WHAT IS IN A NAME?

Growing up in Romania, I thought the colorfully-dressed, dark-skinned, boisterous strangers were quite distant from my own culture, quite exotic by any Romanian social standards, although present among us "Romanians." I believed at the time that "they" had only one name: "tigani" in Romanian. The term seemed linked to social expectations of negative, asocial behavior or personalities. I learned only much later to critically analyze the ways in which this term was a historical construct and how because of historical patterns of marginalization - which included slavery in the Romanian territories and extermination during the Holocaust - the name became loaded with pejorative connotations such as "thief" or "worse than animals." The spite with which the word was pronounced around me by other Romanians much too often, as I was growing up, was so powerful that it felt like transgression, outright rebellion, on my behalf, when I decided during my sophomore year at Stanford University that I would go back to Romania for the summer and study the ways of the "tigani." My own friends and family regarded them as unworthy of my time, the worst possible choice in many ways, and seriously began to doubt my academic prowess and sense of direction in life.

I had learned English upon immigrating to the States at the age of fourteen, but nonetheless successfully completed 8th grade and excelled in the International Baccalaureate Program featured at my public high school in Chicago. I had done well on my pre-SAT tests, was a National Merit Finalist, and graduated as the Valedictorian of Class of 2000. At graduation, the mayor of Chicago congratulated me on my speech, which focused on cheering students on as they would go on and try to improve their own lives and the lives of others. My admission to Stanford was well deserved, I felt, and it was not on a whim that I chose to study the unknown others, the "tigani" - I was intellectually helping myself figure out a puzzling dilemma: who were these strangers among us, back in Romania? And am I possibly very much like them now that I feel such a stranger surrounded by the rest of America?

My initial Internet searches and loads of library books allowed me to win a summer grant that would allow my research, and so I embarked on a voyage of discovery which lead me to think now, almost nine years later, that observing these people holds as many enigmas and variety of is subjects as the sea. First lesson I learned was that indeed, the term "tigani" along with the term "Gypsy" and their popular equivalents in many languages "zigeuner" and so forth derrive from the Greek term "atinganoi" which meant untouchables. To let the people speak for themselves, here is an Internet link which features a useful condensation of the debate about the names these people often have been associated with or with which they associated themselves - which I will later unfold: file:///Users/Diana/Desktop/DATA.DONTOPEN!!!/NAMING%20ROMA.webarchive

The debate that appears at this link is between people who self-identify as insiders to this minority. I let them speak for themselves. The European Union consensus or the official international standard for naming the whole ethnic minority is the following, deriving from their own language, Romanes: the "ROMA" or the "ROMANY PEOPLE." The "Romany identity" therefore appeared primarily as political discourse driven by an activist agenda to raise above historically constructed, loaded terminologies. The birth and shape of the "Romany ideantity" is fully represented on the official EU site: http://www.rroma-europa.eu/uk/sc_en.html and its associated links.