{"id":14694,"date":"2026-04-30T17:58:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T17:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/14694\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T17:58:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T17:58:10","slug":"six-centuries-of-resistance-of-the-roma-people-in-europe-from-romania-to-seville-spain-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/14694\/","title":{"rendered":"Six centuries of resistance of the Roma people in Europe: from Romania to Seville, Spain | Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

She was born on the road, at the foot of a cart loaded with cauldrons and stills, about 70 years ago. Maria Stanescu grew up a nomad, helping in the family business of distilling. She slept under the open sky, next to the fire that served as both hearth and stove. She was free, even though she lacked basic necessities like shoes. Thirty years ago, \u201cthe winters were so harsh\u201d that she and her family decided to abandon their nomadic life and build a house<\/a> in the Romanian village of Fetesti, 145 kilometers east of Bucharest. After becoming a widow, she became the matriarch of a three-generation Roma family who now gather at the entrance of the house.<\/p>\n

Stanescu transmits her legacy orally, like her language, Romani, which is not taught in schools. She recounts years of persecution suffered for being Roma after the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu, aligned with Nazi Germany<\/a>, ordered the transfer in 1942 of 40 members of her family to \u201cthe north, to forced labor camps from which many never returned.\u201d<\/p>\n

Half a million Roma\u2014out of a total population estimated at one million at the time\u2014were exterminated in the 1940s, a genocide forgotten by history books<\/a>. These are the figures used by the European Union, which experts question due to the lack of both statistics and public interest. They agree that between 25% and 50% of the Roma population was wiped out.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were born into stigma. From our first day of life, we are taught that to succeed, we have to be twice as good as a non-Roma,\u201d says sociologist Gelu Duminica from his office in Bucharest. He places the origin of the Roma people in what is now Punjab, in northern India, from where the Roma migrated in several waves, fleeing invasions and poverty.<\/p>\n

They entered Europe through Romania, where today they represent the biggest minority, comprising 9% of the population according to EU data. Their first documented appearance dates back to 1365. \u201cSome Roma were enslaved for five centuries. It is the longest-running case of slavery in Europe,\u201d Duminica maintains.<\/p>\n

\"\"Gelu Duminica, sociologist, in Bucharest (Romania) on April 22.Alex Onciu<\/p>\n

The Roma genocide, or Samudaripen, has been acknowledged much later than the Jewish Holocaust. Both peoples lost half their population in the Nazi extermination. The Roma were identified by an armband with a brown triangle sewn on it, the symbol of the \u201cundesirables.\u201d They were subjected to mass sterilization campaigns and Nazi experiments. It was only a decade ago that the European Parliament officially recognized this genocide<\/a>, and only in recent years has Germany begun to compensate the descendants of the victims, the sociologist points out.<\/p>\n

The Roma are the largest ethnic minority in Europe: according to European Commission estimates. Between 10 and 12 million Roma live on the continent, and approximately half of them, six million, reside in EU countries (of these, 1.3 million are in Romania and around 800,000 in Spain). These figures fluctuate due to a lack of statistics and the fear of identifying as Roma. The EU has adopted a Strategic Framework for the equality, inclusion, and participation of Roma, to be implemented during the period 2020-2030.<\/p>\n

While some progress has been made in the first years of implementing this plan\u2014increased school enrollment for Roma children, access to healthcare and the labor market\u2014Romanian Socialist MEP Victor Negrescu criticizes the lack of \u201ca specific EU fund\u201d exclusively dedicated to the inclusion of the Roma population.<\/p>\n

Structural poverty<\/p>\n

Trapped in structural poverty, the Roma in Spain suffer from devastating statistics: 80% are at risk of poverty, compared to 16.8% of non-Roma in the EU, according to a report by the Foessa Foundation with data from 2019. And political integration remains the major challenge.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn this legislature, for the first time in the 15 years I\u2019ve been here, there isn\u2019t a single Roma MEP,\u201d laments Spanish Socialist MEP Juan Fernando L\u00f3pez Aguilar. He says that the situation is especially worrying in countries like the Czech Republic and Slovakia, where legal obstacles persist for Roma people in obtaining documentation and accessing basic services. L\u00f3pez Aguilar notes that the Spaniard Juan de Dios Ram\u00edrez-Heredia became the first Roma MEP in the European Parliament in 1986.<\/p>\n

\"\"Petre-Florin Manole, Minister of Labor, Family and Youth of Romania, at the Ministry headquarters, April 22 in Bucharest.<\/p>\n

