italy, Germany or Romania limit the frame of inquiry by political boundary.Footnote 23 Other works that survey Romani history take a broadly European view and explore Romani lives through an expansive chronological scale.Footnote 24 Some of the most common frameworks within which Romani people have been historicized recently include deportation,Footnote 25 racialization,Footnote 26 the imagined “Gypsy,”Footnote 27 the Holocaust,Footnote 28 governance,Footnote 29 citizenship,Footnote 30 activism,Footnote 31 the familyFootnote 32 and the historical discipline’s engagement with Romani history.Footnote 33 Implicit in most of these works is an assumption that Romani people are an ethnic or national minority within a more encompassing and more stable majoritarian community. Surprisingly, even within the European context that does emphasize mobility and migration, historians have almost universally ignored centering meaningfully connected geographies – such as the Mediterranean or the Atlantic as ecological, economic and cultural systems and spaces of mediation – rather than polities.Footnote 34
As such, this book removes Romani Studies from its “splendid isolation.”Footnote 35 Due to disciplinary traditions and the hegemonic consideration of Romani history as intimately tied to Europe, distance exists between the literature on Romani people and literatures related to other subaltern communities. It is commonplace, for instance, to think of the modern racial regime as born in the context of European expansion and related to the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Indigenous populations. Antigypsy sentiments and policies, however, emerged during the century before European imperialism, which complicates this genealogy of race and racialization.Footnote 36 At the same time, Romani ethno-racial meanings, identities and boundaries must be reconsidered in relation to other racial projects. The continued minoritization of Europe’s “internal Other” has always been related to a variety of unequal relationships between Europeans and their “external Others,” a relationship which, however, has not been given attention. The common portrayal of Romani people as the only “European minority,” for instance, emphasizes Romani “Europeanness” and majority/minority relations, while creating a distance and isolation from broader global processes.Footnote 37
In response, this collection draws on and speaks to existing literatures on other transatlantic processes, mobilities and groups, highlighting interrelatedness, similarities and differences. Romani experiences with racialization, labor regimes, cultural (ex)change and mobilities reveal the varied relationships between Romani people and other groups and global dynamics. It complements prior scholarship on Romani people by providing a more complete account of the Romani place in modernity. This work effectively “provincializes Europe” in Romani stories while acknowledging Romani people as modern subjects in the making of the modern world.Footnote 38 This unique Atlantic vantage opens new understandings about Romani people as co-creators of the modern world.
The Making of a Modern Diaspora
This book builds from a straightforward empirical observation, namely, that the first Romani presence across many parts of Europe was recorded at the same time as in the Americas. Romani settlement throughout Western and Northern Europe (but also Russia) coincided with the era of European maritime expansion and exploration. In the fifteenth century, as the Portuguese were colonizing Atlantic archipelagos, reaching the coast of West Africa and establishing a sea route to India, polities across much of Western Europe were also trying to make sense of, and respond to, people calling themselves “Egyptians.” These people were often treated as pilgrims, or had provided letters of passage, only to be expelled or persecuted a few decades later.Footnote 39 Gradually, as a new global racial order was emerging, stereotypes of Romani people stabilized and the policies aimed at Romani eradication, assimilation or expulsion also hardened. The characteristics that became ascribed to Romani people and the social status they were positioned into became carved out in various kingdoms, empires and nations. But this was not only due to developments within Europe (such as the policing of vagrancy); attitudes and actions toward Romani people in Europe were also prompted by larger global phenomena, such as conquest and colonization, the emergence of new commercial circuits, transatlantic slavery, as well as the related solidification of European identities. It is therefore necessary to decenter Europe from the Romani story and reconsider the standard view of Romani people as primarily a European diaspora who are only derivatively present elsewhere.
To give a sense of these entangled histories, in Scotland, for instance, the first reference to Romani people has sometimes – erroneously, it seemsFootnote 40 – been said to be from 1492,Footnote 41 the very year Columbus reached American shores for the Spanish Crown. The beginnings of a Romani presence in the Americas are commonly traced to six years later – to 1498 – and Columbus’ third voyage, on which four “Egyptians,” two men and two women, were sent to Hispaniola to serve their sentences as colonists. Just one year later, in 1499, the same Spanish monarchs who funded Columbus’ voyage enacted the very first legislation against Gitanos in Spain.Footnote 42 This occurred only three generations after the first Romani appearance on the Iberian Peninsula. The first accepted documented mention of “Egyptians” in Scotland comes from 1505, just one year after the first French expulsion order directed toward them and from which they may have been fleeing.Footnote 43 Although these strangers were at first received with a certain curiosity and goodwill by elites, in 1541 the first groups would be banished from Scotland; throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, authorities at various levels continued to banish Romani individuals from their realms.Footnote 44 Finally, after the 1660 Restoration and in the wake of English imperial expansion in the Atlantic, warrants were given, following pressures from Scottish merchants, to transport “Egyptians” along with other “vagabonds” without trial – and thus without much documentary trace – from Scotland to new English colonies in the Caribbean (Barbados, Jamaica) or North America (Newfoundland, Nova Scotia) to work.Footnote 45 Soon after, a 1664 report by a committee set up to advise the Privy Council regarding the management of the growing number of English colonies, racialized the labor force. They noted that “blacks bought by way of trade” would be “perpetual servants,” while “whites,” “gathered up in England, [or a] few from Ireland or Scotland” – and including “gipsies [sic], and other incorrigible rogues” – would eventually after some years be “free to plant themselves or take wages for their service.”Footnote 46
