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This is a multisited ethnography that brings together different sites, people and performances in productive tension. I spent a total of seventeen months conducting fieldwork in Romania between 1999 and 2007, and I made a few more visits there between 2008 and 2012. The main vantage point for this ethnography is that of Pod. Pod’s story is not unique, and similar Roma settlements can be found across Romania. Roma’s reliance on recycling practices and their dispersion within Romania have been widespread phenomena over the last two decades (Zoon 2001). These settlements expanded within Romania after 1989, as many Roma lost their unskilled or low-skilled jobs and sought informal work, recycling from and living next to waste sites on the outskirts of urban areas.

Over the eleven years I visited Pod, its landscape changed considerably. Some of the improvised huts I saw in 2001, piled with rubbish, some out of sight of passers-by, had been replaced by 2008 with fully built houses proudly set on the main road. These constructions testified to the lucrative side of the informal collection of recyclables, and to some Pod residents’ efficient management skills. Most of the intra-community economy circulated through informal arrangements, which often involved a main collector for whom others collected recyclables in exchange for goods or credit. Living conditions did improve during the 2000s for some Roma in Pod; but some things did not change. In 2001, there was no running water or electricity, and virtually no medical facilities. Residents collected water from a broken pipe, and powered electrical equipment with batteries. They had no access to healthcare, and many children either did not go to school or else attended special schools for children with disabilities. This situation had not improved much by 2012. For example, despite the existence of a medical facility built with European funds, no medical staff were available and it was closed down.

As a ‘co-performative witness’ (Conquergood 2001; Madison 2011, 25) in Pod, I got to know the complexity of people’s lives, and not only the hardships and struggles. As Madison aptly puts it: ‘Performative witnessing is also to emphasize the political act (responsibility) of witnessing over the neutrality (voyeurism) of observation.’ (2011, 25) Inside their homes, which I visited often, residents built a safer world of ‘normalcy.’ My co-performative witnessing sometimes involved performing together at dances and celebrations, events that were both frequent and necessary: they made life worth living. At celebrations, guests were not allowed to pay, and were expected to be served. Tables full of food and drinks greeted visitors at these special times, even when the goods were being paid for with credit from the better-off Roma.

As a co-performative witness in Pod and elsewhere, I accompanied my Roma friends and acquaintances to state institutions, on doctor’s and social services appointments, and I went on field trips with Roma school mediator Armando to visit Roma students who were struggling academically. I engaged and built connections with many different people in Pod: I got to know adults and children, young Roma who were studying in schools for the disabled because of their ethnicity, and undocumented adults. Elsewhere I met Roma and non-Roma activists and artists, young people and school staff. I conducted formal and informal interviews, and I attended school performances, concerts and festivals, fairs and exhibitions, in different parts of Romania and abroad in London and Paris. In many of these instances I could gauge how Pod residents’ everyday experiences of citizenship differed from or resembled my own. I experienced, for example, how Roma performances abroad were often received by non-Roma audiences as expressions of national folklore that excluded Roma even as the latter were performing onstage.

Throughout my fieldwork in Romania I consumed and engaged with different types of media, from television and radio to newspapers, with an eye to how Roma were represented. This was a frustrating experience, given the racism and sexism of mainstream media, the misrepresentation of Roma and the lack of Roma voices. Roma in Pod engaged with different media, mainly television, and they reappropriated some of the cultural products for which they felt an affinity. When watching daytime North American and Latin American soaps, literate residents read subtitles aloud to small groups of (mostly) women gathered around small black-and-white television sets. More recently, television sets in Pod often played music by both Roma and non-Roma from the manele-focused music channel Taraf, identified as a ‘Ţigani’ channel. Roma in Pod appreciated ‘Gypsy soaps’, even though these represented gadge’s³² exoticized projections of Gypsiness.

Aside from my own analysis, when I discuss media representations of Roma, including in the television soaps, I will present Pod residents’ views of these productions. In the early years I watched North American soaps with Pod residents, and in the later years I discussed Gypsy soaps with several Roma from Pod in both formal and informal interviews, which changed my own perception of the soaps. In mapping the reception of the soaps and music performances, I also use audience comments from soap websites and YouTube. My media ethnography is situated between a fully embedded reception analysis (Abu-Lughod 2005) and one focused on audience members who participate in or comment on programmes through social media (di Leonardo 2012; Imre and Tremlett 2011). While Roma have rarely been analysed as consumers of media, including television (see Tremlett 2013), I engage with both the majority’s consumption and the readings of a Roma counterpublic that identified with or challenged the images of Roma presented in these cultural productions.

