Gypsy Americans might maintain a sequence of home bases; they often live in mobile homes, settling indefinitely in a trailer park. They may tear down walls or and enlarge the doorways of their homes to combine rooms or make them larger to create a wide open space suitable for the large social gatherings that occur in Rom homes.
In Urban Gypsies, Carol Silverman noted that Gypsies frequently pass along the houses, apartments, or trailers that they modify to a succession of Gypsy families. While some Gypsy Americans travel to make their living, others pursue settled careers in a variety of occupations according to their education and opportunities.
The Gypsy population has been participating in American migrations from countryside into cities. Yet estimates tend to support that the Gypsy American population at any given time is evenly divided between urban and rural areas. Generally, as noted by Silverman, the urbanization of the Rom began as early as the end of the eighteenth century when various groups began to spend the winter months camping in vacant lots on the outskirts of cities, and intensified when "a large number of Rom flocked to the cities during the s and s to take advantage of various relief programs, and remained there because of gas rationing and because of increasing business opportunities within the city.
Currently, there are Romnichal strongholds of very conservative Gypsies who reside in Texarkana, southern Arkansas, and other predominantly rural regions. Gypsies also have joined American movement westward. Many live in California. Gypsy Americans who can do so often travel to other parts of the Western Hemisphere and to Europe.
Many repeatedly visit certain places as part of a set route, including places where their kinfolk lived for generations. Gypsy Americans largely consider Eastern Europe their peoples' home.
Later in , Janus Kwiek, the 'Gypsy King of Poland,' asked Mussolini to grant the Gypsies a strip of land in Abyssinia present-day Ethiopia so they might escape persecution in various host societies. Many Americans have romanticized Gypsies as exotic foreigners. Some Americans draw on the supposedly romantic appeals of Gypsy traditions—especially traditions of dancing and music-making, lives on the road, and maintaining a traveling culture.
Often, established Americans maintain or adopt European prejudices against Gypsies and treat Gypsy immigrants poorly. Just as Europeans have often attributed the fortune-telling skills of Gypsies to "black magic," Gypsy traders have been accused of fencing stolen goods, and of stealing their goods themselves.
Laws attempting to deter, prevent, and punish fortune-tellers and thieves in America have singled out Gypsy Americans. According to Sway, until , Virginia legally barred Gypsies from telling fortunes. And in New Jersey in the middle s, special regulations and licensing requirements applied to Gypsies who told fortunes. Gypsy households have been labeled as "dens of thieves" so that charges brought against one resident may apply to any and all.
In Mississippi in the middle s, such application of liability "jointly-and-severally" is law. There have also been cases in the Pacific Northwest. As recently as the s, New Hampshire expelled some Gypsies from that state on the grounds merely that they were Gypsies.
The fearsome shadow of attempted genocide of Gypsies in Europe still menaces Gypsies. Gypsy Americans are concerned about worsening oppression of fellow Gypsies, most severely in Eastern Europe. This concern is understandable in light of the first two genocidal massacres: during World War I Turks killed Gypsies and Armenians; and during the Holocaust, Nazis massacred Gypsies alongside Jews.
Because too few people know about the Gypsy victims of the Nazis, Gypsies advocate public recognition of that loss. They attempt to draw attention, too, to the current plight of Eastern European Gypsies.
Gypsies have repeatedly shown the ability to adapt without surrendering the essence of their culture. Traditional Gypsy Americans continue to resist the inroads of acculturation, assimilation, and absorption in the United States. Even groups such as the Gitanos or Romnichals, despite having lost most of their original language, still maintain a strong sense of ethnic identity and exclusiveness.
A major issue facing Gypsy Americans since the s is a worldwide Christian Fundamentalist revival that has swept up Gypsies around the world. As masses of Gypsies practice versions of Pentecostal Christianity, currents of Gypsy culture may be undergoing a sea-change.
Gypsies maintain a powerful group identity, though. Their traveling itself sets them apart from other cultures, as does their common rejection of international borders. Another area of difference from mainstream America is attitude toward formal, public schools. Until recently, many Gypsies sent their children to schools only until the age of ten to keep them from being exposed to alien practices and teachings. Prejudice against Gypsies has strengthened their isolation.
One might suppose that economic interactions would dispel the insularity of Gypsies, if insular social techniques did not pull Gypsies together. These opposing tensions give Gypsies a flexible identity. Gypsy people may seem split between their business life, which focuses outwardly on non-Gypsies, and on the other hand, their social life, which focuses inwardly on only Gypsies. Nevertheless, as Silverman noted, some Gypsy Americans may present themselves as Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, and as other local ethnics in order to obtain jobs, housing, and welfare.