Alex Onciu<\/p>\n

The gains have been in access to education, key to political representation. \u201cMy success is an accident,\u201d says Petre-Florin Manole, Romania\u2019s Minister of Labor, Family, and Youth, smiling. He is the first Roma minister in an EU country. He emphasizes that Roma who manage to escape poverty still have to contend with social stigma.<\/p>\n

In Europe, Manole argues, a change of perspective is needed to narrow a gap that has continued to widen. He was particularly struck by a conversation he had in Brussels with the head of an NGO who presented \u201ca handbag manufacturing project as a success story for Roma beneficiaries, at a time when most of the European economic and intellectual elite is talking about artificial intelligence, going to the Moon, and the new industrial revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Spain, the university professor Trinidad Mu\u00f1oz Vacas is an exception, as she belongs to the 0.8% of Roma with university degrees\u2014compared to 26% of non-Roma, according to data from the Fundaci\u00f3n Secretariado Gitano (FSG). Sitting in a park in Seville, the anthropologist traces the history of the Roma in Spain. The first document that refers to them dates from 1425. Just 74 years later, in 1499, there was a royal decree issued by the Catholic Monarchs<\/a> promoting the forced assimilation of the Roma people. Decree after decree, they were deprived of their dressing customs, their language, and their nomadic way of life. Finally, their trades, such as blacksmithing or cattle trading, were prohibited, and they were forced to work as day laborers on other people\u2019s land.<\/p>\n

\"\"A man walks along a street in the Ferentari neighborhood of Bucharest. It is one of the poorest areas of the Romanian capital, populated mainly by Roma.Alex Onciu<\/p>\n

The low-cost flight connecting Bucharest with Seville is full of Roma passengers. Mario and Pamela, both in their thirties, are traveling with their three children. They emigrated a decade ago to work the fields of the southern Spanish region of Andalusia, home to 40% of Spain\u2019s Roma population, according to data from the Fundaci\u00f3n Secretariado Gitano (FSG). They returned to Romania to care for Mario\u2019s father, and now they\u2019re back in Spain to work for several months so they can afford the meal they must traditionally offer to relatives six months after the patriarch\u2019s burial.<\/p>\n

Minister Manole\u2019s mother also traveled on one of these flights a decade ago to work as a day laborer in Spain. The stories of Mijaela, Tina, and Daniel, interviewed in Roma villages that are being emptied out, are repetitive: the opening of borders in the European Union has given them back their nomadic lifestyle and better job opportunities, but only in occupations imposed on them in the past.<\/p>\n

The Great Roundup<\/p>\n

The night of July 30, 1749, marked the definitive break between the Roma and non-Roma population in Spain, asserts Professor Mu\u00f1oz Vacas. \u201cIn a single night, the triumvirate of the Church, the Army, and the Monarchy arrested all the Roma settled in Spain,\u201d she states, referring to what is known as the Great Roundup or the first attempt at genocide against the Roma people in Europe.<\/p>\n

\"\"Trinidad Mu\u00f1oz Vacas, a professor from Cordoba, on April 23 in Seville.Alex Onciu<\/p>\n

Between 10,000 and 12,000 people\u2014almost the entire Roma population in Spain at that time\u2014were arrested in the early hours of the morning in their beds throughout the country. Men and women were separated to prevent them from having children, and their belongings were confiscated. The men would be exploited on the galleys of the Spanish fleet. The women, in the Houses of Mercy. They became slave labor. The dispossession of all their property \u201cplunged the Roma people into absolute poverty, forcing them into begging,\u201d the anthropologist emphasizes.<\/p>\n

There is no trace of this tragic episode in Spanish history books, laments Mu\u00f1oz Vacas. Roma history is primarily transmitted orally. Flamenco singing has not only contributed to Spain\u2019s artistic identity but has also served to preserve Roma identity and transmit the history of the persecution of their people to new generations in the form of sole\u00e1s and fandangos, in the absence of textbooks.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom 1939 to 2012, the official definition in the Romanian Academy dictionary for the word Roma or Zigan referred, firstly, to a dark-skinned person and, secondly, to improper behavior,\u201d explains the sociologist Duminica. It took three years of complaints to change that definition.<\/p>\n

From repression to vindication<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Roma people have historically lived between stigma and the threat of extinction. It is their resilience that has allowed them to survive and transmit their traditions into the 21st century,\u201d concludes Mu\u00f1oz Vacas, who also highlights a renewed drive among younger generations to assert their identity and political participation.<\/p>\n

