Identity
Gitano identity is particularly complex in Spain for a variety of reasons which are examined below. Nevertheless, it can be safely said that both from the perspective of gitano and non-gitano (payo) Spaniards, individuals generally considered to belong to this ethnicity are those of gitano descent and who also self-identify as such.
A confusing element is the thorough hybridization of Andalusian and Roma culture (and some would say identity) at a popular level. This has occurred to the point where Spaniards from other regions of Spain can commonly mistake elements of one for the other. The clearest example of this is Flamenco music, an art form which is Andalusian rather than gitano in origin but, having been strongly marked by gitanos in interpretative style, is now commonly associated to this ethnicity by many Spaniards. The largest population of gitanos being concentrated in Southern Spain has even led to a confusion between gitano accents and those typical of Southern Spain, even though many Kale populations in the northern half of Spain (e.g. Galicia) do not speak Andalusian Spanish.
Indeed, the boundaries among gitano and non-gitano ethnicities are so blurred by intermarriage and common cultural traits in the south of the country, that self-identification is on occasion the only real marker for ethnicity.
The term "gitano" has also acquired among many a negative socio-economic connotation (much as the term quinqui) referring to the lowest strata of society, sometimes linking it to crime and marginality and even being used as a term of abuse. There are also Roma who reclaim the term "gitano" and fill it with self-generated meaning, as a strategy to attack racism within spanish and european society. Non-Roma people should be somehow careful not to re_produce racism by using the latter term.
On the other hand, the exaltation of Roma culture and heritage is a large element of wider Andalusian folklore. Gitanos, rather than being considered a "foreign" or "alien" minority within the country are perceived as "deep" or "real Spain", as is expressed by the term "España Cañí" which interestingly means both "Gypsy Spain" (wheras gypsy is the racist term for Roma) and "Traditional" or "Folkloric Spain".
Evidently this results in a strong distinction between gitanos and Rom immigrants from Eastern Europe, who are commonly identified by the wider population according to their country of origin (Romanians, Bulgarians, etc.) rather than by their actual Rom ethnicity.
The Erromintxela of the Basque Country are also Romani. Their number is small but they identify as distinctly separate from the Caló-speaking Romani in Spain.
Read more about this topic: Romani People In Spain
Famous quotes containing the word identity:
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.”
—Bernard Lewis, U.S. Middle Eastern specialist. Islam and the West, ch. 8, Oxford University Press (1993)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)