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the spanish gypsy

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[ii]
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The Spanish Gypsy

THE HISTORY OF A EUROPEAN OBSESSION

LOU CHARNON-DEUTSCH

T H E P E N N S Y LVA N I A S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

UNIVERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA

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Disclaimer:
Some images in the original version of this book are not
available for inclusion in the eBook.

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant

from the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain’s Ministry
of Education, Culture, and Sports and United States Universities.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Charnon-Deutsch, Lou.
The Spanish Gypsy : the history of a European obsession / Lou Charnon-Deutsch.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-271-02359-7 (alk. paper)
1. Romanies—Spain—History.
2. Romanies—Europe—History.
I. Title.

DX251 .C48 2004

946´.00491497—dc21
2003010254

Copyright © 2004 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802-1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the

Association of American University Presses.

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press

to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the
minimum requirements of American National Standard for
Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Material,
ANSI Z39.48–1992.
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In memory of Roma Holocaust Victims

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

[1]
Cervantes’ Precious Jewel of Love 17

[2]
The Discovery of the Romantic Spanish Gypsy 45

[3]
Spreading the Good Word 87

[4]
The Legacy of the Romany Rye 125

[5]
“Our” Gypsies 179

Conclusion 239

Notes 243

Bibliography 265

Index 279

[vii]
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List of Illustrations

1 John Fulton, Illustration of Magdalena López for James Michener, Miracle in

Seville (1995).
2 Frontispiece, Sancho de Moncada, Expulsión de los gitanos (1619).
3 L’Egytienne, illustration for Miguel de Cervantes, Nouvelles (1709 French edi-
tion). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer
Research Library, University of Kansas.
4 Charles Auguste Steuben, La Esmeralda (1839). Art Resource, New York
(photo: Erich Lessing).
5 Alfred Dehodencq, Bohémiens sur route (1856–63).
6 J. Rougeron, Zambra de gitanos (1883).
7 Baldomero Galofre y Jiménez, En la feria (detail) (1894).
8 Gustave Doré, Gitana dansant le vito sevillano (1862–73).
9 Gustave Doré, Famille de gitanos, a Totana (1862–73).
10 Gustave Doré, Toilette d’une gitana, a Diezma (1862–73).
11 Gustave Doré, Famille de musiciens nomades (1862–73).
12 Gustave Doré, Guitarrero et danseuse ambulante (1862–73).
13 Gipsies at Granada, unsigned sketch in Henry Blackburn’s Travelling in Spain
in the Present Day (1866).
14 Henry Phillip, Gipsies Dancing the Vito, in Lady Louisa Tenison’s Castile and
Andalucia (1853).
15 Cover of Catulle Mendès, Rodolphe Darzens, Les Belles au monde (1889).
16 Pierre Louÿs, illustration from La Femme et le pantin (1899), 56.
17 Harry Franck, unsigned photograph of author in Four Months Afoot in Spain
(1911).
18 Walter Starkie, The author playing the Wddle. . . . Unsigned photograph in In
Sara’s Tents (1953), 246. Courtesy of Michael Starkie.
19 Pichi Hotorovitch: The Gypsy Princess, photograph by José Porta in In Sara’s Tents
(1953), n.p. Courtesy of Michael Starkie.
20 Gypsy Nomads: Barcelona, photograph by José Porta, in In Sara’s Tents (1953),
n.p. Courtesy of Michael Starkie.

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list of illustrations

21 Pepita, illustration from Vita Sackville-West’s Pepita (1938), frontispiece. Re-

produced with permission of the Curtis Brown Group, Ltd., London, on behalf
of the Estate of Vita Sackville-West. Copyright © Vita Sackville-West.
22 Gypsies of Sacro Monte, unsigned photograph in Juliette de Baïracli Levy’s As
Gypsies Wander (1953), n.p.
23 Lillian Polhemus, The author. A few days after her return from Spain. . . . Photo-
graph by Pharaba Shirley, in Lillian Polhemus’s Good-bye Gypsy (1968).
24 Untitled photograph by André A. López in Jan Yoors’s The Gypsies of Spain
(1974). Courtesy of André A. López.
25 Ángel de Huertas, Una gitana, in Blanco y Negro 466 (18 November 1899),
cover.
26 Y así granizaron sobre ella cuartos. . . . Scene from “La gitanilla,” in Ilustración
Artística 27.1357 (1 January 1908), 5.
27 Julio Romero de Torres, Musa gitana (1908). Courtesy of Mercedes Valverde
Candil, directora de los Museos Municipales, Excmo Ayuntamiento de Córdoba.
28 Julio Romero de Torres, Cante jondo (1930). Courtesy of Mercedes Valverde Can-
dil, directora de los Museos Municipales, Excmo Ayuntamiento de Córdoba.
29 Figurita posterior al Diluvio, unsigned photo, to the right of a sketch of a can-
taora from José Carlos de Luna’s Gitanos de la Bética (1951). Courtesy of Pedro
Cervera Corbacho, Servicio de Publicaciones, Universidad de Cádiz.
30 Los ojos de los gitanos, unsigned photo from José Carlos de Luna’s Gitanos de la
Bética (1951). Courtesy of Pedro Cervera Corbacho, Servicio de Publicaciones,
Universidad de Cádiz.
31 La Lola se va los Puertos, clip from Wlm directed by Juan de Orduña (1942).

[x]
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Acknowledgments

many thanks to the friends and colleagues who read all or portions of the
early drafts of this book and supported me with their encouragement and exper-
tise, especially Alda Blanco, Maria Luisa Nunes, Malcolm Read, Temma Kaplan,
Barbara Morris, Jo Labanyi, Helen Cooper and Adrienne Munich. I wish to thank
the State University of New York at Stony Brook for granting me a research leave
during which major portions of the book were completed and the National Endow-
ment for the Humanities for the grant that permitted me to complete the Wnal
chapters. I am also grateful to the many librarians at the State University of New
York who assisted me in the lengthy process of gathering materials and photo-
graphs, especially Donna Sammis, David Wiener, and Amelia Salinero. David
Simpson was a great help in locating and retrieving books from the New York Pub-
lic Library and Kathy A. Lafferty of the University of Kansas Spencer Library
assisted me in the quest to scan rare images. The burden of gathering informa-
tion was also cheerfully borne by María Bobadilla, Eduardo Barros-Grela, Sarah
Battaglia, Betty De Simone, Renee Deutsch, Melvin Simpson, Giulia Simpson, and
Lucía Reyes. The commitment to excellence on the part of the team of editors at
Penn State Press––Gloria Kury, Cherene Holland, Timothy Holsopple, and Ann
Farkas among them––greatly facilitated the Wnal stages of the production progress.
Finally, I owe thanks to the many colleagues who supported my efforts either by
sharing ideas or encouraging me to persist in publishing this manuscript: Román
De la Campa, Kathleen Vernon, James Mandrell, Rosemary Geisdorfer-Feal, Carlos
Feal, José Colmeiro, José del Pino, Jesús Torrecilla, E. Ann Kaplan, Juan Carlos
Rodríguez, Louise Vasvari, and Eva Woods. And, as always, I owe many thanks to
Dale for soup-to-nuts support.

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Introduction

Sources that speak about Gypsies are never very trustworthy.

—teresa de san román, La diferencia inquietante, xvii

Miracle in Seville

when asked to picture in their mind the Gypsies, many people, especially
those with little or no contact with real Romany people, conjure up images of Xam-
enco dancers, colorful wagons, dark-eyed fortune-tellers, horse traders, tinkers, a
panoply of picturesque Wgures that invoke the stereotypes of the Romantic era.
Shortly before his death in 1997, the proliWc novelist James Michener succumbed
to the temptation to revisit some of the most hackneyed of Gypsy stereotypes he
had earlier mostly avoided in Iberia (1968), as a backdrop to a book that showcased
his status as serious aWcionado of the bullWght. In Miracle in Seville (1995), a bizarre
novella that Michener called a “fantasy,” an American journalist tells the story of
two powerful women who battle it out during Holy Week festivities in Seville: a
luminous and compassionate Virgin Mary and an evil Gypsy fortune-teller Magda-
lena López. The battle between heaven’s benevolent powers and Gypsy black magic
and animal cleverness, in other words, between good and evil, is as old as the stones
in the bridge that separate the “real Spain” of the Triana Gypsy district from the
glittering streets of Seville on the opposite side of the Guadalquivir River.

[1]
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introduction

Thinking back on their supernatural powers, the narrator muses that

women “possess an arcane power to inXuence men, making them see visions and
inXuencing them to perform acts they would not normally commit.”1 The Virgin
intercedes on behalf of the proprietor of a famous bull ranch who hopes to stage a
comeback for his bulls. The Gypsy applies her dark magic to protect her cowardly
brother from the horns of a Werce bull and the crowd’s anger at his cowardice.
Michener’s scraggly bullWghter Lázaro López incarnates many of the worst com-
monplaces of the male Gypsy stereotype. The narrator, an American journalist,
derides him as an unlikely bearer of the proud tradition of matador. His style is full
of Xare and daring in the early stages of the bullWght, but when in the end the bull
charges and the matador must plant his feet for the kill, his bravery deserts him
and he resorts to shameless tricks to exit the bullring. Immune to the jeers of the
spectators, he beats a hasty retreat, dodging the cushions and bottles thrown at him
from the stands. In the taverns of Triana, however, López is a boastful and pompous
ass, a hero to the Gypsies who pathetically gather around him and revere him as
someone who has made it.
While the Gypsy bullWghter symbolizes all that is wrong with the Span-
ish male Gypsy, his sister Magdalena, pictured in Figure 1, is a much more com-
plex Wgure who evokes the mystery and lure of the unknown. The purpose of my
book is to trace and analyze the many inXuences that have cast their shadow over
such Wgures as Michener’s mysterious fortune-teller Magdalena. I focus especially
on what many writers before Michener imagined as the “arcane power” of Gypsy
women to inXuence men “to perform acts they would not normally commit.” Chief
among these is the Carmen myth that is perennially reborn in European and
American culture. Michener’s “fantasy” is one of hundreds of musical, artistic, and
literary works set “not far from that famous cigarette factory where Carmen with
the rose between her teeth bewitched the Spanish captain sent to guard her.”2 In
the battle between the Virgin and the Gypsy in Michener’s novella, the Gypsy
woman triumphs, possibly because hers is the power of the sexual predator and
her visage is that of “the kind of woman men do not forget, with Xashing eyes that
seemed to throw sparks.”3 In reality of course, Magdalena is unforgettable because
she is a product of a collective memory, a fatally attractive woman who Xashes her
eyes across four centuries in all forms of art, joining the ranks of the Virgin Mary
as one of the most ubiquitous icons of Western culture.
Magdalena’s “people” are imagined as belonging to another world, often
associated with Egypt as here in Michener’s version, insinuating themselves into
European societies through trickery and monumental scams. In Michener’s version,
the Gypsies had crossed into Spain 500 years earlier and had bamboozled the king
of Spain into believing that they were collecting money to rescue an isolated group
of Christians from Muslim tyranny somewhere in Egypt.4 As will be clear in the

[2]
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Image not available

fig. 1 John Fulton, Illustration of Magdalena López for James Michener, Miracle in Seville (1995).
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introduction

following chapters, there are hundreds of stories of how this foreign import came
to occupy such an important symbolic space in the Western imaginary. This book,
then, is not about the real Romany, even though it is dedicated to those very real
victims who lost their lives in the Holocaust, but about the idealized and some-
times demonized Wgure of the Spanish Gypsy, conceived throughout hundreds of
years as a foreign and exotic presence who stealthfully imported something of the
East into the West that hundreds of years have been unable to eradicate.

Myths of Gypsy Origin and Being

One of the reasons that Gypsies hold such fascination is that they play an impor-
tant role in the evolution of Western myths of origin and being. Who am I? and
Where do I come from? are among the oldest questions implicit in the complex
genealogies of every European culture. At some point in its evolution, every self-
proclaimed nation provides itself with a “spontaneous anthropology” to answer
these questions in the most gratifying way.5 What concerns me in this introduction
to the imaginary Gypsy are two related questions that underpin myths of origin:
Who are they? and Where do they come from? To understand Europe’s centuries-
old investment in the Gypsy as a quintessential other residing problematically on
“home ground” requires a discussion not of sameness but of otherness and other-
ing, and ultimately of racism in the modern, anthropological conWgurations it
came to have in the nineteenth century.
The story begins much earlier, however, with medieval myths of origin
that eventually gave rise to racialized thinking in the regions of premodern Europe
where groups of people either called or calling themselves Egyptians Wrst migrated
eastward into modern-day Germany. The task of tracing their myths of origin and
migrations is complicated for two reasons, Wrst because, as historians and anthro-
pologists have so meticulously documented, myths of origin differ substantially
from region to region even among groups considered consanguineous; and, second,
myths are susceptible to striking reversals depending on the ruling classes to which
their spokespersons owe allegiance. Thus, at various moments in French history
the Franks were champions of liberty and independence or, as Voltaire considered
them, “ferocious beasts in search of pasture, of shelter, and of some protection
against the snow.”6 Their predecessors the Gauls were either inferior barbarians
easily conquered by the Romans and later the Franks, as portrayed by some En-
lightenment writers, or noble serfs of a proud Celtic heritage, as the children of the
French Revolution chose to understand them. Little wonder, then, that myths of
origin assigned by dominant groups to marginalized groups who have never risen
to positions of great political or economic power should seem so unremarkable or

[4]
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introduction

even ignominious, for how else could the pedigree of the dominant peoples who
fashioned them be contrasted with that of subjugated groups?
For this reason the earliest European myths regarding the origins and
migrations of the Roma/Romany peoples are singularly unheroic. Their arrival in
Persia is one of the more fanciful accounts of their migration out of India. In the
historian Hamza of Esfahan’s version (c. 950), Bahram Gor, a Sasanian Perisan king,
persuaded the king of India to send 12,000 Zott musicians, the Romany ancestors,
to entertain his troops in 400 C.E. The appearance of “Egyptians,” as they were
often called in the Balkans and later in Eastern Europe, is usually associated with
the great struggles among warring empires in which the Roma played only a minor
service role, according to later historians. Most of the accounts describing their
appearance in the Balkans coincide with advances or declines of the Byzantine
Empire. For example, in some accounts the Byzantines brought the Zotts to Con-
stantinople as slaves from their raids on Syria in 855. In other accounts the Seljuk
Turks drove them into the Western Byzantine Empire beginning in the mid-
eleventh century during their raids into Armenia. Some hold them to be remnants
of the Ottoman Turks attached to the invading armies who lingered in Eastern
Europe after a defeat of the Byzantine empire in 1071, and many early Europeans
simply identiWed them with heathen Saracens.
In the Middle Ages, the myths and legends that grew up around the Egyp-
tians often reXected the protoracism inherent in Christian biblical genealogies: They
were descendants of Ham, forever marked by the sins of Cain; they had denied suc-
cor to the Holy Family as it Xed into Egypt and so were cursed to wander the world
to atone for their refusal; they were the Egyptians of the old Testament, who,
Ezekiel prophesized, would be dispersed among the nations; they had denied their
Christian faith and were being punished by forced pilgrimage for Wve years, or ten,
or forever; they were survivors of the Pharaoh’s armies that had driven the Hebrews
out of Egypt; or, Wnally, they were a people forever cursed after they participated in
the death of the Christ by making the nails with which he was cruciWed.7
By comparing early Romany history and early European preracism, we see
also that the arrival of Romany groups in Central Europe coincided with the ear-
liest versions of the myth of pre-Adamic peoples or, as it was commonly called,
polygeny, which Kenan Malik has shown was crucial in the formation of the mod-
ern meaning of race. Already in the fourteenth century, European philosophers were
beginning to challenge biblical genealogies that traced all human origins to one
man, speculating that Adam may have been preceded by other groups of people
perhaps originating in India rather than the Middle East. The discovery of new
continents with indigenous peoples lacking all knowledge of either classical or
biblical genealogies widened speculation about race and fueled debates about a uni-
versal descent from Adam. Religious genealogies were gradually replaced or fused

[5]
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introduction

with new discourses on race that came to be used more and more as a measure of
sameness and difference and ultimately as justiWcation for further marginalizing
minorities or subjugating conquered peoples. Peoples were still forced into slavery
based on whether they were thought to be sons of Adam. For example, American
Indians won this lottery to the detriment of Africans imported to South America
as slaves. But decisions affecting whole populations increasingly relied on the
degree of perceived whiteness and other physiological or atavistic characteristics,
thus giving rise to the complex racial classiWcations that would become so impor-
tant to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers.
This shift in myths became especially pronounced during the Enlight-
enment with the rise of the new sciences of man, notably physical anthropology
and linguistics. The establishment of the family tree of Indo-European languages
dates at least as far back as William Jones’s 1788 essay on Sanskrit. Sanskrit stud-
ies fueled the complex theories that fused biblical and anthropological accounts of
human descent. In the late 1700s Immanuel Kant sought, as others did, to Wnd
modern validation for the Great Flood. Reasoning that Tibet was the cradle of civ-
ilization since it had the highest mountains, Kant speculated that Noah’s ark must
have landed there. This turned out to be a useful argument for German national-
ists seeking to valorize German’s Aryan derivation. If Noah’s ark had landed in
India and not in the Middle East, then the “Indo-Germanic” race would be able
to claim the most direct, least contaminated link with human origins. Many of the
earliest arguments about the racial purity of the German race were linked with
such reasoning about Noah’s connection to the Aryan race. Poliakov speculates that
in part the turn to India was an effort to devise a rival origin to that of the Hebrew
pantheon, in other words, the shift had protoracist undertones. Eventually, Ger-
man thinkers lined up to “extricate [themselves] from Judeo-Christian fetters.”8
For example, Johann Gottfried Herder, in Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der
Menschheit (Outlines of the philosophy of the history of man, 1784–91), was one of
several contemporary German scholars who vigorously denied a Hebrew genealogy
in favor of an Indian pantheon.
Ironically, during this time when some European nations were redesign-
ing their myths of origin in favor of an Aryan ascendance, linguists were busy
verifying the Indian origin of the Romani language. Romani dialects Wrst became
an object of interest in 1775–76 when a series of articles in a German-language
Hungarian journal, the Wiener Anzeigen (Viennese notices), reported that a Hun-
garian pastor named István Váli had noticed an afWnity between Romani and the
dialect of Malabar students attending the University of Leiden.9 A few years later
Heinrich Grellmann in Die Zigeuner (The Gypsies, 1782) ventured the theory that
the groups he loosely identiWed as Zigeuner were a separate people who, based on
linguistic studies, could be traced to an Indian homeland. For the next hundred

[6]
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introduction

years, linguists would examine more closely the Romani dialects of Eastern Europe
and ratify Grellmann’s conclusion that Gypsies were racially akin to Indians. By
1870 when Alexandre Paspati published his inXuential Études sur les Tchinghianés ou
bohémiens de l’Empire Ottoman (Studies on the Gypsies or Bohemians of the Ottoman
Empire), which purported to trace the earliest migrations of the Roma, it was gen-
erally accepted by philologists that Romani and certain Indian languages had a
common Sanskrit origin. It then became expedient to distinguish the strains of
Sanskrit to differentiate the groups that had migrated out of India and to establish
a hierarchy of Indo-European peoples in which Gypsies, thought to be descendants
of the pariah or low caste, were either excluded or assigned to the lowest category
of migratory groups.
Like their Enlightenment predecessors, the Romantics expressed great
admiration for Indian language, philosophy, architecture, and religion. By the
beginning of the nineteenth century the cult of Indian culture had reached an
apogee with Carl Schlegel’s 1808 essay Über die Sprache und die Weisheit der Indier
(On the language and wisdom of the Indians). But with the rise of the physical
sciences and the concomitant waning of the importance of biblical genealogies,
philologists and anthropologists began devising other classiWcatory systems besides
language to assess the value and origins of marginal groups. Depending on their
lifestyles and professions, for example, groups were scaled on a grid with nature on
one end and civilization and progress on the other. For some nineteenth-century
thinkers, Gypsies represented a valuable link with nature that had been lost to
modern societies. In 1882 the British philologist Charles G. Leland praised the
wanderers he met along country byways who inhabited the scenery instead of
houses. If you long to be a bird Xying south for the winter, he rhapsodized, then
you are not far from the spirit of the Bohemians: “They are human, but in their
lives they are between man as he lives in houses and the bee and bird and fox,
and I cannot help believing that those who have no sympathy with them have
none for the forest and road and cannot be rightly familiar with the witchery of
wood and wold.”10 Gypsies should be treasured instead of reviled, he reasoned,
since they represent links “which connect the simple feeling of nature with
romance.”11 Like children they lack the words to express the “sense of nature and
its charm, but they have this sense, and there are very, very few who, acquiring cul-
ture, retain it.”12 For Leland and some of his Gypsyphile friends, there was an
afWnity between Gypsies and a vanishing femininity that everywhere was being
replaced by intellect and fashion. If Gypsies could be imagined as a prelapsarian
people who lived in happy communion with nature, as Leland and many others
of his generation imagined them, then hatred of Gypsies would be akin to hatred
of dogs or trees. The problem is, of course, that hating dogs and trees might seem
foolish to a Gypsyologist like Leland, but liking or disliking animals or plants

[7]
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introduction

was a matter of taste, not of social justice, and justice for Gypsies was in short sup-
ply in Leland’s England.
What struck Leland most about modern-day Gypsies was the fact that they
were wanderers. In Poliakov’s opinion, this fascination with the wandering Gypsy
is related to man’s primitive narcissism, the universal aspiration to recover an
archaic stage before individuation. Exalting nature was also an affront to the Judeo-
Christian religions that had endeavored to establish man as “a creature apart—a
‘cultural’ as opposed to a ‘natural’ being.”13 In short, Gypsies were “natural” men
if not altogether “noble” savages. Since Leland and other early anthropologists and
linguists believed that the Roma were descendants of an undetermined Indian peri-
patetic group, speculating about their origins and wanderings became a challeng-
ing and exciting pastime. Leland’s theory was that Gypsies descended from the
warrior Jats who centuries earlier had migrated from India westward into Syria
and eventually Europe, acquiring the habits and professions of the people with
whom they came into contact and bequeathing them atavistically to their descen-
dants. Already in the eleventh century, their “callings” were hereditary, and they
exhibited an inveterate attachment to certain unfortunate “habits.” In a move that
we will see is typical of most writings on Gypsies, Leland mixes “callings” or pro-
fessions together with “habits” or group traits in his description of the earliest
Gypsies. They were, he reported, “without religion,” “notorious thieves,” and “of
the horse horsey.”14 Before leaving India, Leland further speculated, Gypsies had
intermingled with other groups like the Dom or Domarr, a pre-Aryan group who
reportedly were basket weavers, heavy drinkers, carrion eaters, nomads, shepherds,
and robbers. Later they came into contact with the Luri of Persia, a group of
“thieves, fortune-tellers, and minstrels.” Descendants of these Luri still roam in
Syria, Turkey, and Rumania where they are kidnappers and pilferers whose “prin-
cipal pastimes are drinking, dancing, and music.”15
While such speculations about the relation between ancient peoples and
their modern-day descendants may shock modern sensibilities, we must remember
that belief in atavism was commonplace among early social scientists. For example,
ever since the earliest discovery of the Indo-European origin of the German lan-
guage, German scholars had sought to endow their Aryan ancestors with quali-
ties that magniWed those they most admired in themselves. It follows that early
Gypsyologists should try to link what they perceived as the modern Gypsy charac-
ter to an imagined Indian prototype. In most accounts the Gypsy prototype was
the pariah caste of Indians, who even before migrating from Northern India had
constituted a doomed race. By demonstrating that the ancestors of the Gypsies
descended from the pariah caste of India, with all of the negative traits that Leland
ascribed to them, “governments and judicial authorities could legitimize their stig-
matizing policies by invoking scientiWc arguments.”16 For many Spanish writers,

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introduction

on the other hand, it became important to establish that the Gypsies (or Gitanos,
as they are generally called in Spain) originated in Egypt, not India, which further
exoticized them and thus distinguished them from non-Spanish Gypsies. But this
“distinction” did not translate into better treatment for the Spanish Romany any
more than an Indian pedigree helped the Zigeuner avoid racial scapegoating in
other European countries.

The Intransigence of Gypsy Myths

Another important question that dogs cultural anthropologists is why some myths
are so enduring. Solutions to this riddle can be roughly divided into two groups.
In our post-Freudian era myths of origin are often described as a natural response
that reXects the “permanent conXict which dwells in the heart of every human
being.”17 According to Sander Gilman, creating stereotypes is a coping device that
helps to overcome anxiety,18 and in his critical study of Orientalism Edward Said
remarked that it is “perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it
of untreated strangeness” by exoticizing the other.19 Poliakov urges us to relate the
aspiration to discover origins with an “urge to recover the euphoria which charac-
terizes the most archaic stage before individuation,” in other words, a narcissistic
stage preceding subjectivity before the separation of man and nature.20 Even those
who are invested in showing the nefarious consequences of these myths often rec-
ognize their stubborn prevalence as a naturally occurring phenomenon. However,
while Léon Poliakov’s The Aryan Myth convincingly distinguishes Europe’s myths
of origins and their modern permutations, detailing how and why certain changes
in the myths take place, his explanation for the compulsion to invent myths of ori-
gin is vague, invoking a kind of collective psychology based on a failed Oedipality
that can lead to pathological consequences (for example, as manifested in the Third
Reich). Certainly understanding and preventing the radical effects of this com-
pulsion in its most paranoid stages require a recognition of basic psychological
responses. Yet granting the compulsion ontological status is not as important as
recognizing that some eras are more prone to regressive tendencies than others,
because they are overdetermined by material, economic, and political factors.
Seeing the myth-making process as satisfying a deep psychological need
without simultaneously taking into consideration regional economic and cultural
realities leads to a dead-end acceptance of man’s innate tendency to engage in inter-
group conXict. Accepting that there is a deep psychological need to create myths of
origin as part of the process of establishing or afWrming afWnity does not adequately
explain why it is that Gypsies (or other pariah groups) have been cast for so long as
the outsiders even though they may have resided in a given place for centuries.

