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.