The early modern colonial and racial order, as well as new commercial circuits and capitalism itself, then, developed in tandem with the stabilization of the western view of Romani people, who moved through and settled in – both voluntarily and by force – various European, American and (North and Atlantic) African spaces simultaneously. Beliefs held about them and their place in society also travelled, often preceding their arrival. Though these ideas might adjust in new contexts, they also became a way for Europeans to make sense of other new people they encountered and suggested elements of a “racial matrix” from which they could draw.Footnote 47 In just one example, from as early as 1501, the Venetian ambassador to Portugal, Pietro Pasqualigo, described in a letter to his brothers back home how some Indigenous Americans who had just arrived to Portugal “bear the greatest resemblance to the Cingani.”Footnote 48 Though Romani people were only documented as residing in Portugal from the 1520s, Pasqualigo’s Lisbon letter predates this by two decades.Footnote 49 Pasqualigo could draw on these images to approximate the American Natives to his brothers because Venetians had lived alongside Romani people for centuries; indeed, the first mention of Romani people in the eastern Mediterranean comes from Crete in 1322, then a Venetian dominion.Footnote 50 Romani communities existed along the belt of Venetian possessions in the eastern Mediterranean between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Their movements throughout the region, and eventually westward, were linked not only to the growing Ottoman presence but also to a varied circulation of communities and individuals throughout the larger area.Footnote 51
Pasqualigo’s reference thus imaginatively connects the Balkan Mediterranean shores with the North Atlantic American shores. But connections and continuities went both ways. A Spanish royal judge, Juan de Quiñones, added in his Discursos contra los Gitanos (1613) to the series of crimes and allegations already swirling against Romani people in Spain, an accusation of cannibalism, which he accentuated through a transatlantic comparison: “It is nothing less than what the Caribs of the West Indies did, who ate human flesh.”Footnote 52 His words, as well as repressive deeds, were a part of a heightened seventeenth-century antigypsy climate, whereby, in the words of historian Massimo Aresu, “Only two centuries earlier, Iberian institutions had bestowed gifts, allowances and honours upon their leaders. By 1631, Gypsies had become total strangers, so distant that they could be compared to the Indigenous American cannibals. The process of constructing otherness had assumed such extreme characteristics that it eventually de-humanized the Gypsy population of Spain.”Footnote 53
Though only a broad-brush characterization of this century-plus-long period, the above descriptions are telling. Concurrent to European considerations of Indigenous Americans, many Central and Western Europeans were also forming their views about who the Romani people were and how they should behave. The shift in the nomenclature is suggestive here. While in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century documents mention “Egyptians” or “Greeks” (as in the case of Portugal), among others, whose identity is somewhat exotic and uncertain, these terms, by the end of the sixteenth century, become locally substituted by a corruption of the term “Egyptian”; while former terms do not disappear completely (some are still in use today), Romani people increasingly become referred to as “Gypsies” in English, “Gitanos” in Spanish, and “Ciganos” in Portuguese. Though not derivative of the names they called themselves, this renaming illustrates a change in perception from that of foreign visitors passing through to domestic strangers. It marks a shift from being treated with curiosity at their first arrival in new parts of Europe to encountering distancing attitudes once they settled in an area or visited with more regularity.
As part of this shift, Romani cultural specificity would often be deemed problematic, triggered by diverse and shifting factors. In Spain, for instance, during the sixteenth century, their simultaneous construction as natives and foreigners occurred alongside those of Jewish, Moorish, African and Indigenous American descent.Footnote 54 Meanwhile, the inquisitorial visit to the Portuguese colony of Bahia, in 1592, treated them as “Old Christians,” and thus not suspect of a Judaic heresy, but nevertheless of a Cigano “race.” This was the only distinct “race” designation in these inquisition records for people born in Portugal.Footnote 55 By this time, certain expectations of and identities thrust upon Romani people had solidified, making them appear distinct from other Portuguese colonizers as well as the local Indigenous and enslaved African populations. How exactly they thought of themselves during this process remains a scholarly gap in need of attention. Clearly, from just these few examples, bringing Romani people into the story of early modern transatlantic history requires nuancing the accepted perspectives on the process of identity (re)construction and racialization. Further intricacies of belonging and selfhood within a transatlantic colonial context remain unexplored. From the perspective of Romani historiography, though, this illustrates that race matters in ways not apparent when one focuses solely on Europe.