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introduction

A second strategy for explaining the perpetuation of Gypsy myths is to

avoid or diminish discussion of human compulsion and attribute the myth-making
phenomenon to political and economic expediency. Myths of racial superiority
then become part of a national false consciousness, a means to justify the dominance
of some groups over others, part of the ideological ballast that is the effect of an
imbalance of power and wealth. In this sense there is nothing “natural” about a
group’s need to justify itself; the causes are to be located in the material conditions
that should take center stage as providing the most accurate information about
the history of inequality. Arguing that there is a natural compulsion to estrange
oneself from the other, or that xenophobia and the demonizing of the other are
universally characteristic of kinship relations, may indeed be valid, but still can-
not tell us all we need to know to combat inequity and understand its structural
complexities.
One of the problems with Gypsy studies, according to Wim Willems, is
that there is a communis opinio about the origin, status, and habits of Gypsies.21
The study of Gypsies has been plagued for the last 200 years by this tendency to
collapse all Gypsies into a monolithic ethnic identity. There seems to be an un-
fortunate universal agreement about the label “Gypsy” that has impeded rational
discussion of origin, assimilation, persecution, and miscegenation: “The most
important cause for the failure of the historical picture to admit change is that most
writers about Gypsies accept the premise that they constitute one people with a
number of Wxed characteristics.”22 The following chapters trace the evolution of a
cultural icon that, I argue, helped to color and sustain the frozen historical picture
that Willems and others complain is so intransigent.
My contention is, Wrst, that the cultural representation of the Gypsy pro-
vides historians a useful grounding for the study of both the evolution of European
nationalisms and the complicated relations among Europe’s nations, and, second,
that Spain’s role in this evolution is especially key for understanding the Gypsy
stereotype. In the broadest terms, Spanish culture has had a dual relation with the
foundational narrative of Orientalism, both as a culture that repressed a constitu-
tive element of its historical identity, projecting it onto the Wgure of the exoticized
Gypsy, and one that has represented, since the 1700s onward, an exoticized other
to its Northern European counterparts.23
To understand fully the role that the internal colonization of the Spanish
Roma played in the construction of Spanish nationalism, cultural critics need to
analyze the economic and productive forces that impinge on discursive practices
that in turn participate in the construction of national identity. Recognizing the
interdeterminancy of Welds of representation––visual, literary, musical, historical,
and anthropological––exposes the constructedness of the imaginary Spanish Gypsy.
But to see this symbolic interface in its proper light, as a form of cultural capital

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introduction

with determined exchange values, we also need to analyze the historical contexts
for the deWnitions of Gypsyness. It is especially important to trace the collapse
of Gypsy identities into Andalusian identity, which by the twentieth century came
to stand for Spanishness both outside and, to an extent, inside Spain’s cultural
arena. The construction of the imaginary Gypsy depended on both intercultural
and interdisciplinary dialogue that until now has eluded us because of approaches
that are overly focused on a single culture or framed within a single disciplinary
approach.
Edward Said’s work has demonstrated how colonialism and imperialism
are facilitated by emphasizing difference and stratiWcation. In the case of the Roma,
who in early chronicles are usually described as invaders rather than conquered
peoples, we must speak of an interior rather than a foreign colonization, a self-
colonization that nevertheless resembles other forms of imperialism in speciWc
ways. Nation building and nationalism have a direct impact on the way dominant
groups construct marginalized ethnic groups simultaneously as diseased members
of a body that should be if not amputated at least quarantined, or, conversely, as
exotic assets to some imaginary pluralist society. With the waning of Enlighten-
ment universalism that sought to transcend human differences,24 racial difference
and inequality had to be explained by other means than mere cultural differences,
and the result was a scientiWc racism that relied on empirical data to stratify pop-
ulations. Science was called on to explain the inequities and differences endemic in
rising capitalist societies, and it obliged by explaining the Roma’s social degrada-
tion by recourse to physiological inferiority. Ethnic identity in the modern sense
is an offspring of the process of state formation; when nationalism is on the rise
in a given state, issues of difference generally gain prominence, and ethnic myths
proliferate. When measured against the progress and patriotism of a dominant
group, the disenfranchised of a nation are bound to suffer in comparison. The other-
ness of the disenfranchised group is then often maximized, or in some instances
sanitized and provisionally subsumed into the national identity when there is an
incentive to do so for reasons of exchange of cultural or economic capital. Where
we Wnd this otherness prominently manifested is in the discursive practices of
emerging capitalist states where Gypsies were always imagined in permanent exile
from some other place beyond national borders, even when, in fact, their Romany
groups had been residents for many generations.
One of the things that makes Gypsies so interesting but also so difWcult to
study is that they are what Benedict Anderson has recently described as both an
“unbound seriality,”25 by which he means a broad or “open-to-the-world” group
that has its origins in the print media, such as nationalists, anarchists, or bureau-
crats, and at the same time a “bound seriality” like Tutsis or Asian Americans.
However, to show how these categories are causally related, it is valuable to go

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introduction

beyond this dyad and to distinguish three discursive categories that have achieved
great symbolic prominence in discussions of Spanish culture. The Wrst, “gypsies”
with a lower-case g, roughly corresponds to a Romantic construction that still
abounds in contemporary cultures. Anyone who exhibits nomadic or rebellious
tendencies can be classiWed a gypsy; gypsies can be from anywhere and nowhere;
there are gypsy scholars, bohemian (bourgeois) artists, and gypsy “kings,” all of
whom have no ethnic afWnity with the Roma. And the imaginary Bohemia that
these “gypsies” inhabit, as Evelyn Gould points out, “has accomplished its imperial
goal, expanding its frontiers to embrace today’s Europe. . . . Bohemia continues to
be conceived still today as the social performance that both dramatizes ambivalence
about cultural identity and legitimates ambivalent cultural response.”26 In other
words, it is still desirable to identify with the freedom-loving, restless vagabond
as Gypsies have been imagined, beginning with Miguel de Cervantes’ novella “La
gitanilla” (The little Gypsy girl). The second category, the subject of this study
that most Payo (non-Roma) historians and writers designate as Gypsies with an
uppercase G (or Gitanos, when referring exclusively to Spanish Romany groups), is
a racialized designation that refers to any number of ethnic groups as they are
imagined by nonmembers of those groups. It is, nevertheless, ideologically aligned
with the previous category. Already in the seventeenth century Spanish counselors
of state, concerned with questions of blood and legitimacy, were debating whether
Gypsies were a race or a self-selected confederation of thieves, tinkers, musicians,
or fortune-tellers. As we shall see in Chapter 1, Cervantes’ contemporary Sancho
de Moncada was ambiguous about Gypsy racial status. On the one hand he claimed
that Gypsies were merely rufWans who banded together as thieves and ought to be
exterminated. Yet he sprinkled his text with citations of the Bible implying that
Gypsies descended from the Egyptians whom God had cast out into the world to
atone for their sins.
Gypsies as a racialized category came into clearest focus in the nineteenth
century with the rise of physical anthropology that distinguished groups accord-
ing to the “hard” aspects of ethnicity, such as phenotypical difference, cranium
size, facial features, and language. With the discovery of the Sanskrit origin of
Romani dialects and the work of Heinrich Grellmann, it was no longer fashionable
to speak of Gypsy speech as a rogue’s tongue, or jerigonza as it is called in Spanish,
and historians and philologists rallied to construct a more modern (nonbiblical, sci-
entiWcally based) myth of origin that still holds among many scholars: Gypsies
are descendants of pariahs who left northern India sometime during the Wfth to
the tenth centuries. Their diaspora continues, according to nineteenth-century
historians, because they observe strict endogamous practices and taboos against
intermarriage with Gorgios, Gadjés, Busnés, Payos (the various designations for
non-Roma). Coupled with the centuries-old negative stereotyping, the imagined

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introduction

purity of the Gypsy race encouraged communities to isolate and often stigmatize
their Romany communities, reinforcing negative conclusions regarding their patri-
otism, religious practices, and ability to be honest, productive citizens. In his
“objective” classiWcation of degenerate types in L’uomo delinquente (Criminal man,
1876), the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso relied on racialized categoriza-
tions, claiming that criminality was a consequence of atavistic biological stigmata
and that certain races, like Gypsies, were more predisposed to crime than others.
The Spanish social anthropologist Rafael Salillas in El delincuente español. El lenguaje
(The Spanish delinquent: The language; 1896) concurred, reporting that Gypsies
by nature and occupation were more akin to the delinquent than to the normal ele-
ments of society.27 The nefarious consequences of this racialization of the Roma
occurred during World War II when hundreds of thousands of Roma perished,
many exterminated in the Nazi death camps.
The third category is most commonly referred to in English as Roma,
Romá, Romani, Romany, or Travellers, subsets of which are the subjects that mod-
ern social scientists endeavor to study independently of the Wctions, stereotypes, or
racialized thinking associated with the other two categories. Twentieth-century
cultural and social anthropologists reject received stereotypes and avoid references
to ancient cultures, bloodlines, racial purity, and other pseudoscientiWc designa-
tions and instead examine the conditions and relations of speciWc ethnic groups,
such as the Romanichals, Kalderash, or Spanish Calés, with their non-Roma neigh-
bors. For today’s social scientists ethnic identities are more usefully thought of as
instrumentalist or functionalist rather than primordial, since race has been shown
to be a very inadequate marker of ethnicity.
Although Romany groups inhabit every European country, twentieth-
century social anthropologists have until recently not been eager to study them
because they were not considered an altogether separate culture; that is, they were
not exotic because they were “too close to home for comfort.”28 Students of mod-
ern anthropology often avoided or were discouraged from choosing Romany groups
for Weldwork because they resided in an anthropologically uninteresting Europe. In
recent decades, however, dozens of social anthropological studies have begun to
appear, such as Isabel Fonseca’s controversial Bury Me Standing or, in Spain, Teresa de
San Román’s Gitanos de Madrid y Barcelona (The Gypsies of Madrid and Barcelona;
1984) and La diferència inquietant (The disquieting difference; 1994). Anthropolo-
gists may argue certain universals, for instance, that the Roma constitute an ethnic
identity bound on the one hand by an often strict, self-imposed exclusivity, and on
the other by centuries of repression, persecution, and ghettoization. But they also
recognize that each Romany group has a geography of limited expanse, a national
identity, and a history bound up with the histories of European nation-states that
too often belittle, diminish, or overlook altogether their participation.

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introduction

The reason that I call this category discursive, however, is not to divorce
the term from its historical referent, but to argue that even the most objective,
consciously unbiased analysis of Romany communities too often slips into harm-
ful generalizations. Anthropologists have a tendency to abstract universals from
the study of samplings that are too small and too local, and through the uncritical
citation of dubious sources cultural historians as well as social scientists have
unwittingly perpetuated ancient stereotypes and generalizations that obscure the
true relations and complex realities of the Romany populations they analyze.
Recent studies critical of the theoretical underpinnings of ethnology high-
light the need to broaden interdisciplinary approaches to the study of ethnic iden-
tity. The interdependency of the three categories described above is complex and
resilient, and it would be a mistake to study any one of them in isolation from the
other two. Perhaps the cultural critic, poised at the intersection of cultural anthro-
pology and cultural criticism, can best gauge the co-determinacy of nationalism
and symbolic practices. But this is the case only if all the many determinants of
ethnicity are also taken into account: economic factors that compound racism; cul-
tural conventions and traditions that get translated into historical verities and vice
versa; competing nationalisms and their colonialist aspirations; hysterical reactions
to the Industrial Revolution; evolving gender codes; and, Wnally, the Romany par-
ticipation in their own isolation from, or assimilation into, national identity.
It is in the lateral shifts in European consciousness back and forth from
one category to the other that we can start to see the political stakes of all three:
how the unbound category of the gypsy, a Romantic fantasy based and proliferated
in the world of print culture, music, and graphic representation, inXects the more
bounded categories of Roma that are the subject of modern anthropology and his-
tory; how the passionate, freedom-loving gypsy gets superimposed on the diasporic
Gypsy communities mistakenly imagined as culturally and racially isolated from
the non-Roma; and how the latter affect the Romany subclassiWcations used by
today’s cultural anthropologists who focus on Romany participation in urban and
industrial economies and their complex cultural and social interrelation with the
Gorgios. In the following chapters I use the term “Gypsy” or “Gitano” to refer to
the cultural constructs that are the subject of this book, including the Gypsy image
that some history books and anthropological studies have constructed, and I reserve
the terms “Roma” or “Romany” (the adjective) to refer to real subjects whom most
non-Roma still refer to as Gypsies.29
Although often referred to as a Romantic construct, the Spanish Gypsy
is not in any simple way the creation of the French Romantics. The icon as traced
here evolved from the travel of print/visual/musical culture back and forth across
the Pyrenees, beginning even before Cervantes’ “La gitanilla” (1613), which is the
subject of Chapter 1. It relied on historical documents as distant as Sebastian

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introduction

Münster’s Cosmographia (Cosmography; 1544) or Heinrich Grellmann’s Die Zigeuner

(The Gypsies; 1782), and as local as the acrimonious treatises of the seventeenth-
century Spanish arbitristas (counselors of state) such as Fray Melchor de Huélamo,
Manuel Fernández de Córdoba, Martín Del Río, and Sancho de Moncada, who
deWned the Gypsy “problem” for a struggling nation in need of scapegoats.
Subsequent chapters trace how the Spanish Gypsy gained special promi-
nence in the fabulous accounts of the nineteenth-century Bible salesman George
Borrow, who borrowed heavily from Golden Age sources as well as living inform-
ants and philologists to create a veritable encyclopedia of known Gypsyology. In
turn, Borrow bequeathed many, if not all, of the loathsome or fabulous stereo-
types that quickly got grafted onto Preciosa’s Romantic progeny: Guiseppe Verdi’s
Azucena, Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon, George Eliot’s
Fedalma, George Sand’s Moréna, and Victor Hugo’s Esmeralda all owe something
to Borrow’s picaresque imagination.
In modern European systems of musical, visual, and literary representation,
which are the legacy of Romantic idealizations, a host of female Wgures stand out
above all others and can be said to make up the nuclei of the imaginary Gypsy. For
example, new versions of Carmen, Esmeralda, and Moréna continue to re-create
and, in ways I discuss at length here, reshape the myth. In addition to gender, they
are linked together by many characteristics drawn from the pool of Gypsy stereo-
types that has arisen from the seventeenth century onward. Except for Mignon, part
of their enduring exotic appeal resides in their Spanishness, and one of the objects
of this book is to discuss the relevance both of the fact that women have borne
the heavy symbolic load of the unbound category of Gypsyness, and the tendency
for Europe to look to southern Spain to fulWll its desire for an exotic other. To ex-
plain this phenomenon, the closing chapters of this book address the way Spain
participated in its self-exoticization via the Wgure of the Andalusian Gypsy. As the
Wnal chapter argues, Spanish philologists and folklorists also perpetuated Borrow’s
concept of the Wctitious Gypsy, even when their stated intention was to correct his
vision with that of a more “authentic” Gypsy based on historically accurate texts
and scientiWc observation.

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1
Cervantes’ Precious
Jewel of Love

¿What good are they to the world?

––fray huélamo 1

the arrival of roma “pilgrims” in Spain, in groups of ten to one hundred,

accompanied by their counts and dukes, took place in the early Wfteenth century.
Letters of safe passage that provided nominal protection from local reprisals and
persecutions, and in some instances material assistance, facilitated their early travel.2
This era of safe conduct ended by the sixteenth century and was followed by a period
of persecution, beginning with the Catholic kings’ royal decree (the Pragmática of
1499), mandating that within a period of two months Gypsies who did not settle
in Wxed domiciles, serve a master, take a profession, and relinquish their language
and dress, would face expulsion or perpetual slavery.3 The Wrst examination of what
is termed here the “imaginary” Spanish Gypsy dates not from the Wfteenth-century
migrations that resulted in the 1499 Pragmática, however, but from what has been
called the Golden Age of Spanish literature, when Spain’s ethnic politics produced
catastrophic upheavals among Spanish Roma, Moors, and the remnants of the Jew-
ish population who had not been expelled by the Catholic monarchs.
The way that Golden Age texts articulated ethnic otherness reveals that
the debate about the value of marginal groups to the nation was in full swing by

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the spanish gypsy

the early seventeenth century, during a critical time in the development of Spanish
statehood. Much of what in later centuries counted as knowledge about Spanish
Gypsies originated in this era more golden in its discourses than its coffers, despite
the massive inXux of bullion from the American colonies. The stereotype of the
thieving, conniving Gypsy helped to link what was mysterious or unknown about
the peripatetic, nonconformist Roma groups with other threats to the nation’s eco-
nomic and moral well-being: Barbary pirates, groups of roving bandoleros (highway-
men), the urban pícaro (rogue), and especially, according to José Antonio Maravall,
the mounting “passion for lucre” that was gripping Spain.4 It was during this dif-
Wcult time that Miguel de Cervantes published his popular collection of Novelas
ejemplares (Exemplary novels; 1610–13), which included one of the Wrst sketches of
Gypsy life, “La gitanilla” (The Gypsy girl). What is noteworthy about Cervantes’
novella in this context is its ambivalent racial ideology; it insisted on the racial
difference of Gypsies, contributing enormously to the perpetuation of the mostly
negative Gypsy stereotypes that were circulating at the time, while it challenged
that difference by offering knowledge about select Gypsies that was irreducible
to any common racial stereotype. Thus it offered both a recognition of Gypsy racial
difference and a disavowal of that difference through a linking of Gypsies with
other nonracially differentiated groups. Although clearly inXuenced by the accusa-
tory political discourses of its time, “La gitanilla” owed its appeal to its celebration
of humanist ideals that transcended racial categories. At the same time, respond-
ing to a literature in search of “novel” themes, in the last instance it reestablished
the radical difference that would separate Gypsies from the educated Payos or non-
Gypsies who wrote about them for centuries to come.
Cervantes was not the Wrst to apprise readers of Gypsy difference in man-
ner, dress, speech, and occupations. Several dozen allusions, all very brief, appeared
in sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese literary texts. These include Celestina
(1499), possibly the Wrst mention of Gypsies in Spanish literature, and Farça das
Ciganas (A Gypsy farce; 1521), a comedy by the Portuguese playwright Gil
Vicente, featuring the Wrst theatrical appearance of the Gypsy.5 Other examples
following these two early works are Diego de Negueruela’s Farsa llamada Ardamisa
(A farce called Ardamisa), written in the early 1500s; Juan de Timoneda’s Comedia
llamada Aurelia (A comedy called Aurelia; 1564); Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de
Alfarache (1599); Lorenzo Palmireno’s Estudioso Cortesano (The studious courtesan;
1573); and Lope de Rueda’s Comedia llamada Medora (A comedy called Medora) and
Eufemia (1567), to name just a few.6 All the classic Gypsy motifs of Golden Age
Spanish literature are already tested in these early works: from fortune-telling,
singing, magic, and dancing, to pickpocketing, baby snatching, horse trading, and
highway robbery. Still, most of the allusions to Gypsies in Spanish interludes,
plays, and novellas that appeared during the seventeenth century were inspired by

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cervantes’ precious jewel of love

Cervantes’ comedy Pedro de Urdemalas and his immensely popular novellas “La
gitanilla” and “Coloquio de los Perros” (The dogs’ colloquium), written in the Wnal
decades of the sixteenth or beginning of the seventeenth century and published in
1613.7 To the list of stock motifs Cervantes added several of special interest here
because of their implications for a non-Roma audience and for their novel rep-
resentation of Gypsies: the idealization of a peripatetic lifestyle, the parasitical
relation between Gypsies and the ruling classes, the marked contrast between male
and female occupations and economies, the codes for family and group protocols
governing interracial alliances or “conversions” of non-Gypsies to Gypsy status,
and the debate about inheritable attributes.
As creator of what we could call the glamorization of the Gypsy woman,
“La gitanilla” established a strong contrast between the thieving, abject members
of the race and one exceptional and beautiful woman. Preciosa somehow stands out
from all the rest, as if the author wished to skim off all of the goodness and beauty
from a whole race, the better to concentrate it in this one precious specimen who
is more beautiful than the rest, who earns more money, dances and sings better,
and loves more honestly and deeply. This is how at Wrst we perceive Cervantes’
character: a rare exception amid a group of scoundrels and thieves. The thievery
taught to her by her presumptive grandmother seems not to have stuck to her,
and neither the weather nor the blistering sun has managed to “spoil the face or
roughen the hands” of this blond, green-eyed beauty.8 Of course, if the Gypsy Pre-
ciosilla seems too good to be true, it is because she is not: Her real name is Con-
stanza de Azevedo y de Meneses, the kidnapped daughter of the wealthy magistrate
of Murcia. Once removed from her Gypsy heritage, something the text subtly allows
readers to do almost at once, there is very little left to commend the Gypsies who
populate this work, perhaps with the exception of the old Gypsy man who eulo-
gizes the Gypsy way of life or the old woman who, to save the life of Andrés and
ensure Preciosa’s future happiness, confesses that she had stolen Preciosa.
In selecting a woman heroine unwittingly masquerading as a Gypsy, Cer-
vantes was playing to a literary taste for Romanesque plots. The choice of a band
of Gypsies as his heroine’s foil, however, also permitted him to play with popular
misconceptions and stereotypes that were sure to engage his reading public in
the dialectic about the negative role of the Roma in the nation’s Xagging economy.
Cervantes was certainly aware that interest in the Roma minority intensiWed in
the early 1600s as Spain entered a general era of decline. It is important for mod-
ern readers to recognize that although it has been termed the Golden Age, the
Spain of 1613 was not the Spain of the prosperous 1500s. Trade with the Americas
was increasingly in the hands of the Genovese and other foreigners; the debt of
the monarch and the nobles was soaring, while the population was in steep de-
cline. Emigration and displacement, with the resulting depopulation of formerly

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the spanish gypsy

prosperous rural areas, were affecting agricultural production: Some areas of Castile
were being abandoned completely, drastically reducing the crown’s revenues. Then,
between 1596 and 1602, a nearly bankrupt Spain suffered a catastrophic epidemic
that resulted in 600,000 deaths in Castile alone. The unfavorable peace treaty
signed with England in 1604 and the 1609 truce with the United Provinces of the
Netherlands were, in the words of the historian John Elliott, the direct result of
Spain’s “Wnancial, economic, and psychological exhaustion.”9
The decrease in silver revenues from Mexico and Peru during the second
decade of the century resulted in chronic shortages for the royal treasury at a time
when the lavish court expenses of Philip III were escalating.10 By levying more taxes,
however, the crown was contributing to the depopulation of rural areas and the de-
crease in revenue-producing agriculture. With Spain’s commercial decline, rampant
inXation, excessive taxation, and fall in agricultural productivity, little wonder that
countless vagabonds and bands of roving outlaws, the bandoleros of literary fame,
roamed the countryside of Catalonia, Castile, and Valencia, while cities, especially
Seville, saw an inXux of unemployed or underemployed laborers.11 In the south, the
legendary picaroon was a social, not just a literary, phenomenon. The rise of both
vagabondage and bandolerismo or highway robbery in Spain at the time Cervantes
wrote “La gitanilla” has been cited to account for the fear of Roma groups that is
evident in this and other seventeenth-century texts featuring Gypsies. Though small
in numbers, the Roma had obviously become a handy scapegoat for the ofWcial ide-
ology of the Counter Reformation, or, as Bernard Leblon put it: “If three thousand
Gypsies managed nearly to eclipse the masses of vagabonds, deserters, and highway-
men to become the Wgure of the primary national calamity it is because one found
in them a symbol.”12 For a nation struggling to identify itself as a uniWed, racially
homogeneous people, the Roma symbolized the recalcitrant other, both despised
and celebrated for their indifference to the well-being and laws of the nation.
The collapsing of Gypsy identity into that of other disaffected groups is
not a sign of a general mixing of indigent groups, although some intermingling
surely did occur. Traveling or residing in closely knit, predominantly endogamous
family groups, the early Roma were distinguishable from ordinary vagabonds, and,
as the historians Teresa San Román and Henry Kamen have pointed out, they rarely
associated with the bandoleros, who were made up of groups of returning soldiers,
displaced foreigners, underemployed rural men who had lost their lands because
of excessive taxation, career bandits, and lesser regional nobles and their vassals,
who for one reason or another lived on the margins of society.13 What is clear is that
the association of peripatetic Roma and non-Roma groups like the bandoleros at
the hand of dominant ideologues and writers, as well as in the popular imagina-
tion, produced widespread antagonism that would have a lasting negative effect on
Roma/Payo relations.14

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cervantes’ precious jewel of love

Because peripatetic groups of Roma were conspicuous in their dress and

customs, debates about expulsion versus assimilation coincided with this period
of intense scapegoating. At the same time that Cervantes was entertaining readers
with the exotic Gypsy ways of Preciosa and her ilk in “La gitanilla,” the laws of
Spain were evolving in a campaign to assimilate forcibly all itinerants, Wrst by
associating them in the public mind with worthless vagabonds and, following from
that, calling for the regulation of their dress, travel, residences, professions, and
language. During the reign of the Hapsburgs, the number of Roma who were
hanged, imprisoned, kidnapped and placed with Spanish families, exiled from the
country, sent to be galley slaves, or forced to work in the Almadén mines can never
be calculated, but these repressive measures may have affected a large percentage
of the Roma population and doubtless provided the Roma with a rationale for
emphasizing their difference from dominant culture. Some punishments were the
result of minor infractions and petty thievery, but various laws stipulated that a
subject could be brought to justice merely by virtue of being declared a Gypsy.
Laws that in previous decades had outlawed vagrancy—the most severe under
Phillip II in 1586—were reissued or even expanded by the Cortes (the Spanish leg-
islative assembly) during Cervantes’ lifetime to single out Roma groups. For exam-
ple, in 1609, the same year that a decree ordering all those of Moorish descent to
leave Spain resulted in the expulsion of some 275,000 subjects, Philip III ordered
the expulsion of all those calling themselves Gypsies unless they settled in towns
of more than one thousand inhabitants and adapted the dress and speech of the
non-Roma residents. In 1610, the year Cervantes wrote “La gitanilla,” the Cortes
decreed that Gypsies were not really Christians and not a separate people, merely
thieves and murderers.15 DeWnitions such as this, based on an activity and behav-
ior rather than a kinship group or culture, marked the beginning of a long process
that would end in 1783 when Charles III decreed that there was no such thing
as an ethnic Gypsy, that the term Gitano (Spanish Gypsy) was merely a deroga-
tory name given to or assumed by bands of thieves. By implication people who
were not thieves, those who had Wxed domiciles and occupations, were not, indeed
could not be, Gypsies. As we shall see, however, in 1610 the issue of Gypsy iden-
tity was not so easily swept away.

Who Are the Gypsies?

Early seventeenth-century plays and prose Wction largely corroborated the royal
court’s assessment of its Roma population as errant and reprehensible misWts.
Through their overwhelmingly negative portraits of Gypsies, Lope de Vega’s El
nacimiento de Cristo (The birth of Christ; before 1604) and Arenal de Sevilla (The

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beach of Seville; 1618); Francisco López de Ubeda’s La pícara Justina (The rogue
Justina; 1605); Vicente Espinel’s Marcos de Obregón (Marcos of Obregon; 1618);
Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses’ Soldado Píndaro (Pindaro the soldier; 1626); and
Jerónimo de Alcalá’s Donado hablador, ó Alonso, mozo de muchos amos (The chattering
lay brother, or Alonso, the servant of many masters; 1626) reXected the scapegoat-
ing tactics of royal pronouncements and decrees that sought either to expel or to
assimilate Roma groups. In addition, during these same years, numerous political
tracts appeared that either justiWed the royal decrees published by the Cortes or
promoted even more radical solutions to the “Gypsy problem” than the one the
Cortes were seeking. Notable among these were Fray Melchor de Huélamo’s Libro
primero, de la vida y milagros del glorioso confesor Sant Ginés de la Xara (Book 1 of the
life and miracles of the glorious confessor Saint Gines de la Xara; 1607); Martín
Del Río’s Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (Book 6 of the Disquisition on magic;
1606); Sancho de Moncada’s Restauración política de España (Spain’s political restora-
tion; 1619); Francisco Fernández de Córdoba’s Didascalia multiplex (A compendium
of moral teachings; 1615); and Pedro Salazar de Mendoza’s Memorial de un hecho de
los gitanos (Brief regarding a Gypsy affair; 1618). All these treatises viliWed Gypsies
as a group and, unchallenged, were passed down to future historians as evidence of
Gypsy ignominy.
Religious leaders contributed to the notion of Gypsy deviance by cast-
ing doubt on the religious zeal of the Roma and noting their stubborn rejection
of religious authority. For example, Fray Huélamo complained that Gypsies did
not belong to a diocese and had no priests living among them. Nor did they go
to confession, follow papal decrees, request dispensations to contract marriage, or
purchase papal bulls.16 In keeping with their distress at the country’s economic
downslide and their protobourgeois preoccupation with merit and civic usefulness,
essayists like Huélamo complained most bitterly of the failure of the Gypsies to
join a regulated workforce or to be of service to the nation as soldiers and farmers,
and they suggested as a remedy forced service in the galleys:

Leave aside that they know no trade, have no rents, and work no
land, which means they are necessarily all thieves. . . . What good
are they in the world? They are not acolytes, sacristans, clerics,
or priests, nor are they mayors, councilmen, or constables. They
are not town criers, nor games keepers. On the contrary, when
they enter a town, people have to watch their homes so closely
that they can’t even go to their Welds. They pay no taxes to the
King, nor tithes to the Church. . . they are as useless during war
as during peace time, they are totally unproductive, and do great
harm, and yet even though the men never work, nor the women

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cervantes’ precious jewel of love

spin wool or make cloth, they are better dressed than other peas-
ants, since they ordinarily wear garments festooned with what
they have Wlched from some unlucky newly wed or some garment
made for feast days. And, since they have no goods to conWscate,
something much to be regretted, their crimes go unpunished. I
Wnd no other use for them but the galleys, may they all be of some
use there.17

All of the above-mentioned essayists concurred with Huélamo in their

scorn of the Gypsies, but the question of exactly who the Gypsies were was open to
debate. Numerous documents from the sixteenth century had reported that Gyp-
sies readily admitted nonmembers into their ranks.18 This led seventeenth-century
statesmen and writers to suggest that they were not a people, but a group of brig-
ands. Martín del Río Wrst made this claim in 1606, quoting as his source Sebastian
Münster’s 1552 Cosmographia Universalis. In turn Sebastián de Covarrubias y Orozco
quoted Del Río in his inXuential Tesoro de la lengua castellana (Treasure of the Cas-
tilian language), which Sancho de Moncada cited in 1619. Together with Huélamo
and Del Río, Moncada was among the group of self-styled economists and reform-
ists known as the arbitristas (arbitristes or counselors of state) who published tracts
regarding economic and social issues in an effort to stem what he declared was
Spain’s precipitous “decline.” Besides mapping a program for economic reforms
designed to increase commerce and encourage industrialization and agricultural
production, the arbitristas often included suggestions for curing the social ills
that, they argued, were contributing to the general decline of the Spanish nation.19
Moncada, a professor of Holy Scripture at the University of Toledo, justiWed his
reform package with lengthy explanations for Spain’s spiritual and cultural malaise,
and his Restauración is rife with the “hysterical xenophobia” that to a large extent
characterized writings on Gypsies in the seventeenth century.20
Jean Vilar Berrogain, the modern editor of Restauración, concludes some-
what naively that Moncada was not a racist since he believed that Gypsies were
not a racial minority, merely a sect that admitted members, a “pack of idlers” who,
like “wolves,” know only how to rob and Xee.21 Disclaimers such as this, based
on the idea that racism is a late eighteenth-century phenomenon, fail to take into
account the devastating effects of scapegoating entire groups, including those who
did not fall into the category of idlers condemned by Moncada. Undeniably race
was a social not a biological category in the seventeenth century, but Spanish soci-
ety was already organized as if races could be distinguished not just by cultural and
economic criteria, but by parentage. At what age would the children of Gypsies be
counted as idlers and thieves and thus conform to Moncada’s grouping? Examin-
ing Moncada’s text together with court decrees allows us to plumb the depths of

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seventeenth-century Gypsy stereotyping, which, if not consistently racist in the

biological sense, provided ample justiWcation for the ill treatment of ethnic Roma
for decades to come.22
The Eighth Discourse of Moncada’s Restauración, entitled “Expulsión de
los Gitanos” (Expulsion of the Gypsies), begins with three biblical references, two
to the Egyptians whom many at that time still considered the ancestors of the
Gypsies. Thus even though he later argues that Gypsies are a sect and not a race,
in a move not unlike that of Cervantes in “La gitanilla,” Moncada begins his dis-
course with quotations that have clear racial implications:

Vidi afXictionen eorum, qua ab Aegyptiis opprimuntur; et scient

Aegyptii quia ego Dominus (Exodus 3; 7)

(I have seen their afXiction, of those oppressed by the Egyp-

tians . . . and the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord.)