Contemporary urban Rom usually live interspersed among the non-Gypsy population, establishing ofisi fortune-telling parlors, one means of livelihood in working areas or in their homes. Their businesses may make many Gypsies seem quite assimilated, and at other times the same Gypsies may seem very traditional. Gypsies have tended to maintain two distinct standards of public behavior, one among themselves, another among outsiders, and Sway pointed to a "form of body language and interactional style" that Gypsies often use when interacting with non-Gypsies.
For example, an appropriate time for a Gypsy to play to stereotype is while performing as a musician or fortune-teller for audiences who are known to value Gypsies' exoticism. On the other hand, Silverman added that "a large part of behaving appropriately as a Gypsy involves knowing when to conceal one's Gypsiness. For many, noted Silverman, "the process of boundary crossing [is] a performance strategically enacted for survival.
Gypsies and non-Gypsy Americans have subjected each other to prejudices. To many Americans, Gypsy Americans seem to be sinister foreigners. To the Gypsies, Sway observed, "non-Gypsies seem cold, selfish, violent," as well as defiled or polluted. However, because Gypsies depend economically on non-Gypsies as customers for their services, they cannot afford to isolate themselves physically from non-Gypsies.
Instead, social techniques enable Gypsies to maintain their cultural separateness from the people near whom they live, and with whom they do business.
Basically, these techniques consist of taboos. A Gypsy court system enforces the taboos, to effectively limit social interactions with non-Gypsies. Gypsy Americans may bend their taboos by eating in a restaurant with non-Gypsies, and then attend to the taboos by remarking that some uncleanliness made them sick or unlucky.
Stereotypes of Gypsies have focused on their nomadism, fortune-telling, and their trading. Non-Gypsies have stereotyped Gypsies, their cultures, and their skills as exotically different at best, but often much more offensively.
As a result, English-speakers say that to defraud, swindle, or cheat someone is to "gyp" them. This sensational image of Gypsies as criminals does not find support from statistical analysis of court records, since conviction rates of Gypsy Americans seem to be lower than rates of other ethnic Americans for rape and murder; and the conviction rate of Gypsies for theft is no higher than the rate for other Americans. However, Hancock pointed out in his The Pariah Syndrome that the association of Gypsies with crime goes deep and is sometimes justified since Gypsies have resorted to theft as a means of survival; but "much of it is not justified, however, and is the result of exploitation of a stereotype by a popular press which is less interested in the honest Gypsies.
Western stereotypes of Gypsies as criminals arose when Gypsies first entered Europe. Confusion reigned over Europe's attempts to know who the Gypsies were. Matt Salo stated in his introductory essay to Urban Gypsies that "many early [European] accounts describe Gypsy bands as conglomerations of various segments of the underclass of society," adding that Gypsies were widely thought to be "a motley assemblage of rogues and vagabonds.
Sway suggested that because the Gypsies were dark, strangely dressed, and spoke a language believed to be "a kind of gibberish used to deceive others" lent credence to the fear that they were spies for the Turks and enemies of Christendom. This stereotypical figure's popularity has captured audiences and helped to conceal ethnic Gypsies. In addition to their supposed criminality and freedom, the Gypsies have been portrayed as beautiful, loose, loose-bodied, flexible, and insolent—as in British novelist D.
Lawrence's portrayal of a Gypsy man in The Virgin and the Gipsy, first published in Desire for the other tends to represent itself culturally as the other's desire; as Hancock notes, "Gypsy women A gypsy wedding party poses for the camera in this photograph. Conversely, the roles of non-Gypsies as customers for some Gypsy businesses have contributed to Gypsies' negative stereotypes of non-Gypsies. To fortune-tellers non-Gypsies tend to seem depraved. Until relatively recently, when some Gypsy activists and scholars have begun to try to present their people in a better light, stereotypes faced little or no opposition.
Gypsies had little basis of trust for attempts to reveal how they "really" are, and lacked the resources to publish denials of specific claims.
However, many Gypsy Americans now are actively trying to debunk oppressive stereotypes of Gypsies and promote a new public image. The film, King of the Gypsies, which was "suggested by" the best-selling book by Peter Maas, focuses on the squalor of Gypsy life from the perspective of a Gypsy-born boy who reviles Gypsies. Gypsies have protested the inaccurate and garish portrayals in this film.