The processes of European colonial expansion, including the genocides, enslavements and voluntary and forced population movements, are also the context shaping the Romani diaspora. Throughout Western Europe, penal transportation would be variously pondered as a means of assimilation, breaking up communities and exterminating Romani people from the metropoles.Footnote 56 Nowhere is it more visible than in early modern Portugal, where, due to the small population base, penal transportation became one possible sentence within anti-Romani legislation and a way to secure labor for its overseas possessions. Hundreds of families were impacted by such policies. Shards of their experiences can be uncovered in Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, São Tomé and elsewhere. Thus, the story of anti-Romani racism, which is usually approached as an aspect of early modern state-building, must be seen as unfolding in the context of colonial expansion and imperialism.Footnote 57
In addition, the emergence of new populations, be they Indigenous, Afro-derived, Creole, neo-European or other, mingled with and generated distinctive Romani experiences and identities in the Atlantic and beyond. Both the violence and ethnogenesis inherent in transatlantic modernity, as well as the circulation of people, objects and ideas throughout the Atlantic space, shaped Romani experiences and the Romani diaspora more broadly.Footnote 58 This was not confined to European centers of colonization facing west. Take Banat, for instance, a region in present-day Romania and Serbia (and with a small part extending into Hungary). In the eighteenth century, when the Habsburgs conquered it from the Ottoman Empire and eventually incorporated the territories into the kingdom of Hungary, it served as a testing ground for new governance models in Central Europe. Racial hierarchies put in place and the discriminatory policies applied toward Roma were shaped not only by local dynamics, but also by Habsburg memory of the Reconquista and the colonial practices developed and applied in the Spanish Americas.Footnote 59 This book rethinks such Atlantic connections, circulations and influences by tracing them all the way to the post-Cold War moment and the migrations following the fall of communism and the Euro-Atlantic realignment (indexed in the EU and NATO accession). Today, as a result of post-1989 migrations, family networks of Roma originally from that same region in what is now Romania maintain kinship ties and economic relationships across sixteen European and North American countries, creating a truly Atlantic community.Footnote 60
Romani History
The history of Romani settlement throughout the Atlantic world can be usefully divided into three broad phases: the early modern and colonial period; the period of European migration to the Americas at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century; and the post–World War II period. These are not waves, but rather periods when Romani people become visible in distinct ways. The first period emerged within the context of the forced population movements of imperial expansions. In the second, nationalistic immigration controls prompted attempts at identifying Romani people and regulating their border crossing. As transnational migrants and refugees during the third period, they garnered new attention – from politicians, the media and scholars. During each phase, authorities reacted to Romani presence and movements, and generated documents about them, from across the Atlantic world.Footnote 61
Throughout the colonial period, Romani people were arriving in European colonies primarily from or via metropoles – from Portugal to Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde or São Tomé; from Spain to Peru or Mexico; from England or Scotland to Jamaica, Virginia or Barbados; from France to Louisiana.Footnote 62 The character of this transatlantic movement differed across empires and reflected military considerations, economic and labor needs, the demographic composition of both the metropole and the periphery, and metropole–colony relations. Early modern Portugal, for instance, regularly exiled Romanies to North Africa, Brazil, São Tomé or Angola, where they, along with criminal exiles, served as a valuable labor force, especially in the army, that helped to stabilize colonial control and trade.Footnote 63 After the eighteenth century, once Brazilian authorities no longer required convict labor because of the supply of enslaved Africans and because the country was able to attract free migrants, the Brazilian authorities regularly shipped unwanted Ciganos to Angola or Maranhão (in the northern part of today’s Brazil). The Spanish Crown, on the other hand, generally forbade Romani settlement in its South American colonies, adopting harsh anti-Romani policies of segregation and assimilation at home instead. The fear was that they might exercise too much autonomy in their own best interests, rather than in the interests of the Crown in places with little colonial oversight. Some of the arguments for such positions included the impossibility of controlling Romani people in the colonies, the fear they would corrupt the Indigenous people living in Jesuit mission villages or that they would otherwise conspire with the Portuguese or Brazilians (especially mixed-race mamelucos) to capture and enslave Indigenous people.Footnote 64 In other words, around the same time that Spain was moving across the Atlantic and conquering the “Others” in foreign lands, it prevented “internal Others,” or those “natives” treated as “foreigners,”Footnote 65 from accompanying them; Romani outsider status was realized in their confinement within the metropole.Footnote 66 Nevertheless, at the end of the sixteenth century, they were documented in the viceroyalty of Peru. Romani people continued to live in Spanish American spaces as several chapters in this volume attest.Footnote 67
Despite the available sources being almost universally written by others, we can learn much about Romani experiences of the early modern Atlantic world. We know they made use of this inter-imperial space to negotiate opportunities they saw as serving their own best interests. For instance, when María de la Concepción described her family’s recent migratory movements to the Mexican inquisitors in 1668, she named eight port cities that spanned three continents and two empires.Footnote 68 Others also experienced such remarkable mobility, though likely not most; records suggest many lived in intergenerationally stable communities in the Americas. Some were indentured laborers, while others became landlords, ranchers, church wardens or traders – including of the enslaved; still others were soldiers, healers, blacksmiths, carpenters, musicians or dancers. They registered land claims, made wills and sued to claim their inheritance. We know they married and baptized their children and took Catholic rites, just like other colonists. Their lives appear quite similar to other common European colonial subjects, even as antigypsy laws and sentiments were responsible for at least some of their transatlantic sojourns. Only in two regards can major differences be seen. They almost exclusively appear in records in family units; this is even in the cases of military service or those forced across the sea. Sometimes these families, for instance those in Brazil, even maintained their distinctiveness and community life in the colonies across generations.Footnote 69 The transatlantic racial order also appears to have affected them in ways distinctive from other European migrants. Romani women, on occasion, are documented in intimate relationships with Native and Black men, although in other instances Romani men especially insisted upon benefits typically understood as being reserved only and explicitly for whites. Unless they transgressed some sort of regulation though, most early modern Atlantic Romanies kept themselves out of the records.Footnote 70
The second period of Romani visibility spans the end of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century. After the abolition of slavery in the western hemisphere, new states across the Americas promoted the migration and settlement of people from Europe, often with the aim of colonizing and “civilizing” their interiors. The US, Brazil and Argentina, in particular, competed in attracting new migrants and each saw huge population growth as a result. The encouragement of European migration and the limitation of migration from other parts of the world also reflected the eugenic goals of “whitening” the population. Romani people were part of this European migration, arriving especially from the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, but also from Spain, Russia and Italy.Footnote 71 It should be said, however, that those categorized as “Gypsies” were considered the least desirable of European migrants. One comparative analysis shows that by 1930, fourteen out of twenty-two countries in the Americas studied had immigration laws against them – the second most directly targeted group after the Chinese.Footnote 72 As several chapters in this volume document, laws and immigration officers across the Americas attempted to identify Romani people and prevent their entry.