In the case of Romania\u2019s Roma, systemic persecution ended with the fall of the Soviet Union\u2019s communist regime in 1989, while for the Spanish Roma, the turning point came in 1978 with the arrival of democracy after the death of dictator Francisco Franco<\/a>. \u201cIt has only been a few decades since the Roma have been free to define our identity for the first time,\u201d says actress Alina Serban from a Bucharest theater. For five years, she has been playing to sold-out audiences with her play, \u201cThe Great Shame,\u201d in which she confronts Romanian audiences with an uncomfortable reality from a first-person perspective: the persistent stigma against her ethnicity. <\/p>\n

\"\"Actress Alina Serban, pictured in a room at the National Theatre of Romania on April 21.Alex Onciu<\/p>\n

2,500 kilometers from the village of the Romanian matriarch Maria, the caps, shoulder bags, and Louis Vuitton or Versace T-shirts worn by her grandchildren are the same ones that dictate the fashion tastes of young Roma people in the Tres Mil Viviendas neighborhood of Seville, in southern Spain. It is the poorest neighborhood in the country, a place where exclusion and stigma are chronic. After a night at the Feria de Abril<\/a>, a woman walks down the street to throw a bag of garbage onto a huge pile of trash that grows larger among the overflowing containers. \u201cThe garbage trucks don\u2019t come,\u201d explains one of the residents, shrugging his shoulders. No one expects them to protest, or to file a complaint with City Hall, just as they don\u2019t expect the cleaning services to be penalized for arriving late or simply not coming at all.<\/p>\n

\"\"Two young people travel on a scooter in the Las 3.000 Viviendas neighborhood of Seville, on April 23.Alex Onciu<\/p>\n

From those same streets is emerging a new generation of Roma influencers, who use social media to reclaim their identity, denounce exclusion, and demand their place. Manuel Jim\u00e9nez, a 26-year-old gay Roma man, has been the pioneer, opening a window onto social media to reveal daily life in the neighborhood.<\/p>\n

In the Las Vegas neghborhood of Las 3,000 Viviendas, we\u2019re greeted by the influencer Jr. Yuse, who, at 19, proudly embraces his three identities. He identifies as Moroccan and \u201centrevelao: half non-Roma, half Roma.\u201d His father arrived as a young man from Casablanca, Morocco, and married his mother, herself the daughter of Roma and non-Roma parents. Yuse El Hor Vega, the Andalusian version of the Arabic name Yusef, is starting to make a name for himself on TikTok. He sits down in front of a dilapidated building, and little by little, his friends, whom he calls cousins \u200b\u200bor brothers, begin to arrive.<\/p>\n

In that group, few have continued their studies beyond the age of 14. Like 19-year-old Miguel Santiago Moreno, who has started his own urban music production company. \u201cYou go out into the neighborhood, you start to see the bad things, and you get swept up in it. Then you don\u2019t want to study anymore,\u201d explains Yuse, alluding to the context of exclusion into which they are born. Others insist that a Roma person with an education \u201cwon\u2019t have more opportunities\u201d than one without. They denounce the discrimination not only in access to employment but also in daily life. \u201cThere\u2019s always someone who crosses the street or a woman who clutches her purse when she sees you,\u201d says Juan Carlos Portela Hidalgo.<\/p>\n

They don\u2019t conceal the presence of drugs or crime in the neighborhood, but they maintain that there are also \u201cgood people\u201d who are simply looking for \u201ca job to support their families and be happy.\u201d Statistics show that six out of ten Roma children are destined to drop out of school before completing secondary education. Yuse works in his mother\u2019s grocery store and spends the rest of his day on the streets with his community. \u201cThe quality of the social and family network\u201d is the only indicator in Spanish statistics where the Roma community has an advantage over non-Roma, according to the Foessa report: 48.5% of the Roma community has daily \u201csocial and family relationships\u201d; in the rest of the population, that percentage is 29.7%.<\/p>\n

Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a> to get more English-language news coverage from EL PA\u00cdS USA Edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She was born on the road, at the foot of a cart loaded with cauldrons and stills, about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14695,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8620,42,8621,327,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-14694","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-bucharest","9":"tag-francisco-franco","10":"tag-juan-fernando-lopez-aguilar","11":"tag-sevilla","12":"tag-spain"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14694\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}