Haec dicit Dominus, dispergam Aegyptios in nationes, et venti-

labo eos in terras (Ezekiel 29)

(Thus saith the Lord God. I will scatter the Egyptians among the
nations, and will disperse them through the lands.)23

Both Biblical excerpts recall the punishment of the Egyptians for their expul-
sion of the Israelites and, by inference, provide a somewhat novel explanation for
the wanderings of Spanish Roma. In the popular imagination it was believed at the
time either that the Gypsies had been expelled from Egypt because they had failed
to assist the Holy Family as they Xed into Egypt or that they were doomed to wan-
der the earth for a determined time because, although originally Christians, at one
point they had renounced their faith.24 According to both versions, Church leaders
had ordered them to wander the earth as penance for their neglect or lack of faith,
and it was in the guise of pilgrims that they reportedly made their Wrst entry into
Spain in the Wfteenth century.25 Moncada’s quotations, on the contrary, seem to sug-
gest that Gypsies are pariahs, not because of their ancestors’ treatment of the Holy
Family but because of their oppression of the Israelites—a somewhat ironic indict-
ment given Spain’s expulsion and persecution of the descendants of the Israelites
as well as Moncada’s repeated assertion that Gypsies are a sect, not a people.26
Chapter 1 of Discourse 8 of the Restauración, entitled “Quién son los
Gitanos?” (Who are the Gypsies?), summarizes the legends concerning the migra-
tions of Gypsies that were in circulation during Moncada’s time: that they entered
Europe as Tamerlane’s soldiers, that they crossed over into Europe when Spain was

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invaded by the Moors, or that they descended from the Tartars, Persians, Nubians
of Lower Egypt, or other nations of Asia Minor. Brushing aside all these legends,
Moncada asserts that “those who wander about Spain are not Gypsies, but rather
swarms of idlers and atheists, and, without any religion whatsoever, Spaniards who
have initiated themselves into this type of life or Gypsy sect.”27 Quoting the 1610
decree of the Royal Cortes, Moncada continues: “Let it be known that they are not
a nation, may their name and its use be forever confounded and forgotten.”28 Yet
everything in Moncada’s document serves to identify, not forget, the Gypsies and
to widen the gulf between Gypsies and non-Gypsies. For example, he compares
them to the class of birds called wagtails (aguzanieve or motacilla in Spanish), ugly
birds, he reports, that lay their eggs in the nests of other birds.29 To an economist
like Moncada who advocated stimulating manufacturing, one of the worst sins of
the Gypsies was that they were unproductive: The men engaged in no commerce
and had no Wxed professions; they were leeches who sucked the richness from the
lands they crossed and sustained themselves on the sweat of others, while their
women were prostitutes who destroyed many a good marriage with their dances,
fortune-telling, magic spells, and singing.30
As spies, traitors, vagabonds, thieves, fortune-tellers, and heretics, all
Gypsies deserved, according to Moncada, to be executed, and in this he goes far
beyond the assimilationist recommendations of the Cortes. However, as an alter-
native to execution, a solution he knew to be unlikely, he recommended that all
those calling themselves Gypsies be expelled from the nation, just as anything that
does harm should be severed from the body politic. Thus Moncada argued against
previous legislation mandating that Gypsies settle in large populations, where it
was reasoned they could be better controlled. For him there was no advantage in
having thieves residing in cities instead of roaming the countryside. And to those
who argued that only the men should be expelled, Moncada countered that it was
the women who commit the worst crimes of all; allowing women and children to
stay behind would be an invitation for them to raise more “wolf cubs.” If it was
right and just to expel the descendants of the Moors––and Moncada notes wistfully
that the Moriscos were at least productive members of society––then surely it would
be reasonable to expel all Gypsies. An even closer analogy can be made with the
Jews: For Moncada the Gypsies are the “new” Jews because they have assumed all
of the negative traits and habits of the expelled race. Accordingly he urges Philip
III to deal with them as harshly as the Catholic Kings had dealt with the Jews
“who sucked the Republic dry and gave nothing in return, who were thieves and
receivers of stolen goods, witches, prognosticators, evildoers.”31 Moncada does not
suggest what the king should do about settled Gypsies with Wxed employment
or professions (as was the case with some Andalusian and Catalonian populations).
We must infer, therefore, either that he was ignorant of their existence, a strong

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possibility given his other inaccuracies, or that he would not consider them Gyp-
sies at all since they did not Wt his description of thieves and rogues, the conclusion
Charles III would reach in the eighteenth century.32
Moncada concludes his diatribe with an exhortation in Latin, O Regum
summe, horum plura ne temnas (absit) Ne forte tempsisse Hispaniae periculosum existat
(O greatest of Kings, God forbid that you treat lightly more of these lest by chance
it seems you have treated lightly a danger to Spain).33 Philip III, however, did not
choose to follow Moncada’s harsh suggestion regarding this danger, and the 1633
Pragmática of his successor Philip IV put an end to the reiterated calls for expul-
sion. It was not humanitarian concern that prompted his decision: “It does not
seem practical to expel them because the depopulation in which these lands Wnd
themselves after the expulsion of the Moors, and which has resulted in our present
condition, cannot suffer the least evacuation.”34 Political expediency won out in the
end over xenophobic counselors: Spain simply could not afford to become any more
depopulated or to lose skills the Roma offered. As a result, the strategy of forced
settlement would be the policy for the next several centuries.
From the above survey, it is easy to see why, compared with the legislators,
writers, and essayists who were his contemporaries, Cervantes has been cited by
critics for his sympathetic portrayal of Gypsies.35 But in the catalogue of much-
celebrated attributes and virtues that deWne Preciosa’s non-Gypsyness, we can never-
theless measure the loathing of the Gitano that was already widespread by the year
1613: In contrast to those around her Preciosa is clean, neat, and polite, honest and
discrete, witty and wise, literate, chaste. All these attributes so heavily prized in
seventeenth-century elite women are snatched away from the Gypsies when Pre-
ciosa turns out to be a lady. In contrast her cohorts, including her guardian who is
a veritable “Argos,” are greedy, scheming thieves; better to close the book on them.
It is pointedly left to Preciosa to do this in her summing up of the Gypsy mental-
ity at the end of the novella: “They have the devil and experience as their tutors and
teachers, and so they learn in an hour what you’d expect them to learn in a year.”36
Curious about the harshness of this and other statements in Cervantes’
other works, Luis Astrana Marín in his introduction to Don Quijote asks “What
could the Gypsies have done to Miguel de Cervantes to make him upbraid them
so pitilessly? Did they, by any chance, play him a bad turn during his years as
commissioner in Andalusia, when he had to deal with so many farmers, millers,
bakers, and all manner of riffraff?”37 Astrana Marín answers his own question in the
negative by saying that the level of animosity can be explained only by something
much more personal, alluding to the Cervantes’ family’s contentious relations with
the Mendoza family who were part Roma. Astrana Marín then goes on to claim,
however, that Cervantes’ treatment of Gypsies was in large sympathetic. Admit-
tedly, the most worthwhile thing that the Gypsies possess in this story turns out to

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be something they stole, yet “La gitanilla” expresses, perhaps for the Wrst time in
European literature, and certainly in Spanish literature, an admiration for a certain
kind of itinerant life together with a rejection of organized society based on an
orderly transfer of goods and services. The famous homily delivered by a group
elder sketches out the Gypsy worldview that resonates with the beatus ille theme
common to Renaissance literature:

We are the lords of the pastures, the ploughed Welds, the heaths,
and the streams. The heath offers us free Wrewood; the trees
fruit, the vineyards grapes; the gardens, vegetables; the streams,
water, the rivers, Wsh, and the private estates, game; rocks offer us
shade, mountain passes provide fresh air, caves give us housing.
For us, inclement weather is an airing, snows cool us, rain bathes
us, thunder offers us music, and lightning provides torches; for
us, hard ground makes a soft mattress; our leathery skin is like an
impenetrable chain-mail coat to defend us; our lightness of foot
knows no shackles, no gullies stop us, no walls get in our way.38

Cervantes’ readers were widely familiar with the motif of the artiWcial
court life versus the country idyll, with its appeal to the “natural primitive good-
ness of man.”39 The Gypsy “lords of the pastures” share the same imaginary space
as the idealized shepherds of Arcadia, but in the case of the Gypsies such an ode to
freedom would likely provoke both envy and reprobation on the part of readers.
That the Gypsy lives a life in perfect harmony with nature, which for mostly urban
readers must be mediated by an author’s words, is all to the good: It is one of the
functions of poetry and literature in general to manifest the disjuncture between
lived experience and the imagination. But that the Gypsy should receive free or
steal what others worked for must have offended the emerging bourgeois mental-
ity that Sancho de Moncada appealed to in his economic treatises. Unlike the
shepherds and farmers who earned their natural setting, the arbitristas argued that
the reason Gypsies exempted themselves from any organized labor or strict moral
conduct was because their nature resembled that of wild, roaming animals. No
shackles, ravines, or walls impeded their movement through real, not just imagi-
nary spaces. Among these “born thieves,” as everyone from Moncada to Cervantes’
narrator described them, pickpocketing was a sanctioned art rather than an evil.
Disregarding conventional codes of honor and the rituals of the court (such as cur-
rying favor with dignitaries), and self-exempted from the laws of the community,
Gypsies were free to devise and enforce their own laws, punishments, and econo-
mies. For example, their marriage ceremony shunned the rituals of the Catholic
Church; they permitted divorce and incest and punished adultery with extreme

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severity. The Gypsy was thus a symbol of absolute nonconformity, escaping both the
feudal-lord/serf arrangement (by refusing to become Wxed to the land or serve a mas-
ter) and the emerging bourgeois/proletariat arrangements dependent on Moriscos
and slaves. In short, their freedom could be a source of envy on many accounts.
One should not be tempted, however, to imagine “La gitanilla” as a Xedg-
ling utopia. Cervantes’ Gypsy idyll has been variously interpreted as an anticipa-
tion of Rousseau, a parody of the pastoral novel, or even a vindication of Gypsy life.
But, read closely, the story does not glamorize Gypsy life, which, E. Michael Gerli
notes, unfolds “half way between the pastoral and the picaresque, half way between
the ideal and the infamous polarities of romance.”40 Stanislav Zimic, another critic
to see past the idealizing aspects of Gypsy life, notes that when viewed from the
twentieth century the portrait is not in the least idyllic, especially for women.41
More important, as the story unfolds it becomes clear that existing in harmony
with nature does not ensure a life of virtue, and disdain for worldly goods and prop-
erty does not immunize one from the century’s lust for gold. On the contrary, one
of the novella’s striking paradoxes is that the Gypsies’ lust for gold coins, even
while they disdain the comforts of the court that gold could purchase for them
and prefer to bivouac beneath the stars. In short, the rustic life as described in
the above citations is Xung at the reader as a tantalizing or potential good, but
the antiutopian Cervantes used the Gypsy stereotype to warn that virtue is not the
product of a bucolic space and lust is not limited to the rich and landed. The ode
to freedom and nature that opens the novella is more a nostalgic lure for readers
already aware of the failure of utopian enterprises than a statement of fact about
Gypsy existence.
The question remains, however, whether virtue and vice are rooted in
nature or deeds. It is not always clear in “La gitanilla” whether the Gypsy is amoral
because he is an animal acting in accordance with instincts, as is sometimes hinted
by the story’s descriptions, or whether his acquisitiveness is a socially acquired
evil. Solving the mystery of whether Cervantes intended to create a sympathetic
or negative portrait of Gypsies, or whether his narrator’s opening statement that
Gypsy women and men are born in the world only to be thieves indicates a belief
in biological determinism, may not be as important as understanding the im-
pact of this work on future historians and ethnologists searching for knowledge
about the Spanish Roma. Yet dozens of critics have taken a keen interest in decid-
ing these questions regarding Cervantes’ ideological take on race, some in hopes
of distinguishing the master from his more biased contemporaries, others to show
him as a spokesman for the operative values of Spanish aristocracy. For our purposes
it is more important to understand exactly what was meant by race or sangre in
seventeenth-century Spain. This story, like many other Golden Age texts, embod-
ies the contradictions resulting from the coexistence of what Juan Carlos Rodríguez

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identiWes as two competing ideological matrices: the Wrst phase of bourgeois ideol-
ogy with its emphasis on the beautiful soul and the last phase of feudal nobility
that clings to “blood” as the determinant of hierarchical order.
It is likely that such terms as “race” and “blood,” used so frequently in
Golden Age texts, were not always as biologically linked as we regard them today.
In other words, the question of nature versus nurture is often raised by twentieth-
century scholars whose views on race are more exacting in terms of Galenic science
than those of Cervantes and his contemporaries; thus a discussion of race often
produces wildly differing conclusions. Some critics have argued that the words
parece que (“it seems that”) in the novella’s opening statement quoted above sufWce
to set in motion the classic Cervantine irony and cast doubt on his racialist beliefs.
Others insist that since in “La gitanilla” one can “become” a Gypsy through certain
rituals and trials, it follows that Cervantes understood the fallacy of his narra-
tor’s opening diatribe and rejected biological determinism. On the other hand, it
is often pointed out that since no amount of time spent with her abductors is suf-
Wcient to transform Constanza-Preciosa into a true (rapacious) Gypsy, it follows
that Gypsyness cannot be acquired except through birth.
Since “La gitanilla” has become such a focal point for discussions of
Gypsies in the seventeenth century, it is useful to summarize what becoming a
Gypsy means in this text. Cervantes tried to imagine this transformation through
both Preciosa, who, although raised as a Gypsy, acts like a lady, and Don Juan
de Cárcamo, a wealthy citizen of the court who will assume the name Andrés
Caballero and become an honorary Gypsy to win the favors of Preciosa. Cervantes
did not try to imagine, as George Eliot would later do in The Spanish Gypsy, what
happens when a Gypsy is raised as an aristocrat, but like Eliot he suggested that
the inXuence of one’s racial group prevails during times of crisis. Preciosa is success-
ful as a Gypsy only to the extent of incorporating herself into the Gypsy practice
of selling entertainment, an activity that Carroll Johnson interprets as a precursor
of a future capitalist economy. In most regards, however, she is the embodiment of
the court poet’s esquiva, an idealized and elusive feminine subject who refuses to be
bound by the social customs governing marriage, but who succumbs Wnally to
patriarchal codes when she falls in love.
For his part Juan/Andrés must undergo a ritual initiation into Gypsy sta-
tus. First the Gypsies seat him on a log and place in his hands a mallet and shears,
instruments symbolizing Roma professions. Next he must dance to the sound of
Gypsy guitar music. Finally his arm is bared and a silk ribbon is wound around it
twice with a stick. These minute details of an initiation rite lend the text an aura
of authenticity that have led some to speculate that Cervantes had Wrsthand knowl-
edge of actual Gypsy customs.42 They also support the contention that Cervantes,
like Sancho de Moncada, understood Gypsies to be more of a fraternity than a race.

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Yet the rituals do not make of Juan a true Gypsy: He must Wrst pass several tests
by learning to steal, play cards, and participate in the various shady activities of his
cohorts. Andrés’s acceptance by the Gypsy troop is also dependent on his liberal
disbursement of money, and in this he shows the moral superiority that distin-
guishes gentleman from Gypsy rogue. Thus the elder’s ode to Gypsy life is tem-
pered by an implied criticism of practices that are accentuated by Andrés’s largesse
and innate nobility.
This can be seen in the activities that make Andrés a “bad” Gypsy: Rather
than steal and hoard wealth in secret, the implied Gypsy norm, he publicizes and
shares his wealth, hoping to buy favors and to inXuence Preciosa’s feelings. At the
same time that this spreading around of money makes it easier for him to be
accepted, it serves to elevate him morally above the community. Like Preciosa, he
is an exception held in esteem by the group precisely for what is lacking in them:
wealth and the knowledge of exchange values, aristocratic largesse, and an acute
sense of loyalty. Although his fellow Gypsies spend long hours instructing him in
the Wne arts of vagrancy, Andrés never acquires the knack of stealing. Presumably
his gentle birth militates against this custom, and he scandalizes the others by
sometimes paying restitution to the victims of the Gypsies’ petty thievery. At other
times he secretly buys objects that he then passes off as stolen goods. Like Pre-
ciosilla, he rejects Gypsy laws that permit a man to punish or divorce his wife, and
when called a thief by the mayor of Murcia, he reacts by reverting to an aristo-
cratic code of honor and driving his accuser through with a sword. You can take the
noble out of the court, this story tells us, but you can not corrupt him, even if, like
Preciosa, you have been brought up for your entire life in the Gypsy ways.
In tandem with the complicated exchanges of identity between Gypsy
and Payo culture elaborated in “La gitanilla” are the reiterated exchanges involv-
ing money and entertainment that serve as the focal point of contact between the
two groups. In fact, nearly every action in this novella is facilitated by exchanges
in which money, especially the gold doubloons mentioned so often, plays a signiW-
cant material and symbolic role. The transactions between Gypsies and Payos do
not necessarily reXect how relations really stood between the two groups, but they
do demonstrate how Spain’s ruling classes imagined them to be and they register
the growing discontent on the part of some intellectuals like Cervantes over the
changes brought about by “the new world of money.”43 Alban K. Forcione was
one of the Wrst to note the importance of economic issues in the novella and to
conclude that Cervantes acted as spokesperson for the ofWcial policy regarding
Spanish Roma.44 This position was furthered by Robert Ter Horst, who argues that
Cervantes created the “small society” of the novella’s Gypsies as a synecdoche for
the larger population and its plebeian economy.45 Ter Horst contrasts the acquis-
itiveness and thievery that characterize the Gypsies with the prodigality of the

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aristocratic world of Andrés Caballero. A clash of economies occurs with the initi-
ation of a nobleman with unencumbered wealth into a society of Gypsies whose
economy is based on scarcity, thievery, and hoarding. The open hand of Andrés,
“abundant, liberal, prodigal,” contrasts with the clutching talon, symbol of the
“predatory, sterility, or lack” of the Gypsies.46 Andrés’s gold buys an exemption
from the universal laws of the Gypsies, just as Preciosa’s beauty and moral superi-
ority exempt her from being fully subject to the laws governing marriage.
In contrasting the Gypsy’s and the nobleman’s relation to wealth, Ter
Horst draws an analogy with the competing economic theories of John Maynard
Keynes and Adam Smith: “In present-day terms one might liken the aristocratic
approach to the Keynesian method of stimulating growth through deWcit spend-
ing and the plebeian theory to classical concepts of saving and capital formation
so as to have funds in hand for any opportunity or emergency.”47 The problem with
this analogy is that it is equally possible to show the novella’s aristocrats as proXi-
gate spenders or givers (Andrés) and stingy misers (the family and guests of the
lieutenant). Similarly, though Gypsies are cast as greedy, the most important Gypsy
performs an act of great charity that allows Preciosa to recover her fortune, and in
another act of generosity the Gypsy troop offers to empty its coffers to rescue
Andrés from execution. Using the Smithian model to describe the Gypsy economy
also seems to contradict Ter Horst’s comparison of Gypsies and other “venture
capitalists” who sail the high seas in search of markets and proWts. Finally, it can
be argued that Andrés is not speculating in a Keynesian sense because his gifts to
the Gypsies are not so much a donation as a down payment, minimal in terms of
his actual fortune, on goods (his future bride), which in no way resembles deWcit or
high-risk spending. Nevertheless, Ter Horst is right in noticing that when all the
money transactions between Gypsies and non-Gypsies are concluded, what Wnally
emerges is a couple deeply in love and a band of Gypsies that has opened up its
economy to the chivalrous notion of charity. It is likely an exaggeration to conclude
that the novella expresses “a fearful devotion to the lifelong bond between wife and
husband,”48 but clearly Cervantes wanted readers to leave behind all the sordid
and material concerns of the Gypsies and concentrate in the end on a happy restora-
tion of a patriarchal idyll. In this world of abundance the principal “good” is an
obedient daughter, and her successful marketing results in a ritual transference
from father to son-in-law. In this sense the story’s Gypsies stand outside the happy
circle of courtly customs, reminding readers not only of the defects of the despised
race, but of the improbability of Golden Age scenarios.
Ter Horst’s oversimpliWed categories are complicated by Joan Ramón
Resina, who notes that they not only fail to describe intergroup transactions,
but run counter to actual Gypsy-Payo relations. Resina instead studies the way
money mediates codes of love and acts as a principal means of communication and

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measurement of value, speciWcally, a woman’s value. The various monetary negoti-

ations in the text (for example, Andrés’s betrothal present) determine Preciosa’s
use, exchange, and surplus values. Preciosa is not a passive player in this economic
valuation; she both speculates with her own value, and thus escapes the Gypsy
economy, and champions woman’s intrinsic value, for example, in her ballads in
honor of Santa Ana and Queen Margarita.49 Far from a mere object of exchange in
a male-dominated economy, Preciosa is keenly aware of her earning power among
the elite classes and therefore her value to her future prospects and the Gypsies. As
a Gypsy Preciosa rejects the aristocratic code with its courtly love conventions that
Andrés offers her and instead insists on setting conditions that Resina describes
as a “new lovers’ semantic.”50 As a non-Gypsy, however, she establishes her value at
a much higher standard of exchange than would be possible for an ordinary Roma
woman. In other words, she enhances the “base metal” of her Gypsy heritage by
citing the incalculable treasure that is her virtue and reminding her suitor that
virtue is not a question of class: “If all souls are equal, the soul of a laborer can equal
in worth to those of emperors.”51 With this she removes herself from the Gypsy
communal property and establishes her right as an exceptional individual to deter-
mine her status.
Read in this light, Preciosa resembles a multifaceted jewel that circulates
through various economies and in the process serves alternately to distinguish and
to juxtapose Gypsy and Payo value systems without preference to either. As
William H. Clamurro recognizes, beneath the surface of the novella run the “harsh,
this-worldly social structures and values” of seventeenth-century society, which
subvert the expectations of the romance genre.52 This is especially evident in the
uses of money and exchanges and their relation to personal identity and the social
order. As a plot device, money secures freedom, maintains disguises, saves repu-
tations, protects virtue, and buys time. But it also takes on a linguistic function
that links identity and the social order: It is a language that symbolically by turns
binds and disassociates the tale’s most precious object, Preciosa, from her social
context. Money is the supplement to language that allows others, especially male
characters like Juan and Clemente, to talk to and about Preciosa. And whether at
any given moment Preciosa accepts money (for example, from Clemente) or rejects
it (for example, when she scoffs at Andrés’s hundred gold crowns) determines her
status as either a Gypsy or a lady, Preciosa or Constanza.
It is not just a question of virtue and integrity being more important to
Preciosa than wealth and position, for in the end as Constanza she possesses both:
She is the perfect lady (chaste, acquiescent, silent), and her wealth and position are
restored. The only thing that she must relinquish is her Gypsy identity, a trans-
formation that Cervantes’ readers would surely have regarded as a positive event.
On the other hand, Constanza’s uncharacteristic submissiveness in the Wnal scene

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contrasts sharply with the catalytic quality of her earlier interventions, disappoint-
ing some modern readers like Clamurro. More important, Preciosa’s apotheosis and
sudden disappearance mirror the eclipsed role of the Gypsies at the end of the tale:
“Once the larger community’s laws and customs intervene, the powers and possi-
bilities of language, high-spirited wit, and the tricks and defenses of this margi-
nal group all seem to collapse. Preciosa’s sudden docility is as marked a change as
is the uncharacteristic immobility of the gypsies.”53 The novella’s climax also
marks a return to the thematics of feudalism that opened the story, in which issues
of honor, virtue, vice, and nonconformity are inextricably tied to blood. Preciosa’s
remarkable speech in which she argues that virtue is a question of souls, not of
blood, is perhaps not canceled out, but it is forced to coexist with a more traditional
system of values. In other words “La gitanilla” is not an allegory of the hierarchy of
souls taking precedence over a hierarchy of blood; in the end what lifts Preciosa “to
the highest rank” is that her blood is Wnally recognized as deWning her worth: She
is the daughter of her father, and therefore a lady and not a Gypsy.54
One aspect of money that critics have not examined at any length is its
importance as a catalyst for the reader’s engagement with the text, a theme that
Francisco J. Sánchez explores in his suggestive article “Theater Within the Novel.”
The money transactions that take place for spectacles such as Preciosa’s dancing in
the casino to occur invited Cervantes’ readers to visualize mentally the conditions of
spectacle and theater. While theater productions and other mass spectacles created
the illusion of equality among social classes, readers of “La gitanilla” would disasso-
ciate themselves from this illusion as they apprehended the cultural and economic
circumstances necessary for staging public events. In other words, the reader is sud-
denly able to see the disjuncture “between what the mass audience is seeing and
what the normative discourse of power is ‘saying.’”55 For the gentlemen and magis-
trates of the casino where Preciosa performs, she is an idealized beauty. At a distance
from the scene, however, readers would understand that she is part of a setting that
is orchestrated by urban powers, a character in a play involving an exchange between
body and money taking place in a “monetary space embedded in the relation
between Wgure and reception.”56 The novella’s Gypsies, whom Sánchez refers to un-
accountably as “peasants,” facilitate a subliminal experience of disorder by allowing
readers to imagine an alternative space to theatrical idealization, a space he describes
as monetary because it “threatens the foundations of the system of privileges.”57
Like Ter Horst, Clamurro, and Resina, Carroll Johnson sees the Gypsy/
non-Gypsy interaction as a clash between two economic systems, one aristocratic
and primitive and the other mercantile and progressive. He differs from them, how-
ever, in arguing that Cervantes did not serve as a spokesperson for the dominant
economic order; rather he shows that the aristocrats, for example, the men gam-
bling in the casino or the poet Clemente who is involved in money trading with

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the Genovese, are engaged in what Cervantes saw as nonproductive, parasitical

activities of a retrograde economic system.58 Not unlike the aristocrat’s trading in
precious metals, the Gypsy men want to appropriate Andrés’s mule and augment
its value by disguising its defects. Johnson accordingly draws a parallel between
Gypsy and aristocratic economies: Both the mule and gold are objects that have
been taken, not produced; consequently both groups are steeped in the values of
late feudalism in the seventeenth-century. Gypsy men, that is, because Johnson
interprets the activity of the Gypsy women to be a harbinger of a new economic
order based on a Xedgling bourgeois capitalism. For example, Preciosa’s jewel is her
virginity that she offers as merchandise to the highest bidder: Granddaughter and
grandmother are engaged in an economic system “that is markedly progressive,
dependent on speculation and exchanges.”59 All the Gypsy women participate in
the production of spectacles of entertainment, transforming the songs they receive
(on credit) into the “happy earnings” that Preciosa predicts will enable them to pay
the poet the price for his verses and keep the surplus for themselves.
A thoughtful reading of “La gitanilla” is enough to convince even the non-
specialist that Cervantine society was Wxated on money and monetary transactions.
In an era when Spanish currency was being devalued (inXation was rampant and
gold and silver coinage was disappearing, to be replaced by copper), it is not sur-
prising that Cervantes framed his story in terms of two such key economies of
exchange: love and money, which he regarded as mutually dependent.60 But the
often-impecunious Cervantes was also keenly interested in the value of words,
goods, and economic systems because of personal experiences with both his work
and family relations. Most critics agree that Cervantes knew more about the rogue
culture that he came into contact with while residing in Seville than about Roma
life. It has also been suggested, however, that he had at least some Wrsthand knowl-
edge of Roma customs since his Wrst cousin Martina was the granddaughter of a
Roma. Martina’s mother, Cervantes’ aunt, María de Cervantes, bore her to the cleric
Martín de Mendoza, nicknamed el gitano. Martín was the eldest son of the duke del
Infantado, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, and a Gypsy woman whom the duke had
met at a fair in 1488. This affair provoked a prolonged scandal into the 1530s and
a series of legal suits that lasted throughout Cervantes’ life. As a priest, el gitano
could not contract marriage with María; instead he gave her sumptuous gifts im-
ported from abroad and was bound under oath to pay her 600,000 maravedis as a
dowry.61 In the beginning, the Cervantes family beneWted considerably from this
largesse, but when the father of el gitano, Diego de Hurtado, died, his younger
brothers fought to gain hold of the remaining patrimony, and the Cervantes fam-
ily was suddenly disinherited. Years of litigation and imprisonments followed,
which in the end left the Cervantes family penniless. So when Miguel de Cervantes
writes that all Gypsies are thieves, one is tempted to recall this lengthy history of

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claims against the descendants of the wealthy gitano and to read “La gitanilla” as an
allegory of a family saga: The Gypsies possess something of great value (a woman
who measures her worth against her virginity) that is not theirs and must give
it back, just as in real life the Mendoza family is sued to comply with the oath to
supply the Cervantes family with a cash payment in exchange for María’s honor,
obviously valued at a very high price since several generations were not enough to
cancel the debt.