I am a gadgi (non-Roma) and Romanian citizen of mixed Romanian-Hungarian descent, with a Ph.D. gained in the United States and currently working in the United Kingdom. Some of my non-Roma Romanian friends and acquaintances rolled their eyes upon hearing about my research topic, and worried that I would reiterate or add to many Westerners’ mistaking of Romanians for Roma; some asked me ‘please don’t make us all look like Ţigani.’ My Western location at the time of my fieldwork in Romania, being the United States and, after 2005, London, bestowed upon me a certain cachet among some of my informants: one of the Romnja in Pod decided I was Spanish, a nation to which she felt connected; one Romni from the village of Clejani called me a ‘foreign gadgi’, as opposed to a local, Romanian gadgi. At times the perception of my identity shifted – for example, when a lawyer asked me whether I was a Romni friend’s daughter, even though we were both in our thirties. This instance, when I was taken for a Romni by a non-Roma, was a shocking (for me but not, as it turned out, for my Romni friend) reminder of the widespread gendered stereotypes about Romnja as young, over-fertile mothers with dozens of children. Several times, when I accompanied friends and witnessed similar situations, the casualness of such incidents and the everydayness of racism really struck me. My shock reflected my privileged position: for my Roma friends and acquaintances these incidents were not surprising. As I show in Chapter 2, there was no shortage of such incidents: encounters in hospitals, schools, shops and police stations, and often with state employees, demonstrated this everyday racism.

In many instances my ethnographic journey involved making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Performance and theatre scholar Baz Kershaw discusses radical theatre, which has the power to change the ideological inclination and worldviews of audiences: ‘theatre which mounts a radical attack on the status quo may prove deceptive. The slow burning fuse of efficacy may be invisible’ (1992, 28). I see the slow burning fuse metaphor as an apt description of the change in subjectivity that I experienced when making the strange familiar and vice versa. The slow burning fuse was started for me most likely at a Christmas celebration in Pod, when I visited with non-Roma friends. In these moments, when I was allowed into people’s lives, the expected power balance was temporarily redressed; instead of only witnessing suffering and injustice, I spent enjoyable moments with Pod friends. These became turning points in the co-witnessing process of ethnography, when the initial impulse, of seeing Pod as a problem that needed a solution, receded to some extent. I started listening to people more carefully, to their music, their dances and their actions. My sense of outrage at their situation never disappeared, but it became equally important for me to document their other stories – in addition to stories about injustice and discrimination – from the way they saw Gypsy soaps to their perspectives on belonging in Romania.

From Pod, this study moves to other places within Romania, including Bucharest, and then abroad to the West, following the trajectory of ‘Gypsy music’. In addition to Pod, I conducted fieldwork in Bucharest and in Clejani, the village in southern Romania from where the famous (in the West) Roma band Taraf de Haïdouks originate. In London I experienced first hand the considerable international success of ‘Gypsy music’: from traditional music to the ubiquitous manele,³³ everything had become prime material for mixing into dance music in venues such as the Barbican and clubs such as Koko and Cargo. I attended concerts at these venues, as well as other cultural events. I attended many performances of the dance group Together, composed of both young Roma and gadge, which initially started at a local school near Pod. My travels across Romania took me to different parts of the country, where I interacted with different Roma: Romungre, Gabors (traders and welders), Kelderara, Karamidarja and Vatrash, Lăutari, Ursara, Kelderara and Rudara, as well as activists and intellectuals.

The ethnographic material in this book focuses mainly on Roma from Transylvania and Wallachia, regions within Romania’s national borders. The distinct histories and social status of different Roma, including musicians, in Transylvania and Wallachia influence current perceptions of these musicians and the different stereotypes associated with them. Roma known as Romungre were historically Hungarian speaking, and had musical occupations during the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I met some Romungre in Pod, most of whom only spoke Romanian. Roma musicians in Wallachia were known as Lăutari; I met some Lăutari in Clejani. The repertoire and audiences of Romungre and Lăutari musicians diverged with the music and histories of Austro-Hungary and Romania respectively, until 1918, when Transylvania became part of Greater Romania. Transylvanian music and Romungre musicians were ‘rediscovered’ by the Tanchaz movement as Hungarian folk music in the 1970s. From socialism to post-socialism, Transylvania remained the repository of folk music for Hungarian musicologists and nationalists alike. Muzica lăutărească – the music of the Lăutari in Wallachia – had strong Turkish influences, evident today in manele, the most popular genre, played predominantly by Roma musicians in Wallachia. Today manele production is most powerful in Bucharest, and the concentration of media production and political power in the city has made certain groups of Roma, especially those in and around Bucharest, more visible in the national arena. The media brought to Pod the sounds and sights of manele from Bucharest, and Roma in Pod enjoyed, consumed and performed manele and a traditional Roma dance known locally as csingeralas, a type of verbunk, part of the Tanchaz music. However, ‘manelists’ are most numerous in the south of Romania, and manele are equally popular in Transylvania.

Despite the diversity that characterizes both Roma and their musical production, and despite their significant musical success, this book shows that Roma have not gained a legitimate place as a culture in the national imaginary, and they continue to be denied cultural citizenship, even when their music is praised. While Roma musicians’ performances may continue lucrative stereotypes about Roma that have existed for centuries, from the perspective of a Roma counterpublic, these performances can be read as performances of citizenship. As the advent of neoliberalism under monoethnic nationalism has maintained the citizenship gap for Roma, paying attention to the subjectivities of Roma and including them as equal partners in social and cultural programmes could be a first step for state institutions to take in bridging this gap.