Increased migration and new forms of transoceanic travel also created opportunities for European authorities to dispose of various undesirable groups. For example, in her research in Italian archives, Paola Trevisan encountered cases of “foreign Gypsies” who were forced by officials to embark on steamers to Brazil, Senegal, Turkey or Egypt. During this period states became obsessed with determining where “Gypsies” belonged, which variably resulted in their removal or restriction from their teritories.Footnote 73 The commonalities shared between immigration laws and border practices suggest transnational borrowing, even if not a systematized transnational practice. The consistent, if ad hoc, locally motivated reactions to Romani presence across Europe during the early twentieth century also helps explain the heinous persecution they experienced during World War II. Even in countries without formally organized anti-Romani policies, the seeds of their elimination lay all around the continent. They had already been made unwanted everywhere; it merely took the mechanism to realize their attempted extermination.Footnote 74
In sum, Romani mobility, whether forced or voluntary, shaped the way nation states developed border controls, which in turn shaped Romani transnational strategies, connections and movements. Though transatlantic Romani migrations characterized this era, circulation between countries impacted Romani lives to just as great an extent. This period was also characterized by high transnational mobility of many Vlach-Rom communities, such as the Kalderash and Lovara, who circulated throughout the Atlantic space and migrated to both North and South America. Some became true cosmopolitans, their movement connecting the Atlantic continents and maintaining lively links.Footnote 75 In just one illustrative instance, a group of “Brazilian” Romani men carrying US passports who were imprisoned in Serbia in the 1930s had stayed for some time in South Africa. According to the American consul, they spoke Portuguese, English and some Afrikaans, as well as the Romani of the Roma living in Vojvodina, a region in the north of Serbia.Footnote 76
As a result of this migration history, new Romani communities emerged in the Americas to such an extent that, despite the colonial-era immigration history, in several countries of Latin America today, including Chile as described at the start of this introduction, “Gitanos” are primarily associated with these East European Romanies, rather than with Iberian Calós. Indeed, in Mexico as elsewhere, the term húngaros (Hungarians) has become a synonym for Gitanos.Footnote 77 In Argentina, the largest Romani populations are Rom with origins in Eastern Europe, followed by the Romanian-speaking Ludar. Even though the earliest Romanies might have arrived from Spain during the colonial era, today Calós (with origins in the Iberian Peninsula) constitute the smallest Romani group in Argentina.Footnote 78
An understanding of Romani lives from this period comes from a diverse array of sources. New Romani arrivals coming from the east to various western European ports of departure coincided with an interest among Anglophone scholars, often referred to as Gypsilorists or Gypsiologists, of collecting, documenting, tracking and even pretending membership in Romani culture.Footnote 79 The Gypsilorists’ writings often straddled the line between scholarship and lore, some of which was consumed by a broader public.Footnote 80 The press played a role by reporting on the appearances of these strangers presented often in a sensationalist manner. The heightened expectations attached to these exoticized people meant that journalists throughout the Atlantic tracked Romani movements in their reporting.Footnote 81 Those whose real or purported characteristics coincided with outsiders’ stereotypes of “Gypsies” were made especially visible in reports, as several chapters in Part II attest. Unlike the previous era, Romanies also wrote their own stories during and about this period, including Steve Kaslov, who was a leader in the Russian Roma community in the US from the 1920s through 1940s.Footnote 82 Victor Vishnevsky, a Russian Lovara with Hungarian roots born in China,Footnote 83 describes in his memoirs his journey through various countries, including Iran and Brazil, along with his views about and understanding of various societies and why, for instance, he found settling in Brazil better than living in Europe.Footnote 84
Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Romani individuals and families from Europe have continued circulating and settling throughout the Atlantic. Broadly speaking, Romani movements and choices, like those of their compatriots, were influenced by events and processes, such as wars, persecutions or the political or economic situation in their home country, although these often impacted Romani communities in specific ways. Some Romani people, especially from Eastern Europe, migrated across the Atlantic during and after World War II to escape persecution or as war refugees. Some crossed the Iron Curtain in search of better living conditions, drawing, for instance, on US refugee support, including church networks, new transnational organizations, such as the International Refugee Organization, as well as extended kinship networks.Footnote 85 Still others fled the Balkans, especially Bosnia and Kosovo, amidst the Yugoslav Wars and today create diasporic community connections across multiple countries.Footnote 86 Romani people from specific regions of Spain, for instance, left during the Francoist regime as a way to escape poverty or as a reaction to forced resettlement in the cities. As a result, in Argentina certain groups of Calós, known as “Argentinian Calós,” originally arrived from Andalusia in the 1930s, while others, referred to as “Spanish Calós,” began migrating particularly from the Madrid area in the 1960s.Footnote 87 Today, the latter would distinguish themselves as “American Gitanos” from their relatives who stayed in Spain. They see themselves as a distinct network of families related by marriage, who carry certain cosmopolitan dispositions and sensibilities that ready them to move across various Latin American countries.Footnote 88
In some instances, movements during the later part of the twentieth century built from existing relationships. As mentioned at the beginning, while ancestors of those who identify as Horahane in Chile today arrived there in the early twentieth century alongside other migrants from the Balkans, others came during and after World War II, while still others immigrated in the 1980s. New families continue to arrive even today. In this and several other instances, following and mobilizing kinship connections and reconstituting families became a central mechanism for managing movement and settlement. Migration has often been a family or kin group decision, not an individual one. While extended families sometimes migrate together, individuals or nuclear families might also join or follow relatives across borders. Migration and other movements have forced new strategies to maintain kinship and community ties, though family members or individuals otherwise connected continue to provide crucial information and support to new migrants. For many communities today, just like in the past, the histories and experiences of such migrations, as well as the maintenance of transatlantic networks (increasingly through social media), have become aspects of their identities.