The Child Jewel

Another aspect of “La gitanilla” that claims only passing attention in discussions
of Preciosa’s identity is the reason Cervantes chose the motif of kidnapping to frame
his story. Of course, plays and novellas about poor men and women who turn out
to be aristocrats and other tales of mistaken identity were the stock in trade of
Golden Age literature. Lope de Rueda had earlier borrowed the device from Luigi
Giancarli’s La Zingana (The Gypsy woman; 1545) for his 1567 Comedia llamada
Medora (A comedy called Medora), a play about an infant boy who is exchanged
for a Gypsy. Cervantes also used the device in his novella La ilustre fregona (The
illustrious scrubwoman), so that it may well be the case that he chose this plot
device primarily for its Romanesque or fanciful effect. But by having his stolen
child stand out so conspicuously from her base kidnappers, Cervantes also helped
to circulate what chroniclers like Fray Huélamo were arguing in their essays,
namely, that anything of worth that the Roma possessed was stolen from the Payos.
He thus served as a bridge between seventeenth-century folk culture, in which tales
of baby snatching and switching had already been in circulation since the Middle
Ages, and elite arbitristas like Sancho de Moncada, with whom he is sometimes ide-
ologically linked, who determined the social and legal status of the Roma through
their lobbying of the royal Courts.62
What is ironic about Cervantes’ version of the baby-stealing myth is that
“La gitanilla” was written at a time when the number of abandoned newborn babies
among the sedentary population was growing because of severe demographic
changes in the population of Castile. For example, in Salamanca, the number of
abandoned newborns was listed at 30 before 1590, 75 in 1592, and 102 by 1595.63
Pirates still kidnapped men from ships off the Barbary coast and held them for
ransom (as Cervantes was painfully aware since he had suffered this fate), but there
is no evidence that kidnapping was a common practice among peripatetic Roma
groups in Spain or in any other country. Even alleged cases of child snatching are
very rare.64 Sancho de Moncada claimed that the Moors called the Roma Raso cher-
any (“thieves”) because of their habit of stealing children and selling them to the

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Berbers, but he lists no single case reported.65 Juan Quiñones de Benavente in

his 1631 Discurso contra los gitanos (Discourse against the Gypsies) claimed that it
was common knowledge that Gypsies stole children to sell them as slaves to the
Barbary pirates, but he also does not cite speciWc instances or give the names of
any of the “grave men” who were his claimed informants. More than one hundred
years later, historians like Heinrich Grellmann still claimed that Gypsies stole
children, according to him to eat their tender Xesh, a claim widely refuted by later
historians but still persisting in modern histories.
While there is little evidence of Roma kidnapping of non-Roma babies,
there is a good deal of documentation throughout Europe regarding the forced
removal of Romany children from their parents as a means to assimilate them into
mainstream cultures. The most egregious cases were in Eastern Europe, where until
the middle of the nineteenth century entire Roma families were sold into slavery,
exchanged, or given away.66 Although this type of wholesale slavery never existed
in Spain, anti-Gypsy legislation with increasingly severe punishments for vagrancy
and itinerancy often had the effect of separating family members. During the six-
teenth to the eighteenth centuries, court deputies often proposed the removal of
children from their parents to achieve the goal of forced assimilation. For example,
the 1534 Cortes decreed that children who begged should be placed as domestics
and punished if they were caught begging a second time. In 1594 court deputies
studied an original proposal by two of its members, which would have provided a
“deWnitive” solution to the unruly group of vagrant Gypsies who were considered
the “dregs” of Spanish society.67 The solution consisted of the forced separation
of Gypsy men and women to prevent propagation and to encourage interracial
relations. Gypsy children up to the age of ten years were to be placed in orphan-
ages where they would be given religious instruction, after which they would be
apprenticed to tradesmen or placed as domestics. The proposed legislation was
never passed, both because its measures seemed too extreme and because the court
was divided between two grand solutions to the Gypsy “problem.” These were
either forced assimilation or expulsion, the solution that was adapted in 1609
against the Moriscos and that had such dire consequences for the economy (see
Fig. 2). In the end, the route of forced sedentarization was what Spain adopted as
its ofWcial policy, and punishments for infractions against existing statutes often
resulted in children being brought up by other than their natural mothers and
especially their fathers, many of whom spent long years in prison or in the galleys.
If we discount popular belief as unfounded, what does it mean that a myth
as noxious as the baby-snatching Gypsy made its way into all sectors of society in
so many countries; that it was taken up enthusiastically by the Romantics, as we
shall see in Chapter 2, and transported into the twentieth-century literature of all
European countries? The myth forms part of the shared Gypsy stereotype that, like

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Image not available

fig. 2 Frontispiece, Sancho de Moncada, Expulsión de los gitanos (1619).

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the spanish gypsy

every stereotype, hides behind a shield of false permanence. But its very unfound-
edness means that, as Homi Bhabha puts it, the stereotype must be “anxiously
repeated,” because no one can ever really demonstrate it empirically.68 This is
why Moncada burdened his anti-Roma detractions with so many appeals to legal,
ecclesiastical, and secular authorities, many identiWed by name, but others cited
with vague references such as “all the Doctors,” “writers commonly say,” “the
majority say,” “grave men say,” “everyone recognizes,” “the popes advise,” “many
and wise men say.” In each culture where it surfaces, the stereotype of the Gypsy
baby thief responded to particular conWgurations of power and stages of national
development. Moncada’s insistence on the knowledge of “wise men” signals Impe-
rial Spain’s preoccupation with the bases of its power and knowledge and its un-
certainty about its citizenry. Casting the Gypsy as a thief of non-Roma children
reXected the court’s fear of the mixing of groups and a desire to cast the Spaniard
as a racially uncontaminated subject. Separating Preciosa from the denigrated
group symbolizes the court’s often cruel efforts at achieving racial homogeneity.
Another way to imagine the drama of Preciosa’s identity is as a reenact-
ment of a primal scene on a national scale speciWc to Spanish seventeenth-century
politics. Preciosa is the fetish that provides the reader/voyeur with the soothing
vision of an imaginary plenitude: a Spain that is “a precious jewel of love,” as one
of Preciosa’s suitors calls her––a nation as beautiful, musical, poetic, and racially
mysterious as Preciosa. That she also signiWes a lack is clear from the novella’s
conclusion: Preciosa relinquishes her will, her livelihood, her freedom, her speech,
her name, her Gypsyness, and her garments to come into full view of her new (old)
aristocratic family. In doing so, she regains her dignity and her racial superiority,
while the Gypsies with whom she lived, now without their stolen prized posses-
sion, revert to the baseness of the received stereotype. The Gypsy/non-Gypsy
dichotomy is recycled as a reafWrmation of the arbitrista discourse that shadows the
novella, and the story for modern readers at least gains knowledge value about the
importance of fantasy in ofWcial attitudes and policies about marginalized groups,
in an indirect way “authorizing” discrimination.

Preciosa’s Afterlife

Owing to the popularity of Cervantes and of Spanish literature in general, as well

as the prominent role of Spain in European politics, translations and adaptations
of Cervantes’ work began to appear shortly after their publication in Spain (see
Fig. 3).69 ModiWcations to the plot and the characters responded to varying national
preoccupations and artistic conventions, but in general Gypsies played a less
prominent role in the story’s plot as the century progressed. In France Cervantes’

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novellas were popular in their original Spanish, especially during the Wrst half
of the seventeenth century, when the taste for the Romanesque plot reached its
height.70 François de Rosset’s 1614 French translation of a selection of the novellas
that included “La gitanilla” inspired a series of popular theater adaptations in the
following decades. The Wrst was Alexandre Hardy’s La Belle égyptienne (The beauti-
ful Egyptian; 1615), followed a few years later by Jean-Pierre Camus’s L’Innocente
Egyptienne (The innocent Egyptian). Sallebray’s 1642 adaptation, also titled La Belle
Égyptienne, is perhaps the closest to the original, eliminating some of the burden-
some literary allusions that had crept in and contemporizing the language. Salle-
brary simpliWed Cervantes’ plot somewhat, however, dwelling more on the love
interest between Andrés and Preciosa and less on the secondary plots involving
the Gypsies. The result is that the French Preciosa is less the Gypsy and more the
lady, and this gentriWcation would proceed through the various seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century European versions.
“La gitanilla” was also successfully adopted for stage and transposed into
poetry in the Netherlands. Dutch stage versions stressed as well the love motif
and conspicuously underplayed Don Jan’s (Andrés’s counterpart) comportment as
a Gypsy. Disguising oneself as a Roma would have been a dangerous activity in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Netherlands, which was more successful than
most countries in suppressing its Romany population. By 1524 the Wrst edict had
already been passed against all Gypsies or those who dressed as Gypsies, whom the
courts wished to banish from Dutch lands because they were heathens. The gallows,
Xogging, branding, or hard labor awaited offenders, and organized heidenjacten, or
Gypsy hunts, were common.71 ReXecting ofWcial doctrine, both Catharina Verwers
Dusart’s De Spaensche Heiden (The Spanish Gypsy; 1644) and Mattheus Gansneb
Tengnagel’s La vie de Konstance (The life of Constance; 1643) emphasized the pagan
practices of the Gypsies, whom they depicted as devotees of Pallas Athena, Diana,
and other gods of antiquity.72 This perhaps explains why posing as a Gypsy in these
works is much more a taboo than in Spanish versions: Jan is a Gypsy only for a
few hours and never becomes an apprentice to Gypsy thieves. Dutch writers also
eliminated Pretiose’s (Preciosa’s) skill at reading palms and from the very begin-
ning carefully distinguished her from her cohorts, whereas Cervantes’ mixing of
Gypsy and non-Gypsy had been somewhat more Xuid. Still, despite the fact that
the ofWcial policy of repression against Gypsies was more severe in the Netherlands
than in Spain, the “little Gypsy girl” motif was hugely successful in both litera-
ture and art. Within a few years of the Dutch plays mentioned above and Jacob
Cats’s hugely successful poem “Seltsaam trougeval tuschen en Spaans Edelman en
een Heydinne” (The unusual union of a Spanish gentleman and a Gypsy woman),
Dutch artists were busy depicting their favorite scenes from “La gitanilla,” usually
the moment when Pretiose meets Jan. This scene is laden with popular symbols of

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Image not available

fig. 3 L’Egytienne, illustration for Miguel de Cervantes, Nouvelles (1709 French

edition). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer
Research Library, University of Kansas.
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the time, such as white roses and a white dress to indicate Pretiose’s innocence and
visual disassociation from the more colorful heiden.
Among Spanish adaptations, that of Antonio de Solís y Rivadeneira, La
gitanilla de Madrid (The Gypsy girl of Madrid; 1631?) is the most famous. As in
some of the foreign adaptations, Solís’s Preciosa is much more the lady, and conse-
quently much less the Gypsy, divulging her noble origin before spectators have had
a chance to form a concept of her as a true Gypsy. Solís’s comedy closely follows the
unities of time and place, which dramatically alters the Romanesque adventures of
the Cervantine version. All the action takes place in Madrid, making this a tighter,
tidier work. Although Preciosa’s suitor Juan vows to go to Salamanca with the
Gypsy troop to prove his love for her, he is saved from the unhappy prospect of
being inaugurated as a Gypsy leader by the sudden revelation of his love’s true
identity. This facilitates their marriage and instantly distinguishes them from the
raggle-taggle Gypsy troop. Juan wears a Gypsy costume throughout the comedy
but spends only a few brief moments with the troop. Instead, he delegates his ser-
vant Julio to be instructed in the craft of house theft and other Gypsy activities,
which gives Juan more time for wooing his lady and acting like the true gentle-
man he is.
This divergence from the original plot does not reXect a more urban
as opposed to peripatetic lifestyle of real Roma; rather, as in the case of the later
French and Dutch adaptations, it marks a change in literary tastes. Gypsies play a
very minor role in the play, mostly to prompt or react to the actions of the main
characters and to plan thefts that never take place. They are present everywhere,
but they barely act or speak; they have become mere decoration in a frivolous
comedy of errors about mistaken identities in which intrigues and miscues relat-
ing to the true identity of Preciosa, Don Juan, Juan’s servant Julio, and his cousin
Don Enrique take center stage. As in the Dutch versions, Preciosa is less a Gypsy
from the very beginning of the play. She tells fortunes but expresses her disdain for
the credulous Payos who believe in her art. Defending her honor is much more
important to her than defending her way of life, and her method of doing this is
more regal, articulate, haughty, and jealous. She is also keenly aware of having been
cheated by fate by being born with a noble soul into a family of lowly Gypsies, and
she rails against a false concept of honor based on birth instead of merit: “Is it
possible that birth deWnes nobility? Oh human error. Why, blind, did you make
nobility the daughter of chance?”73 Despite what appears to be a challenge to the
feudal concept of nobility, in the end Preciosa’s merit stems not from experience
and good deeds, but from the virtue bestowed on her because of her noble birth.
Well before the Gypsy leader Maldonado confesses that she was stolen from her crib
and that she is actually the sister of Doña Isabel, Solís’s audience will be aware at
some level that Preciosa is more than a lowly Gypsy. Especially after she claims in

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Act 2 to be a servant playing the role of Cervantes’ gitanilla (“We are going to put
on a play / by Cervantes, called La gitanilla, / . . . and I, / who am a house servant,
/ will be the Gypsy Preciosa,” 646–67), it is difWcult to imagine Preciosa as any-
thing other than a gifted and reWned noblewoman masquerading as a Gypsy.
Having reduced Gypsies to a relatively minor role in the plot of La
gitanilla de Madrid and centered all of the play’s action in Madrid, Solís oddly then
included an encomium to rural Gypsy life similar to the speeches Cervantes in-
cluded in “La gitanilla” and Pedro de Urdemalas. Solís’s alabanza or ode to Gypsy
life, pronounced by Preciosa in this version, begins with a customized version of
the beatus ille theme, sounding much more pastoral than its antecedents:

So listen you two novitiates;

This is what our life resembles:—
We are dwellers of the meadows,
Of Welds beside the towns
Where, with neither the bustle of the city,
Nor the desolateness of remote places,
Modifying both extremes
We compose a quiet life for ourselves,
So delightful, so carefree,
And above all, so comfortable,
That, according to the most credible opinion,
Our life gave birth to the chaconne,
The Xower of the watercress was born on our shores,
And the life of the idler was fashioned there. (661)

Much could be said about the obvious distortions in this rendition of the
“delightful” and “quiet” Gypsy life, but more interesting in terms of stereotypical
representation is the description of the duties of a Gypsy leader that Preciosa out-
lines for her lover. As their leader, Juan would be responsible for deciding the pleas-
ures and occupations of each member of the troop. He would condemn the most
clumsy to be blacksmiths, the group’s only honest occupation, while the most gifted
“are all idlers” (662). All the women would become dancers since this is an innate
Gypsy talent: “We are all born knowing how” (662). In addition, he would assign
the most intelligent and witty to read palms and tell fortunes or to learn the skill
of pickpocketing. Maldonado adds to this list other examples of Gypsy activities,
including baby snatching and house robbing, by consulting his logbook of recent
Gypsy crimes that he carries in his sack.
Another Gypsy activity mentioned in La gitanilla de Madrid is that of serv-
ing in the king’s galleys, a fate that the Roma actually suffered following the more

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repressive royal decrees of 1549, 1560, 1695, and as late as 1717. When a noble-
man scornfully wonders if Gypsies are good for anything, the servant Fabio astutely
retorts: “What are you saying? If it weren’t for them, Who would man the galleys
Of our king?” (667). Echoing Sancho de Moncada’s Restauración, Solís’s characters
imply that Gypsies can provide only this one useful service to the nation. The Gypsy
leader Maldonado threatens all who refuse to carry out their assigned theft with
the galleys: “Hear me now, anyone who is afraid should go to the galleys to serve
the king” (670). Either way the Gypsy should serve his leader by stealing or his
king by rowing, to which the witty servant Julio points out that serving one will
result in serving the other: “We’ll end up serving him as well as rowing in his ser-
vice, if we’re caught by the law” (670).
The great popularity of “La gitanilla” and its spinoffs against the backdrop
of tightened regulations and restrictions on Roma life and occupations throughout
Europe underscores the contradictions of cultures emerging from feudalism that
both loathed and were fascinated by their minority populations. The discourse
of Gypsy difference that evolved in the wake of Cervantes’ novellas would feed
the ethnocentric and scientiWc racisms of later centuries. In the case of Spain, espe-
cially, the portrayal of nonconformist Gypsy lifestyles and economies, and the use
of Gypsies to problematize notions of virtue, usefulness, and blood, also indicates
that beyond mere literary convention Gypsies played a role in the conceptualiza-
tion of contending ideological matrices. If the economic and political impact of the
Roma was marginal to the development of the Spanish state, as their detractors
invariably argued, their symbolic role grew and formed part of the contradictory
vision of the nation’s internal other who was variously seen as resourceful material-
ist or useless idler, accomplished entertainer or primitive bivouacker, beautiful girl
or evil horse thief. These stereotypical attributes allowed the dominant classes to
establish the criteria for membership in the nation’s citizenry, and they provided
justiWcation for elite classes in the emerging Spanish state to deWne themselves as
the only legitimate race, in contrast to those groups that did not belong on the
nation’s soil and had no “natural” right to be there.
Bernard Leblon describes Cervantes’ use of Gypsy stereotypes as the pre-
dictable borrowing of an innate satirist. According to him, Cervantes used pica-
roons and Gypsies to ridicule the ineptness of local ofWcials and magistrates and
to parody outmoded codes of chivalry; his pseudoidealization of Gypsy life served
as a sort of burlesque jeu littéraire (“literary strategy”) that was in no way intended
to seduce readers into believing that his description of Gypsy life was accurate.
Cervantes was too smart for that, according to Leblon.74 While all this is true, the
aim of this chapter has been to clarify that the function of Gypsies in “La gitanilla”
and its adaptations is much more profound than that of a simple jeu littéraire.
Admittedly their role would be further enhanced in French Romantic literature

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the spanish gypsy

and art and later in twentieth-century Spanish debates about the origin of Xamenco
music and Andalusian identity, which are studied in succeeding chapters. But it was
during Spain’s Golden Age that Gypsies became an important symbolic pretext, a
ground-zero platform on which to raise questions of difference and to rehearse sac-
riWcial rites of purgation and ostracism. What this symbolic purge translated into
in terms of the bondage, displacement, assimilation, and increasingly widespread
repression of the Roma is impossible to calculate, but it is safe to speculate that
Roma life resembled the idyll celebrated by the Gypsies of Cervantes and Solís only
in the imagination of those who were not themselves members of the “pariah race.”

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2
The Discovery of the
Romantic Spanish Gypsy

You are Spanish? Show me Your Castanets!

—jean charles davillier, L’Espagne (Spain), 368

Viva this joyous misery! This sun-drenched love and this bohemian carefreeness!
—théophile gautier, Voyage en Espagne (Voyage to Spain), 73

beginning in the 1750s, the race was on, especially in France, but also in
Germany and England, to classify and hierarchize races according to objective cri-
teria. By the early nineteenth century, the conception of Gypsies as a passionate race
of pariahs prone to tragedy both reXected and affected the increasingly racialized
discourses in the social sciences. The notion of racial determinism was especially
prevalent in France during this period, when, as a result of ideological inXuences,
“the laws of science, which were supposed to regulate the future of mankind,
were released from divine control.”1 In 1749 Georges-Louis Buffon, often regarded
as the forefather of modern natural science, validated what many Europeans already
believed––that climate inXuenced both skin color and character. But it was be-
tween 1800 and 1850 that the number of pseudoscientiWc studies attempting to
systematize racial typologies to explain racial inequality increased signiWcantly, and
as the inXuence of early theories of heredity spread many social scientists aban-
doned altogether biblical accounts to explain physical and mental characteristics
that they believed distinguished the peoples of the earth. In 1802 Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck advanced the hypothesis of the transmission of acquired characteristics

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the spanish gypsy

by inheritance, and in 1830 Barthélemy Dunoyer attempted to explain why some

races were slaves and others masters, basing his belief on the idea that customs and
prejudices regarding domination and slavery were inherited.2 Some social scien-
tists, like Pierre Cabanis writing in 1824 on the relation between physiology and
morality, advocated the notion of an intellectual and moral scale of races, while
others ranked races according to favored and less-favored physical characteristics
such as facial features, color, or body size. What all of these theoreticians shared was
a compulsion for categorization that was typical for the period.
By mid-century the question of racial differences was entering a new stage
that coincided with the consolidation of the various European nation-states. The
conviction was growing that social inequality was inevitable because it was a nat-
urally occurring phenomenon and that it was the duty of the scientist to investi-
gate the reasons for this phenomenon.3 It was generally accepted by then that, as
Prosper Lucas argued in his Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’hérédité naturelle
(Philosophical and physiological treatise on natural heredity; 1847), characteristics
could be inherited through a combination of physiological and climatological
means. However, appeals to Romantic notions relying on biblical genealogy coex-
isted with more scientiWc anthropological approaches. The most notable example
was the minor French aristocrat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, whose inXuential
Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the inequality of the human races;
1853) contributed to racial stereotypes by explaining the rise and fall of entire
nations based on racial typologies. Arguing in favor of polygenesis, or the multiple
origin of the human species, he sought to explain the “eradicable” mental and phys-
ical differences among humans that have exerted their inXuence over all of what he
called the greatest human civilizations.4
Gobineau divided the whole of the human species into three primary
varieties: the dark races with highly developed animal faculties, indifference to
pain, cowardice, and “monstrous impassivity” that “stamps the negro with the
mark of inferiority to other races”;5 the yellow races––sensual, violent, cruel, prac-
tical, and unimaginative; and the white races, endowed with the highest mental
faculties, a keen sense of order and justice, liberty, patriotism, and a “singular love
of life.”6 Though Gobineau acknowledged that civilizations evolved as races fuse,
he believed that some races were purer than others, and he furthered the notion of
racial determinism by arguing that moral characteristics were tied to physiology,
that blood in the last instance determined the relative purity or contamination of a
people,7 and that, transmitted by bloodlines, people’s behavior was determined by
the race to which they belong.8 Gobineau’s racial theories may have been anachro-
nistic because of their Romantic “mysticism and unreason”9 but his inXuence on
writers such as Mérimée insured that his ideas perpetuated Romantic racialized
thinking and found favor with successive generations of social scientists whose

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conclusions, if not methods, varied little from his. Needless to say, placing less
emphasis on religious myth to explain racial differences and more on environ-
mental determinism or inherited physiological distinctions did not lead to a more
egalitarian consensus regarding racial difference. If anything, by the end of the
nineteenth century, differences among races were more sharply drawn, and collec-
tive traits such as virility and femininity, youthfulness and decadence were assigned
to entire races and became commonplace knowledge among large sectors of bour-
geois societies.
The “popular racialism” as Tzvetan Todorov termed it10 that evolved as
a result of these early attempts at scientiWc classiWcations of racial groups also re-
Xected both economic and political relations within and among European nations.
As a result of rising European nationalisms, a response, as many have argued, to the
development of the capitalist mode of production, divisions within the white race
were deemed necessary, and scientists debated hotly terms such as Indo-Germanic,
Indo-European, Aryan, and Semitic.11 Suddenly race was thought to be a factor in
explaining both international and internal conXicts and exploitation, thus raising
the stakes in the evolving controversies over racial classiWcations. As Robert Miles
has pointed out, at the same time that ruling bourgeois classes racialized the groups
they exploited, they constructed or enhanced myths of their own prestigious
origins. It suddenly became expedient “for members of the bourgeoisie in each
nation-state to identify themselves with a particular imagined line of racialized
descent on this genealogical map, often using it additionally to identify the crite-
rion of membership of the nation, to specify the common ‘we.’ As a result, each
nation was imagined to have a ‘racial’ character, composition, and history.”12

