Romani People in the Americas
Ongoing Work
The FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University (FXB Center) has developed a robust research program on Romani history and contemporary social and political issues. Most of its work to date, however, has centered on Roma in Europe. While this emphasis reflects the global distribution of the Romani population and the preponderance of Romani related political activity, it highlights a lacuna in the worldwide reach of Romani studies. Romani people live all over the world, including in the Americas, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
The FXB Center launched a program focused on Romani people in the Americas the first element of which was a substantial conference in early April 2019. The second element of the program was a research project documenting the circumstances of Romani people in the United States, a project that come to an end in 2020. Following that, FXB undertook a similar venture in Canada as Canada has not been a site of systematic research on this global minority population. The remaining element of this program is being explored and aims to examine the situation of Romani people in Brazil.
Recent Work
Confronting Major and Everyday Discrimination. Romani Experiences in Canada’s Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area.
The FXB Center, in partnership with the Canadian Romani Alliance, launched a qualitative study involving middle-class and working-class Romani and non-Romani people in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area, a region known as the area with the largest and most diverse Romani population in Canada. This study attempted to explore the realities and the struggles of Canadian Romani people who experience stigma and everyday discrimination, the types of stigma and discriminatory incidents they face, and the downstream consequences of stigma.
Study Aims
- To explore the subjective experiences of stigma and everyday discrimination by ordinary Romani people in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area (GTHA), Canada.
- To explore the perceptions and perspectives of ordinary Canadians regarding Romani people, anti-Roma discrimination, and stigmatization in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area (GTHA), Canada.
About the Study
Numerous studies document the Romani people’s exposure to racism and discrimination across geographies and political regimes. But these people’s subjective experiences of stigma and their response to these experiences have received much less attention. This scholarly deficit compromises the understanding of Roma political and social participation and demands, and in particular of the constraints that inhibit such agency and voice. It also affects the interpretation of Roma interactions with societal structures such as education, employment, or healthcare. Without an understanding of a minority’s subjective pain and reaction to enduring stigma, analyses of community responses – including cynical responses towards official offers of “integration” (as opposed to inclusion or anti-racist policies) – are likely to be partial at best. Canada provides a fertile yet relatively under-explored setting for research into this topic.
Available reports suggest that both discrimination and stigmatization against members of the Romani community in Canada remain commonplace. Romani people face hate crimes and racial profiling, discrimination in accessing education, health care, housing, and proof of legal identity. Romani people are also exposed to stigmatization, in part as a result of widespread societal ignorance about their history and culture.
Stigmatization negatively affects Romani people and generates a plethora of defense tactics, including denial of Romani heritage. The impact of this phenomenon of denial is illustrated by recent discrepant information about the size of the Romani Canadian population. This research project explored the experiences of stigma and everyday discrimination by middle-class and working-class Romani people in Toronto, Canada. Instead of focusing solely on anti-Roma discrimination or poverty, as has been the case for much of the European research to date, this project endeavored to incorporate other contemporary conceptualizations of exclusion, in particular, the concepts of stigma and everyday discrimination in order to unlock new understandings of the manifestations of racial injustice, and related remedies.
Research Team
Jacqueline Bhabha, JD, MSc served as the project’s Principal Investigator. In that role, she oversaw the implementation of the project and contributed to the development of the research tools and data analysis. She is Director of Research at the FXB Center at Harvard University; Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer at Harvard Law School; Adjunct Lecturer on Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School; and Harvard University Adviser on Human Rights Education. Her central research interests focus on the protection and empowerment of marginalized populations, particularly in the context of migration, refugee status, and statelessness.
Professor Bhabha has longstanding research experience with Roma in Europe, having conducted work within Roma communities in Italy, Serbia, Kosovo, and Romania. Professor Bhabha’s experience includes extensive visits to Roma residential sites, interviews with Roma informants and advocates, and conducting joint seminars and workshops with Roma adolescents in Europe. Professor Bhabha coordinated the Romani Realities in the US project implemented in the US by Voice of Roma and Harvard FXB from 2018 to 2020.
Margareta (Magda) Matache, PhD, served as the project’s research coordinator. As such, she coordinated and monitored the study implementation, supervised training sessions and verified protocol compliance by study staff, maintained communication with the Canadian partner, and contributed to data analysis.
Dr. Matache is a Lecturer on Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Director of the Roma Program at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University. Her research focuses on systems of oppression, with a focus on anti-Roma racism. With more than 20 years of experience in activism and research, Dr. Matache has dedicated her work to advancing justice and Roma rights.
Gina Csanyi-Robah, Hons. BA, BEd, co-founder of the Canadian Romani Alliance, Canada coordinated the work of the field researchers in Toronto, took the necessary steps to follow the Canadian regulations regarding research, co-authored the final report/article of this study, and collaborated in writing other related materials.