At the other end of the film spectrum is Latcho Drom— a "musical journey from India to Iberia, a seamless anthology of Gypsy music as played by an assortment of professionals on a variety of stringed instruments—sitars, zithers, violins, guitars—against means of percussion that range from small drums to brass vases to paired spoons to castanets," wrote J. Hoberman Village Voice, July 26, , p. The film ends in Western Europe, with singers, players, and dancers performing in France and Spain.
Gypsies' patterns of kinship structures, traveling, and economics characterize them as an ancient people who have adapted well to modern society. Much scholarship on U. Gypsies treats only the Rom; and although other groups differ in some ways, Silverman states that the folk belief or folk religion of all ethnic Gypsies consists mainly of "the taboo system, together with the set of beliefs related to the dead and the supernatural.
Gypsy taboos separate Gypsies—each group of Gypsies—from non-Gypsies, and separate the contamination of the lower half of the adult Gypsy's body especially the genitals and feet from the purity of its upper half especially the head and mouth. The waist divides an adult's body; in fact, the Romani word for waist, maskar, also means the spatial middle of anything. Since a Gypsy who becomes polluted can be expelled from the community, to avoid pollution, Gypsies try to avoid unpurified things that have touched a body's lower half.
Accordingly, a Gypsy who touches his or her lower body should then wash his or her hands to purify them. Similarly, an object that feet have touched, such as shoes and floors, are impure and, by extension, things that touch the floor when someone drops them are impure as well. Gypsies mark the bottom end of bedcovers with a button or ribbon, to avoid accidentally putting the feet-end on their face.
To Gypsies, it seems non-Gypsies constantly contaminate themselves. Non-Gypsies might neglect to wash their hands after urinating in public restrooms, they may wash underwear together with face towels and even tablecloths, or dry their faces and feet with the same towel.
According to Silverman, when non-Gypsies move into a home, "they often replace the entire kitchen area, especially countertops and sinks, to avoid ritual contamination from previous non-Gypsy occupants. Taboos apply most fully to adult Gypsies who achieve that status when they marry.
Childbearing potential fully activates taboos for men and especially for women. The mother, because of her intensive contact with the infant, is also considered impure. As in other traditional cultures, mother and child are isolated for a period of time and other female members will assume the household duties of washing and cooking.
Between infancy and marriage, taboos apply less strictly to children. For adults, taboos, especially those that separate males and females, relax as they become respected elders. Hancock generalized that for mobile Gypsies, methods of preparing food have been "contingent on circumstance. Cleanliness is paramount, though; and, "like Hindus and Muslims, Roma, in Europe more than in America, avoid using the left hand during meals, either to eat with or to pass things" Ian Hancock, "Romani Foodways," The World and I, June , p.
Traditionally, Gypsies eat two meals a day—one upon rising and the other late in the afternoon. Gypsies tend to cook and eat foods of the cultures among which they historically lived: so for many Gypsy Americans traditional foods are Eastern European foods.
Those who have adopted Eastern Orthodox Catholicism celebrate holidays closely related to the slava feast of southeastern Europe, and eat sarmaa cabbage rolls , gushvada cheese strudel , and a ritually sacrificed animal often a lamb.
For all Gypsies, eating is important. Any weight loss is usually considered unhealthy. If food is lacking, it is associated with bad living, bad luck, poverty, or disease. Conversely, for men especially, weight gain traditionally means good health. The measure of a male's strength, power, or wealth is in his physical stature. Thus a Rom baro is a big man physically and politically. A growing awareness of the health risks of obesity tempers some Gypsies' eating.
Eating makes Gypsy social occasions festive, and indicates that those who eat together trust one another. Taboos attempt to bar anybody sickly, unlucky, or otherwise disgraced from joining a meal. Because of these taboos, it is more than impolite for one Gypsy to refuse an offer of food from another.
Since Gypsies consider non-Gypsies unclean, in Gypsy homes they serve non-Gypsies from special dishes, utensils, and cups that are kept separate, or disposed of and replaced. Though some Gypsies will eat in certain restaurants, traditionally Gypsies cook for themselves. Gypsies have brightly colored traditional costumes, often in brilliant reds and yellows. Women then wear dresses with full skirts and men wear baggy pants and loose-fitting shirts. A scarf often adorns a woman's hair or is used as a cumberbund.
Women wear much jewelry and the men wear boots and large belts. A married Gypsy woman customarily must cover her hair with a diklo, a scarf that is knotted at the nape of the neck. However, many Gypsy women may go bareheaded except when attending traditional communal gatherings. In addition to religious holidays, Gypsy funerals are the biggest community holidays.