The French Creation of a Gypsy Race

From the above scattered quotes, it is not difWcult to recognize the inXuence of
French racial thought in tracing the evolution of Gypsy descriptions in French
culture from 1700 to 1900. Generally the “discovery” of the Spanish Gypsy by
French travelers and writers coincided with the racialized theories of Gobineau and
his mid-nineteenth-century followers. In summarizing their voyages to Spain,
eighteenth-century French travelers had largely ignored what would later become
the major tourist attractions of the Gypsy quarters of cities such as Seville and
Granada. Their mission, as Manuel Bernal Rodríguez summarizes it, was scientiWc
and cultural rather than anthropological.13 If they mentioned Gypsies as a race, it
was usually to dismiss their importance altogether, to denigrate them as did Jean-
François Bourgoing, or, like the traveling soldier Nicolas Massias, simply to iden-
tify them as descendants of the Moors.14

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the spanish gypsy

This is not to say, however, that eighteenth-century French travelers

were indifferent to the perceived contrast between French and Spanish customs
and character, only that Gypsies were not particularly representative of the Span-
ish nation as it was perceived by these early travelers. In 1700 the anonymous
French traveler M*** published lengthy travel letters about the Spanish character
and customs, dwelling, as many early French and British travelers did, on what-
ever characteristics he thought best distinguished citizens of northern climes from
their southern neighbors: bullWghts, religious superstition, ignorance, poverty, un-
sanitary living conditions, cruel and arbitrary justice, poor table manners, unappe-
tizing food, primitive traveling conditions and roads, crippled commerce, and
economic chaos, all without singling out Spanish Gypsies. Jean-François Peyron,
Chrétien-Auguste Fischer, Father Jean Labat, and Jean-Marie-Jérôme Fleuriot de
Langle all made passing reference to national dances and customs without specify-
ing the ethnic identity of performers. Any ethnic distinctions related strictly to
Spain’s Moorish past, which was deemed the most interesting feature of Spanish
cultural identity. Most eighteenth-century travelers regarded Andalusia as a quasi-
Moorish region where it was possible to view the vestiges, now sadly in ruins, of a
great premodern culture. Interpreting Moorish inscriptions and architecture was of
far more interest to these early travelers than were the current residents whose cus-
toms and occupations they often despised.
Even eighteenth-century foreign travelers who took special note of the
popularity and origins of dances such as the fandango rarely identiWed its perform-
ers as Gypsies, though the dance was an important part of the Gypsy repertoire by
that time.15 Despite this reserve, some of their descriptions give clues to the per-
formers’ ethnic identity, and by mid-nineteenth century Gypsies would be consid-
ered a key element in all descriptions of Spanish dance. One of the Wrst to comment
on the fandango was Jean François Peyron in his Nouveau Voyage en Espagne fait
en 1777 et 1778 (New voyage to Spain made in 1777 and 1778), Wrst published in
1782. To him we owe one of the Wrst comparisons of the Spanish dances of Cadiz,
such as the fandango, with the dances of the puellae gaditane or Cadiz maidens that
Martial (Marcus Aurelius Martialiis), Juvenal, and Pliny had described in the Wrst
century.16 With their supple bodies, innate gaiety, expressiveness, and brio, Peyron
declared, Spanish dancers were born to please the spectator: “Their voice, the gui-
tar, the clicking castanets, and the heel stomping in rapid alternation with which
the dancers mark their steps and keep time, produce a charming ensemble that
sometimes transports the spectator,” who will cry out, according to Peyron, not
from anger but “for the pleasure he experiences.”17
Peyron’s countryman Jean-François Bourgoing was equally charmed by
the fandango, citing it as an example of the general Spanish (but not Gypsy)
taste and aptitude for dance: “There a Spanish woman, in appropriate costume,

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accompanying instruments with her castanets and marking time with rare pre-
cision, becomes one of the most seductive objects which love can use to extend
its empire.”18 According to Elena Fernández Herr, Bourgoing’s description of a
Spanish bolero was nothing less than an early version of the tablao Xamenco or what
has come to be known as a Xamenco review.19 It is worth quoting in its entirety
since the description reappears repeatedly as an example of Gypsy dance in later
travel journals and guidebooks:

A male and female dancer spring onto the stage from different
directions, both in Andalusian costume, typical of the dance;
they Xy to their encounter as if driven to it. The man extends
his amorous arms towards the woman, who proceeds to abandon
herself in his embraces; but suddenly she swirls and escapes him.
In turn the dancer, as if incensed, retaliates by withdrawing. The
orchestra pauses, the couple stops as if undecided, the music soon
renews their movements.
Next the man expresses his desires with force and vivac-
ity. The woman appears more eager to respond. A more voluptu-
ous languidness is painted in her eyes, her breast heaves more
violently, and her arms extend towards the object that beckons;
but a new of wave of sadness comes over her a second time; then
a new pause again rouses one to the other.
The sounds of the orchestra rise persistently: the music
soars to keep pace with their steps. Filled with desire, the male
dancer thrusts himself again in front of the woman. The same
feeling draws her to him. Their eyes devour each other; their lips
nearly touch, she is once more weakly held back by a semblance
of modesty.
The musical fracas accelerates, and with it the vivacity
of their movements. A sort of vertigo, a drunken voluptuousness,
seems to lock them together: all their muscles summon and ex-
press their pleasure, their gaze is confounded. Suddenly the music
stops, the dancers relax in a languorous swoon: the curtain falls
and the spectators revive.20

Some of Bourgoing’s contemporaries were quicker to racialize popular

dance forms such as the fandango even if they did not necessarily associate them
with Gypsies. The British traveler Henry Swinburne in his Travels Through Spain
and Portugal in 1775 and 1776 (1779) was less enthusiastic about Spanish dances
than Peyron or Bourgoing. He censured especially the Manguindoy, which he

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claimed was so salacious that it was prohibited under severe penalties, as well as
the fandango, both of which according to him were Havana imports “of negro
breed.”21 The fandango, however, was “so thoroughly naturalized in Spain, that
every Spaniard may be said to be born with it in his head and heels.”22 Pierre Beau-
marchais, the author of the exuberant Le Barbier de Séville (The barber of Seville)
and Le Mariage de Figaro (The marriage of Figaro), wrote to a friend in 1764 that
the fandango resembled the calenda danced by American slaves, as repellent as it
was irresistible: “Dance here is entirely unknown, that is to say Wgure dancing,
since I would not honor with that title the grotesque, often indecent movements
of the Moorish and Granadan dances that so delight the public; the most popular
here is called the fandango, whose music is extremely lively and whose charm con-
sists in lascivious gestures and steps.”23 Upon witnessing the fandango this “most
modest of men” blushed to the tips of his ears to see a young Spanish woman, with-
out raising her eyes and with a modest Wgure, stand up to dance beside her daring
partner. She begins by extending her arms and snapping her Wngers to keep time;
her partner circles about her, approaches and withdraws with violent steps to which
she responds with similar gestures, all the while snapping her Wngers as if to say:
“I care not, try your best to keep pace with me, I won’t be the one to tire Wrst.”24
M***, like Beaumarchais, compared the fandango to the American Negro
calenda and described it as licentious and immodest,25 while another traveler, the
count Gustave Philipe Creutz, insisted that its lascivious, indecent movements were
“born in the harem.”26 For his part, the mayor of Gibraltar, Sir William Dalrymple,
speculated in 1774 that the dance originated in the West Indies along the coast
of Guinea.27 Father Labat, a missionary to the French colonies of Martinique and
Guadalupe, agreed, saying that the Spaniards had learned it from the Indians.28
Writing in 1809, Étienne Lantier was amused by reports that the fandango was rec-
ommended as a curative by Arab doctors. He quoted a native source who insisted
that the dance was of Arab origin, although others argued that it was brought
from Havana.29 Fleuriot de Langle (also known as Figaro), on the contrary, imitated
Peyron and asserted in 1785 that the fandango was already popular among the
Romans who understood it to be a Spanish invention.30 The best modern inter-
preter, he assured his French readers, was one Julia Formalaguez, whose seductive
movements would make any hermit hand over his lettuce, habit, and sandals to
the nearest devil.31 Another aWcionado, Giovanni Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt
(1725–1798), bothered little about the origins of the fandango but reported at
length in his diary about experiencing a delirious pleasure at seeing it performed
in a Madrid theater, where it was commonly inserted after or between acts of
theatrical farces. His escort, one Doña Pichona, explained to him that Gypsies were
the best fandango dancers, and the following day Casanova hired a Roma dance
instructor and proceeded to add the fandango to his repertoire of seductions. The

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marquis of Casinos apparently agreed, writing in 1761 that the fandango was best
executed by Gypsies.32
Most eighteenth-century travelers, however, were more keenly fascinated
by the Arab inXuence on dance, dress, and language and, ignoring the Gypsy pres-
ence in Granada, Seville, or Cadiz, commented at length on the Moorish Xavor of
southern Spain, attributing the indolent and passionate Andalusian character to
its racial hybridity. Although travelers admired Arab architecture and ancient wis-
dom, in general the mixing of Spanish, Jewish, and Arab peoples was imagined
as detrimental to the modern-day Spanish stock, producing a bad “blood” that
impeded enlightened progress because it too closely tied Spain to North Africa.
According to one anonymous traveler, Andalusian blood was tainted: “The Andalu-
sian race is not beautiful. The men are dark, small, and rather poorly built. They
are irritable, cheating liars, and in general, very clever.”33 Andalusian women fare
somewhat better: “The women are pleasing, without being pretty, and very Xir-
tatious.”34 With such a population Andalusia was for this traveler a fertile but
underdeveloped paradise: “Andalusia could produce all the fruits of nature, but the
laziness of its inhabitants limits production to wool, wine, oils, oranges, lemons,
and very good horses.”35 From this it is clear that as early as the 1767 the French
were eyeing the fertile Andalusian landscape and Wnding ways to denigrate the
stewardship of its local inhabitants. In the following century Gypsies would be
separated from the general population and become a key part of this discourse on
Spanish moral defects as well as talents.
As the number of travelers increased and as European concepts of racial
difference relied more heavily on the observation of physical types, distinguishing
among Spaniards became more popular, and arguments regarding climatological
determinism carried the day. Seven years after Georges-Louis Buffon argued that if
a group of Senegalese were relocated to Denmark for an unspeciWed time their skin
would turn white, the anonymous French traveler M*** wrote that the passionate,
jealous, Spanish character, especially in its Andalusian manifestations, was probably
owing to the scorching climate of Spain.36 Jean-François Bourgoing, who resided in
Spain for eight years as secretary to the French ambassador, offered detailed assess-
ments of Spanish national character and numerous picturesque accounts of local
scenery, customs, and occupations in his Nouveau voyage en Espagne (1788), later re-
vised under the title Tableau de l’Espagne moderne (1797), but, like most Enlighten-
ment travelers, he was no connoisseur of Gypsy music or attire. On the contrary, like
Peyron, he considered Gypsies a scourge “of which society should have long hence
purged itself,” and he was much more concerned with the customs of the elite than
those of the common people, with whom he had only minimal contact.37 More so
than the French Gypsies, he speculated, Spanish Gypsies led a “dissolute life,” occu-
pying themselves in “suspicious” professions that prey on the innocent. Bourgoing

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attributed ethnic difference among Spaniards to the effects of climate rather than
race. For example, he regarded all Andalusians as particularly susceptible to crime
because of the néfaste (“unlucky”) southern climate: “During the summer a certain
wind produces a kind of frenzy that makes their excesses more frequent.”38
Gradually travelers associated the “frenzy” and “excess” of the Spanish
character more particularly with Spanish dance performers, especially Andalusian
women. French travelers especially came to enjoy the South’s néfaste climate after
the newly established postal routes from Madrid to Andalusia made travel more
convenient. Some were inspired by descriptions of performances that Chrétien-
Auguste Fischer witnessed during his 1797–98 voyage to Cadiz, Fischer being
among the Wrst to equate Spanish dances performed by Andalusian women with
sexual ecstasy. The bolero, he reported, was “an authentic tableau of jouissance,
produced in its preludes and in all of its nuances, from the Wrst awakening of the
senses to the fulWllment of desire.”39 Because of their vivacity, beauty, and agility,
Andalusian women were naturally adept at the fandango and bolero, he reported,
and so would have no need to purchase the set of twelve “engravings showing the
various steps and movements of the seguidilla bolero, as well as the correct attire
for this dance” that were on sale at the Escribano bookstore in Madrid.40
General histories of the Gypsies began to appear at about the same time
that the Wrst detailed on-site observations of Roma such as those of Bourgoing and
Fischer were stirring the French imagination. The Wrst history to offer a compre-
hensive portrait of European Gypsies was Heinrich Grellmann’s 1783 Die Zigeuner
(The Gypsies). Considered during its time the most authoritative account of Gyp-
sies in Europe, this work became a model for all future histories, one of the most
cited studies of all times according to Wim Willems.41 Lacking reliable empirical
information, Grellmann constructed a Gypsy identity by grouping together a vari-
ety of itinerant groups and assigning them a Wxed ethnographic proWle.42 One of
the more enduring legacies of Grellmann’s history was his account of a legal case
in Hungary involving a group of Zigeuner who had been executed after confessing
(under torture) to having killed and afterward eaten their victims. While in a later
edition Grellmann rectiWed his account by reporting that the charge of cannibal-
ism was later dropped, the damage had already been done: “It would take a century
and more for suggestions of Gypsy cannibalism to die away.”43 Every historical
account of Spanish Calés would repeat Grellmann’s assertions even when claiming
a distinctive racial proWle. In fact, even early twentieth-century writers such as
F. M. Pabanó, José-Carlos de Luna, and Walter Starkie still cited the Hungarian
case, thus perpetuating the negative portrait of the Gypsy even when they ques-
tioned the veracity of the story.
During the Wrst half of the nineteenth century, as anthropologists and
ethnologists began to reWne concepts of race, distinctions among subgroups of

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Spaniards living in the same region became more precise. Foreigners distinguished
Calés from other Andalusians by their darker skin color, although they still applied
many of the same stereotypes that anthropologists generally associated with darker
skin color (laziness, passion, temper) to all Andalusians, regardless of phenotype.
To draw a racial distinction between Gypsy and non-Gypsy Andalusians but still
apply popular concepts regarding climactic determinism, the anonymous historian
J. M. (generally thought to be Baron François Jacques Jaubert de Passa, who trav-
eled frequently to Spain to study irrigation systems)44 speculated in 1832 that
because of their darker skin color Spanish Gypsies originated in Northern Africa,
speciWcally in the Yemen desert and regions bordering on Egypt: “Their physique,
skin, laxity, agility, and Xexibility all reveal to us the torrid climate from which
they sprang.”45 Nomadic customs and family arrangements further reinforced this
conclusion: With their horses and livestock gathered about them, their portable
kitchens, their women crouching down to serve them or tending the children in
the corner of a one-room dwelling, J. M. suggested that Gypsies closely resembled
bivouacking Arabs.46 Gypsy dance, with its castanets, guitars, lascivious move-
ments, and brilliant dress, provided further validation of an Egyptian origin for
early travelers and historians such as J. M., who was widely quoted as an expert
on Spain.47
Some of the most egregious stereotypes (eating of human Xesh, gathering
and eating of dead animals, kidnapping of children, casting the evil eye, acting as
spies for foreign nations) that continue to form part of the Gypsy stereotype found
their origin in hearsay remarks and anecdotes that were handed back and forth
among travelers, historians, and eventually anthropologists and ethnologists, who
enveloped them in a cloak of legitimacy by examining their claims. For example,
most of the physical and moral stereotypes Wrst reported by Grellmann were speed-
ily grafted onto the Spanish Gypsy. J. M. claimed that Spanish Gypsies showed in
their very demeanor their foreign, barbarous origins. Their smile had a hard and
disagreeable quality; their joy was a forced emotion; and sadness was the deWning
feature of their physiognomy.48 Their look, he reported, was Werce and shifty, truly
terrifying because “their eyes shine with an extraordinary Wre.”49 Following J. M.’s
1832 remark, every subsequent account of the Spanish Gypsies would underscore
their peculiar “look.” We will see the long life of the Gypsy’s “burning eyes” and
“melancholy look” in another chapter.
Later in the century the historian Victor de Rochas boasted a more sci-
entiWc approach to Gypsy characterization and anatomy in Les Parias de France
et d’Espagne (The pariahs of France and Spain; 1876). Following George Borrow’s
lead, Rochas refuted J. M’s Gypsy genealogy,50 claiming that all Spanish Gitanos
descended from the same small group of Roma who had migrated into Spain dur-
ing the reign of the Catholic kings: “a generally accredited idea in Spain and even

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in the south of France, among ignorant or superWcial people, is that Gitanos differ
essentially from the Bohemians and that they descend from the Spanish Moors. But
history, anthropology, and linguistics conspire to contradict such an opinion.”51 Less
exacting about his information on Gypsy character, Rochas cited the usual, decid-
edly unscientiWc sources: besides George Borrow, Cervantes, Heinrich Grellmann,
Martín del Río, and others. But to arrive at his theory of Gypsy migrations, Rochas
also relied on more technically advanced anthropologists such as Izydor Kopernicki,
who had studied sixty skulls of Hindus and European Roma and discovered “strik-
ing conWrmation” of the common ancestry of modern Roma and the “lower classes”
of Indian society,52 or linguists such as M. Miklosich, who had identiWed Slavic
vocabulary words in the Roma dialects of Spain.53 Rocha’s dismissal of the theory
that the Calés descended from peoples migrating into Spain from North Africa, a
mere footnote to his history of the pariah cultures he studied, would become a more
important issue in twentieth-century scholarship, when Spanish historians and
anthropologists revisited the question of Calé origins and searched for evidence to
validate or refute J. M.’s theory.

Preciosa’s Progeny

During the mid-nineteenth century, Cervantes’ discrete and luminous Preciosa was
revived as a charged symbol of nonconformity and fatal attraction. However, while
Cervantes’ “La gitanilla” still left an indelible mark on the art, music, Wction, and
poetry of the Romantic era, most Romantic Gypsies were tinged in the darker
shades of Victor Hugo’s or Gérard de Nerval’s imagination.54 From the early adap-
tations mentioned in Chapter 1 until the end of the nineteenth century, Preciosa
was “reborn” hundreds of times, nearly always as an orphan who springs forth into
the Wctional world with her Gypsyness in full view even if her origins are described
at Wrst as obscure. Most of Preciosa’s Romantic progeny are of true Gypsy origin,
but many lack parents, close friends, or family ties, the better perhaps to epito-
mize Gypsy freedom from bourgeois codes of conduct. Racial identity is responsi-
ble for the Gypsy heroine’s innate passion and spontaneity, and any civilized veneer
quickly dissipates in the face of adversity or Gadjé (non-Roma) hypocrisy. Even
when brought up in a family of non-Gypsies, such as George Sand’s Moréna (from
her 1853 novel La Filleule), a woman’s Gypsyness inexorably exerts itself at Wrst
contact with other Gypsies who often come to reclaim her for their race.
The GypsyWcation, and in many instances demonization, of Cervantes’
Preciosa was consecrated in Prosper Mérimée’s 1846 novella about Carmen, the
passionate and tragic Spanish Gypsy who still haunts the modern stage and movie
screen. However, the intensiWcation of a Gypsy-identiWed allure and evilness

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occurred several decades before Mérimée’s novella. In his Wrst novel, Han d’Island
(1823), Victor Hugo painted the character Bechlie as a dark, mysterious force
aligned with the devil: “The woman’s aspect was not reassuring. Her arm held a
metal lamp above her head, casting a bright light on her face. Her livid features,
her dry and angular shape, lent her a cadaverous air, and from her eyes beamed sin-
ister rays like those from a funeral torch.”55 By contrast Hugo’s Esmeralda (Notre
Dame de Paris, 1831) is a much more alluring Wgure, although she, like her model
Preciosa, is only a pseudo-Gypsy, stolen from her mother when she was an infant.
And like Preciosa, Esmeralda derives her force from the strong contrast between
her luminescent non-Gypsyness and the malevolence of the authentic Gypsies who
had stolen her and guard her as a prized possession.
Despite her non-Gypsy origin, Hugo’s Esmeralda does not metamorphose
into a lady like Cervantes’ Constanza de Azevedo y de Meneses. She is much
too much the Gypsy, as the Gypsy was imagined to be by the Romantics, to be
accepted into conventional bourgeois society, and even the revelation of her aris-
tocratic origin fails to rescue her from the tragic fate of most of the subsequent
Romantic and post-Romantic heroines. By the time that her birth mother realizes
that the hated Gypsy street dancer Esmeralda is really her daughter, the police have
already arrived to carry her off to prison in one of Romantic Wction’s most pathetic
denouements. If the fashionable aphorism “Once a Gypsy, always a Gypsy” still
dominated popular thought about Gypsy character, the same did not hold true
about the non-Gypsy. What if living among the Gypsies was enough to mark a
non-Gypsy as irretrievably other? This is the question that Hugo posed for an audi-
ence who in real life feared that the Gitans of the Batignolle section of Paris were
encroaching on their lives. Hugo’s most enduring feat as far as the solidiWcation of
the stereotypical Gypsy heroine is concerned was not simply his transformation
of Preciosa into a tragic heroine but his evidence of the destruction that follows
from the confrontation of Roma and Gadjé worlds, an idea that reaches fruition
in Mérimée’s Carmen. Esmeralda’s unhappy end is preceded by the destruction of
nearly all of the non-Gypsies who come into contact with her, and she, in turn,
arouses the collective lust and cruelty of the entire Gadjé world. Hugo’s Esmeralda
may have been, as some critics suggest, strongly inXuenced by Antonio de Solís y
Rivadeneira’s La gitanilla de Madrid (The Gypsy girl of Madrid), the immensely
popular stage version based loosely on Cervantes’ story, which saw Wfteen editions
beginning in the 1630s, but by transforming Esmeralda into a tragic muse he set
the stage for a profound change in the conception of the imaginary Spanish Gypsy.
The Esmeraldas, Carmens, Azucenas, and Morénas of Romantic Wction
were also the progeny of operatic gitanos, zingaras, egizianas, zigeunerin, and bohémi-
ennes already in wide circulation throughout Europe by the eighteenth century.
Max Peter Baumann’s table of Gypsy singspiel and operas lists thirteen works from

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the spanish gypsy

1724 to 1793 performed in Naples, Paris, Vienna, London, Frankfurt, Dresden,

Lübeck, and Munich.56 The popularity of the operatic Gypsy heroine continued
undiminished well into the nineteenth century, which saw no fewer than sixty-four
operas performed in nearly every European capital.57 Michael William Balfe and
Alfred Bunn’s 1843 The Bohemian Girl, based on Cervantes’ “La gitanilla,” was per-
formed in London one hundred times, making it the most popular of all nineteenth-
century operas in England.58 Ambroise Thomas’s opera Mignon (based on Goethe’s
1798 Wilhelm Meisters Lehr- und Wanderjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s apprenticeship
and travels]) was performed more than a thousand times, “becoming one of the
most successful operas in music history.”59 The music for these operas was no more
authentically Roma (despite the clichéd Wddles, tambourines, or castanets) than
Cervantes’ Preciosa or any of her eighteenth- and nineteenth-century progeny. In-
spired by the revisionist work of Franz Liszt (1811–86) based on Hungarian Gypsy
music, however, the anxiety for authenticity was suddenly gripping the haut
monde of music. And with the gradual inclusion of “Romantic Spain” in the Euro-
pean grand tour, a more genuine interest in the “real” Spanish Gypsy and authentic
Spanish Gypsy music was beginning to have its effects on European high culture.
For example, the search for authentic Spanish music led the Russian composer
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804–57) on a pilgrimage to Granada to make the
acquaintance of the Calé Xamenco guitarist “El Murciano.” Nearly every nineteenth-
century French traveler sought to inXuence readers’ attitudes regarding Spanish
musical aptitude and skill, and gradually Spanish music was identiWed with Gypsy
dance and guitar spectacles, marking another stage in the consolidation of Spanish
national identity with Andalusian and Gypsy identity that would culminate in the
twentieth century.
The exchange between Spanish and other European cultures through the
Gypsy medium was fertile and enduring. As part of this exchange, ancient myths
about the Gypsies were recycled and renewed, imported and exported to and from
Spain with amazing tenacity. Such was the fate of the baby-snatching myth, Wrst
propagated by German historians in the Wfteenth century, and later surfacing in
Italy in Luigi Giancarli’s comedy La Zingana (The Gypsy; 1545). The Spanish play-
wright Lope de Rueda then incorporated it into his 1567 Comedia llamada Medora
(A comedy called Medora), and from there as we have seen Cervantes recycled it in
his “La gitanilla” of 1613. The myth reappeared in the 1630s in Antonio de Solís y
Rivadeneira’s La gitanilla de Madrid (The Gypsy girl of Madrid), an adaptation of Cer-
vantes’ novella that inspired Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame (1831), which in turn inspired
Antonio García Gutiérrez’s El trovador (The troubadour) in 1836. Giuseppi Verdi
then adapted García Gutiérrez’s version for his opera Il trovatore (The troubadour;
1853). The horror of the stolen baby seems never to lose its appeal for European
bourgeois culture. Even after revisionist writings debunked the historical accuracy

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of the baby-snatching myth, changelings, adoptions, and baby theft continued to

be popular plot devices, sometimes reversing the ethnicity of the stolen child. For
example, George Eliot’s Gypsy Fedalma (from her epic poem The Spanish Gypsy,
1853) was brought up as an English lady, and George Sand’s Moréna (La Filleule,
1869) grew up in an aristocratic French family, but the message of the incommen-
surability of races carries through all these reversals. With such an enduring Wctional
presence, it is not surprising that even today travelers, ethnographers, and histori-
ans should feel the need to validate or refute the myth that Gypsies steal babies.60
At the same time that Northern Europeans were placing Gypsy fantasies
like Carl Maria von Weber’s Preziosa, Bizet’s operatic Carmen, or Verdi’s Azucena
in Spanish settings with music adopted to European tastes, Spanish composers were
beginning to export their own compositions that were heavily inXected by what
passed as Gypsy music. Pablo Sarasate (1844–1908) incorporated into his Spanish
Dances melancholic rhapsodies with rhythmic Wgures, oriental arabesques, and the
staccato clapping that characterized the cante jondo.61 Later, Isaac Albéniz (1860–
1909), Enrique Granados (1867–1916), Manuel de Falla (1876–1946), and, Wnally,
Joaquín Rodrigo (1901–99), the last of the Spanish neo-Romanticists, would fol-
low with their vast repertoire of Andalusian cantos, preludes, rhapsodies, serenatas,
jotas, and sagitallis. Roma musicians would in turn adapt this “Gypsy” music for
their own repertoires, preparing the stage for what I call in Chapter 5 the “Xa-
menco wars” of the early twentieth century, when debates such as those waged in
Hungary about folk versus Gypsy music as the source of the national music (and
national pride) were played out in Andalusia.

