The Spanish Gypsy
by Lou Charnon-Deutsch
Introduction
Sources that speak about Gypsies are never
very trustworthy.
–Teresa
de San Román, La diferencia inquietante,
xvii
Miracle in Seville
When asked to picture in their mind the Gypsies, many people,
especially those with little or no contact with real Romany
people, conjure up images of flamenco dancers, colorful
wagons, dark-eyed fortune-tellers, horse traders, tinkers,
a panoply of picturesque figures that invoke the stereotypes
of the Romantic era. Shortly before his death in 1997, the
prolific novelist James Michener succumbed to the temptation
to revisit some of the most hackneyed of Gypsy stereotypes
he had earlier mostly avoided in Iberia (1968), as
a backdrop to a book that showcased his status as serious
aficionado of the bullfight. In Miracle in Seville (1995), a bizarre novella that Michener called a “fantasy,”
an American journalist tells the story of two powerful women
who battle it out during Holy Week festivities in Seville:
a luminous and compassionate Virgin Mary and an evil Gypsy
fortune-teller Magdalena López. The battle between
heaven’s benevolent powers and Gypsy black magic and
animal cleverness, in other words, between good and evil,
is as old as the stones in the bridge that separate the
“real Spain” of the Triana Gypsy district from the
glittering streets of Seville on the opposite side of the
Guadalquivir River.
Thinking back on their supernatural powers, the narrator
muses that women “possess an arcane power to influence
men, making them see visions and influencing them to perform
acts they would not normally commit.” The Virgin intercedes
on behalf of the proprietor of a famous bull ranch who hopes
to stage a comeback for his bulls. The Gypsy applies her
dark magic to protect her cowardly brother from the horns
of a fierce bull and the crowd’s anger at his cowardice.
Michener’s scraggly bullfighter Lázaro López
incarnates many of the worst commonplaces of the male Gypsy
stereotype. The narrator, an American journalist, derides
him as an unlikely bearer of the proud tradition of matador.
His style is full of flare and daring in the early stages
of the bullfight, but when in the end the bull charges and
the matador must plant his feet for the kill, his bravery
deserts him and he resorts to shameless tricks to exit the
bullring. Immune to the jeers of the spectators, he beats
a hasty retreat, dodging the cushions and bottles thrown
at him from the stands. In the taverns of Triana, however,
López is a boastful and pompous ass, a hero to the
Gypsies who pathetically gather around him and revere him
as someone who has made it.
While the Gypsy bullfighter symbolizes all that is wrong
with the Spanish male Gypsy, his sister Magdalena, pictured
in Figure 1, is a much more complex figure who evokes the
mystery and lure of the unknown. The purpose of my book
is to trace and analyze the many influences that have cast
their shadow over such figures as Michener’s mysterious
fortune-teller Magdalena. I focus especially on what many
writers before Michener imagined as the “arcane power”
of Gypsy women to influence men “to perform acts they
would not normally commit.” Chief among these is the
Carmen myth that is perennially reborn in European and American
culture. Michener’s “fantasy” is one of hundreds
of musical, artistic, and literary works set “not far
from that famous cigarette factory where Carmen with the
rose between her teeth bewitched the Spanish captain sent
to guard her.” In the battle between the Virgin and
the Gypsy in Michener’s novella, the Gypsy woman triumphs,
possibly because hers is the power of the sexual predator
and her visage is that of “the kind of woman men do
not forget, with flashing eyes that seemed to throw sparks.”
In reality of course, Magdalena is unforgettable because
she is a product of a collective memory, a fatally attractive
woman who flashes her eyes across four centuries in all
forms of art, joining the ranks of the Virgin Mary as one
of the most ubiquitous icons of Western culture.
Magdalena’s “people” are imagined as belonging
to another world, often associated with Egypt as here in
Michener’s version, insinuating themselves into European
societies through trickery and monumental scams. In Michener’s
version, the Gypsies had crossed into Spain 500 years earlier
and had bamboozled the king of Spain into believing that
they were collecting money to rescue an isolated group of
Christians from Muslim tyranny somewhere in Egypt. As will
be clear in the following chapters, there are hundreds of
stories of how this foreign import came to occupy such an
important symbolic space in the Western imaginary. This
book, then, is not about the real Romany, even though it
is dedicated to those very real victims who lost their lives
in the Holocaust, but about the idealized and sometimes
demonized figure of the Spanish Gypsy, conceived throughout
hundreds of years as a foreign and exotic presence who stealthfully
imported something of the East into the West that hundreds
of years have been unable to eradicate.
