Huellas del Trauma Colonial Romaní-Gitano en España (1499–1978): Narrativas de Recuperación y Reparación de un Pueblo con Historia(-s)

Abstract

The constant colonial intervention on Roma bodies, practices and knowledge in the Spanish nation-state has been incardinated from 1499 to the present day in a specific type of racism: anti-Gypsyism or anti-Roma racism. Although denied, undervalued or hidden by historiography, institutions, academies and the state educational system alike, the tracing of its ideological, normative and historical constants for almost 600 years allows us to verify and locate specific formations of colonialism and coloniality, and situate racism, patriarchalism and capitalism within their modern contexts. In turn, these forms of violence not only show the traces of Roma colonial trauma, but also point to the persistence of vernacular strategies of resistance and re-existence for the physical-corporal, ontological-cultural, historical, and the safeguarding of identity. This text, therefore, collaborates in the emergence of Roma recovery, recognition, justice and reparation narratives, whose memories, knowledge and historical practices are inseparable from our present realities. To investigate these processes, we examine the historical period between 1499 and 1978 in the Spanish nation-state, while both dates refer to the first and the last of over 250 anti-Gypsy regulations and laws.