Romantic Travels, Romantic Gypsies

Not surprisingly, with such fertile interaction among musicians, performers, his-
torians, and travelers, dance spectacles began to occupy a larger share of the for-
eigner’s entertainment, and picturesque descriptions of visits to Gypsy quarters
such as the Triana district or the tobacco factory in Seville and the Albaicín district
and Sacromonte caves of Granada eventually became standard fare in the European
travelogue.62 During the nineteenth century approximately six hundred travelers
visited Spain, a third of them French.63 Spain became à la mode in France between
1800 and 1850, both for travelers and for writers of historical novels, plays, and
poetry.64 Preceding and immediately following the invasion of French troops that
escalated into the War of Independence (1808–13), France saw a Xourish of travel
memoirs and essays, many written by military personnel more preoccupied with
recounting military campaigns and travels than describing local customs and in-
habitants. There are, however, many exceptions, including the anonymous Mes

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Réminiscences de l’Espagne, Esquisse rapide des moeurs et usages de ces contrées célèbres . . .
(My reminiscences of Spain, A quick study of the customs and habits of these cele-
brated countries; 1822–23) and [?] Amade’s Voyage en Espagne, ou Lettres philoso-
phiques contenant l’histoire générale des dernières guerres de la péninsule (Voyage in Spain,
or philosophical letters containing the general history of the latest peninsular wars;
1822–23). Beginning in the 1820s not a year went by in France without a theatri-
cal performance starring Spanish types: Between 1830 and 1840 upwards of Wfty
melodramas, vaudeville performances, and historical dramas brought stock Span-
ish themes to the French stage.65
Once the Romantic idealism of Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas père, and
Victor Hugo had taken the literary world by storm, and Romantic bohemianism
had Wrmly gripped the Parisian art scene, the Gypsy came to symbolize freedom
and spontaneity, and the mostly sedentary Calés of southern Spain in consequence
became an object of intense international curiosity.66 For the “bohemian” artist,
the real Bohemian (called gitan or gitano in French) became an ideal subject both
for painting and for emulation, but in the mythologizing process that resulted
the political and social realities of the historical Roma subjects were obscured. The
French Romantics reduced the Spanish Roma, together with their Hungarian coun-
terparts in the Batignolle district of Paris, to a simple set of stereotypical images:
the dancing wench, the sly horse trader, the ancient fortune-teller, the ragamufWn
child, the itinerant tinker, to name a few. Gradually, given the advantages of prof-
iting on their image, the Roma themselves became enthusiastic propagators of
the Romantic Gypsy myth, capitalizing on the French and English desire both to
witness and to live the bohemian life (at arm’s length from “real” Bohemians, it
should be noted) and thus escape a claustrophobic bourgeois life.
Many travelers echoed eighteenth-century attitudes about Gypsies, such
as Jean François de Peyron’s opinion (1776) that they were a pack of thieves.67 In
his Voyage en Espagne (Voyage through Spain), published in 1859, although the trip
itself was made in 1840, Théophile Gautier asserted categorically that “their true
profession, essentially, is that of thief.”68 However, neither Gautier nor any fellow
travelers of his generation shared Jean-François Bourgoing’s conclusion that Spain
should purge itself of its Gypsy population. As Spain and Hungary became popu-
lar destinations for the Romantic tourist, and perhaps as European racism took a
more anti-Semitic turn, Gypsies began to occupy a larger and less dismissive space
in the European imagination. No threat to any national interests as Jews were often
painted, the Gypsy became a quaint and colorful symbol for a forgotten lifestyle
that should be preserved as a mirror for what more developed societies had left
behind.
Travelers vied with one another to help their French countrymen gaze into
that mirror. Rebelling against the previous generation of Enlightenment armchair

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explorers, French travelers especially from the 1830s on produced a radical trans-
formation in the European attitude toward Spanish “local color,” often criticizing
the moralizing of their predecessors.69 Archeological descriptions were interspersed
with more picturesque accounts, beginning with those of Alexandre de Laborde:
Itinéraire descriptif de l’Espagne (Descriptive itinerary to Spain; 1808), and Voyage
pittoresque et historique de l’Espagne (Picturesque and historical voyage to Spain;
1806–20), which were the result of numerous trips from 1797 to 1806. On the
heels of Laborde’s veritable encyclopedia of Spain came the cultural invasion of
post-Napoleonic Wars travelers: Adolphe Blanqui (1825), Charles Nodier (1827),
Prosper Mérimée (1830, 1835, 1840, 1846, 1853, 1859, 1864), Louis Viardot
(1834), Adrien Dauzats (1836, 1837), Charles Didier (1836–45), Pharamond
Blanchard (1826–38), Marie-Henri Beyle (Stendhal, 1837), Adolphe Custine
(1838), George Sand (Aurore Dupin, 1838–39), Théophile Gautier (1840), Victor
Hugo (1843), Edgar Quinet (1843), Alexandre Dumas (senior, 1846), Antoine
de Latour (1848), Gustave Flaubert (1849–51), Alexis de Valon (1849), Alfred
Dehodencq (1849–55), Auguste-Emile Bégin (1852), Jacques Boucher de Perthes
(1855), Jean Charles Davillier, (1862), Luis Teste (1868), Edmondo De Amicis
(1871), and Héctor France (1888) all made their trips to Spain and embellished their
travel accounts, letters, or stories with Romanticized tableaus and adventures.70
What follows are summaries of these new travelers’ vision of the Spanish Gypsies.
What the Romantic traveler was Xeeing, according to Alberto González
Troyano, was a world in which mercantilism and the regulated, domesticated
bourgeois existence were thought to be crushing the Romantic spirit.71 What he
searched for, and consequently invented, were things that previous generations had
rejected or overlooked: “cultural contrasts, agrarianism, the unusual, more varied
landscapes, mestizaje, medievalism, orientalism.”72 For some of Europe’s elite this
meant varying the usual grand-tour itinerary to venture into Hungary on a quest
for Alexander Pushkin’s Tzigany (from his 1824 poem of this title), but for many
others it meant a sojourn in southern Spain, whose roads and inns made traveling
difWcult but whose ruins, antiquities, and cultural diversity held special appeal
for the Romantic tourist. Whether their personal preference was for meridional,
oriental, or medieval nostalgia, Andalusia seemed to fulWll every Romantic’s notion
of an exotic locale. At roughly the same time that the Orient was “invented,” as
Edward Said put it, by Europeans, Andalusia was constructed as a dream world
where time could be slowed, life savored to its fullest, and the disturbances and
hypocrisy of the modern, “civilized” world of large European capitals avoided.
For Edgar Quinet, all Spaniards were linked by a mysterious and pas-
sionate force that contrasted with the North’s love and respect for reason, law, and
principles, but Andalusia was the region that best typiWed the Spanish spirit. In
Mes Vacances en Espagne (My Spanish vacation), based on his 1843 travels, Quinet

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reported on a multiregional dance interlude midway through a bullWght that he

witnessed in Granada. Parading into the bullring in regional garb were Basques
with their long tresses, “half-Arab” Valencians, Catalans with colorful sashes,
Asturians and Galicians in more somber garb, and the most spectacular of all, the
Andalusians: “The richest, the most brilliant are the Andalusians, with their large
hats, light espadrilles, a thousand embellishments, fastened with metal combs.”73
Appreciative of this diverse display of nationalist pride, Quinet nevertheless con-
cluded that the Andalusians embodied the soul of Spain better than any other
group. A single gesture by the Andalusian dancers provoked the following raptur-
ous description of the “génie,” that is, the genius and spirit of the Spanish nation:
“There is a moment which seized the crowd: each Andalusian stoops to gather
Xowers from the ground that he then places in the hair of his dance partner. Imme-
diately afterward he leans his tilted head on the back of his hand with his elbow
resting on the shoulder of the Andalusian woman, and then he remains perfectly
still. Oh silence, dreams, meditations of love, the eve of an Andalusian day, beneath
the stars of Granada!” This simple gesture, which Quinet implausibly conjectured
was spontaneous, encapsulated the combined memory of the village, the province,
and the nation, “the eternal statement of all Spains, old and new.”74 Above all,
pleads Quinet, Spain should Wght to preserve its ancient dances and rituals such as
the bullWght and Andalusian dances that he described in such rapturous detail.
What would replace these popular spectacles if Spain were to go the route of its
northern neighbors would be foreign theater and vaudeville, with all the attending
insipidness and obscenities of French petty bourgeois tastes.
For the most part, early nineteenth-century travelers did not journey to
Andalusia intentionally to search for Gypsies, but they paved the way for those
who would do so later in the century, by either verifying or, conversely, mourning
the loss of the colorful “Espagne romantique” (“romantic Spain”), which they had
learned of in the prose and poetry of Victor Hugo and Alfred Musset, and by exoti-
cizing the Gypsies, especially of Seville and Granada. Prosper Mérimée, like Quinet
an enthusiast of the bullWght and fond of mingling with the “popular classes” in
taverns and inns, expressed a deep disappointment that during his trip to Spain
he never crossed paths with any highway robbers.75 Nevertheless, he passed along
to his readers in the Revue de Paris (Paris Review) and L’Artiste (Artist) richly tinged
adventures gathered from informants during his travels, nourishing the French
taste for the romance of the open road and the intensity of a passionate people. The
inspiration for Carmen was a serving girl Mérimée encountered and sketched in
Valencia in 1830, which he melded with a story told to him by his friend Manuela
Montijo (née Kirkpatrick), countess of Teba, about a Malagueñan man who killed
his lover in a jealous rage. Mérimée’s decision to transform Cervantes’ pseudo-
Gypsy Preciosa into an adventurous and predatory real Gypsy from Andalusia was

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a response to French readers’ desire to imagine the real Bohemian life, but his
GypsyWcation of the tavern girl “Carmencita” was also the product of his readings
of, in addition to “La gitanilla,” August Friedrich Pott’s Zigeuner in Europa und
Asien (Gypsies in Europe and Asia; 1844), the eighteenth-century sainetes (“inter-
ludes”) of Ramón de la Cruz, the local color sketches of Serafín Estébanez Calderón,
and especially George Borrow’s The Bible in Spain and The Zincali. Mérimée wrote
to his friend Manuela Montijo that Borrow was too much of a prude to appreciate
the passion of the Gypsies and the promiscuity of their women, a lapse that he
evidently sought to rectify in his novella: “He says very curious things about the
Gypsies, but as an Englishman and a holy man, he did not wish or could not see
several traits that are worth mentioning. He suggests that Gypsy women are very
chaste and that a Busno, that is to say a man who is not of their race, can not touch
a hair on their head. However, in Seville, Cadiz, and Granada, I came across in my
time Gypsy women whose virtue did not resist a duro.”76
According to Evelyn Gould, to read Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen “is to par-
ticipate in an ideal version of bohemian narrative.”77 By this she means that the
novella spoke more to the desires of the bohemian-minded bourgeoisie on the
eve of the 1848 revolution than it described any Calé community that Mérimée
may have sketched in his travels to Spain. In the middle decades of the nineteenth
century, French bohemianism was synonymous with a countercultural revolution-
ary attitude, but as Gould convincingly argues it also always had its counter-
revolutionary side that appealed strongly to the bourgeoisie. Gould calls Carmen a
“bohemian” narrative because it leaves unresolved the contention between bohemia
as the symbol of freedom and rebelliousness, and a bohemia that reinforces domi-
nant social values. While this reading of the story’s ambiguity has its value for
examining the vicissitudes of French political history and also for explaining the
enduring success of the story across centuries and cultures, it neglects the possible
effects that the negative stereotyping of Spanish Gypsies might have produced on
real Roma populations. Carmen leaves the reader with a clear notion of the disas-
trous effects of bohemian values not only as they are lived by French artists and
writers, but as these values are purportedly lived by the Spanish Roma. For the
thousands of readers across Europe, it is not merely bohemia in the way that Gould
understands it that “weakens moral Wber,”78 but contact with “real Gypsies” that
others after Mérimée would seek out (or avoid at all costs) during their travels
through Spain.
This does not invalidate Gould’s conclusion that the formal structure of
Carmen contains both a critique of bohemianism and an invitation for readers to
identify with the values of a countercultural lifestyle, releasing a “utopian energy”
that anticipates the 1847 uprising.79 However, this conclusion fails to take into
account that Mérimée’s pseudoethnology of the Spanish Gypsies inserted in Carmen

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would have the ring of truth for many future readers, similar to the inXuence
of George Borrow’s The Bible in Spain or The Zincali, which are examined in the
Chapter 3. Evidence of this can still be found in Mérimée’s modern commentators.
For example, Ilse Hempel-Lipschutz in “Andalusia, de lo vivido a lo escrito”
(Andalusia from the lived to the written) attributes the lasting appeal of Mérimée’s
“universally human” characters to their speciWcity rooted in the author’s actual
experience in Spain: “Mérimée locates his characters in a reality that is anchored in
daily routine, at the same time offering guarantees of its authenticity. We have
already noted that he constantly transposes episodes or details taken from his per-
sonal experiences to the ‘Wctionalized’ experiences of his character.”80
Mérimée gently ridiculed Borrow for his lack of knowledge about Gypsy
sexuality, yet he apparently agreed with many of the Bible salesman’s other obser-
vations that he passed along in his concluding chapter of Carmen, together with
comments borrowed from August Friedrich Pott’s 1844 Zigeuner in Europa.81 The
litany of Gypsy traits and physical attributes will be familiar to readers of George
Borrow and J. M.: the Werce look, the tendency for the women to grow old quickly,
the lack of patriotism and indifference to religion, and the afWnity with animals.
Carmen even includes a version of the hokkano baró (“great trick”) story that the
author claims was told to him by a Spanish woman (possibly his friend Manuela
Montijo), a variation of the tale that Jerónimo de Alcalá Wrst introduced in his
picaresque novel El donado hablador o Alonso, mozo de muchos amos (The chattering lay
brother, or Alonso, the servant of many masters) in 1624. Thus Mérimée partici-
pated in the popular bourgeois habit of passing off circulating folklore about
minority groups as fact, shoring up his “knowledge” with information from in-
formants who either ignored or disguised the fact that their information had come
from centuries-old Wctional works.
Mérimée ended his tale with a Wnal demonstration of his authority to speak
on the subject of Gypsies by exhibiting his linguistic knowledge. He is proud to
have discovered the etymology of the word frimousse (“face, visage”), a combination
of the Romani Wrla or Wla (“visage”) and mui (“visage”). Few of Mérimée’s contem-
porary readers would share the linguistic expertise of his modern editor, Maurice
Parturier, who understands that this was a frivolous etymology––“a kind of joke
very much in the manner of Mérimée.”82 However, beyond a mere ploy to estab-
lish authority over a text that seems to want to escape his control, Mérimée’s lin-
guistic ruminations participated in the contemporary vogue of categorizing ethnic
groups according to language groups. A comparison of verb inXections leads him
to conjecture that the German Romani dialect is “purer” than the Spanish, and this
allows him to distinguish between the two groups. The inXuence of Gobineau, one
of Mérimée’s correspondents, is evident in this ranking of dialects that indirectly
hierarchizes people. Mérimée’s linguistic braggadocio also aligns him with those

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who, like George Borrow, dreamed not just of moving freely among real Roma, but
of passing among them with ease as a pseudo-Gypsy. In 1846 an ecstatic Mérimée
wrote to a friend that he had been able to communicate in a Romani dialect with
two muleteers in Perpignan: “I spoke Caló with them, to the great horror of the
colonel of artillery who accompanied me, and it turns out that I was more proW-
cient than they, and they rendered tribute to my science with a resounding
approval of which I was not a little proud.”83
Next to Mérimée, the most inXuential nineteenth-century French writer
to travel to Spain was Théophile Gautier, whose Voyage en Espagne (after a voyage
made in 1840) saw dozens of reimpressions and editions well into the twentieth
century. While British travelers appealed constantly to the authority of Henry
Blackburn, George Borrow, or Richard Ford, many French travelers (for example,
Auguste Emile Bégin in his Voyage pittoresque en Espagne et en Portugal en 1850), used
Gautier as a yardstick against which to measure their own experiences and liberally
quoted him in their travelogues or travel guides. Like most travelers who pre-
ceded him to Granada, Gautier was mostly interested in the national treasures of
Spain, notably the Alhambra, which played to the orientalist tastes of the time. For
Gautier the exotic appeal of Gypsy women resided not so much in their dances,
which in general he found lacking, but in the “purity” of their race, which he
imagined was a vestige of their mysterious Oriental and African heritage:

I saw few beauties, although their Wgure type and character are
remarkable. Their dark skin emphasizes the brightness of their
Oriental eyes whose ardor is tempered by a certain mysterious
sadness, like the remembrance of some forgotten land whose
greatness has now eclipsed. Their mouth, rather thick and strongly
colored, recalls the full-bloomed African mouth; their small fore-
head and aquiline nose betray their common origin with the
Gypsies of Valachia and Bohemia, and all the children of this
bizarre people who traversed medieval society under the generic
title of Egypt, whose enigmatic Wliation remains unchanged
throughout the centuries. Nearly all show in their comportment
such a natural majesty, such an excess of allure, they are so com-
fortable with their body, that, despite their tattered clothes, their
Wlthiness, and their poverty, they seem to be conscious of the
antiquity and purity of their race, free from any mixture.84

Another of Gautier’s contributions to the exoticization of the Spanish

Gypsy was the inspired plasticity of his portraits. His goal was to express verbally
what artists whom he admired, such as Jacques Callot, Salvator Rosa, or Alfred

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Dehodencq, had captured on canvas: skin the color of Havana cigars, eyes like black
diamonds, and blue dresses with white zebra stripes. By 1861, however, in his
poem “Carmen” Gautier had tinged the colorist portrait with images of death and
violence, the Xip side of the happy-go-lucky female Gypsy portrait that was also
dear to the Romantics:

And mid her pallor, explodes

a mouth of conquering laughs
red pigment, scarlet Xower,
that draws its purple from the heart’s blood.85

Finally, Gautier also popularized the Romantic illusion of the Gypsies’ racial purity
and unchangeable nature by portraying them as a people for whom time stood still,
preserving against all odds a culture that was an anachronism in the modern state.
At the same time, paradoxically, he emphasized that time had caused irreparable
damage by completely erasing Roma history. This dual image of loss and preserva-
tion heralded the beginning of the ambiguous discourse about racial decadence
and mongrelism versus racial purity and immutability in discussions of Roma ori-
gins. While we roughly associate the theme of decadence with Wn-de-siècle French
culture, it is clear that the fear of destruction of traditional Andalusia is already in
place by the 1840s, and it would inevitably have an impact on representations of
Gypsy ethnicity.86 It also sparked new debates about the relation between domi-
nant ethnic identity and the nature of itinerant Gypsies, whom many non-Roma
perceived as unworthy citizens of the state.

Flesh and Blood Fossils

Beginning with Carmen, Cervantes’ Preciosa was transformed into a born Gypsy,
which made it easier to justify her passion, impulsiveness, and tragic allure. It also
inspired speculations about the racial identity and characteristics of Gypsies who
were moving into the European consciousness partly because of the bohemian craze
in Paris and partly because of large-scale westerly migrations of the Roma from
Eastern Europe. Another determining factor in the GypsyWcation of Preciosa was
the fascination with origins that coincided with the simultaneous rise of “nation-
alism, philology, biology, and Wissenschaft” of the mid- to late nineteenth century.87
Like Mérimée’s Carmen, George Sand’s novel La Filleule (1853) explicitly posed the
question of exactly what constituted the race immonde (“Wlthy race”) that wore on its
forehead the mark of fallen grandeur.88 The answer given in La Filleule shows to
what extent French intellectuals were beginning to characterize the Gypsy as an

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“ancient” race with all that this designation implies. Having originated in India,
they were thought by many to be of very pure stock, a biomoral throwback, and a
living, rare curiosity. At the same time it was implied that they were a dead race,
incapable of the transition into the modern era that was the particular accomplish-
ment of younger, more vigorous races: “Some among them are like the fossils one
Wnds scattered across all points of the globe that the rubble tramples without real-
izing that they are the bones of a primitive people.”89
La Filleule tells the tragic story of a half-Gypsy, Moréna, raised by an aris-
tocratic French family. Her mixed race and elite education inspire her guardians
to ruminate about race-based versus culture-based characteristics. Which race pre-
dominates in a case of miscegenation? Do members of a given race inherit only
physical characteristics or a combined physical and moral condition? Can education
overcome negative, race-based predispositions? These are among the many ques-
tions the novel directly poses. Clearly in this case physical traits alone do not form
the core of racial identity. Mère Floche reminds Moréna’s guardian Stéphen that
Gypsies in general are of mixed blood: Some are as dark as Negros; others are nearly
white. Not every Gypsy, she reports, has the dark skin, frizzled hair, and thick lips
associated with the race in the popular imagination. This does not mean physical
features are of no consequence in judging Gypsy character, however; rather Moréna
is the exception that proves the rule. The fact that she differs morally from the type
leads Mère Floche to conjecture approvingly that she must be the daughter of a
Spanish Christian. Stéphen agrees, Wnding Moréna, despite her bronzed skin, accept-
ably “European”: “Even though she is very dark, there was nothing about her face,
her hair, her skin that was not acceptable to the European race. Mother Floche
was right, I thought, she is the daughter of a Spanish Christian” (99). Moréna,
then, is only a “half-Bohemian,” a “physiological curiosity,” but in a testimonial to
both the popular belief in the ascendancy of racial identity and the atavistic inher-
itance of characteristics, the Gypsy in her eventually prevails over the upbringing
of her guardians. Nature in this instance wins out over nurture: Moréna is a living
demonstration of Lamarck’s law of the inheritance of acquired characteristics that
was so inXuential in discussions of evolution in the nineteenth century. Stéphen
predicts that this will be the case as he comments on his adopted daughter’s
growing pains: “I have always sensed Xowing in her something violent and savage
that might be softened by education but never totally vanquished. The plant will
always sprout its thorns the day it blooms” (144).
Moréna presents readers then with the “fact” of the Gypsies’ negative and
immutable predispositions, proving what Théodule Ribot in L’Hérédité (Heredity)
would argue in 1873––that the Gypsy was a survivor of a previous age, the moral
and social dodo bird or ornithorhyncus now surpassed by other European races.90
Stéphen is amazed at Moréna’s inherited agility and temerity, in other words, her

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bond with the natural world that allows her to jump like a squirrel and swim like
a gull, but he is not otherwise persuaded by the picturesque portrait of Gypsies that
has been painted by the press. He has read enough to know the “true” nature of the
Gypsies and the well-founded mistrust that they inspire in the nations through
which they have passed, which have suffered their plundering, Wlth, and ruses, “in
a word, their abjection” (50). Thus the living “fossils,” as the character Edmond
Roque calls them, are not Gypsies only because of their dark skin or their capacity
to scurry like squirrels and swim like gulls but because of their passion, baseness,
ferocity, and criminal nature. In Moréna, comments Roque, one can visually “drink
in” one of Cervantes’ “ravishing little Gypsy girls,” but there the analogy with
Preciosa ends. Like Carmen, Moréna is never able to escape the blood she shares
with this “race of devils”; like every other true Gypsy, she is as dangerous to her-
self as to others. Neither the country priest summoned to baptize Moréna nor the
most steadfast love and elite education provided by her guardians will ever be able
adequately to “whiten” her; she is forever marked as a member of an abject race.
As living fossils, Gypsies in La Filleule are imagined to be self-exempted
from the moral and social constraints of more civilized European societies, and the
narrator repeatedly shocks readers by sounding the depths of Gypsy abjection. For
example, as Algénbib, Moréna’s presumed brother, begins plotting the best way to
seduce her, the narrator slips in an explanatory comment regarding Gypsy permis-
sive attitudes toward incest. Given the fact that the narrator has already revealed
that Moréna and Algénbib are not biologically related, such comments as the fol-
lowing are gratuitous: “For certain itinerant Bohemian tribes, the union of brother
and sister is no more criminal than it was for the biblical patriarchs” (195). Not
content with this vague statement, the author footnotes the narrator’s statement
to validate further its veracity, introducing the same type of pseudodocumentary
information that Mérimée included in Carmen to lend credence to his story: “The
author of this history, speaking one day with a very beautiful daughter of Bohemia
whose job it was to walk the horses, noticed with pity that she was pregnant and
asked her which of the Bohemians was her husband.—He isn’t there, she said.
It’s my brother.—You speak thus of all the men of your tribe?—Not at all, she
responded. He is the son of my father and my mother, who is two years my junior”
(195). Sand interspersed other tidbits of Gypsy knowledge throughout La Filleule,
either as part of the narrative récit––“In the case of Bohemians, as with several other
savage peoples, adoption is second nature” (196)––or ventriloquized by one of the
male characters. According to Stéphan, for instance, Gypsies are “adept at the
science of trickery, whether stealing a chicken or merely an egg,” even though they
are also “excessively chicken-hearted” (110). Stéphan also casually alludes to the
baby-snatching myth by claiming that Algénbib must be one of those Bohemians
who make it their business to kidnap children.91

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At the same time that the ofWcial story peddled in La Filleule painted a
mostly negative portrait of Gypsies as an ignoble race stubbornly immune to any
amount of education and good treatment and “predestined to misfortune before
they’re even born” (168), La Filleule made indirect appeals to moderation and com-
passion in dealing with them. According to Roque, what marks the difference
between French and Spanish attitudes toward Gypsies gives the French the higher
moral ground: “In Spain especially people have felt even horror and contempt”
(166). Thus the idea so often expressed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century trav-
elogues that Spaniards are indifferent to their monuments extends here to their
treatment of minority populations. Frenchmen, greater lovers of music, are able
to appreciate and encourage Gypsy talent, while Spaniards express only antipathy
and distrust toward their native productions: “The racially pure Spaniard hates the
Gypsy, just as the Pole hates the Jew, just as the American hates the Negro, just as
the Indian hates the Pariah” (185). Everybody hates somebody, except perhaps the
culturally superior French who alone can claim to be lacking in racial prejudice.

A Visit to the Gypsy Quarters

A shift from Wction to accounts of interactions with “real” Spanish Gypsies

occurred in the mid-nineteenth century as French travelers began registering their
reactions to local informants in more Realist (in the literary sense of the word)
terms. For example, in 1846 Alexandre Dumas père, accompanied by a veritable
troop consisting of the artists Eugène Giraud, Adolphe Desbarolles, and Louis
Boulanger, the writers Auguste Maquet and Amédée Achard, and an African ser-
vant named Paul, descended upon Granada to soak in the local color and afterward
transmit their adventures to their French correspondents. Dumas regarded a dance
recital arranged for by his local guide, M. Couturier, as an incestuous and repellent,
but at the same time, mesmerizing spectacle. His description is reproduced in its
entirety here to show how, compared with Bourgoing’s 1776 version, the imagi-
nary Gypsy had evolved into a symbol of decadence by the mid-nineteenth century.
Dumas’s descriptions would have a substantial inXuence on later writers and artists,
both for their sensual appeal and for their suggestion of the incestuous nature of
Gypsy sexuality, a common belief among missionaries, ethnologists, and even con-
temporary encyclopedists.