Myths of Gypsy Origin and Being
One of the reasons that Gypsies hold such fascination is
that they play an important role in the evolution of Western
myths of origin and being. Who am I? and Where do I come
from? are among the oldest questions implicit in the complex
genealogies of every European culture. At some point in
its evolution, every self-proclaimed nation provides itself
with a “spontaneous anthropology” to answer these
questions in the most gratifying way. What concerns me in
this introduction to the imaginary Gypsy are two related
questions that underpin myths of origin: Who are they?
and Where do they come from? To understand Europe’s
centuries-old investment in the Gypsy as a quintessential
other residing problematically on “home ground”
requires a discussion not of sameness but of otherness and
othering, and ultimately of racism in the modern, anthropological
configurations it came to have in the nineteenth century.
The story begins much earlier, however, with medieval myths
of origin that eventually gave rise to racialized thinking
in the regions of premodern Europe where groups of people
either called or calling themselves Egyptians first migrated
eastward into modern-day Germany. The task of tracing their
myths of origin and migrations is complicated for two reasons,
first because, as historians and anthropologists have so
meticulously documented, myths of origin differ substantially
from region to region even among groups considered consanguineous;
and, second, myths are susceptible to striking reversals
depending on the ruling classes to which their spokespersons
owe allegiance. Thus, at various moments in French history
the Franks were champions of liberty and independence or,
as Voltaire considered them, “ferocious beasts in search
of pasture, of shelter, and of some protection against the
snow.” Their predecessors the Gauls were either inferior
barbarians easily conquered by the Romans and later the
Franks, as portrayed by some Enlightenment writers, or noble
serfs of a proud Celtic heritage, as the children of the
French Revolution chose to understand them. Little wonder,
then, that myths of origin assigned by dominant groups to
marginalized groups who have never risen to positions of
great political or economic power should seem so unremarkable
or even ignominious, for how else could the pedigree of
the dominant peoples who fashioned them be contrasted with
that of subjugated groups?
For this reason the earliest European myths regarding the
origins and migrations of the Roma/Romany peoples are singularly
unheroic. Their arrival in Persia is one of the more fanciful
accounts of their migration out of India. In the historian
Hamza of Esfahan’s version (c. 950), Bahram Gor, a
Sasanian Perisan king, persuaded the king of India to send
12,000 Zott musicians, the Romany ancestors, to entertain
his troops in 400 C.E. The appearance of “Egyptians,”
as they were often called in the Balkans and later in Eastern
Europe, is usually associated with the great struggles among
warring empires in which the Roma played only a minor service
role, according to later historians. Most of the accounts
describing their appearance in the Balkans coincide with
advances or declines of the Byzantine Empire. For example,
in some accounts the Byzantines brought the Zotts to Constantinople
as slaves from their raids on Syria in 855. In other accounts
the Seljuk Turks drove them into the Western Byzantine Empire
beginning in the mid-eleventh century during their raids
into Armenia. Some hold them to be remnants of the Ottoman
Turks attached to the invading armies who lingered in Eastern
Europe after a defeat of the Byzantine empire in 1071, and
many early Europeans simply identified them with heathen
Saracens.
In the Middle Ages, the myths and legends that grew up around
the Egyptians often reflected the protoracism inherent in
Christian biblical genealogies: They were descendants of
Ham, forever marked by the sins of Cain; they had denied
succor to the Holy Family as it fled into Egypt and so were
cursed to wander the world to atone for their refusal; they
were the Egyptians of the old Testament, who, Ezekiel prophesized,
would be dispersed among the nations; they had denied their
Christian faith and were being punished by forced pilgrimage
for five years, or ten, or forever; they were survivors
of the Pharaoh’s armies that had driven the Hebrews
out of Egypt; or, finally, they were a people forever cursed
after they participated in the death of the Christ by making
the nails with which he was crucified.