Csanyi-Robah is a Canadian Hungarian Romani, educator born in Toronto and currently residing in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her family arrived in Canada in 1956 as Geneva Convention refugees escaping the Hungarian Revolution. Gina began her work as a Romani rights activist in 2004 at the European Roma Rights Centre. She has been at the forefront of the Roma civil rights movement, since she joined the Roma Community Centre (RCC) in 2007. After serving as the Executive Director of the RCC, Gina co- founded the Canadian Romani Alliance in 2014, a not-for-profit organization focused on public education, community capacity building, advocacy, and promoting human rights and social justice. In addition to her work for the Canadian Romani Alliance, Gina has continued on in her profession as an educator.
Past Work
Romani Realities in the US: Breaking the Silence. Challenging the Stereotype.
Thanks to a grant from the Cummings Foundation, the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University (Harvard FXB) and Voice of Roma launched a new research project in the summer of 2018 focused on the situation of Romani people in the United States. Since 2012, Harvard FXB has implemented an innovative research and capacity-strengthening program related to Romani people, who have long been an ill-treated minority, facing persecution and, in the past, even slavery. Up until now, the Harvard FXB Roma Program has worked with Roma living in Europe where they form the largest ethnic minority group. Romani Realities in the United States: Breaking the Silence. Challenging the Stereotype will enable us to contribute much-needed quantitative research designed to understand the struggles of Romani people in this country. Download the study one-pager here.
About the Study
The FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University and Voice of Roma collaborated on a study of Romani (i.e., Roma/Romani/Romanichal/“Gypsy”) living in the United States. The research team collected data to help improve the understanding of the social, economic, cultural, and health status of Romani people and the discrimination Romani people face in the United States. Prior to this study, there was little information about the lived realities and challenges faced by the American Romani population. Romani people in the US are spread widely, and census data does not include information on Romani identity. This study collected quantitative and qualitative data via short answers plus open-ended questions. The findings in this study will hopefully inspire and encourage more research on Romani populations across the Americas, counter stereotypes, and begin to address the problems that Romani people face.
Read the Report
In November 2020, the FXB Center and Voice of Roma released Romani Realities in the United States: Breaking the Silence. Challenging the Stereotype. The study includes insight from 363 questionnaires with Romani Americans, touching on socioeconomic conditions, stigma, discrimination, identity and culture. To learn more, view and download the infographic, and read the press release.
Research Team
Jacqueline Bhabha, JD, MSc. serves as the Principal Investigator of the project. She is the Director of Research at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights; Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer at Harvard Law School; Adjunct Lecturer on Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School; and Harvard University Adviser on Human Rights Education. Professor Bhabha has longstanding research experience with Roma in Italy, Serbia, Kosovo, and Romania.
George Eli serves as a field researcher in the project. He is an American Romani activist and award-winning filmmaker. He is the founder of The Romani Media Initiative (RMI), a non-profit organization dedicated to challenging negative stereotypes about Romani people through educational films and other media.
Margareta (Magda) Matache, PhD, serves as the project’s research coordinator and manages the overall implementation of the project. Magda is a Romani rights activist from Romania, director of the Roma Program at the Harvard FXB Center, and also a Harvard instructor. In 2012, she was awarded a Hauser postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard FXB Center and founded the Roma Program at that time. From 2005 to 2012 Matache was the executive director of Romani CRISS, a leading NGO that defends and promotes the rights of Roma.
Kristin Raeesi serves as a coordinator for the project and a board member of Voice of Roma. She is an American Romani researcher and activist who has been involved in advocacy on behalf of the American Romani community for over a decade. Raeesi has been a panelist for several national Romani Studies conferences, and has given media interviews/written op-eds for national news outlets in the US on the topic of Romani rights and representation.
Aaron Williams serves as a field researcher in the project. He is an American Sinto/Romanichal activist. He has been actively involved in several community-based initiatives to create awareness and recognition of Romani Americans for several decades. He served as a former officer for the Romani American organization Romani Zor. Williams was also responsible for helping to organize International Romani Day organizations in several cities in the US and in Europe in 2013. Most recently, he contributed to a local exhibit at the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum that featured the history of Romani people in Texas.
Amanda Schreiber serves as a field researcher in the project. She is an American Romani activist and co-founder of the American Romanichal group “Organization of United Romanichals (OUR).” She works to create awareness of the unique culture and history of American Romanichal communities.
Carol Silverman serves as a project coordinator for this study. She is a Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Folklore at the University of Oregon and has done research with Roma for over 30 years in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Western Europe, and the US. Her 2012 book, Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora, won the Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Lauren Slepsky-Chicko serves as a field researcher for the project. She is an American Slovak Romani researcher and activist. Lauren has been researching her Eastern Slovak Romani lineage, as well as the Romani Diaspora, for the past 15 years. She performs professionally as a singer and comes from a family with a strong musical tradition, extending through many generations. She is also a writer and artist. Using her artistic and historical knowledge, Lauren aims to educate the public about Romani heritage and culture.
Contact Information
Margareta Matache:
- Phone: +1 (617) 432-7536
- Email:mmatache@hsph.harvard.edu
Kristin Raeesi:
- Phone: +1 (346) 493-5276
- Email: kraeesi@twu.edu
Learn more about Voice of Roma by visiting http://www.voiceofroma.com/.