Virtually nothing, however, is known about the impact the end of European imperialism in Africa and African liberation had on Romani experiences on that continent and on transatlantic circulations to and from it. For instance, while historical documents show a “Cigano” presence in Angola for centuries, many arrived along with a massive influx of settlers, especially from underdeveloped and overpopulated rural areas of Portugal, after 1951. In that year, Angola became reclassified as a province of Portugal and was experiencing economic growth, while António Salazar’s regime started to actively promote white settlement in a bid to strengthen Portuguese control. Meager evidence gestures to the Portuguese Ciganos’ ambivalent place in Angola during this era. As Portuguese citizens, they moved relatively freely between provinces, but in their movement and activities they seemed to cross the colonial segregation of inhabitants and related administrative divisions. An exchange between provincial authorities between 1956 and 1959 shows how officials tried to control Romani movement in the district of Huambo in the interior, because of “violations and misconduct,” and Romani involvement “in illegal trade dealings with the natives.”Footnote 89 This was on the eve of the Angolan war of independence (1961–74), when the inhabitants of Angola were, by the “Native Statute” of 1926, still divided into two kinds – the natives (indígenas) and citizens – which determined their movements, rights, access to social services, economic opportunities and so on.Footnote 90 Through their ambulant trade with African “indigenes” in the interior, Ciganos threatened to undermine this dual system and indirect rule. As a result, colonial authorities forced several of them to return to Portugal and limited their itinerant trade to the coastal cities where most white settlers lived. Ciganos, nevertheless, continued to arrive in Angola (as well as Portuguese Mozambique and Guinea), although most left along with other Portuguese in 1974 when Angola gained independence. Many years later, David Lagunas, a contributor to this volume, encountered some of them in Latin America.Footnote 91
At the end of the twentieth century, the movement of Romani individuals was seen as problematic and a challenge to the political project of (North) Atlantic realignment after the end of the Cold War. Between the mid-1990s and about 2010, Roma from Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia and other countries started arriving in Western European countries (such as Belgium and the UK). Others arrived in Canada, including some who claimed refugee status.Footnote 92 This was a period when the so-called transition from socialism led to economic collapse in industrial and agricultural sectors, increased poverty and unemployment and provoked a dramatic growth in discrimination, xenophobia and direct physical violence directed at Romani minorities. At the same time, countries of East-Central Europe (ECE) were working to join NATO, the Council of Europe and the EU. This was conditioned by fulfilling requirements related to further economic liberalization, democratization, human rights protections and migration controls. This process of “Euro-Atlantic integration,” as it has been called, has had contradictory impacts, especially on vulnerable and discriminated against populations, even as it opened new migratory pathways and opportunities. The arrival of thousands of European Roma seeking asylum put a strain on bilateral relations between countries and elicited a range of legislative and policy changes, including the reimposition of visas on ECE citizens, restrictions to acceptance of Romani refugee claims, Canada’s 2012 immigration reforms and adoption of a “Designated Country of Origin” policy and the further unification and securitization of migration policies withing the EU.Footnote 93 Whether in the UK, Canada or elsewhere, the official rhetoric has questioned the legitimacy of Romani individuals from ECE as refugees and reinforced prejudices linking Romani migration to criminality and welfare.Footnote 94 While ECE politicians spoke against migration, which they thought showed their countries in a bad light, and proposed a series of pro-Romani policies to prove their support for human and minority rights, the dominant discourse also framed Romani claims of refugee status as largely bogus or as an attempt to misuse the system.Footnote 95 The media treated Romani flight primarily as a question of diplomacy and international relations, rather than a humanitarian issue or a reaction to acute racist violence, while for national majorities in ECE countries, it became almost an assault – by a despised minority – on efforts of what they saw as the rightful return to “the Euro-Atlantic family.”
This brief Atlantic history of Romani people – from the last years of the fifteenth century through the first years of the twenty-first century – illustrates that Romani people are part of the history of the modern Atlantic world. Their migrations across, between and within empires and nations, along with the official responses to these movements, have influenced the development of modern states and the formation of contemporary Romani identity and sense of belonging. Despite facing broad discrimination, their ongoing existence as a people is a testament to their resilience in the face of exclusionary and even eliminatory tactics. It is essential to incorporate Romani realities into the histories of Europe, Africa and the Americas. They deserve to be treated as part of these larger histories, rather than placed outside them or portrayed as a people without history.
About the Book
Each chapter in this collection takes one historical moment and phenomenon as its starting point. Taken together, the chapters map a Romani Atlantic experience through coverage of diverse periods, regions, topics, scales and approaches. The broad temporal frame of the collection includes studies of sixteenth-century colonial empire formation through twenty-first-century securitized immigration regimes. Geographical points and flows range from early imperial Spain and Mexico, Lusophone Angolan slave trading ports, Ellis Island immigration controls, villages of Southeastern Europe and Canadian community centers, among many other places. Each case study functions as a node in the migratory flow and reflow of people, ideas and processes examined in service of Romani lived experiences. Such a broad geographic and temporal scope is purposive: it frames together, for the first time, scholarship previously conceived of in isolation. Bringing together disparate geographies in longue durée temporalities also reveals informative patterns – related to imperialism, nationalism and globalization, just to name a few – and prevents myopic interpretations from overly focused examinations.
