The history of Romani Americans is missing. Although the experiences of other marginalized and immigrant American groups are now well-represented in mainstream historical scholarship, Romani Americans remain absent from American history. This absence has detrimental effects to Romani Americans who are placed outside historical time. It also harms scholars whose work could benefit from the placement of Romani people in the histories they tell. As one of only two professional historians working on Romani American history in the United States, I often wonder: Why is Romani American history missing? And why should we find it?
Museum
Although scholars working on Romani history of other parts of the world often lament the limited work being produced and its isolation from mainstream histories, the situation in the Americas is much more dire. The handful of histories written about American Romani people are so isolated and disconnected from each other (over both decades and continents) that it does not constitute a scholarly tradition. This is not the case in Europe. In the British context, Jodi Matthews describes Romani people’s ‘absent presence’ in British history and concludes that in ‘mainstream narratives of Britishness . . . Romani people are only there if you already know where to look.’ But, at least, there they are. Adrian Marsh, writing of Europe, concludes that because ‘Gypsy history has been frequently suggested as “missing”, “lost” or “forgotten”. The idea that Gypsies have little history has been extremely influential and is behind some of the misapprehension of non-Gypsy peoples about them.’ This also enhances ‘the ability of non-Romani people to ignore or leave out Gypsies from many aspects of society.’ So although missing Romani history might be considered a damaging global phenomenon, the American case is, in this case, exceptional.
Romani American history is missing not because there have not been Romani people in the Americas. Rather, it is missing because the past experiences of Romani people have been missed by American historians. Famously, several Spanish gitano/as travelled to what is today the Dominican Republic on Christopher Columbus’ third voyage in 1498. From then on, as Europeans invaded, conquered and settled in the western hemisphere, Romani people sojourned alongside others of their compatriots. They came as indentured servants, soldiers, deportees and free colonists, just like other members of Spanish, Portuguese, French and English empires. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Romani people continued to immigrate to and throughout the Americas, provoking a backlash (at times) as states developed stronger borders and greater controls against them and other unwanted populations. Today, Romani Americans inhabit a present informed by this past.
Despite their actual presence in the American past, Romani people have been missed by historians. This missing Romani American history is caused by a number of linked issues, some quite benign, others less so. Sources are always an issue when studying people who were marginalized in the past. That there are very few archival collections related directly to Romani American history can certainly prove challenging. But sources do exist that document Romani lives in the past, although the past reverberates from them in particularly difficult ways. Those who wielded power over Romani lives in the past still appear to be insulting, patronizing and criminalizing them, and sometimes even shouting from the archives at them, making careful, contextualized and critical readings of such sources necessary. Despite source considerations, as scholars of other marginalized people have shown, creative techniques of recovery can reveal a spectacularly boisterous archive in which the voices of those once thought to be silent are revealed to have been chatting all along.
That historians of the Americas have not considered Romani people in the histories they produce is also because an alternative historical tradition, in the absence of a professional one, developed over the generations. This surrogate story is largely based on the writing of nineteenth century ‘gypsylorists,’ aficionados who collected, studied and published on diverse Romani related realities. And while scholars of Romani people in Europe are moving past this orientalist foundation, scholars of the Americas have instead ignored this body of work. This has isolated Romani history from the trajectory of American historical developments as they’ve grown over the past century. As such, stories related to Romani American pasts remain stranded in a bygone narrative and ignored as unusable by contemporary historians already thinking about the past in much different ways. ‘Despite the limitations,’ the historian Rafael Buhigas Jiménez suggests hopefully, ‘all this constitutes a rich fief from which the weeds can be extracted and cultivated again with the right tools.’ Romani American history, then, can and should be written.
The consequences of missing Romani Americans in history are equally diffuse and universally negative. American history remains incomplete without the experiences of Romani people included. This exclusion is more than just an issue of quantity; the quality of interpretation lags behind what it might be, limiting historical accuracy and fuller narratives. Studies of race, empire, colonization, nationalism, state building and labour (just to name a few) all look different when viewed inclusive of Romani experiences. Though measuring what is missing is a nearly impossible task, American historians of all eras, approaches and regions would tell more nuanced stories had Romani experiences been considered.
This absence has limited historians of the Americas who have uncovered Romani people in their studies, but who then doubt what to make of them when no other scholarship exists to consult. Other scholarship also suffers from missing Romani American history. Historians of Romani people in Europe could benefit methodologically, contextually, comparatively and collaboratively from an engagement with American historiographies. Romani Studies scholars who are not historians have also missed these missing Romani histories. These scholars and activists often link the contemporary subject of their inquiry back to its origins hopeful of a ground on which to build their work. With the rise of antigypsyism in both Europe and the United States, this history work is more timely than ever. Yet when professional historians fail to provide meaningful histories, non-historians often default to knowledge about the past from other available sources. For Romani American history, these sources can be quite dubious.
twentieth century, courtesy of Library of Congress
Finally, and most importantly, the case of (the) missing Romani American history has been, and remains, harmful to Romani Americans. Too often, Romani Americans have been relegated to the realm of fictional stock characters founded on mere stereotypes. How else can one explain the prevalence of “Gypsy-face,” a derivative of blackface? How else can American storeowners racially profile Romani American customers? How else can American police forces host training aimed at targeting “criminal Gypsies“? Such ignorance can, at least partially, be traced to the lack of a legitimate place in historical narratives for Romani American people. They suffer the consequences of being missed by history; although they also remember and commemorate this history in their own ways.
How does one start a new field of history? An important part of the historical method is to build upon the work of other historians. But if there are no other historians doing the work, from what can one build? This is a dilemma that impacts historians, the publics they serve and, most significantly, the subjects of the histories they write. It is thus the responsibility of all of us to help solve the case of (the) missing Romani American history.