By comparing early Romany history and early European preracism,
we see also that the arrival of Romany groups in Central
Europe coincided with the earliest versions of the myth
of pre-Adamic peoples or, as it was commonly called, polygeny,
which Kenan Malik has shown was crucial in the formation
of the modern meaning of race. Already in the fourteenth
century, European philosophers were beginning to challenge
biblical genealogies that traced all human origins to one
man, speculating that Adam may have been preceded by other
groups of people perhaps originating in India rather than
the Middle East. The discovery of new continents with indigenous
peoples lacking all knowledge of either classical or biblical
genealogies widened speculation about race and fueled debates
about a universal descent from Adam. Religious genealogies
were gradually replaced or fused with new discourses on
race that came to be used more and more as a measure of
sameness and difference and ultimately as justification
for further marginalizing minorities or subjugating conquered
peoples. Peoples were still forced into slavery based on
whether they were thought to be sons of Adam. For example,
American Indians won this lottery to the detriment of Africans
imported to South America as slaves. But decisions affecting
whole populations increasingly relied on the degree of perceived
whiteness and other physiological or atavistic characteristics,
thus giving rise to the complex racial classifications that
would become so important to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
thinkers.
This shift in myths became especially pronounced during
the Enlightenment with the rise of the new sciences of man,
notably physical anthropology and linguistics. The establishment
of the family tree of Indo-European languages dates at least
as far back as William Jones’s 1788 essay on Sanskrit.
Sanskrit studies fueled the complex theories that fused
biblical and anthropological accounts of human descent.
In the late 1700s Immanuel Kant sought, as others did, to
find modern validation for the Great Flood. Reasoning that
Tibet was the cradle of civilization since it had the highest
mountains, Kant speculated that Noah’s ark must have
landed there. This turned out to be a useful argument for
German nationalists seeking to valorize German’s Aryan
derivation. If Noah’s ark had landed in India and not
in the Middle East, then the “Indo-Germanic” race
would be able to claim the most direct, least contaminated
link with human origins. Many of the earliest arguments
about the racial purity of the German race were linked with
such reasoning about Noah’s connection to the Aryan
race. Poliakov speculates that in part the turn to India
was an effort to devise a rival origin to that of the Hebrew
pantheon, in other words, the shift had protoracist undertones.
Eventually, German thinkers lined up to "extricate [themselves]
from Judeo-Christian fetters." For example, Johann Gottfried
Herder, in Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Outlines of the philosophy of the history of man, 1784—91),
was one of several contemporary German scholars who vigorously
denied a Hebrew genealogy in favor of an Indian pantheon.
Ironically, during this time when some European nations
were redesigning their myths of origin in favor of an Aryan
ascendance, linguists were busy verifying the Indian origin
of the Romani language. Romani dialects first became an
object of interest in 1775—76 when a series of articles
in a German-language Hungarian journal, the Wiener Anzeigen (Viennese notices), reported that a Hungarian pastor named
István Váli had noticed an affinity between
Romani and the dialect of Malabar students attending the
University of Leiden. A few years later Heinrich Grellmann
in Die Zigeuner (The Gypsies, 1782) ventured the
theory that the groups he loosely identified as Zigeuner
were a separate people who, based on linguistic studies,
could be traced to an Indian homeland. For the next hundred
years, linguists would examine more closely the Romani dialects
of Eastern Europe and ratify Grellmann’s conclusion
that Gypsies were racially akin to Indians. By 1870 when
Alexandre Paspati published his influential Études
sur les Tchinghianés ou bohémiens de l’Empire
Ottoman (Studies on the Gypsies or Bohemians of the
Ottoman empire), which purported to trace the earliest migrations
of the Roma, it was generally accepted by philologists that
Romani and certain Indian languages had a common Sanskrit
origin. It then became expedient to distinguish the strains
of Sanskrit to differentiate the groups that had migrated
out of India and to establish a hierarchy of Indo-European
peoples in which Gypsies, thought to be descendants of the
pariah or low caste, were either excluded or assigned to
the lowest category of migratory groups.
Like their Enlightenment predecessors, the Romantics expressed
great admiration for Indian language, philosophy, architecture,
and religion. By the beginning of the nineteenth century
the cult of Indian culture had reached an apogee with Carl
Schlegel’s 1808 essay Über die Sprache und die
Weisheit der Indier (On the language and wisdom of the
Indians). But with the rise of the physical sciences and
the concomitant waning of the importance of biblical genealogies,
philologists and anthropologists began devising other classificatory
systems besides language to assess the value and origins
of marginal groups. Depending on their lifestyles and professions,
for example, groups were scaled on a grid with nature on
one end and civilization and progress on the other. For
some nineteenth-century thinkers, Gypsies represented a
valuable link with nature that had been lost to modern societies.
