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The Romani Diaspora, Part Two
| Article
# : |
15113 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1989 |
5,264 Words |
| Author
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Ian Hancock
Ian Hancock is the UN and UNICEF representative for the
International Romani Union and a professor of linguistics and
English at the University of Texas at Austin. He has
published
extensively on the Roma; most recently he has written The
Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution. |
Coming originally from India, the Roma reached Europe in the twelfth or thirteenth century at the time of, and because of, the Christian holy wars with the Muslim invaders of the Byzantine Empire and the Holy Land. As the newly arrived Roma were thought to be part of that Islamic threat, names were wrongly applied to them that they still bear today: Heiden, Tatar, Egyptian, Saracen, and so forth. All testify to their mistaken identity and account for the prejudice the Romani experienced throughout Europe.
Gypsies first arrived in America because they were sent as convicts and felons, in an attempt on the part of European countries to get rid of them. Portugal began shipping off Gypsies in the 1500s to India, Africa, and South America, and there were Gypsies with Columbus on his third voyage to the Americans in 1498. The first full-scale shipment of Spanish Gypsies into North America followed a government proclamation dated 1749 ordering their expulsion to the West Indies. Between 1769 and 1800, when Louisiana was under Spanish domination, numbers of Gypsies were transported there as part of Spain's solucion americana. Jones, writing in 1834, and Olmsted, writing in 1861, both refer to these Louisiana Gypsies who, by that time, had intermarried with the free black slaves in that state.
Queen Christina of slaves ordered the shipment of Gypsies to her colony in Delaware in 1648. Gypsies also came to America from Germany following the Thirty Years' War, selling themselves to redemptioners for the price of their fare. Gypsies had been the subjects of cruel persecution in Germany ever since their first appearance there in 1407, and by 1514, the first of many murderous "Gypsy hunts" had been legalized, in which Gypsies were tracked down and killed in the forests like wild animals.
When Swedish and German ships brought them to the New World, the Roma were left on the coasts of New England and Delaware, often having had their possessions stolen from them. Many remained more or less in the northeastern part of the country--Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey in particular.
Gypsies from Britain began to arrive in Virgina after 1661, when as a result of an act passed by Richard Cromwell's Parliament the "wholesale deportation" of Scotland's and England's unwanted populations began. After the American War of Independence, the thirteen former colonies were no longer a place to which British undesirables could be sent; instead they were taken to Australia. But from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, many more Romanichals from
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