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Spain The Gypsies
The term "Gypsies" is used by outsiders to label an
ethnic
group the members of which refer to themselves as Rom and
speak a
language known as Romany. No one knows exactly how many
Gypsies
there are, either in general or in Spain in particular.
Estimates
of the Spanish Gypsy population range as low as 50,000 and
as
high as 450,000, and other estimates place the world Gypsy
population at between 3 and 6 million. Correct estimates
are made
difficult by the nomadic life-style followed by a portion
of the
group, by their cultural isolation, by the sense of
mystery
surrounding them and their origins, and by the division of
the
population into a number of distinctive subgroups.
It is generally accepted that Gypsies migrated out of
India
into Europe as early as the eleventh century. There are
records
of their having arrived in Spain as early as 1425 and in
Barcelona, in particular, by 1447. At first they were well
received and were even accorded official protection by
many local
authorities. In 1492, however, when official persecution
began
against Moors and Jews to cleanse the peninsula of
non-Christian
groups, the Gypsies were included in the list of peoples
to be
assimilated or driven out. For about 300 years, Gypsies
were
subject to a number of laws and policies designed to
eliminate
them from Spain as an identifiable group: Gypsy
settlements were
broken up and the residents dispersed; Gypsies were
required to
marry non-Gypsies; they were denied their language and
rituals as
well as well being excluded from public office and from
guild
membership. By the time this period had drawn to a close,
Gypsies
had been driven into a permanently submerged underclass
from
which they had not escaped in the late 1980s.
Spanish Gypsies are usually divided into two main
groups:
gitanos and hungaros (for Hungarians). The
former,
in turn, are divided into subgroups classified by both
social
class and cultural differences. In the late 1980s, the
gitanos lived predominantly in southern and central
Spain.
Many of them took up a sedentary form of life, working as
street
vendors or entertainers. Although poor and largely
illiterate,
they were usually well integrated into Spanish society.
The
hungaros, however, are Kalderash, one of the
divisions of
the group from Central Europe (hence the name). They were
much
poorer than the gitanos and lived an entirely
nomadic
lifestyle, usually in tents or shacks around the larger
cities.
They made their living by begging or stealing, and they
were much
more of a problem for Spanish authorities. Many
gitanos
denied the hungaros the status of being in their
same
ethnic group, but outsiders tend to regard them all as
basically
Gypsies. In any case, whatever common ethnic consciousness
they
possessed was not sufficient to make them a significant
political
force.
Under Franco, Gypsies were persecuted and harassed, as
indeed
they were throughout the areas of Europe controlled by
Nazi
Germany. In the post-Franco era, however, Spanish
government
policy has been much more sympathetic toward them,
especially in
the area of social welfare and social services. Since
1983, for
example, the government has operated a special program of
compensatory education to promote educational rights for
the
disadvantaged, including those in Gypsy communities. The
challenge will be to devise programs that bring the Gypsy
population into the mainstream of the country's economic
and
political life without eroding the group's distinctive
cultural
and linguistic heritage.
Data as of December 1988
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