Gypsies: The hidden Americans

“Gypsy.” The very word suggests the exotic and mysterious, the tribal and nomadic - customs and ways strikingly at odds with those of modern Western life. Periodically, observers pronounce the end of the “Gypsy life,” and the inevitability of the assimilation of Gypsies into modern society. Yet Gypsies survive - separate, secretive, unique among the people of the world - and they have preserved their traditional way of life. How have they avoided assimilation, yet adapted to an industrial society? What keeps them apart? How are they organized, and what do they believe? How do they live in the America of the 1970’s? This book - the first complete account of American Gypsies - answers these questions. Anne Sutherland spent two years in close, continuous contact with a kumpania (community) of Rom Gypsies living in “Barvale, California,” part of that time as principal of their “Romany school.” Overcoming the secrecy, suspicion, and deception with which the Rom commonly treat all gaje, or non-Gypsies, Sutherland has produced an in-depth look at the full range of everyday social life among the Rom. Gypsies details the Rom kinship system, marriage patterns, and leadership structure within the kumpania; their relations with non-Rom Gypsies and with the gaje, the nature and function of their present-day nomadism, and the flexible economic system and inflexible moral system which have combined to protect the Rom way of life for centuries. Included here is an extraordinary first-hand account of a kris romani - a Rom trial - from initial dispute to final settlement. The portrait that emerges provides an important and intriguing study of the adaptive patterns and current life-style of the American Rom. Not officially recognized as a minority in the U.S. until 1972, Gypsies have led an almost entirely invisible existence here. Now we have this fascinating contemporary view of these “hidden Americans” BOOK JACKET