In 1882 the British philologist Charles G. Leland praised
the wanderers he met along country byways who inhabited
the scenery instead of houses. If you long to be a bird
flying south for the winter, he rhapsodized, then you are
not far from the spirit of the Bohemians: “They are
human, but in their lives they are between man as he lives
in houses and the bee and bird and fox, and I cannot help
believing that those who have no sympathy with them have
none for the forest and road and cannot be rightly familiar
with the witchery of wood and wold.” Gypsies should
be treasured instead of reviled, he reasoned, since they
represent links “which connect the simple feeling of
nature with romance.” Like children they lack the words
to express the “sense of nature and its charm, but they
have this sense, and there are very, very few who, acquiring
culture, retain it.” For Leland and some of his Gypsyphile
friends, there was an affinity between Gypsies and a vanishing
femininity that everywhere was being replaced by intellect
and fashion. If Gypsies could be imagined as a prelapsarian
people who lived in happy communion with nature, as Leland
and many others of his generation imagined them, then hatred
of Gypsies would be akin to hatred of dogs or trees. The
problem is, of course, that hating dogs and trees might
seem foolish to a Gypsyologist like Leland, but liking or
disliking animals or plants was a matter of taste, not of
social justice, and justice for Gypsies was in short supply
in Leland’s England.
What struck Leland most about modern-day Gypsies was the
fact that they were wanderers. In Poliakov’s opinion,
this fascination with the wandering Gypsy is related to
man’s primitive narcissism, the universal aspiration
to recover an archaic stage before individuation. Exalting
nature was also an affront to the Judeo-Christian religions
that had endeavored to establish man as “a creature
apart–a ’cultural’ as opposed to a ’natural’
being.” In short, Gypsies were “natural” men
if not altogether “noble” savages. Since Leland
and other early anthropologists and linguists believed that
the Roma were descendants of an undetermined Indian peripatetic
group, speculating about their origins and wanderings became
a challenging and exciting pastime. Leland’s theory
was that Gypsies descended from the warrior Jats who centuries
earlier had migrated from India westward into Syria and
eventually Europe, acquiring the habits and professions
of the people with whom they came into contact and bequeathing
them atavistically to their descendants. Already in the
eleventh century, their “callings” were hereditary,
and they exhibited an inveterate attachment to certain unfortunate
“habits.” In a move that we will see is typical
of most writings on Gypsies, Leland mixes “callings”
or professions together with “habits” or group traits
in his description of the earliest Gypsies. They were, he
reported, “without religion,” “notorious thieves,”
and “of the horse horsey.” Before leaving India,
Leland further speculated, Gypsies had intermingled with
other groups like the Dom or Domarr, a pre-Aryan group who
reportedly were basket weavers, heavy drinkers, carrion
eaters, nomads, shepherds, and robbers. Later they came
into contact with the Luri of Persia, a group of “thieves,
fortune-tellers, and minstrels.” Descendants of these
Luri still roam in Syria, Turkey, and Rumania where they
are kidnappers and pilferers whose “principal pastimes
are drinking, dancing, and music.”
While such speculations about the relation between ancient
peoples and their modern-day descendants may shock modern
sensibilities, we must remember that belief in atavism was
commonplace among early social scientists. For example,
ever since the earliest discovery of the Indo-European origin
of the German language, German scholars had sought to endow
their Aryan ancestors with qualities that magnified those
they most admired in themselves. It follows that early Gypsyologists
should try to link what they perceived as the modern Gypsy
character to an imagined Indian prototype. In most accounts
the Gypsy prototype was the pariah caste of Indians, who
even before migrating from Northern India had constituted
a doomed race. By demonstrating that the ancestors of the
Gypsies descended from the pariah caste of India, with all
of the negative traits that Leland ascribed to them, “governments
and judicial authorities could legitimize their stigmatizing
policies by invoking scientific arguments.” For many
Spanish writers, on the other hand, it became important
to establish that the Gypsies (or Gitanos, as they are generally
called in Spain) originated in Egypt, not India, which further
exoticized them and thus distinguished them from non-Spanish
Gypsies. But this “distinction” did not translate
into better treatment for the Spanish Romany any more than
an Indian pedigree helped the Zigeuner avoid racial scapegoating
in other European countries.