The methodological breadth of this collection is equally expansive. Though primarily historical in nature, contributing scholars also employ anthropological and autoethnographic approaches. A fuller examination of topics is considered in the chapter descriptions below, but includes explorations of racialization, immigration regimes, migration trajectories, employment, representations, the circulation of stereotypes, as well as family relationships. Such diverse methodologies and topics provide a better understanding of Romani lived experiences while also considering how existing social vulnerabilities, inequalities and disenfranchisements have characterized these experiences throughout history.
The Romani Atlantic is organized into three Parts grouped topically and chronologically following the three distinct periods of visibility sketched above. Part I, “Colonial Flows,” considers Romani experiences within the early modern Spanish, Portuguese, French and English Atlantics from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The three chapters in this section reveal the opportunities Romani people made for themselves, even with European antigypsy sentiments and policies continuing to shape their movements and possibilities. The four chapters in Part II, “Immigration Circulations,” focus mainly on the first half of the twentieth century. During these decades, Romani families, like so many others, left Europe in unprecedented numbers looking for a better life in the Americas. The Atlantic crossings and circulations these families undertook frequently met with diverse forms of resistance, prompting the revision of strategies to support their self-determination and demands for respect. Part III, “Diasporic Connections,” considers the contemporary implications of more recent movements of Romani people throughout the Atlantic world. These chapters illustrate various strategies through which familial and community transatlantic experiences and connections are retained in both fact and in individual and collective memory. During each period of visibility, the transatlantic flows experienced, circulations undertaken and connections forged and retained have reshaped not only individual and family lives, but also the character of Romani communities and forms of belonging in ways that continue to resonate today.
Colonial Flows
Part I of The Romani Atlantic considers the impact of early modern empires on the lives of Romani people as well as the role of Romani people within imperial Atlantic developments. As people, commodities and ideas flowed around the Atlantic rim, Romani people engaged with empires in ways similar to other colonial actors. They fled persecution, constructed new trade networks and labored for imperial aims both for themselves and against their will. Yet in other ways, they experienced an early modern Atlantic distinctive to themselves, due to the social and ideological spaces into which they were placed by others. New Romani communities emerged in the Americas and Africa, only some of which lasted for long. Exclusionary laws, practices, assumptions and ideas often set Romani people apart from all other groups there. Though such considerations originated in Europe, they did not remain unchanged as they moved abroad and, in a feedback loop, later impacted attitudes and policies in Europe as well. New Atlantic circumstances, and in particular the emergent racial projects that involved other peoples with whom Europeans came into contact, prompted translations of older European ideas about “Gypsies” and the recalibrations of antigypsy regulations and sentiments. At the same time, the resultant geographical and ideological spaces created opportunities for Romani people to advantage themselves in ways they deemed best and create lives they deemed worth living.
Part I begins with Susanna Macías Pascua and Mariana Sabino-Salazar’s examination of the transatlantic experiences of Romani people as they related to the Spanish Inquisition. Inquisition records provide invaluable insight into the personal experiences and everyday lives of the Romani women and men whose voices are preserved in these sources. This chapter centers the words of women like María de la Concepción, accused in 1668 of sorcery and superstition in Mexico, to reveal their priorities, agency and autonomy. Such records show how early modern Romani people managed to travel the Atlantic and engage in culturally meaningful occupations that nourished their distinctive sense of identity while being bound within transatlantic imperial systems. That they did this alongside other marginalized people and under the watchful eye of Church authorities suggests both similarities to and differences from other early modern Atlantic inhabitants.
The Spanish Atlantic proceeds into the Portuguese Atlantic in Martin Fotta’s study of the Romani connections and flows between Lusophone Europe, Africa and South America. The chapter focuses on eighteenth-century Angola, a place where Europeans and Africans from various backgrounds came together. Romani people (Ciganos), alongside many others from both Portugal and its colonies (especially Brazil), were banished here as part of a strategic policy to develop and make productive colonies. Once there, however, Romani racial privilege resulted in social and economic opportunities unknown elsewhere. Like other marginalized groups in Portugal, some Ciganos in Angola developed an economic niche trading the enslaved, ivory and other products from the fringes of the Atlantic system. This demonstrates how those considered threats to society in Portugal were seen as useful for the imperial project abroad, all the while facilitating new avenues to geographic, social and economic mobilities for themselves.
The final chapter of Part I, Ann Ostendorf’s exploration of transatlantic racialization, finds that an understanding of early modern ideas about race remains incomplete, and even inaccurate, without considering Romani people as part of this history. The chapter traces the ideological work that Romani people did for non-Romani Europeans as part of American colonial projects while simultaneously considering how Romani people navigated within these racial regimes. Utilizing the metaphor of the “Gypsy veil,” the chapter shows how across four centuries and as many empires, non-Romani Europeans contrasted and linked Romani, Indigenous and African-descended people to create a shared sense of early whiteness. A growing web of beliefs bound Indianness, whiteness and blackness together via the Atlantic flows of actual Romani people and the ideas others held about “Gypsies.” The chapter ends with early nineteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic examples foreshadowing the staying power of antigypsy sentiments that are explored more fully in the next section.
Immigration Circulations
The four chapters in Part II of The Romani Atlantic place Romani mobility at the center of the analysis. Whether or not they thought of themselves as immigrants, late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Romani Atlantic sojourners increasingly found their travel intentions at odds with the goals of American nation states. As the state apparatuses meant to control the movement of people grew, Romani families, some of whom make appearances in multiple chapters in this section, faced new challenges to their travels. As a result, old prejudices became reworked in new contexts to reinforce the “undesirable” status of Romani people. While porous borders had previously benefited those desirous of relocation, by the twentieth century borders became hurdles to overcome. The challenges faced when encountering newly enclosed and increasingly racialized nations impeded their immigration, migration and circulation, even if in many cases no specific laws against “Gypsies” existed, and the decisions made and reasons given to block their entry were improvised by individual officials. Part II also shows the impact of border interactions and immigration regimes on Romani sociability and kinship networks and how Romani identities remained in motion and adapted to these novel circumstances.
