Camp Romani New Mexico
Rom Kangeri {Romani Church}
Deming, NM
Walk~Ins 10 am-3 pm
Read COVID-19 updates
http://ravenstarenchantments.simplesite.com/
Dr Raven Dolick MsD/Chovihano
Ivone Lopes Brazil, Chovihani We are citizens, not your “outsiders”
In the U.S., we’re scattered: coming from a multitude of countries, speaking many dialects, practicing disparate traditions, and observing various le
vels of traditionalism. But few Americans realize that there are Roma living in their midst, or that we've been here since the beginning—three Roma are said to have accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the New World. Guitarist Django Reinhardt was Romani, and some theorize such disparate icons as Charlie Chaplin, Michael Caine, Elvis Presley, and even former President Bill Clinton come from Roma roots. Undocumented by the U.S. Census, We the American Roma may keep our heritage under wraps, but when it does emerge, we faced discrimination from friends, landlords, waiters, classmates, strangers, cops, store clerks, and professors. Many of us were raised with warnings not to tell others of their ethnic identity, and so many of us in America do remain a hidden ingredient in America’s melting pot.
“WE American Roma come from many different sub-groups, so it is hard for us to organize when we may have little culturally in common,”
But in the past decade, a new crop of activists within our populace has emerged, and we’re forming advocacy organizations and school programs to aid our under-served communities, determined to set the record straight on our cultural identity. But each headline-making event or raid can set our work back but only makes us more vigilant as ethnic based Romani warriors for a judicially charged status. Maria’s story is one of the most modern American hits and especially close to home for to me, she was seven years old when she and all Romani children her age and older were taken from their Brooklyn community by authorities of the State of New York and put into institutions and foster homes. It was 1955 and flooded my Roma community, and her parents--Roma who had escaped the Holocaust in Europe as also my Father--were accused of child abuse because of their itinerant lifestyle. It was a program she likens to the forced assimilation of Native Americans through government-run boarding schools. She lost her native Romani dialect, she says, after it was beaten out of her at Catholic institutions. In the early 80s, while teaching women’s studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Ahern bumped into a woman crossing the street. “I think I’m your mother,” the woman said. To fast forward to current, in 1985, Ahern launched her Roma-heritage organization, Lolo Diklo, which is now a roving educational museum based on Vashon, an island off Seattle. Not long after she settled there, a friend proposed she rent the cottage on her property. But the offer was rescinded just before Ahern was due to move in. The friend’s husband refused to “let a dirty gypsy on his property,” Ahern says she was told. Since then, the islanders have come to know that derogatory remarks won’t fly with the now-retired cousin of mine and now 66-year-old Ahern, who gives anyone who uses the term “gypped” a talking to. “No one says anything insulting to me,” Ahern says. But the Maria incident was a reminder of the pervasive discrimination. “It’s as if people were gleeful finally they could prove gypsies could steal babies, when, in all the centuries of that stereotype, there's not one recorded proof it has happened once,” she says.
“Should you need to have a lighter skinned person vouch for you? Does that have to be the standard?” asks Kristin Raeesi, a 34-year-old Romani activist and grant writer at the University of Alaska. Though Raeesi has a dark complexion, her newborn son, with his blue eyes and light brown hair, and Raeesi’s younger sister, who sports light hair and bright green eyes, are proof of the diversity found in Roma populations and even within families. “The blond angel found must have been snatched by horrible dark people,” Raeesi says scathingly. Growing up in a Wyoming town of 600 people, Raeesi was instructed to hide her Romani background and claim a more “acceptable,” as she puts it, heritage. This lesson was solidified the only time she ever heard her culture mentioned in school, when a grade school teacher read Shel Silverstein’s poem, “The Gypsies Are Coming” to the class. It begins:
“The gypsies are coming, the old people say,
To buy little children and take them away.”
After that she kept her mouth shut. “When you don’t see yourself represented in the school and you don’t see yourself even in dominant society, TV shows, or movies—maybe one reference here or there and it was always something negative—you hide,” she remembers. Today, she is out of the closet. “I know it sounds corny but I feel like I’m OK with myself—finally—it’s only taken me 30-plus years to get there.”
As this sentiment is now shared widespread in my Chillicothie Familia. Gypsy Sisters
Nettie, Laura, Mellie and Kayla from the TLC show “Gypsy Sisters.” (TLC)
In college, Raeesi took a Balkan music class at the University of Wyoming and spoke publicly about her heritage for the first time. But shortly into the term, an anthropologist guest lecturer called the Roma a dirty and culture-less people. Raeesi couldn’t contain herself. “Stop talking,” she yelled, standing up in front of the class, near tears, and berating the woman for using her standing to discriminate. “If I hadn't been in the class, people would have said, 'I guess they really are dirty,'” Raeesi says. The clichés of gold-draped gypsies in caravans reading fortunes and swindling outsiders have dogged Roma since they arrived in Europe as refugees from India in the Middle Ages. Considered heretics for their practice of fortune telling and palm reading, we adopted a nomadic lifestyle to avoid persecution, and practiced trades they could take on the go. A thousand years later, millions of my Familia still live across Europe in shanty towns, often targeted by police, denied social services, and even segregated within schools. Though many no longer practice traditional occupations or travel nomadically, the stereotypes persist. Although to duly note I still live in a vardo and perform all the traits of our music with belly dance and magic to show as a living museum how we relyn on our own skills without government aid to have secure family. A reputation of thievery and crime brings with it closer monitoring and sometimes direct targeting of Roma communities, even in this great U.S.A., where the profiling is not nearly as harsh as in Europe. The 2001 Police magazine article titled “Gypsies: Kings of Con” asserts that Gypsies “look upon the rest of society simply as their ‘prey’,” and “there is no sin in stealing if you are a Gypsy.” Five years later, a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed a group of 800 or so detectives across the U.S. who call themselves “The National Association of Bunco Investigators” and who specifically patrol neighborhoods for “Gypsy crime,” mainly described as scams and fraud. Yes Gestapo as it is, this abuse from peace keepers still runs rampant in modern Roma history in America! Even fast forwarding to more recent indications of white supremacy rule in America, I consider the case against Morgan Ahern. Morgan Ahern during a demonstration in Vashon, near Seattle, Washington, in the Spring of 2011. (Morgan Ahern/Lolo Diklo)
Activists’ allegations about racial profiling are an issue of semantics, says Dennis Marlock, the designated "special investigator" with the Milwaukee Police Department, who created a stir with his book License To Steal: Traveling Con Artists: Their Games, Their Rules—Your Money. The crimes are not inherent to Roma as a whole, Marlock says, but the work of a organized criminal group of Roma who call themselves Gypsies. He equates them to the Sicilian Mafia, a criminal group within the population of Sicilians to invoke fear and control. “It’s not law enforcement that created negative connotation. If we’re guilty of bringing that to the public, then I'm guilty,” he says. He later addresses the Roma activists who have come out against him: “It's not me causing you problems, it’s your criminal element.”
He recalls calling a meeting when “American Gypsies were flooding in by the carload” to Milwaukee. “This is America, if you claim fortune telling as what you do, fine, but if you’re gonna be ripping [people] off ... you’re going to see a lot of me,” he told them, and then asked for volunteers who submitted to being fingerprinted and photographed. I know this personally as a supportive activist for my people their at the time!