The Intransigence of Gypsy Myths
Another important question that dogs cultural anthropologists
is why some myths are so enduring. Solutions to this riddle
can be roughly divided into two groups. In our post-Freudian
era myths of origin are often described as a natural response
that reflects the “permanent conflict which dwells in
the heart of every human being.” According to Sander
Gilman, creating stereotypes is a coping device that helps
to overcome anxiety, and in his critical study of Orientalism
Edward Said remarked that it is “perfectly natural for
the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated
strangeness” by exoticizing the other. Poliakov urges
us to relate the aspiration to discover origins with an
“urge to recover the euphoria which characterizes the
most archaic stage before individuation,” in other words,
a narcissistic stage preceding subjectivity before the separation
of man and nature. Even those who are invested in showing
the nefarious consequences of these myths often recognize
their stubborn prevalence as a naturally occurring phenomenon.
However, while Léon Poliakov’s The Aryan Myth convincingly distinguishes Europe’s myths of origins
and their modern permutations, detailing how and why certain
changes in the myths take place, his explanation for the
compulsion to invent myths of origin is vague, invoking
a kind of collective psychology based on a failed Oedipality
that can lead to pathological consequences (for example,
as manifested in the Third Reich). Certainly understanding
and preventing the radical effects of this compulsion in
its most paranoid stages require a recognition of basic
psychological responses. Yet granting the compulsion ontological
status is not as important as recognizing that some eras
are more prone to regressive tendencies than others, because
they are overdetermined by material, economic, and political
factors.
Seeing the myth-making process as satisfying a deep psychological
need without simultaneously taking into consideration regional
economic and cultural realities leads to a dead-end acceptance
of man’s innate tendency to engage in intergroup conflict.
Accepting that there is a deep psychological need to create
myths of origin as part of the process of establishing or
affirming affinity does not adequately explain why it is
that Gypsies (or other pariah groups) have been cast for
so long as the outsiders even though they may have resided
in a given place for centuries.
A second strategy for explaining the perpetuation of Gypsy
myths is to avoid or diminish discussion of human compulsion
and attribute the myth-making phenomenon to political and
economic expediency. Myths of racial superiority then become
part of a national false consciousness, a means to justify
the dominance of some groups over others, part of the ideological
ballast that is the effect of an imbalance of power and
wealth. In this sense there is nothing “natural”
about a group’s need to justify itself; the causes
are to be located in the material conditions that should
take center stage as providing the most accurate information
about the history of inequality. Arguing that there is a
natural compulsion to estrange oneself from the other, or
that xenophobia and the demonizing of the other are universally
characteristic of kinship relations, may indeed be valid,
but still cannot tell us all we need to know to combat inequity
and understand its structural complexities.
One of the problems with Gypsy studies, according to Wim
Willems, is that there is a communis opinio about
the origin, status, and habits of Gypsies. The study of
Gypsies has been plagued for the last 200 years by this
tendency to collapse all Gypsies into a monolithic ethnic
identity. There seems to be an unfortunate universal agreement
about the label “Gypsy” that has impeded rational
discussion of origin, assimilation, persecution, and miscegenation:
“The most important cause for the failure of the historical
picture to admit change is that most writers about Gypsies
accept the premise that they constitute one people with
a number of fixed characteristics.” The following chapters
trace the evolution of a cultural icon that, I argue, helped
to color and sustain the frozen historical picture that
Willems and others complain is so intransigent.
My contention is, first, that the cultural representation
of the Gypsy provides historians a useful grounding for
the study of both the evolution of European nationalisms
and the complicated relations among Europe’s nations,
and, second, that Spain’s role in this evolution is
especially key for understanding the Gypsy stereotype. In
the broadest terms, Spanish culture has had a dual relation
with the foundational narrative of Orientalism, both as
a culture that repressed a constitutive element of its historical
identity, projecting it onto the figure of the exoticized
Gypsy, and one that has represented, since the 1700s onward,
an exoticized other to its Northern European counterparts.