Groups of Gypsies travel and gather to mark the passing of one of their own. Marriages are also important gatherings. Ideas about health and illness among the Rom are closely related to a world view romania , which includes notions of good and bad luck, purity and impurity, inclusion and exclusion.
Sutherland, in an essay entitled "Health and Illness Among the Rom of California," observes that "these basic concepts affect everyday life in many ways including cultural rules about washing, food, clothes, the house, fasting, conducting rituals such as baptism and the slava, and diagnosing illness and prescribing home remedies.
Much attention goes to avoiding diseases and curing them. The most powerful Gypsy cure is a substance called coxai, or ghost vomit.
According to Gypsy legends, Mamorio or "little grandmother" is a dirty, sickness-bringing ghost who eats people, then vomits on garbage piles. There, Gypsies find and gather what scientists call slime mold, and bake it with flour into rocks. Gypsies also use asafoetida, also referred to as devil's dung, which has a long association with healing and spiritualism in India; according to Sutherland, it has also been used in Western medicine as an antispasmodic, expectorant, and laxative.
Sutherland also recounts several Gypsy cures for common ailments. A salve of pork fat may be used to relieve itching. The juice of chopped onions sprinkled with sugar for a cold or the flu; brown sugar heated in a pan is also good for a child's cold; boiling the combined juice of oranges, lemons, water, and sugar, or mashing a clove of garlic in whiskey and drinking will also relieve a cold.
For a mild headache, one might wrap slices of cold cooked potato or tea leaves around the head with a scarf; or for a migraine, put vinegar, or vinegar, garlic, and the juice of an unblemished new potato onto the scarf.
For stomach trouble, drink a tea of the common nettle or of spearmint. For arthritis pain, wear copper necklaces or bracelets. For anxiety, sew a piece of fern into your clothes. Sutherland notes that elder Gypsies tend to "fear, understandably, that their grandchildren, who are turning more and more to American medicine, will lose the knowledge they have of herbs and plants, illnesses, and cures.
When a Gypsy falls sick, though, some Gypsy families turn to doctors, either in private practices or at clinics. As Sutherland notes in her essay in Gypsies, Tinkers and Other Travellers, "The Rom will often prefer to pay for private medical care with a collection rather than be cared for by a welfare doctor if they feel this care may be better.
In general, Gypsy culture seems to facilitate obesity, and thus heart trouble. Most Gypsies are at least bilingual, speaking the language of the country in which they live as well as some branch of the Gypsy language, Romani. Sway observes that "since the Gypsy language has [almost] never been written, it has been easily influenced by the sounds of local languages.
Next, modern Greek contributed words to the vocabulary. The language of the Gypsies was the key that unlocked the mystery of their supposed origin. Sway reports that the discovery that Gypsies originated in India was made by a scholar who noticed a close similarity between the language of the Hungarian Gypsies and the Sanskritized Malayalam of subcontinent Indians. This discovery, by a Hungarian theology student, Istvan Valyi, did not come until the middle of the eighteenth century. Matt Salo suggests that "from the realization that Gypsies indeed had their own language, the step to the recognition of their separate ethnicity followed automatically.
Matt Salo points to linguistic histories that help account for Gypsies who do not speak Romani: groups of Gypsies split when they left the Balkans, leaving behind others, including those who were enslaved.
Fraser indicates that currently, some dialects of Romani are classified as Armenian, others as Asiatic other than Armenian , and the rest as European.
Groups from each of the language branches are now widespread. And, according to Fraser, the English word, "pal," first recorded in is one of the few Romani words to have entered the English lexicon. When non-Gypsies ask Gypsies speaking Romani to identify the foreign language, explains Silverman, "Gypsies usually answer Romanian, Greek, or Yugoslavian," to minimize curiosity and prejudice toward them.
Among themselves, Gypsies are also said to use a sort of sign language, patrin —marks meaningful to themselves but unintelligible to others. They seemingly used these symbols to describe conditions of camps for future campers, as well as to provide information about people in the area that might be useful for those practicing fortune-telling. Furthermore, Gypsies usually use their Gypsy name only among other Gypsies, and adopt an Americanized name for general and official uses.
Particularly because many Gypsies pick common names, they are hard to trace. Traditionally Gypsies maintain large extended families. Clans of people numbering in the scores, hundreds, or even thousands gather for weddings, funerals, other feasts, or when an elder falls sick.
