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Nine or ten of us were sitting in a semicircle on folding chairs, beer-bottles in hand, glad that it wasn't any one of us who had the responsibility of keeping the thirty-pound pig turning over the coals under the blazing Texas sun. That obligation belonged to the young boys.

The conversation was about two movies with Gypsy characters which had shown in 1996 in cinemas all across America: Thinner, by Stephen King, and Walt Disney’s cartoon version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The responses were varied. One person was angry, and suggested that legal action should be taken against the hurtful stereotyping, and wanted to know whether they'd dare make such films about any other minority population. Someone else said it wasn't worth worrying about because the characters depicted were nothing at all like real Gypsies. Someone else said he enjoyed both films simply as entertainment and didn't make a connection with any experience in his own life. Overall, the older men were less upset by the films than the younger men were. Their point was that Romani life was so far removed from that of the gadj� (non-Gypsies) that it didn't matter what they thought. Several of the younger men disagreed.

The discussion gradually turned to the question of where we had originally come from, our status as a "legitimate" ethnic minority, and whether we were really recognized as such by the US government. And we talked about Rroma (1) as a world population, and about numbers. One estimate of forty million was proposed, which pleased everybody, but when it came to what the total was for America, the generally acknowledged figure of about one million was challenged on the grounds that not everybody really qualified, because a good many of those people called Gypsies were not actually Rroma but Bayash, a cover term for various non-Vlax American Romani populations (2) including the Romanichals (3), the Bashalde (4) and the Romungre (5), besides the actual Bayash themselves (6).

The talk at that slava (7) in the May of 1997 highlighted some anomalies: first, that there was no single, acceptable designation which served to include all populations who define themselves as Romani except a foreign — and for some people a pejorative — one, Gypsy; secondly, that while all Rroma were Gypsies, not all Gypsies were Rroma; and thirdly that when it came to estimating how many of us there were globally, those considerations didn't matter if it made us appear to be a more numerous. For me, a fourth presented itself: the great dissimilarity between the "small-g-gypsy" of Hollywood, and actual Romani people, and what the repercussions of this were in terms of perceptions of identity.

When it comes to the question of "what is a Gypsy," the Romani understanding is as vague as that of the non-roma. And because unity and cooperation outwardly, i.e., with the larger society, cannot possibly become a reality until it has been achieved inwardly, i.e., among ourselves, this fact must be resolved both outwardly and inwardly before we can move ahead. Given that populations defined as "Gypsies" exist in their millions throughout central and eastern .Europe especially, and given that everywhere their relationship with the surrounding societies is one either of conflict or else of malign neglect, the ingredients are already there for a crisis of major proportions — another porrajmos (8) — to take place.

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Roma Participation Program