To understand fully the role that the internal colonization
of the Spanish Roma played in the construction of Spanish
nationalism, cultural critics need to analyze the economic
and productive forces that impinge on discursive practices
that in turn participate in the construction of national
identity. Recognizing the interdeterminancy of fields of
representation—visual, literary, musical, historical,
and anthropological—exposes the constructedness of
the imaginary Spanish Gypsy. But to see this symbolic interface
in its proper light, as a form of cultural capital with
determined exchange values, we also need to analyze the
historical contexts for the definitions of Gypsyness. It
is especially important to trace the collapse of Gypsy identities
into Andalusian identity, which by the twentieth century
came to stand for Spanishness both outside and, to an extent,
inside Spain’s cultural arena. The construction of
the imaginary Gypsy depended on both intercultural and interdisciplinary
dialogue that until now has eluded us because of approaches
that are overly focused on a single culture or framed within
a single disciplinary approach.
Edward Said’s work has demonstrated how colonialism
and imperialism are facilitated by emphasizing difference
and stratification. In the case of the Roma, who in early
chronicles are usually described as invaders rather than
conquered peoples, we must speak of an interior rather than
a foreign colonization, a self-colonization that nevertheless
resembles other forms of imperialism in specific ways. Nation
building and nationalism have a direct impact on the way
dominant groups construct marginalized ethnic groups simultaneously
as diseased members of a body that should be if not amputated
at least quarantined, or, conversely, as exotic assets to
some imaginary pluralist society. With the waning of Enlightenment
universalism that sought to transcend human differences,
racial difference and inequality had to be explained by
other means than mere cultural differences, and the result
was a scientific racism that relied on empirical data to
stratify populations. Science was called on to explain the
inequities and differences endemic in rising capitalist
societies, and it obliged by explaining the Roma’s
social degradation by recourse to physiological inferiority.
Ethnic identity in the modern sense is an offspring of the
process of state formation; when nationalism is on the rise
in a given state, issues of difference generally gain prominence,
and ethnic myths proliferate. When measured against the
progress and patriotism of a dominant group, the disenfranchised
of a nation are bound to suffer in comparison. The otherness
of the disenfranchised group is then often maximized, or
in some instances sanitized and provisionally subsumed into
the national identity when there is an incentive to do so
for reasons of exchange of cultural or economic capital.
Where we find this otherness prominently manifested is in
the discursive practices of emerging capitalist states where
Gypsies were always imagined in permanent exile from some
other place beyond national borders, even when, in fact,
their Romany groups had been residents for many generations.
One of the things that makes Gypsies so interesting but
also so difficult to study is that they are what Benedict
Anderson has recently described as both an “unbound
seriality,” by which he means a broad or “open-to-the-world”
group that has its origins in the print media, such as nationalists,
anarchists, or bureaucrats, and at the same time a “bound
seriality” like Tutsis or Asian Americans. However,
to show how these categories are causally related, it is
valuable to go beyond this dyad and to distinguish three
discursive categories that have achieved great symbolic
prominence in discussions of Spanish culture. The first,
“gypsies” with a lower-case g, roughly corresponds
to a Romantic construction that still abounds in contemporary
cultures. Anyone who exhibits nomadic or rebellious tendencies
can be classified a gypsy; gypsies can be from anywhere
and nowhere; there are gypsy scholars, bohemian (bourgeois)
artists, and gypsy “kings,” all of whom have no
ethnic affinity with the Roma. And the imaginary Bohemia
that these “gypsies” inhabit, as Evelyn Gould points
out, “has accomplished its imperial goal, expanding
its frontiers to embrace today’s Europe. . . . Bohemia
continues to be conceived still today as the social performance
that both dramatizes ambivalence about cultural identity
and legitimates ambivalent cultural response.” In other
words, it is still desirable to identify with the freedom-loving,
restless vagabond as Gypsies have been imagined, beginning
with Miguel de Cervantes’ novella “La gitanilla”
(The little Gypsy girl). The second category, the subject
of this study that most Payo (non-Roma) historians and writers
designate as Gypsies with an uppercase G (or Gitanos,
when referring exclusively to Spanish Romany groups), is
a racialized designation that refers to any number of ethnic
groups as they are imagined by nonmembers of those groups.
It is, nevertheless, ideologically aligned with the previous
category. Already in the seventeenth century Spanish counselors
of state, concerned with questions of blood and legitimacy,
were debating whether Gypsies were a race or a self-selected
confederation of thieves, tinkers, musicians, or fortune-tellers.
As we shall see in Chapter 1, Cervantes’ contemporary
Sancho de Moncada was ambiguous about Gypsy racial status.