Although Gypsy communities do not have kings as such, traditionally a group will represent a man as king to outsiders when it needs one to serve as a figurehead or representative. Often, too, a man and his family will tell hospital staffers that he is "King of the Gypsies" so that he will receive better treatment—the title can help provide an excuse for the hospital to allow the large family to make prolonged visits.
In units bigger than a family and smaller than a tribe, Gypsy families often cluster to travel and make money, forming kumpanias —multi-family businesses. During recent decades in the United States, on the other hand, Gypsies have been acculturating more closely to the American model by consolidating nuclear families. Currently, after the birth of their first child, some Gypsy couples may be able to move from the husband's parents' home into their own.
This change has given more independence to newly wedded women as daughters-in-law. Gypsy families and communities divide along gender lines. Men wield public authority over members of their community through the kris —the Gypsy form of court. In its most extreme punishment, a kris expels and bars a Gypsy from the community.
For most official, public duties with non-Gypsies, too, the men take control. Publicly, traditional Gypsy men treat women as subordinates. The role of Gypsy women in this tradition is not limited to childbearing: she can influence and communicate with the supernatural world; she can pollute a Gypsy man so that a kris will expel him from the community; and in some cases she makes and manages most of a family's money.
Successful fortune-tellers, all of whom are female, may provide the main income for their families. Two subgroups of the Rom, the Kalderash "coppersmith" and Machwaya "natives of Machva," a county in Serbia appear in the photographs in Carlos de Wendler-Funaro's collection.
The Ludar , or "Romanian Gypsies," also came to the United States during the great immigration from southern and eastern Europe between and Most of the Ludar came from northwestern Bosnia.
Upon their arrival in the United States they specialized as animal trainers and showpeople, and indeed passenger manifests show bears and monkeys as a major part of their baggage.
Most of de Wendler-Funaro's photographs of this group were taken in Maspeth, a section of the borough of Queens in New York City, where the Ludar created a "village" of homemade shacks that existed from about to , when it was razed. Echoes of age-old stereotyping abound.
On the other hand, law enforcement officials insist that they are merely trying to do their jobs. Mark Wynn, who studied the habits of gypsy criminal groups years ago while he was working in Police Intelligence. To them, [crime is] a business. Although gypsy theft or fraud rings have been reported for years all over Middle Tennessee—from Columbia to Springfield—gypsy bands seem to have a special fondness for Belle Meade, where some theft-weary residents tell of multiple hits and others describe instances in which an entire neighborhood has been attacked in a single day.
She had only gotten to the breakfast room when my son came in and caught her. A few days later, Pirtle identified the woman and her male partner after they had been arrested by Belle Meade police during an apparent burglary attempt at the Belle Meade home of the George Creaghs. The intruder appeared to be the same woman who had repeatedly rung the doorbell the previous day. When Stewart had answered the door, the unknown woman had claimed to be a babysitter hired by the Creaghs to help care for their grandchild.
Catherine Stewart called the police and watched as they arrested the woman in the driveway. She was wearing a nylon sweatsuit and sports shoes. They told police they had no Social Security numbers or phone numbers. That incident occurred almost two years ago.
Gypsies are a close-knit, communal people with enough common biological, cultural and linguistic heritage to qualify as an ethnic group. Their origins are uncertain, but, in the late 18th century, their original homeland was thought to be northwestern India. Theirs is a rich culture, but they have historically been ostracized by established society. Meanwhile, the police just stood by watching.
An earlier brand of compassionate conservative would have recognized, as Ronald Reagan did, that the promise of the United States is replenished by immigrants. But that brand of conservatism is dead; Donald J. Trump made sure of that two years ago, when he began his presidential campaign with a scurrilous invocation of Mexican criminals destroying this once-great nation. Conservative pundits like Carlson are merely echoing his sentiments, even if some of them previously grasped the importance of immigration to the American project.
Carlson seemed acutely focused on the mention of defecation in the Post-Gazette. As for the prevalence of such acts in California? Buday, a lawyer who has lived there for about 30 years and has been working to help the Roma acclimate to the town she loves. She says Carlson contacted her by email but she didn't respond. That's just as well, for Buday would have only complicated Carlson's fearsome tale of a gypsy intrusion into the American heartland.
Speaking with quintessential Midwestern cheer, Buday described efforts to integrate the Roma asylum-seekers into the small Pennsylvania community. She wishes the federal government had provided some "resources and staffing" for that enterprise but is confident that her fellow Californians can work with their new Roma neighbors.
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