Theirs was the characteristic sepia complexion of the Gypsies,

with great black eyes of velvet and mother-of-pearl; lovely eyes, but
in such close proximity to their matted, unkempt hair that their
beauty was diminished by contact with this dirty, disheartening

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feature. Bands of vivid red ribbon encircled their blue-black

tresses, and each girl carried a bunch of ruby carnations and white
marguerites, already wilting in shame at Wnding themselves in
such sordid company, born as they were beneath such a beauti-
ful sun amid such pure fragrance. Add to this blue and white
striped dresses covering wrists and ankles; scarlet sashes to match
the hair ribbons; stockings, once white, now the color of Queen
Isabel’s chemise; large, broad feet in shoes that bore no relation
to the rest of their costume; and you have a fairly accurate pic-
ture of these dancing girls. We had asked for real Gypsies; now we
had them.
Castanets began to click, the guitar sounded its open-
ing chords, the father broke into that monotone song one hears
everywhere in Spain, but that I have not managed to teach to any
musician; a music that accompanies everything, work, sleep,
dance; then one of the girls began a swaying movement in unison
with her brother. At Wrst, the steps were simple and unaccented,
the conventional movement of the hips too vague to kindle a
spark of Wre in the eyes of the lascivious brother. But their glances
grew more and more provocative—they danced in closer contact,
linking hands, then lips. Trepignements that seemed like a battle
between lasciviousness and modesty emanated from these two
nearly joined mouths, and the boy and the girl remained sus-
pended thus, looking at each other, ready to abandon themselves
to their desire that burnt their eyes and pushed them one towards
the other. Meanwhile, their father mingled with his song various
obscene exclamations that convulsed the audience and seemed de-
signed to excite the boy still further and snatch the last shreds of
modesty from the girl.
At last the brother removed his hat and with it in hand
circled his sister two or three times. Without moving from her
spot, she arched her head backwards like a drunken bacchante
and bent her torso with the most provocative suppleness; then
suddenly the hat fell, the dancer emitted a sharp hiss like that of
a serpent; he became more ardent, his sister more impassioned,
and he pursued her until, to the last notes of the guitar and the
singer’s last cries, she collapsed in a crumpled heap.92

Whether or not there actually existed a sexual relation between the brother
and sister as Dumas reported, the fact is that he, like most traveling Romantics, was

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blind to the performative aspects of Gypsy dance, imagining, or at least intending

that his readers should imagine, that the passion of the dancers necessarily extended
beyond a staged production into the performers’ private lives. This satisWed the
common longing to witness something spontaneous and authentic, which he
imagined to be the natural expression of Gypsy passion. In fact, however, long
before Dumas’s trip Gypsy dance performances had already evolved into a routine
that to satisfy the craving of the foreign spectator for authenticity included the
preliminary ritual of the visitor Wnding a guide (or more likely the guide spotting
the foreigner), the guide offering to arrange for friends or acquaintances to allow
the foreigner to view a spectacle that was performed “only” among the Gypsies,
and the payment of a determined fee that was ritualistically delayed but always
exacted, which Dumas aptly termed the adieux métalliques (“metallic farewells”).93
If there ever was a spontaneous form of folkloric dance, it vanished during the nine-
teenth century with the “transformation of its performers into authentic profes-
sionals and, at the same time, of Xamenco song and dance into a commodity on sale
to señoritos and tourists.”94
It was perhaps because they saw their homegrown bourgeois bohemia for
the mirage that it was, as a type of what Evelyn Gould termed a “performance
community,”95 that Dumas and his friends were able to convince themselves of
the originality and spontaneity of the performances they arranged in Seville and
Granada, when in fact Calé entertainers, wise to the price that the market would
bear for an imagined peek at authentic Gypsy ritual, were only too happy to stage
a performance of their “passion.” Dumas makes clear his conviction that the pas-
sion of the dancers was authentic in his concluding remarks about the dance per-
formance which he predicts will end in bed:

We are no more squeamish about such exhibitions of passion

than of anything else, but with our innate sybaritism, we prefer
dancers with delicate hands, dainty feet, and a skin of white or
gold. We expect to Wnd men who desire, women who abandon
themselves to this desire, and consequently we do not wish to
see this dance merely develop into an incestuous affair, or the
poetry result in a passion between brother and sister, which no
doubt preceded it and which certainly would follow what we
had seen.96

Dumas’s repugnance was shared by many fellow travelers who nevertheless sought
to repeat his experience. An astonished Alexis de Valon, traveling three years after
the Dumas group, wonders how Hugo and Mérimée could possibly have modeled
Esmeralda and Carmen after the women he saw in Granada: “A dozen atrocious

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females, as hideous as they were Wlthy, with the proWles of goats and the hands of
Weld mice, executed for us I know not what indecent dances, much more disgusting
than voluptuous. Ah, monsieur Victor Hugo, monsieur Mérimée, tell us please that
Esmeralda and Carmen were not Granadan Bohemians!”97
Despite their repugnance, a common if not always convincing response
to Calé traditional dance, Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Emile Bégin, and many
others were convinced that the French did not despise the Gypsies as much as the
Spanish, and that heretofore it was left to foreigners to preserve the “essence” of
Andalusian customs. It would never occur to a self-respecting Spaniard to visit
the Sacromonte caves, Bégin claimed, while, “indeed, as far as we French are con-
cerned, the Bohemians are merely a bit more curious than other people, while for
the Spaniards, the Bohemians are dogs, less than dogs.”98 Mid-century French trav-
elers for the most part appreciated the Gypsies as a “a virgin race pure from any
mixture”99 and thus were able to overlook the extreme poverty, homelessness, men-
dacity, and sordid living conditions of Andalusian Calés, whom they regarded as
noble vestiges of ancient civilizations and obstinate resisters to a changing world.
In brief, for the French, outer “dirt” shielded the inner “purity” of the Gypsies, and
this was a marvel to preserve.
A great deal of imagination had to be put to work to convert the Gypsies
the French saw and sketched in Spain into the wonderful Carmens that so mes-
merized French readers. But by the same token, a great deal of effort was put into
the performance on behalf of the Calés to ensure that the illusion succeeded. That
the Spanish Romany in the entertainment industry understood this is perfectly
clear from some of the anecdotal evidence of their awareness of the performative
aspect of Gypsyness and its role in enticing foreign visitors, especially the French
and the English, to Spain. In 1851, a Spanish philologist who signed his name
D. A. de C. offered an interesting example of Gypsy astuteness in his Diccionario
del dialecto gitano (Dictionary of the Gypsy dialect; 1851). The anecdote is one of
many that circulated in Seville at a time when jokes at the expense of French for-
eigners were common.100 Two Gypsy rogues, Carando and Bachanó, devise a way
to rob a Frenchman who is sketching the Giralda tower. Carando approaches the
man and, referring to the tower, asks, “Sir, do you know one of the little tricks
of this little lady?” “No, oh please do tell me, I’ll pay you for it,” responds the
Frenchman. “Well, zu mercé (‘your honor’), this tower moves at a rate of two miles
a minute,” to which the Frenchman replies: “That’s impossible!” To prove his
point Carando goes up to the tower and leans against it with all his weight for three
minutes, just long enough for Bachanó to steal the Frenchman’s overcoat. When
the victim notices that his coat is missing, Carando admonishes him, “Did you
leave it there? Oh well, didn’t I tell you? We have moved six miles in the last
three minutes!”101

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Canvassing the Real Spanish Gypsy

The French bohemian craze that swept literature and the performing arts was
equally vigorous in the Wne arts in which a steady stream of images was produced
from the 1830s until the end of the century. Every salon from 1831 to 1881
included examples of exotic Gypsies, leading Marilyn Brown to conclude that this
subject was substantially a bourgeois phenomenon.102 One possible explanation for
the popularity of the subject was the inXux of Romany in Western Europe follow-
ing the 1848 abolishment of slavery and serfdom in Eastern Europe.103 Equally
convincing is the argument that, as we have seen above in the case of writers and
travelers, the Gypsy represented a holdout from the constraints of modern society
that appealed to artists and their clients: “Full of the ennui of industrial capitalist
society, an artist could look to the lifestyle of an archetypically primitive wanderer
like the gypsy to Wnd an enviable natural state of continuous transition between
ordered social structures.”104 It was not just that Romany populations provided a
handy subject for those uneasy with an increasingly structured society; some artists
were attempting to emulate in their own lives aspects of what they imagined the
lifestyle of the Roma to be, and many of the images of Bohemians are in fact por-
trayals of artists’ untidy studios, country escapades, café culture, pseudopoverty, and
boulevardism. The contact between the Roma and these self-styled “bohemians” was
minimal; the bohemian vogue was not a form of pro-Roma social protest as much
as the expression of an artistic malaise that, as Brown has convincingly argued, if
anything helped to diffuse the fear of counterculture bohemianism by registering
it in familiar modalities. Certainly there is no evidence that the bohemian craze had
any beneWcial impact on the lives of the Roma.105 For example, in Romantic rep-
resentations such as French Salon paintings of the 1830s, “real Gypsies” are often
depicted in foreign countries or at least in settings at some distance from Paris,
especially in Spain and the southern French provinces, or they are given temporally
remote, exoticized, or legendary treatments detached from present-day urban life.
Yet the Gitanos painted during this period pointedly resemble the Parisian mod-
els after which they are fashioned despite their exotic Spanish dress and locales. For
example, in the 1840s, Narcisse Díaz de la Peña (1807–76) made his reputation
painting sleeping nymphs and Romantic images of vaguely Spanish Gypsies after
models he sketched in and around his Barbizon studio. As Brown points out, de la
Peña’s Gypsies are largely removed from social immediacy: “His carefree bohemi-
ans, like those of Murger, were happily distanced from the social world of ‘real
bohemians.’”106 Pierre-Jules Jollivet’s Hispanicized Interior of the House of an Alcalde
to Which Some OfWcers Bring Gypsies Accused of Theft (1831), Adolphe Leleux’s Songs
at the Door of a Posada (1843), or his Spanish Smugglers (1846) typify this idealized
treatment. Charles Auguste Steuben’s La Esmeralda (1839, Fig. 4) places Esmeralda

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squarely within the classical French boudoir. A predecessor of Manet’s Olympia, it

invites readers to dwell on the focalized bare shoulders, breasts, and legs of the
semiclad Esmeralda. The lamb, in a provocative gesture, seems eager to suckle
Esmeralda’s breasts, while a “remarkably undeformed Quasimodo” crouches in the
shadows.107 Steuben’s painting makes no reference to Esmeralda’s tragic fate; rather
she is an example of the popular association of small, playful mammals and pretty
women that is characteristic of nineteenth-century salon art. Little wonder that in
his review of the 1839 Salon, Prosper Mérimée objected that Steuben’s Esméralda
resembled a Paris grisette more than his passionate muse Carmen.
In the second half of the nineteenth century a new generation of artists
followed in the footsteps of Romantic traveler-artists such as Louis Boulanger,
Alexandre Laborde, Girault de Prangey, Adrien Dauzats, Pharamond Blanchard,
Adolphe Desbarolles, Alexandre Dumas, and Eugène Giraud. Like their predeces-
sors, Alfred Dehodencq (1849–55), Gustave Doré (1862), Edouard Manet (1865),
and Henri Regnault (1868–70) Wlled their sketchbooks with images of Spanish
Gypsies that now appealed to a growing French taste for what were intended to
be more realistic renditions of exotic locales and peoples. This did not mean that
the portraits of the Realists were any less idealized: The more the French legal
system treated the Romany as undesirables, the more favorably artists portrayed
them, and this perpetuated the idealism that the Romantics had injected into their
earlier portraits. Alfred Dehodencq’s Bohemians Returning from an Andalusian Festi-
val, although praised for its realism (Mérimée thought the picture captured the
“essence” of the Spanish Gypsy), was clearly a product of a lingering Romantic His-
panicism that revived dreams of bohemianism in some of its critics.108 An ecstatic
Théophile Gautier reported that the image made him wish to be a Gypsy himself:
“The painting of M. Dehodencq has revived in me the dream that I have had one
hundred times to throw down the pen of the feuilletonist and to run away to lead
the vagabond life with these Spanish ragamufWns.”109 Still, artists like Rugeron and
Dehodencq were increasingly stretching their talent by ethnicizing their Gypsies,
and capturing this essence on paper and canvas meant not just living and depicting
a life that could be termed bohemian, but seeking a more extensive and convinc-
ing familiarity with their subject. Because of this, Dehodencq, Gautier concludes,
was able to translate the climate, heredity, habits, and history of the Gypsy in
form and color, gestures and attitudes, to produce the “the real Spain in all its raw
crudeness.”110
Dehodencq’s “ethnographic aptitude” was the result of extensive travels
in Spain. After he was shot in a skirmish during the 1848 French revolution, his
doctor prescribed a lengthy convalescence in a warmer climate. Accordingly, in 1849
he set out to Wnd Don Juan on the other side of the Pyrenees. His Wrst stop was
Madrid where, with the help of the Spanish artist Madrazo, he began sketching

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fig. 4 Charles Auguste Steuben, La Esmeralda (1839). Art Resource, New York.
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bullWghts and religious processions, scenes from the Quijote, Gil Blas, and his
acclaimed portrait of a brigand that an appreciative Gautier thought captured the
“intimate Spanish Xavor.”111 Dehodencq next followed in the footsteps of Dumas
and his artist friends by seeking out the Gypsy quarters in Andalusia, concentrat-
ing on the Triana district of Seville instead of Granada. He arrived in Seville in
November 1850 to take up residence in the Hotel Europe, a favorite watering hole
of British and French tourists. His Wrst and lasting impression of Seville is of a city
given over to pleasure. The “grande affaire” of Seville, he wrote to his mother, is
the promenades, dances, serenades, and processions that seem to be the inhabitants’
sole preoccupation.112 Intoxicated by Andalusia, Dehodencq pondered a reformula-
tion of art that would transform all his Seville-inspired sketches and paintings: Art
must be something like a dream, he concluded, but with the power of reality.113
Dehodencq’s patron, The duke of Montpensier, who resided in Seville,114
approved of the artist’s proposal to meld the religious and voluptuous Spanish
character in two grand paintings, one of a Gypsy dance recital and the second of
a religious procession leaving the portals of the Cathedral of Seville. To guide him
in his research, the duke introduced him to two Calé women who had given him
private recitals in the past and who agreed to pose for Dehodencq. The result, Une
Danse de Bohémiens devant le pavilion de Charles Quint à l’Alcazar (A Gypsy dance
in front of the Charles V pavilion), earned for Dehodencq the praise of his fellow
artist Antoine de Latour, who wrote to his friend Adrien Dauzats that here, at last,
was an artist who could capture “a real meeting of Gypsies, not those luminous and
vague fairies of Díaz, but, in front of the Charles V pavilion, a brutal and energetic
dance of true Bohemians.”115
A second painting by Dehodencq, Bohémiens et Bohémiennes au retour d’une
fête en Andalousie (Gypsy men and women returning from an Andalusian feast), was
exhibited in Paris in 1853, while the artist was preparing to leave Spain for further
adventures in Morocco. The painting failed to capture a medal in the exhibition
and was criticized by those who thought the subject was unworthy of an artist
who should be dedicating his talent to depicting historical subjects. Not everyone
shared this negative opinion, however. Mérimée admired the painting’s authentic-
ity, and Gautier’s praise was extravagant: When the last Gypsy has disappeared
from the earth, he predicted, “drowned out by encroaching civilization,” this great
painting will take its place alongside Carmen and help us to Wnd him again: “Noth-
ing could be truer, more local, more characteristic. . . . Long live this joyous mis-
ery! This love of the blazing sun and this carefree bohemianism!”116
Echoing Gautier’s praise nearly thirty years later, the biographer Gabriel
Séailles declared that Dehodencq possessed a special genius for capturing nature,
arresting an aspect of reality, and seizing and Wxing on canvas the living types that
Wlled his imagination.117 Figure 5, Bohémiens sur route (Bohemians on the road),

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fig. 5 Alfred Dehodencq, Bohémiens sur route (1856–63).

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gives evidence of the “ethnographic aptitude” that Gautier and later Séailles so
admired in Dehodencq’s art. Composed thirty years apart, these two estimations
of Dehodencq’s painting show the enduring myth not just of the Spanish Gypsy
but of expressive realism in general. Writing in 1885, Gabriel Séailles expressed
the lasting French enthusiasm for Spanish local color that would carry into the
twentieth century.
Avant-garde painters of the 1860s forward continued to use the Spanish
Gypsy as a subject, although they reiterated the bohemian stereotypes of the
Romantics and Realists and, with few exceptions, avoided social statements.118 The
naturalists often executed more sensuous femmes fatales that drew on Mérimée’s
Carmen for inspiration, although, once again, most of their models were Parisians
who posed in costume in the artists’ ateliers. Manet sketched some of his Gypsies
after the Hungarian Roma who lived in the Batignolles section of Paris known as
“Little Poland,” where his studio was located. More authentically ethnic settings
meant to evoke Spanish locales and dress were also fashionable. Henri Regnault,
who had spent two years in Spain (1868–70), offered many renditions of full-
Wgured Spanish Gypsies that competed with the salon portraits of the now more
sensuous Esmeraldas or more modern Gypsies, such as Courbet’s Une Dame Espag-
nole (A Spanish lady) or Ernest Hébert’s 1867 Zingara (Gypsy woman).119 Eventu-
ally French renditions of Spanish Gypsies Wltered into the Spanish illustrated
magazines as well, where they enjoyed a long popularity because of their seeming
verisimilitude. For example, in 1883 Jules Rougeron’s Zambra de gitanos (Gypsy
dance fest) (Fig. 6) was praised by the editor of Ilustración Artística for rendering the
scene in the Albaicín quarters of Granada “with a perfect knowledge of the scene
and types.”120
In the more ethnicized renditions, the Gypsy portrait often made reference
to the sexual availability of the female subjects. For example, Achille Zo’s Family
of Voyaging Bohemians (Andalusia), exhibited in the 1861 Salon, depicts an idealized
grouping of traveling Gypsies surrounding a mother and child riding on a donkey,
an evocative Virgin and child composition except that instead of being nestled in
her mother’s arms the frontally naked child straddles the back of a donkey. To the
right of the donkey, another young girl, who promises to be a beauty, strolls with
her dress slipping from her shoulders to just below her breasts. In Emile-Etienne
Esbens’s Gitanos d’Alcala de Jenarez (Gypsies of Alcalá de Henares), the artist
arranged men in various postures to emphasize the sensuality of the Gypsy male:
In the background one leans suggestively against a sunlit doorway. The guitarist
in the foreground elegantly crosses his legs while staring suggestively out at the
external focalizer, while his companion, his hand on his thigh and white shirt
opened to a hairy chest, stares out complacently. Scattered on the ground is the evi-
dence of Gypsy insouciance: melon peels, ropes, straw, a wine Xask overturned.121

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This “display” of Gypsy bodies would soon be echoed in the paintings of Spanish
genre artists, such as those of Baldomero Galofre y Jiménez, who painted numer-
ous market and festival scenes in Andalusia. Figure 7 shows a detail from an en-
graving entitled En la feria (At the fair), reproduced in Ilustración Artística in 1894.
The Gypsy woman nursing her child was a common motif that survives even in
today’s representations of itinerant Romany. That she is often depicted lying on
the ground in a beggar’s pose carries a moral message about the propagation of a
wretched race.

“Show Me Your Castanets”

Gypsies and saltimbanques were also the stock-in-trade subjects of Gustave Doré
(1832–83), who warrants a special commentary here because his sketches have
been so widely used to illustrate books about Spanish Gypsies. From his earliest

Image not available

fig. 6 J. Rougeron, Zambra de gitanos (1883).

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childhood Doré exhibited a fascination for Paris street performers, whom he de-
picted with what some Parisian critics regarded as inappropriate pathos. Doré’s
1862 trip to Spain led to a fruitful collaboration with the illustrated magazine
Tour du Monde (World Tour), which, beginning in 1862, published his engravings,
periodically accompanied by a running travelogue by the renowned Hispanist, the
baron Jean Charles Davillier. By 1873 Tour du Monde had published 164 full-page
engravings and 160 vignettes for the L’Espagne (Spain) series.122 Then, in 1874,
Hachette purchased 306 of the 324 engravings, together with Davillier’s text,
and published them together in Voyage en Espagne (Voyage in Spain). Shortly after
(1876), the popular series was translated into English by J. Thomson and published
in New York by Scribner’s. The vignettes and engravings from the Tour du Monde
series continued to be reproduced until recently as examples of the true Spanish
Gypsy, when in fact many of the Spanish Gypsies that Doré sketched were drawn
from Parisian models. Marilyn Brown describes Doré’s style as a “picturesque his-
panicism” that idealized poverty and vagrancy and appealed to the type of bour-
geois almsgiving that other artists, such as Courbet, were already problematizing
on the home front.123 But Doré’s blatant pathologizing of the Gypsy milieu added
to the exotic appeal of the Spanish engravings and thus was wildly popular among

Image not available

fig. 7 Baldomero Galofre y Jiménez, En la feria (detail) (1894).

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Hispanophiles. The engravings appeared in thirty different texts, including those

by Emile Bégin, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, and Edmondo de Amicis.
Figures 8–12 are a sampling of Doré’s Spanish Gypsies that Davillier included in
L’Espagne.
The text that accompanied Doré’s sketches solidiWed Gypsy stereotypes
that Dehodencq, Gautier, Dumas, and others had popularized in previous decades,
although Davillier was in general a less impassioned and more objective observer,
avoiding the sensationalism of his predecessors. Chapter 6 of L’Espagne offered its
readers a—by the 1860s—familiar summary of historical details, possibly borrowed
from the historian J. M., which lent an aura of false authority to the succeeding
chapters on Gypsy culture, much as Mérimée’s historical précis helped to authen-
ticate Carmen. In general terms Davillier described the Andalusian Calés as a nation
within a nation, albeit one without recognition or rights. Agreeing with J. M.
(whose primary source as we have seen was Heinrich Grellmann), he speculated
that northern Spanish Gypsies were descendants of the Tchinganes chased from the
banks of the Indus River by the invasion of Tamerlane in the early Wfteenth cen-
tury, while Andalusian Gypsies were of Arab origin. To substantiate his conclusions
about Gypsy behavior, Davillier cited all the usual seventeenth-century sources:
Covarrubias, Cervantes’ “La gitanilla,” Juan de Quiñones’s Discurso contra los gitanos
(1631), as well as the post-Enlightenment sources (especially George Borrow), and
concluded in agreement with these authorities that Gypsies had a “penchant for
thievery.”124 Along with detailed accounts of various Calé professions, he noted their
squalid living conditions, for example, in the Sacromonte caves with their “entirely
nude children, as black as little Africans, rolling about, willy-nilly, among the
family poultry and Wlthiest domestic animals.”125 Clearly, however, Davillier was
more interested in documenting the professions and activities of the Gypsies than
in pathologizing them as his friend Doré would sometimes do in the accompany-
ing sketches; and he, like George Borrow before him, did not re-create the Gypsy
woman as a sexual fantasy for his Tour de Monde readers.
It should not be imagined from his objective tone that Davillier’s minutia
about Gypsy life were in every instance the product of Wrsthand experience.
Throughout the L’Espagne collection it is clear that most of Davillier’s informa-
tion about Gypsies derived from secondary sources: in addition to those mentioned
above, the numerous sainetes and zarzuelas he saw in theaters throughout Spain,
such as El valor de una gitana (A gypsy woman’s worth), and the dozens of romances,
popular verses, jokes, and etymological dictionaries that he heard or consulted.126
In terms of Andalusian public entertainment, however, Davillier truly excelled,
rivaling Richard Ford in his classiWcation and descriptions. Determined to avoid
the touristy version of Gypsy dances usually performed in Granadan hotels, which
he and other French tourists regarded as a diversion for the more squeamish British

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fig. 8 Gustave Doré, Gitana dansant le vito sevillano (1862–73).

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fig. 9 Gustave Doré, Famille de gitanos, a Totana (1862–73).

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fig. 10 Gustave Doré, Toilette d’une gitana, a Diezma (1862–73).

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fig. 11 Gustave Doré, Famille de musiciens nomades (1862–73).

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fig. 12 Gustave Doré, Guitarrero et danseuse ambulante (1862–73).

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tourists, Davillier and his entourage preferred to arrange performances in the

Sacromonte caves. His resulting descriptions stand out for both their detail and
their substance. He began his history of the baile de Gitanos (“Gypsy dance”), as
did Richard Ford, by reference to Martial’s text on the dancers of ancient Gadix
(today Cadiz). In his lengthy treatise on musical instruments he claimed that the
castañuelos (“castanets”; crotalo in Latin) were in use two thousand years earlier; and
both the castanets and the pandareta (“tambourine”) are evidence of the common
ancestry of antique Gadix dances that Gypsies had preserved for posterity: “Today,
as formerly, castanets are an essential part of the dance, especially popular dance,
for castanets are assuredly one of the cosas de España—one of the Spanish things
par excellence.” As the saying goes, he added, “you are Spanish? Show me your
castanets!”127
Davillier’s most extensive description of Gypsy dance derived from his
sojourn in Seville where he witnessed performances in a patio setting in the Triana
district. These performances, lushly sketched by his traveling companion Doré,
included rondeñas, malagueñas, the tango americano, the zapateo, the vito, and the
olé, which he described in technical terms avoiding the lavish and sensual portraits
of Dumas and Gautier. Clearly for Davillier the dance and music were more im-
portant than creating a scene of tempestuous passion or a feast for the senses. Still
he made an important contribution to the myth of the antiquity of Xamenco dance
that would serve the political ends of Spanish Xamencologists and ethnologists in
the following century.
Despite the popularity of the Tour de Monde series, the bohemian craze
gradually waned in the decade of the 1870s in France, even though there was yet
another inXux of Roma into Paris following the Prussian wars. The occasional
paintings of Gypsy camps, such as those of Vincent van Gogh (1853–90), who
painted the annual Roma gatherings at Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer in southern
France, did not feature Hispanicized themes. Toward the end of the nineteenth
century, however, a resurgence of interest in exotic Xamenco dancers was fed by
the Universal Exposition in Paris and the restaging of Bizet’s Carmen (see below,
Chapter 4), but by then the Gypsy as a metaphor for the starving, bohemian artist
had fallen from favor. Gautier’s description of the Spanish Gypsy, nevertheless, lived
on. In his laudatory 1885 study on Dehodencq, Gabriel Séaille glossed Gautier’s
1840 description of the Gypsy women that Dehodencq had so skillfully rendered,
quoted above:

Their great Oriental eyes, oblique, deep, a somber Xame against

a mother of pearl whiteness, are shaded by thick, long lashes; their
forehead is small, the oval of the face thick-set, the nose aqui-
line, very white teeth. Their visage expresses both cunning and

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audacity. They have a strong gait, the frank allure of the wild
animal. The women, with their curved shape, very well set on
their haunches, have the grace of “bodies softened by walking and
dance” with the Xirtatiousness of savages and a fondness for vivid
colors: red, orange, yellow, blue, tawdry Wnery, veils, Xounces.128

Gypsies, explains (or rather repeats) Séailles, enjoy an unfettered and savage exis-
tence; free from civilization, theirs is the soul of the innocent and wild animal,
guided by instinct alone. The vocabulary Séailles employed to capture Gypsy phys-
iognomy and character is by now familiar to us: rascal, joy, light, liberty, nature,
animal, deWance, beast, savage, allure, audacity, grace, liveliness, devil. Dehodencq
admirably captured this litany of traits, according to Séailles (again borrowing
a quote from Gautier), because of his extraordinary “ethnographic aptitude.”129
Through repeated comments such as these, the French bequeathed their myth of
the Gypsy “dream of a free and savage existence” to the Gypsyphiles of the next
century, as will be evident in the following chapter.130

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3
Spreading the Good Word

Oh, lovely lovely Spain! Renown’d, romantic land!

—lord byron (George Gordon), Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 23

It is my belief, if you sat long enough in the Court of Lions you

would see the whole English-speaking world.
—frances elliott, Diary of an Idle Woman in Spain, 148

with the rise of Western human sciences in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, interest in Romany peoples intensiWed to a much greater degree than
warranted by their numbers or economic prominence. This was owing to a number
of social and cultural factors. First, without exception, every European country was
populated with Romany communities, some of whom still resisted intermarriage
with other groups and either rejected sedentary lifestyles or lived in well-deWned
enclaves distinctly apart from any larger community with national allegiances. This
made them an ideal target population for curiosity seekers and amateur ethnolo-
gists, who would not have to travel far to examine exotic peoples or locales, and for
early anthropologists who, in a century obsessed with validating myths of origin,
were initiating investigation into polygeny and the permutations of racial character-
istics. New discoveries in linguistics, paleontology, phrenology, biology, and anthro-
pology convinced many that, Wrst, race was a quantiWable category and, second,
that the white race was not a single uniform race with a common ancestry traceable
to Adam and Eve. This gave rise to a concerted effort to deWne racial and cultural
diversity through the study of anthropological and ethnological characteristics that

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the emerging sciences generally categorized according to a universal stage of human

development.1
On the grid of Western progress, Gypsies were for some a pathetic
anachronism and for others a wise holdout that shunned the conformity and con-
veniences of modern life. The emergence of European nationalisms made it increas-
ingly important to mark divisions within the white race: between fair-whites and
dark-whites,2 primitive and more civilized groups, favored and less favored types
of Indo-Europeans, and, increasingly in the latter half of the nineteenth century,
between Semites and Aryans. Ethnology became the staging ground for compli-
cated discussions about national pride, and scientiWcally “irrefutable” knowledge
afWrming the stature of dominant and marginal groups was produced at a feverish
pace. Sadly, conclusions about national character, distinguishable ethnic traits, and
cultural identity, which required “objective” scientiWc validation, often served to
legitimize exclusionary social practices, even in countries where there existed a
widespread fascination with Gypsy customs and peoples.
Gypsies fell into a special category within discussions of race in Great
Britain. If the working classes were “urban savages,” a “race apart” in need of civi-
lization, the Gypsies of Great Britain were imagined either as having magically
escaped class designation altogether (being of mysterious and therefore uncatego-
rizable origins and professions) or as even more savage than the working classes
because of their Werce opposition to wage labor.3 Their presence in an increasingly
industrialized Great Britain was “an intolerable affront to the values of modern
civilization.”4 As the capitalist mode of production expanded, vast shifts in labor
power were required and “[c]ulturally distinct modes of existence and reproduction
were erased or reconstituted in different forms.”5 The Romany Travelers of Britain,
however, were often regarded as a nonindigenous group immigrating from some-
where else, a pariah culture that local authorities encouraged or forced to migrate
somewhere else rather than a minority ethnic group in need of assimilation into
a capitalist workforce. In nations that were attempting to identify a cultural homo-
geneity and solidify a sense of common national goals, as well as to organize a
regularized workforce dependent on wage labor to increase production, Gypsies
were the most glaring misWts. They were generally despised as only slightly higher
than Australian aborigines, Africans, or American Indians in the racial typologies
of the nineteenth century. Resistance to assimilation marked them as a challenge
to bourgeois societies that measured racial superiority by the ability to civilize,
dominate, and absorb weaker groups. Nevertheless, with their entrenched dislike
for the sedentary professions and lifestyles of both urban and rural communities,
and their imagined freedom from an increasingly bureaucratic British justice sys-
tem, it is not surprising that some authors and artists also prized and emulated
Roma nonconformity.

