Abstract:
This article studies anti-Roma racism as a transnational phenomenon from the perspective of locally entrenched social history. Based on the idea that local contexts provide particulars of more complex phenomena, this article studies the Roma of the province of Bizkaia (Basque Country, Spain) in the nineteenth century to illustrate anti-Roma racism in other contexts. The work deals with anti-Roma racism as it appeared in Bizkaian texts of a judicial nature, such as orders, official letters, notices and records. The authors show that the Basque Country took great efforts to eliminate the presence of Roma in its territories. Roma were not allowed to enter the territory of Bizkaia and local authorities were ordered to detain and expel all Roma from Bizkaian territories. These measures did not apply to autochthonous convicts of non-Roma origin and yet targeted the Roma explicitly, thus rendering them into presumed culprits. All this was not an exception but rather a common pattern of anti-Roma racism, well-documented in the rest of Spain, Europe and the world at the time.

Bio: 
Rafael Buhigas Jiménez holds a PhD in Contemporary History with the first thesis written on the history of the Roma people during the Franco dictatorship in Spain. His research focuses on the processes of racialization, antigypsyism, and segregation.