gitanos

elsa had warned me about gitanos, the iberian gypsies. consensus was that they were shameless thieves, first class cons and brutish barbarians, not to mention stinky and rowdy marginals.

gypsy barrios - essentially seedy, overcrowded concrete compounds - are the sadly successful outcome of the spanish authorities' assimilation crusade. some twenty years ago, iberia's last rebellious nomads were crammed into sterile apartment buildings which, in the rough hands of these former tent-dwellers, quickly fell prey to accelerated decay.

gypsies are also called "rom" (free man) and have been associated with the dom indian caste. they are believed to have abandoned their native punjab around the year 900. linguists have even traced back the origins of romani - the traditional gypsy idiom - to sanskrit, and uncovered shared features with modern darvinian languages such as hindi, bengali, and panjabi. so gypsies settled in spain around 1425 and nearly 600 years later, gitanos were still completely alienated mostly because they had retained much of their traditional beliefs and way of life.

few are the metro trips where a couple of gypsies don´t jump into a crammed car dragging a pull cart containing a mini p.a. system, only to whip out a mike. next thing is you are being treated to a syrupy but abbreviated version of some spanish tune, like it or not. oftentimes, the second gitano looks around with an expression of the most intense boredom while smacking a tambourine to the beat and pelting out the chorus. it´s all very entertaining. of course, the hat is passed around before the metro pulls into the next station...