Evicting Rome’s Undesirables - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 101

they had become well-established over the years, developing close and mutually
beneficial commercial relations with their italian clients (collectors, antiquar-
ians, etc.), which allowed them to earn a legal and adequate income. moreover,
it gave many women an unprecedented central role both in family finances
and in relations with non-Roma clients, since they were the ones primarily re-
sponsible for collecting and selling the goods. as the anthropological literature
documents (leiris 1951; bestor 2001; aime 2002), porta portese and many other
smaller neighborhood markets had become a space of interaction and exchange,
enabling Roma to develop strategies of inclusion through commercial activities.
Their presence in porta portese was brought to a halt by constant municipal po-
lice checks due to allegations of illegal activities there.
in response to this exclusion, italian NGos and Roma groups sought alter-
native locations in which to resume commercial activities and created various
pijats, often merging with smaller markets which had formed to display Roma
craftsmanship. These exclusively Romani spaces gradually mutated into new
contexts for interaction with the rest of society. There are currently at least four
such pijats on the southern side of the city and although the vicolo savini one
was established by a family that had lived on that street for over twenty years,
sellers include Roma from both legal and unauthorized camps in the vicinity.
like the other Roma markets, this one has always had a very precarious status.
its organizers have so far been unable to obtain official permits for the stalls de-
spite repeated appeals to the authorities underlining that such permits would
help them regularize their legal and tax status in the country. instead, this lack of
institutional recognition of the pijats keeps them in a state of constant instability
since, as has already happened various times, the authorities can disrupt business
at any moment, confiscating material and checking people's immigration status.
The precariousness of the pijats thus becomes an extension of the condition of
insecurity and fear of police controls which haunts the daily life of many Roma
in the city. This regime of instability is evident in the management of formal “no-
mad camps” such as Castel Romano, but is even more critical for those who live
in unauthorized encampments and for whom the collection and sale of recycled
goods is often the only source of income.
from shantytowns to Global media and back again
since the winter of 2007, the presence of unauthorized settlements has been one
of the most pressing issues of political debate in the city; they are generally de-
fined as a major source of insecurity and degradation, requiring decisive and
direct intervention on the part of the institutions. These settlements are mostly,
though not exclusively, the result of recent migration flows from Romania, which
were already becoming substantial in 2001 and increased further with the coun-
try's accession to the european union in 2007. The encampments vary in size;