On the one hand he claimed that Gypsies were merely ruffians
who banded together as thieves and ought to be exterminated.
Yet he sprinkled his text with citations of the Bible implying
that Gypsies descended from the Egyptians whom God had cast
out into the world to atone for their sins.
Gypsies as a racialized category came into clearest focus
in the nineteenth century with the rise of physical anthropology
that distinguished groups according to the “hard”
aspects of ethnicity, such as phenotypical difference, cranium
size, facial features, and language. With the discovery
of the Sanskrit origin of Romani dialects and the work of
Heinrich Grellmann, it was no longer fashionable to speak
of Gypsy speech as a rogue’s tongue, or jerigonza as it is called in Spanish, and historians and philologists
rallied to construct a more modern (nonbiblical, scientifically
based) myth of origin that still holds among many scholars:
Gypsies are descendants of pariahs who left northern India
sometime during the fifth to the tenth centuries. Their
diaspora continues, according to nineteenth-century historians,
because they observe strict endogamous practices and taboos
against intermarriage with Gorgios, Gadjés, Busnés,
Payos (the various designations for non-Roma). Coupled with
the centuries-old negative stereotyping, the imagined purity
of the Gypsy race encouraged communities to isolate and
often stigmatize their Romany communities, reinforcing negative
conclusions regarding their patriotism, religious practices,
and ability to be honest, productive citizens. In his “objective”
classification of degenerate types in L’uomo delinquente (Criminal man, 1876), the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso
relied on racialized categorizations, claiming that criminality
was a consequence of atavistic biological stigmata and that
certain races, like Gypsies, were more predisposed to crime
than others. The Spanish social anthropologist Rafael Salillas
in El delincuente español. El lenguaje (The Spanish delinquent: The language; 1896) concurred,
reporting that Gypsies by nature and occupation were more
akin to the delinquent than to the normal elements of society.
The nefarious consequences of this racialization of the
Roma occurred during World War II when hundreds of thousands
of Roma perished, many exterminated in the Nazi death camps.
The third category is most commonly referred to in English
as Roma, Romá, Romani, Romany, or Travellers, subsets
of which are the subjects that modern social scientists
endeavor to study independently of the fictions, stereotypes,
or racialized thinking associated with the other two categories.
Twentieth-century cultural and social anthropologists reject
received stereotypes and avoid references to ancient cultures,
bloodlines, racial purity, and other pseudoscientific designations
and instead examine the conditions and relations of specific
ethnic groups, such as the Romanichals, Kalderash, or Spanish
Calés, with their non-Roma neighbors. For today’s
social scientists ethnic identities are more usefully thought
of as instrumentalist or functionalist rather than primordial,
since race has been shown to be a very inadequate marker
of ethnicity.
Although Romany groups inhabit every European country, twentieth-century
social anthropologists have until recently not been eager
to study them because they were not considered an altogether
separate culture; that is, they were not exotic because
they were “too close to home for comfort.” Students
of modern anthropology often avoided or were discouraged
from choosing Romany groups for fieldwork because they resided
in an anthropologically uninteresting Europe. In recent
decades, however, dozens of social anthropological studies
have begun to appear, such as Isabel Fonseca’s controversial Bury Me Standing or, in Spain, Teresa de San Romšn’s Gitanos de Madrid y Barcelona (The Gypsies of Madrid
and Barcelona; 1984) and La diferència inquietant (The disquieting difference; 1994). Anthropologists may
argue certain universals, for instance, that the Roma constitute
an ethnic identity bound on the one hand by an often strict,
self-imposed exclusivity, and on the other by centuries
of repression, persecution, and ghettoization. But they
also recognize that each Romany group has a geography of
limited expanse, a national identity, and a history bound
up with the histories of European nation-states that too
often belittle, diminish, or overlook altogether their participation.
The reason that I call this category discursive, however,
is not to divorce the term from its historical referent,
but to argue that even the most objective, consciously unbiased
analysis of Romany communities too often slips into harmful
generalizations. Anthropologists have a tendency to abstract
universals from the study of samplings that are too small
and too local, and through the uncritical citation of dubious
sources cultural historians as well as social scientists
have unwittingly perpetuated ancient stereotypes and generalizations
that obscure the true relations and complex realities of
the Romany populations they analyze.
