Geography Reference
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speak of the Roma in terms of their being alienated from Rome and the Romans
means ignoring one of the important dimensions of the Roma presence in a ter-
ritory: their stability.
one could think of stability in the emotional sense, as attachment to a ter-
ritory that symbolizes one's “own place”; but thinking it through to the end, one
could be emotionally, yet not socially, established in a physical territory, in an ex-
aggerated version of that condition described by hannerz ([1980] 1992) as “encap-
sulation”: in other words, being among other people but nevertheless strangers
to them. to make this vague concept of stability easier to grasp, this chapter will
speak in relational terms: that is, about stability as the consequence of ongoing
relationships, the fruit of coexistence—maybe contentious but nevertheless en-
during—between the people of Rome and the Roma; in other words, something
that belongs to the daily experience of lives that are interwoven in sharing the
same territory, whether out of choice or necessity.
stability
my main concern in this study is to provide some examples of the territorial sta-
bility of Roma who have arrived from the former Yugoslavia, and of the combina-
tion between this stability and some forms of mobility.4 i shall focus on a group of
bosnian Xoraxané Roma, the bijeljincuri (or bijeljinakuri) and the Vlasenicakuri
(they hail, respectively, from the towns of bijeljina and Vlasenica).5 The stability
of these Roma is the outcome of a long process of settlement; this started in the
1960s, continued in subsequent decades, and intensified during the conflict in
Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
The main settlement area for the Vlasenicakuri and the bijeljincuri is the
district to the southwest of Rome, surrounding the magliana quarter and ex-
tending south to the neighborhoods of ostiense, marconi, Garbatella, san paolo,
Villa bonelli, trullo, Corviale, eur, tor di Valle, and muratella. some Vlaseni-
cakuri families, insofar as i have been able to reconstruct the information from
my interlocutors, were already present and settled in the territory from the 1970s.
but the first arrivals of the bijeljincuri, linked to the Vlasenicakuri by kinship
and a shared past in Vlasenica,6 began in the late 1980s. between 1991 and 2003,
the Roma from Vlasenica and bijeljina lived mainly in the camps of Via Candoni
and muratella. after the forced eviction of the latter in august 2003, the Roma
were dispersed: some of them went to live in other cities or abroad, but most of
them stayed in Rome. of these, various Vlasenicakuri families moved to other
districts (mainly bastoggi, around the official camp on Via della Cesarina—near
the Via Nomentana—and the Roman coast), although some of them have con-
tinued to frequent the magliana area. The bijeljincuri, after two years of moving
between Rome (invariably the southwest quarter) and the adriatic coast, found
accommodation for the most part in the official camp in Via Candoni; other
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