Adèle Sutre’s chapter, the first in Part II, describes the methods several Romani families employed to gain and exchange knowledge related to state border systems. Specifically, she analyzes how Roma who left Europe at the turn of the twentieth century acquired and expanded their expertise in international movement that covered not only the American continents. Utilizing the concept of “mobility capital,” Sutre deeply and creatively reads a diverse source base to uncover the valuable techniques acquired and then shared that allowed families to achieve their desired location. As these Romani families increasingly experienced the modern border, they learnt the rules and mastered the codes of international movement being created around the world, often in reaction to moral panics surrounding Romani border-crossings and “Gypsy invasions.” The activation of their social networks combined with their integration of experiential knowledge to foster resilience in the face of adversity. The chapter is also a study of modern nation state construction “from below” employing methods of microhistory – including the study of individual families’ itineraries and experiences – and applying these to a transnational global scale.
These transnational circulations are tethered to a specific time and space in Louis Takács’ meticulous investigation of several Romani families who attempted to enter the United States through Ellis Island in 1904. Through a careful reconstruction of their immigration experience as documented in archival case files and the popular press, he points to an important moment when the intensification of antigypsy sentiments interfaced with the practice of border regulations. Though no laws explicitly barred Romani people from entering the US, immigration authorities’ prejudices motivated anti-Romani interpretations of legally allowable restrictive measures. The Board of Special Inquiry, for example, decided that several wealthy Romani immigrant families were “likely to become a public charge,” a designation that could justify their deportation. The moving family stories in this chapter expose the human side to processes both global and nationalistic. Though far from being the only group that suffered nativist sentiments, Romani people experienced the US border in unique ways. This chapter also illustrates several of the tactics Romani immigrants employed as previously laid out by Sutre: a savvy knowledge of their rights, the acquisition of legal counsel and a denial (or sometimes a display) of their identity.
In a similar story, though seen from an angle of contemporary preoccupations with the quality of the nation, Rafael Buhigas Jiménez explores the encounters of Romani immigrants from southern and eastern Europe with the Argentinian border regime during the first half of the twentieth century. Despite a generally pro-immigrant stance, a series of moralistic, eugenic and hygienist discourses infused racial assumptions applied by Argentine authorities to new Romani arrivals. Situated within a general survey of the transatlantic circulations of Romani people to Latin America, Buhigas Jiménez shows how Argentinian authorities were increasingly interested in identifying “Gitanos” and that those thus identified were disproportionally refused entry even though no explicit law barred their arrival. As a result, he suggests that studies of Romani migration should pay attention to the logics of their identification as “Gypsies.” This study speaks of both Argentine population control measures and Romani immigrants’ experiences of the anti-Romani racism embedded in a system promoting racial hygiene.
The final chapter in Part II explores the ways those Romani immigrants who did make it into the US experienced being Romani American during the interwar years. James Deutsch considers this from both the perspective of newly arrived Romani Americans, as well as from the perspective of non-Romani intellectuals who thought about Romani culture. Studying the concept of assimilation as interpreted by both groups, Deutsch uncovers an interesting dichotomy. Non-Romani commentators, like Konrad Bercovici and some members of the Gypsy Lore Society, who often romanticized and exoticized Romani people, worried that their arrival to the Americas would prompt the disappearance of a unique Romani culture. On the other hand, some Romani immigrant activists, like Steve Kaslov, lauded the possibilities that an Atlantic crossing provided for European Roma. Whether the immigrant circulations of the Romani Atlantic were to be celebrated or not depended upon the motives and social position of the commentator.
Diasporic Connections
Part III of The Romani Atlantic, Diasporic Connections, ties many of the themes previously presented to contemporary social realities. Though situated primarily within histories from the second half of the twentieth century, the ethnographic methodologies used in these four chapters focus on family histories to texture diasporic relationships around the Atlantic world and beyond. Stories of transnational Romani mobilities are interwoven with ways of thinking and remembering to illustrate a diasporic sensibility and identity that is bigger than the family and broader than the state. Twenty-first-century diasporic Romani communities remain strengthened as much by shared recollections as shared experiences. The works in this section nuance global structures by exposing the meaning-making inherent in the weaving of transnational connections.
Michael Ciuraru and Dalen Wakeley-Smith accomplish this by juxtaposing two Romani families’ challenging experiences from either end of the twentieth century. The Mitchells, who attempted to immigrate from Montreal in 1905, and the Ciurarus, who arrived in the 1980s from Romania, navigated Romani stereotypes embedded within migratory controls. In both cases, these families presented US immigration officials with an anomaly: Could Romani people appropriately become American? Within that question lay a space for Romani migrants to position themselves as not just adequately American, but quintessentially American. During the era of immigration restrictions, as Adèle Sutre, Louis Takács and Rafael Buhigas Jiménez also note, the undesirability of Romani immigrants forced an unexpected reckoning with extant immigration regimes. This had changed by the century’s end when Romani asylum seekers were seen in a geopolitical context and positioned as refugees from communism. Yet, as Steve Kaslov stressed, emphasizing their adherence to American values allowed them access to a US future; Ciuraru and Wakeley-Smith show Romani people making the most of their networks to prove themselves as model modern global citizens. The memories woven by both families connect descendent members of the Romani diaspora to these family stories still today.