Recent studies critical of the theoretical underpinnings
of ethnology highlight the need to broaden interdisciplinary
approaches to the study of ethnic identity. The interdependency
of the three categories described above is complex and resilient,
and it would be a mistake to study any one of them in isolation
from the other two. Perhaps the cultural critic, poised
at the intersection of cultural anthropology and cultural
criticism, can best gauge the co-determinacy of nationalism
and symbolic practices. But this is the case only if all
the many determinants of ethnicity are also taken into account:
economic factors that compound racism; cultural conventions
and traditions that get translated into historical verities
and vice versa; competing nationalisms and their colonialist
aspirations; hysterical reactions to the Industrial Revolution;
evolving gender codes; and, finally, the Romany participation
in their own isolation from, or assimilation into, national
identity.
It is in the lateral shifts in European consciousness back
and forth from one category to the other that we can start
to see the political stakes of all three: how the unbound
category of the gypsy, a Romantic fantasy based and proliferated
in the world of print culture, music, and graphic representation,
inflects the more bounded categories of Roma that are the
subject of modern anthropology and history; how the passionate,
freedom-loving gypsy gets superimposed on the diasporic
Gypsy communities mistakenly imagined as culturally and
racially isolated from the non-Roma; and how the latter
affect the Romany subclassifications used by today’s
cultural anthropologists who focus on Romany participation
in urban and industrial economies and their complex cultural
and social interrelation with the Gorgios. In the following
chapters I use the term “Gypsy” or “Gitano”
to refer to the cultural constructs that are the subject
of this book, including the Gypsy image that some history
books and anthropological studies have constructed, and
I reserve the terms “Roma” or “Romany” (the
adjective) to refer to real subjects whom most non-Roma
still refer to as Gypsies.
Although often referred to as a Romantic construct, the
Spanish Gypsy is not in any simple way the creation of the
French Romantics. The icon as traced here evolved from the
travel of print/visual/musical culture back and forth across
the Pyrenees, beginning even before Cervantes’ “La
Gitanilla” (1613), which is the subject of Chapter 1.
It relied on historical documents as distant as Sebastian
Münster’s Cosmographia (Cosmography; 1544)
or Heinrich Grellmann’s Die Zigeuner (The Gypsies;
1782), and as local as the acrimonious treatises of the
seventeenth-century Spanish arbitristas (counselors
of state) such as Fray Melchor de Huélamo, Fernández
de Córdoba, Martín Del Río, and Sancho
de Moncada, who defined the Gypsy “problem” for
a struggling nation in need of scapegoats.
Subsequent chapters trace how the Spanish Gypsy gained special
prominence in the fabulous accounts of the nineteenth-century
Bible salesman George Borrow, who borrowed heavily from
Golden Age sources as well as living informants and philologists
to create a veritable encyclopedia of known Gypsyology.
In turn, Borrow bequeathed many, if not all, of the loathsome
or fabulous stereotypes that quickly got grafted onto Preciosa’s
Romantic progeny: Guiseppe Verdi’s Azucena, Prosper
Mérimée’s Carmen, Ambroise Thomas’s
Mignon, George Eliot’s Fedalma, George Sand’s
Moréna, and Victor Hugo’s Esmeralda all owe something
to Borrow’s picaresque imagination.
In modern European systems of musical, visual, and literary
representation, which are the legacy of Romantic idealizations,
a host of female figures stand out above all others and
can be said to make up the nuclei of the imaginary Gypsy.
For example, new versions of Carmen, Esmeralda, and Moréna
continue to re-create and, in ways I discuss at length here,
reshape the myth. In addition to gender, they are linked
together by many characteristics drawn from the pool of
Gypsy stereotypes that has arisen from the seventeenth century
onward. Except for Mignon, part of their enduring exotic
appeal resides in their Spanishness, and one of the objects
of this book is to discuss the relevance both of the fact
that women have borne the heavy symbolic load of the unbound
category of Gypsyness, and the tendency for Europe to look
to southern Spain to fulfill its desire for an exotic other.
To explain this phenomenon, the closing chapters of this
book address the way Spain participated in its self-exoticization
via the figure of the Andalusian Gypsy. As the final chapter
argues, Spanish philologists and folklorists also perpetuated
Borrow’s concept of the fictitious Gypsy, even when
their stated intention was to correct his vision with that
of a more “authentic” Gypsy based on historically
accurate texts and scientific observation.
© 2006 The Penn State University