The transatlantic interlacing of stories and relationships is centered in Carol Silverman’s community study of transatlantic Macedonian Roma families. Her decades-long ethnographic fieldwork has uncovered diverse identities and social relations expressed through musically related activities. These intertwine a local sense of belonging with diasporic connections. Though technologies have changed, negotiating dilemmas of identity remain. The complex migratory routes, as many other contributors to this volume also illustrate, have shaped their globalized consciousness as a transnational community, which at the same time remains rooted in specific locales in North America and Europe. For Macedonian Roma in diaspora, music textures their lives and charts their historical trajectory. It is a space to display being Roma and to evoke memory. What then, she asks, does this Romani Atlantic sound like? It reproduces old memories remixed for new circumstances to rejuvenate a vibrant transnational diasporic community.
Also grounded in extensive fieldwork, though in Buenos Aires and Mexico City, David Lagunas’ chapter recounts the transnational mobilities and discourses of people who refer to themselves today as “American Gitanos.” Through their own telling about their relocation choices, American Gitanos value a sense of cosmopolitanism they strive to express and maintain through enhanced social mobility. Since their arrival to the Americas from Spain after the 1950s, they have developed a distinctively diasporic identity that they proudly showcase to prove their superior engagement with modernity. The varied circulations and implantations throughout South America formed a community still open to moving around that continent as circumstances require. In so doing, they historicize their experience as a community through recounting memories of migration and make use of their “mobility capital” to define their enhanced social position vis-à-vis others.
The final chapter in this volume moves northward to consider European Romani asylum seekers who interfaced with Toronto’s Roma Community Centre in 2012. The unique historical moment of these families’ arrivals – when first Czech and later Hungarian Roma arrived in larger numbers in Canada – prompted an often-unused strategy by “undesirable” immigrants. That is, to attain the asylum status they strove for, these families made themselves hypervisible. Situated in the context of late-twentieth-century Canadian immigration history, and emphasizing the circulatory mobilities of these Romani families, Acuña Cabanzo challenges traditional binary readings of Romani Canadian lives as nomad/sedentary or authentic/fake. While recognizing the uniqueness of specific historical circumstances, the chapter also challenges the migratory “wave” metaphor as being too limited to express Canadian Romani experiences with migration, emphasizing instead the continued diasporic connections and the usefulness of the Romani Atlantic as a method.
Reimagining the Romani Story
Taken as a whole, the chapters in this book present the Romani Atlantic as a robust field of inquiry. They invite scholars interested in Romani-related topics to treat the Atlantic as a site of mediation and connection, which enabled not only Romani travels, but also gave rise to new communities, changed the character of established ones and shaped non-Romani, as well as Romani, views of the Romani place in society. The Romani case speaks clearly of an unfinished and multifaceted five-centuries-long process of ethnogenesis. From the start, colonization flowed through Romani people as readily as Romani people sailed upon Atlantic waves. As nation states developed, immigration circulations provided new, if limited, opportunities to pursue diverse Romani agendas. The many Romani families forced to navigate discriminatory immigration regimes, met old prejudices with clever responses as their varied stories attest. By the twentieth century, the global dynamics of contemporary geopolitics presented challenges that Romani people met with both new and reworked solutions. By shifting the view to the Atlantic zone, The Romani Atlantic retraces various ways Romani agency helped shape the modern world.
Romani people’s impact on modernity – and the staying power of distinct ideas about “Gypsies” over centuries and across continents – is outsized especially considering their numbers. The tension between Romani realities and non-Romani people’s assumptions about “Gypsies” sets their history apart; the Romani case is an especially powerful example of the lasting impact of mobile ideas transposed across the globe. Romani people have never been and are certainly not today merely a provincial European minority. Rather, they have actively participated in early modern empire construction as much-needed soldiers, settlers and traders. Their presence grew imperial power, racialized the Atlantic and securitized national borders, even as they pushed back on prejudiced ideas held about them and restraints explicitly targeting them. Despite what they might have preferred, ideas about “Gypsies” shaped the many and varied ways they settled into new societies.
Adding Romani people to well-known global structures also has the potential to reveal new insights about these systems. Romani people complicate all prior narratives into which they can be placed. Early modern ideas about race, and the resultant policies and structures used to stabilize these ideas, only occurred as they did because of the constantly evolving but widespread antigypsyism within Europe and across European empires. The border practices of nineteenth-century nation states which followed concealed the magnitude of this racism. Its extent only becomes visible when looking through the Romani case and considering how officials – on both sides of the Atlantic – became obsessed with policing “undesirable Gypsies,” even when the criteria used to do so interpreted them as merely a social problem or were improvised ad hoc. More recently, the internationally dependent jurisdictional policies of globalized nations in Europe and the Americas have responded to Romani asylum seekers and migrants with restrictive policies and discourse portraying Roma again as “undesirable.” This is even while recognizing that Roma often face serious racism and exclusion in their countries of origin, which seemingly does not reflect the values of “Euro-Atlantic civilization.” Clearly, Romani history and culture cannot be separated from modern global processes.
Despite the apparent irony that some Romani people suffered exclusion as undesirable while others flourished, such dichotomy reveals much about Romani perseverance. Still today, while antigypsy prejudice remains throughout the Atlantic world, Romani ingenuity persists in support of families and communities shaped by changing transoceanic mobilities. As immigrants and migrants, they have built and retained vibrant diasporic communities adjusting as necessary to suit their aims in the context of local circumstances. They have accomplished this throughout and beyond the Atlantic in ways both similar to and distinct from other dispersed people. Romani people have over five hundred years of circum-Atlantic history awaiting exploration.
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