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The discovery (reported in 1777) that Romany speech showed traces of

Sanskrit presented many interesting challenges for British philologists eager sud-
denly to study Romany dialects both diachronically, as they evolved from century
to century through westward Roma migrations, and synchronically, by comparing
either the wide variations within Roman dialects or their relation with major Euro-
pean language groups. Gypsyologists in Britain evolved a colporteur theory that
held that Gypsies had brought with them from India a bounty of folklore and a
mysterious, pure language that would be lost if efforts were not quickly made to
record them for posterity.6 Rehearsing the stages in the evolution of racial think-
ing and the list of European philologists who provided the substantiation for them
in Great Britain would carry me beyond the subject of this chapter, but it is not
irrelevant that in the nineteenth century many linguists imagined Sanskrit as the
most perfect of all languages, the rich, Xexible, and beautiful source of the family
of Indo-Germanic languages. Frederic Schlegel’s 1843 treatise Über die Sprache und
die Weisheit der Indier (The language and philosophy of the Indians) set out to prove,
using the linguistic methods available at the time, that German was the European
language closest to the Sanskrit mother tongue, while Celtic, Slavic, and Armenian
were much more distant cousins and Hebrew and Coptic not related at all despite
their numerous borrowings.7 He predicted a second Renaissance, a rejuvenation of
European scholarship, if Indian studies were taken up seriously, and many linguists
and anthropologists heeded the call.
Schlegel did not mention the Romany dialects that linguists were begin-
ning to record during his lifetime and that were at least marginally participating
in the vogue of Indian studies. This was because in the competition for Euro-
pean cultural hegemony, the dialects of the Roma peoples, though closely related
to Sanskrit, were of only minor consequence: Lacking a homeland and material
wealth, the Roma were generally accorded a second-rate genealogy in the Indian
language pantheon. The great philologists of the day, if they mentioned them
at all, attributed the origin of Romany dialects to the pariah or lowest caste of
Indian society, and thus they helped to rationalize the extant social and political
hierarchy that assigned Roma groups to the lowest rung of the human ladder. Once
German authors “proved” the pariah origin of the Gypsies, “governments and judi-
cial authorities could legitimize their stigmatizing policy by invoking scientiWc
arguments.”8
This does not mean, however, that the Roma, as a collective entity, were
ignored. Lacking a written history of their own, they were an ideal subject for his-
torians and chroniclers eager to devise one for them, as well as for ethnographers
seeking to deWne the essence of Gypsyness for a Europe enthralled with folklore
and “primitive” peoples, regional music and Xamenco dance, pseudo and “real”
Bohemians, saltimbanques and Gypsy “kings,” and passionate, dark-haired women,

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all the legacy of the romantic imagination entrusting its racial stereotypes to the
new “sciences of man.” In the absence of credible documentation with which to
construct their Gypsy genealogies, Gypsy scholars returned time and again to the
well in which over the centuries the Gadjé (non-Roma) populations had deposited
all of the fantastic legends and loathsome stereotypes that had accrued as well to
other peripatetic groups such as Bedouins and Jews with whom the Roma were
most often compared. Rather than shifting and contingent, ethnic identity was
regarded at this point as something essential, permanent, and recognizable. Finally,
as Northern European countries experienced rapid urbanization, their urban popu-
lations became more mechanized and industrialized, giving rise to inXated expres-
sions of alienation from the natural life closer to agrarian cultures and the noble
savage that populated the books of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the mid-eighteenth
century (for example, his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les
hommes [Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men]; 1755).
Remaining constant in their rejection of settled societies and work routines, the
Roma represented a deWant resistance to progress that, it was feared, was overtak-
ing the industrialized world. As George Behlmer explains, “It was the conXuence
of romantic philology and what has been termed ‘an emerging urban-centered
ruralism’ that transformed the English Gypsy from social outcast into noble sav-
age.”9 InXuenced by a deep sense of nostalgia and unease that invaded the bourgeois
mentality in the nineteenth century, many British linguists, ethnologists, and his-
torians became so inured to their subjects that they sometimes traveled with them
for lengthy periods, in some rare cases even marrying into Roma families and
abandoning their written work as they more and more identiWed with their sub-
jects. But such a radical identiWcation was the exception; generally the nineteenth
century marks a period obsessed with establishing the bases for distinguishing
between Gypsy and non-Gypsy populations, not for uniting them. The result was
the foregrounding of radical differences that anthropologists proposed had existed
from the very earliest moment that the Roma entered Eastern Europe, a theory that
would compound the gulf that separated Gadjé and Roma by showing it to be of
ancient origins.
In nineteenth-century Britain, scores of historical romances framed the
perception of Spain as a nation-state that had for better or worse forged a homo-
genous national identity following a period of racial diversity and tension. The
often-fanciful historical conclusions of the British coincided with new discoveries
regarding racial and ethnic identity in the human sciences and, as Michael Ragussis
argues, opened the door for Victorian England to explore its own pressing issues
of racial difference and national identity.10 Casting Spain as a land of religious
and racial intolerance minimized the guilt that earlier authors such as Walter Scott
had provoked in the British consciousness about British racial intolerance, shifting

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the attention to more “backward” southern countries like Spain.11 The widespread
view of Spanish cruelty was evident both in historical romances such as Edward
Bulwer-Lytton’s Leila, or, the Siege of Granada (1838) and George Eliot’s epic poem
The Spanish Gypsy (1868), as well as in the travelogues of tourists and missionaries
such as the Bible salesman George Borrow, whose works are examined in this
chapter. The Gypsy became deWnitively enmeshed in the English perception of
Spain, standing not just as a symbol of freedom from bourgeois normalcy but as
a challenge to a despised Catholic indoctrination. The principal cultural work of
the nineteenth-century Spanish Gypsy, then, was to fuel British anti-Catholic sen-
timent as well as to participate in home debates about a wide range of issues regard-
ing public versus private good.

British Racialization of the Spanish Gypsies

The eighteenth century marked the beginning of a great surge in foreign travel to
Spain, prompted by historical events such as the War of Succession and the replace-
ment of the Austrian for a Bourbon dynasty on the Spanish throne that resulted in
closer ties with France. In 1749 the establishment by the marquis de la Ensenada of
a system of communications and highways facilitated road travel, and later the cre-
ation of regular shipping lanes, and Wnally the railroad in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury opened up Spain to foreign travel. During the early stages of this expansion,
British travelers, like their French counterparts, had reported on the Gypsy only
in passing and on the whole took little trouble to distinguish between Roma and
non-Roma populations. William Dalrymple in Travels Through Spain and Portugal
in 1774 (1777), Henry Swinburne in Travels Through Spain in the Years 1775 and
1776 (1779), and Robert Southey in Letters Written During a Journey in Spain and a
Short Residence in Portugal (1797) are a few examples of travelers more eager to “sat-
isfy their particular tastes and interests” than the curiosity of their compatriots.12
Conventionally eighteenth-century travel diaries and guides, “more attentive to
cataloguing than local color,” focused more of their attention on monuments and
institutions and less on ethnicity and social conventions.13 Nearly all felt obliged
to report at length on speciWc forms of architecture, natural scenery, language, agri-
culture, food, government, climate, and art of the places they visited, but when de-
scribing character or social organization their brief sketches tended toward gener-
alizations borrowed from earlier travel accounts that grouped all Spaniards together
and showed scant familiarity with the subjects described. Although many travelers
registered their shock at the alarming mixing of classes, they did not feel obliged
to describe the lower orders for their correspondents or readers, which may explain
why mention of the Gypsies until the mid- nineteenth century was so infrequent.

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Gradually, however, travelers began to personalize their trip accounts with

more colorful details that would later fuel the interest of British travelers during
the Romantic period. Richard Twiss, who witnessed popular dances on several
occasions while in Madrid in 1775, explained that there were two types of fan-
dango, one decent and the other “gallant.”14 Quoting an earlier French traveler
(possibly Bourgoing), he claimed that certain gestures of the gallant version offered
a “continual tableau of jouissance,” but he did not identify the dancers as Gypsies.15
He also did not distinguish the inhabitants of the Albaicín and Sacromonte dis-
tricts of Granada or the tobacco factory of Seville from non-Roma Andalusians. For
Twiss, as for many early British travelers, Gypsies had not yet become the essence
or “salt” of the Spanish national character as they would later be described.16 The
class of travelers reporting back to their correspondents did not need to reWne their
observations to articulate the imagined gulf between Spaniards and Northern
Europeans: All Spaniards were exotic, while all British were reWned and civilized.
If Gypsies were singled out, it was usually to express disgust at their miserable
living conditions. The following comment by the British parliamentarian William
Jacob writing in 1811 is typical: “The sides of the hills round Granada abound
with caves, which resemble the troglodyte habitations of the people of Abyssinia,
as drawn by Mr. Salt. . . . [T]hey are occupied by gypsies, who are very numerous
in this part of Spain: they differ nothing in physiognomy from the same class of
people in England, or that called Zigeuners in Germany, and their habits and man-
ners are as similar as the difference of climate will allow.”17 In 1830 the British
writer Henry D. Inglis would go a step further and peek into the “hovels” on
the hillsides of Granada and describe the wretched condition of their inhabitants
in somewhat more detail, but still without mentioning Gypsies.18 For his part, Sir
Arthur de Cappell Brooke speculated that the inhabitants of the Albaicín quarter
were a separate race, descendants of an ancient Musselman population with “more
of the moor than the Spaniard in them”; at least that was what “respectable per-
sons” had informed him during his travels.19
Following these early travelers, Spain became one of the key places to visit,
to report on the nature, customs, and dialects of the Gypsies, in part because the
origin of Spanish Gypsies came to be regarded as even more obscure and mysteri-
ous than that of “Bohemian” or Eastern Gypsies, and their habitats, in Granada and
Seville at least, more easily accessible to the British and at the same time unusual.
They were also more entertaining than the pathetic Travelers they came across
at fairs and roadsides in Great Britain. Another factor was that already by the end
of the eighteenth century Spain was regarded as an exotic destination by other
Europeans; as the numbers of travelers grew, its “barbarous” or “extraordinary” cus-
toms Wlled many a travelogue and notebook published in Paris, London, and Amster-
dam in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Spain was Wnally

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incorporated into the grand tour and became a favorite watering hole of the French
Romantics and their British contemporaries.20
As we saw in Chapter 2, many of the French travelers to Spain in the Wrst
half of the nineteenth century were Romantic writers and artists, and their view of
the Spanish bohémien was shaded by the French craze for a mostly urban, artistic
bohemianism that Marilyn Brown has so perceptively analyzed in Gypsies and Other
Bohemians. Nineteenth-century British and American travelers, by contrast, painted
a somewhat more somber picture of Spanish Gypsies, in part because of who they
were: missionaries, military personnel Wghting under Wellington’s command, bus-
inessmen, diplomats, and other professionals.21 Some traveled and wrote under the
inXuence of home missionaries and reformers, such as the Quaker John Holland,
who had completed a survey of British Roma in 1816, or the Wesleyan minister
James Crabbe, who set up the famous New Forest prayer meetings for the Romany
Travelers of England.22 The cigarreras (“cigar rollers”) of the tobacco factory of
Seville impressed these travelers as “sallow and badly,”23 and Seville even struck
some of them as an “ugly” city,24 hardly a place where a Carmen could thrive. The
British were also generally less sanguine about Gypsy poverty and begging and
much more prone to grouse about the lack of proper accommodation and comforts.
Most did not share Captain Moyle Sherer’s sentimental views of the countryside
and peasants that he expressed in his Recollections of the Peninsula (1824). Elizabeth
M. Leveson-Gower, touring in 1840–41, summed up the opinion of many fellow
travelers by declaring that the Sacromonte caves “were inhabited by squalid,
wretched-looking gipsies of no very good repute.”25
Despite these negative assessments, Spain between 1830 and 1850 was
increasingly a destination of British travelers booking passage on the Peninsular
and Oriental Steam Company tours from the Western Mediterranean port of Cadiz
to the Orient, and it was logical, as Blanca Krauel Heredia points out, that for these
leisured travelers in search of romantic, Oriental ports, Andalusia should come
to stand as an overarching symbol of Spain itself.26 One cultural phenomenon
that some of these British tourists (especially the men) shared with their French
counterparts was their, if not enthusiasm, at least fascination with Andalusian and
Gypsy dance, which they termed generically the olé. Among the British, Ameri-
can, and Irish who visited and wrote about Southern Spain from 1809 to 1884
were Robert Semple (1809), Sir John Carr (1809), William Jacob (1809–10), Lord
Andrew Thomas Blayney (1810), Sir Francis Sacheverell Darwin (1808–10),
Colonel Maurice Keating (1817), Michael Joseph Quinn (1822–23), Baron Taylor
(1826), Sir Arthur Capell-Brooke (1829), Benjamin Disraeli (1830), Captain
Charles Rochfort Scott (between 1823 and 1833), Samuel Edward Cook (1829–
32), Richard Ford (1830–33), Henry David Inglis (1830), David Roberts (1836),
W. Beckford (1834), George Dennis (1836), Charles William Steward (1839),

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Frank Standish Hall (1840), the artists Walter Severn and Henry O’Shea (between
1850 and 1900), Elizabeth Grosvenor (1840–41), Reverend William Robertson
(1841), Isabella Frances Romer (1842), Martin Haverty (1843), Captain Samuel E.
Widdrington Cook (1843), Nathanial Armstrong Wells (early 1840s), Dora Words-
worth Quillinan (1845), Robert Dundas Murray (1846–47?), Hon. Severn Teackle
Wallis (1847), The Reverend Thomas Debary (1848), William George Clark (1849),
Lady Tenison (1850–53), William Edward Baxter (1850–51), George Alexander
Hoskins, (1851), George John Cayley (1852), Arthur Kenyon (1853), John Thom-
son (1853), The Reverend Richard Roberts (1859), Henry Blackburn (1864), Lady
Herbert (1866), H. Pemberton (1868), Marguerite Tollemache (1869), Augustus
John Cuthbert Hare (1871), Annie J. Harvey (1872), John Lomas (1883), and
Frances Elliot (1884).27 Two of the most important travelers occupy the Wrst sec-
tions of this chapter: Richard Ford (1796–1858), who arrived in Spain in 1830
for a three-year stay and afterward published numerous editions of his popular
Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845) and its sequel Gatherings from Spain
(1846), and George Borrow, a self-styled missionary and philologist, who arrived
in 1835 and made two return trips in 1836 and 1839–40.

Missionary Zeal

To Protestant religious groups, nineteenth-century Spain represented a backward

country where the rate of literacy was unacceptably low and the Bible was read only
by a corrupt Catholic clergy. The curious British philologist and Bible peddler
George Borrow (1803–81) was retained by the British and Foreign Bible Society
to circulate copies of the New Testament in Spain and Portugal and to translate and
print portions of the Gospel of Saint Luke into Caló and Basque. From 1836 to
1840 he traveled extensively in the Peninsula and gathered notes for his two books
on Spain: The Zincali; or An Account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841), and the more
autobiographical The Bible in Spain (1843). In The Zincali Borrow corroborated
J. M.’s observations about the role of climate in determining racial characteristics,
and he passed along a considerable share of the anecdotes and stereotypes that Span-
ish bibliophiles had culled speciWcally for him from sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century texts. He expanded the legend of the hokkano baró or “great trick” that
Gerónimo de Alcalá had incorporated into his picaresque novel El donado hablador
o Alonso, mozo de muchos amos (The chattering lay brother or Alonso, servant of
many masters; 1624–26), and he elaborated on Juan de Quiñones’ 1631 tale about
Francisco Álvarez, the bookseller of Logroño.28 Borrow invented the bookseller’s
marriage to a Gypsy woman, his years of wanderings with a Gypsy tribe, his even-
tual rescue, and accounts of the terrible drao, or water poisoning, in which the

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greater part of the inhabitants of Logroño were said to have perished as a result
of a Gypsy plot.
There are many “purely imaginary” events in the story of the Logroño
poisoning, confessed Borrow, but the “material point” was the perWdy of the Gyp-
sies and the courage of a single individual (a Gadjé, it goes without saying) to resist
them to save his city.29 The underlying message of the tale is that Gypsies are
by nature treacherous and vindictive, characteristics that Borrow imputed to a
number of his Calé traveling companions. He professed to be undecided about the
charges of cannibalism, such as those made by Heinrich Grellmann in Die Zigeuner
(1783), but he was quick to repeat the 200-year-old accusations of Juan de Quiñones,
the Spanish counselor of state who in 1631 reported to Phillip IV that in the woods
of Las Gamas (between the towns of Jaraicejo and Trujillo in central Spain), Gyp-
sies gathered to roast and eat human Xesh. In his own travels from Lisbon to Madrid,
Borrow had bivouacked with Calés in those same woods and, a self-proclaimed
authority, asked readers at least to entertain the credibility of Quiñones’ claim: “For
being sure of the forest and the Gypsies, few would be incredulous enough to doubt
the facts of the murder and cannibalism.”30 Rather than condemn cannibalism out-
right, however, Borrow speculated that during times when food was scarce Gypsies
may have been “compelled” to prey on human Xesh, just as people “far more civi-
lized than wandering Gypsies” have done in modern times.31
Following his gruesome report on cannibalism Borrow added a lengthy
description of the Gypsy diet, dwelling on the differences between, for example,
the more civilized British taste for roast squirrel (an animal that after all consumes
nuts, the purest and most nutritious food of the forests) and the Gypsies’ barbaric
ragout of snails. With such curious logic, tendency toward sensationalism, and exu-
berant storytelling technique, it is not surprising that nearly every modern account
of Gypsy life in Spain owes something to the works of George (“Don Jorge” to the
Spanish) Borrow. His passion for remote places and his great facility for learning
languages accorded well with the romantic interest in dialectology, folklore, ety-
mology, and, most important, the untraveled and exotic locales of Southern Europe
and the Orient so attractive to British and French tourists. From roughly the 1840s
until the end of the century, accounts of the origin and description of the Gypsies
such as those published by Borrow began to focus more on language and folklore,
which were collated with the physical distinctions of race. By the time of Borrow’s
travels, Romani was gaining wider recognition as a true language, and the discov-
ery of its Sanskrit origins had all but laid to rest the notion that their jerga parti-
cular (“private slang”), as J. M. and even Borrow called it,32 was an invented dialect
intended to confound the outsider. But old legends of barbarous customs were not
buried; if anything, as with Borrow’s texts, they were exhumed, grew in richness
and detail, and continued to be passed down from one writer to the next even by

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those who were careful to question their veracity and thus seem less credulous or
biased than their predecessors.
Eventually, more progressive nineteenth-century histories and ethnogra-
phies would contain appendixes with grammars and dictionaries of Caló-Spanish
or Caló-English, tables comparing families of Sanskrit and Caló words, and de-
tailed individual etymologies, as well as samples or descriptions of music, poetry,
and folktales. According to Angus Fraser, George Borrow was instrumental in set-
ting this trend, even though his work contained many inconsistencies and plagia-
risms. Together his books on Spain offer a curious assemblage of anecdotes, history,
glossaries, diary entries, customs, and folklore, some of it supplied by Calé inform-
ants such as Antonio López who traveled with Borrow from Badajoz to Jaraicejo.33
A great deal of information also came from documents, rare books, and manuscripts
that the Spanish bibliophiles Luis de Usoz y Río and Pascual de Gayangos had sup-
plied him.34 Other sources were Calé aWcionados such as Juan Antonio Bailly and
Manuel the lottery hawker, who passed along their private collections of song lyrics
and poems gathered in the Triana and Macarena districts of Seville. The master of
the local color sketch, Sebastián Estébanez Calderón (nicknamed El solitario [“The
solitary one”]), also befriended and inspired Borrow’s Gypsy fantasies.
Though both of Borrow’s books on Spanish Gypsies have been repeatedly
reedited and their Caló vocabulary cited by philologists and ethnologists (for
example, by the British philologists Francis Hindes Groome and Charles Leland and
the German linguist A. F. Pott in his Die Zigeuner in Europa und Asien, 1844–45),
it is evident today that Borrow had at best a Xawed knowledge of Romani dialects,
as his capricious etymology of such words as undevel shows.35 Even the title of his
book, The Zincali, is an inaccurate rendering of the intended “The Gypsies.”36 The
linguist George Behlmer concludes that Borrow’s knowledge of Spanish Caló was
as Xawed as his knowledge of the Romani dialect of Britain that he recorded in
Romano Lavo-Lil (1874), a book that Behlmer describes as “both thin and shot
through with ‘absolutely ludicrous’ errors in etymology.”37 For his part Borrow’s
biographer William Knapp dubbed the Caló vocabulary list “a kind of philologico-
literary gazpacho.”38
As a philologist and book peddler, Borrow was somewhat of a failure: He
was Wred from his job and had to return to England before he had sold all his bibles,
and he has been repeatedly criticized for his linguistic errors. But as an adventurer,
storyteller, and propagator of Gypsy myth, he fared extremely well. In France his
imaginative accounts inXuenced Mérimée’s conceptualization of Carmen, which, in
turn, spawned a whole series of Gypsy paintings that spanned the Romantic, Real-
ist, and Naturalist salons. Even after he fell out of favor among his British readers
and colleagues, the tradition of “going a-Gypsying” in England owed much to
Borrow’s colorful travel narratives. The uniqueness and attraction of The Zincali

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and The Bible in Spain were their author’s Romany descriptions of everyday life.
His books contain lengthy conversations with Roma interlocutors sprinkled with
Caló vocabulary that lends them an air of authenticity and spontaneity. Instead of
seeking out exclusively local authorities and dignitaries in the towns he visited,
and burdening his travelogue with minutia about churches and historical buildings
as many previous travelers had done, Borrow deliberately sought out the humblest
and, as he was proud to boast, most remote or dangerous locales, places where, as
his Bible Society employers complained in letters to him, were not always the most
propitious for his missionary work.
In passages documenting Gypsy history, Borrow dutifully summarized all
of the known documentary sources already mentioned by J. M. (whom he occa-
sionally cites verbatim), but he was at his best when describing contemporary cus-
toms and habitats, writing with an air of great authority and conWdence about his
personal observations and convictions about Gypsy character. He accordingly treats
his readers to a heavy dose of sometimes harrowing adventures, conWdent that they
would conclude that this Xamboyant man of the Bible was speaking the Gospel
truth. Doubts about the veracity of some of the related incidents were occasionally
raised, but Borrow’s picaresque travelogues continued to be popular among non-
specialists for several decades. Robert Meyers’s description of Borrow’s debt to
Daniel Defoe provides some indication of the Xavor of the “gypsy man’s” prose:
“[H]e proWted from Defoe’s skill in characterization; he exploited the episodic
technique which Defoe had handled so masterfully; he followed the pattern of the
Wctional autobiography which exhausts the techniques of verisimilitude in order to
convince the reader of its truthfulness; he used the motif of the wandering rogue;
and he proWted from his study of Defoe’s plain, straightforward prose.”39 Clearly
Borrow embellished his stories for dramatic effect, and it is probable that his most
harrowing adventures had more to do with Spanish bureaucracy than with thiev-
ing Calés. Spanish authorities by turns authorized and forbade him to print and
sell his bibles, and he was even jailed for several months for illegally distributing
a Bible printed in Gibraltar, insulting an ofWcer, plastering Madrid with posters
advertising his bibles, and employing men to walk about the city bearing placards
in vivid colors exhibiting his “Xaming advertisements.”40
Borrow’s method of representing the Gypsy as the exotic other has a com-
plicated structure: He was very much under the literary inXuence of the picaresque
novel, especially the works of Daniel Defoe and Alain René le Sage. At the same
time, he was intellectually indebted to notions of race and origin that were the
key interest of contemporary ethnographers such as James Cowles Prichard, Robert
Gordon Latham, and Joseph Arthur Gobineau. In his books on Spain he repeatedly
contrasted Wve categories of people, mostly through a comparison of their deeds, to
reinforce or challenge common knowledge: Spanish Gypsies, non-Gypsy Spaniards

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(whom he called simply Spaniards), Jews, Catholics, and (Protestant) English. He

described all Wve groups as if they possessed Wxed characteristics frozen in time,
although he inferred that the last was the most dynamic and progressive group.
In fact, Borrow was particularly eager to establish that other races were stagnant or
paralyzed by their ignorance, character, superstitions, and religious beliefs, while
the English were a dynamic and more adoptive people. Borrow variously ascribed
both positive and negative attributes to these groups, or peoples, as he called them:
Spaniards were proud and chivalrous but at the same time avaricious, ignorant,
and cruel; Spanish Gypsies were generous to a fault although their customs were
barbaric and they were prone to thievery; Jews were very intelligent and spiritual
but tended to be self-serving and crass moneylenders; Catholics were either fanatic
and ignorant papists still steeped in the religious intolerance that had spawned the
Spanish Inquisition or secret remnants of its victims, the crypto-Jews. In contrast
the (Protestant) English were lenient with Gypsies and Jews, honest and forthright
in their dealings with other nations, and moderate in their judgments of the for-
eigners with whom they come into contact.
Aside from his occasional advocacy, Gypsies for Borrow represented a dis-
tillation of the worst qualities of the Spanish people who were not Gypsies: They
were merely a degree more barbaric, ruthless, and ignorant than their compatriots.
We can see this by surveying one of his favorite rhetorical devices: ostensibly dis-
cussing or criticizing Gypsies to impugn a second group. For example, when describ-
ing the migrations of Gypsies from Northern Europe into Spain, he explained
that although they were certainly a curse wherever they went, their “superiority in
wickedness” was the effect of the immorality of the lands through which they
traveled: “They were not likely to be improved or reclaimed by the example of the
people with whom they were about to mix. . . if they became thieves, it is not prob-
able that they would become ashamed of the title of thief in Spain. . . . If on their
arrival they held the lives of others in very low estimation, could it be expected that
they would become gentle as lambs in a land where blood had its price?”41 At other
times, he associated Gypsies with the ancient and backward peoples of Africa and
the Near East, for example, in chapter 8 of The Zincali, where he compares the evil
eye collectively practiced by Gypsies, Turks, Arabs, Hindus, and Jews. Occasionally
he expressed great admiration for Spain, calling it “the most magniWcent country
in the world, probably the most fertile, and certainly with the Wnest climate,”42
but in rich detail Borrow answered the question about Spain that he claimed he
could not: “Whether her children are worthy of their mother is another question,
which I shall not attempt to answer.”43 The children of Spain, it is clear from all of
Borrow’s works, were unworthy of their mother, and the least worthy, as his books
clearly show, were his “Zincali” friends.
Borrow’s fascination with Jews, which he shared with some of his models

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such as the writers Richard Bright and George Eliot, also led him into lengthy
digressions betraying the European obsession with Jewish wealth and suspicion of
their longevity. He conXated Jews and Gypsies when he wished to emphasize the
foreignness of certain traditions (for example, the casting of the evil eye), but con-
trasted them in many other respects such as wealth, knowledge, and social privi-
lege. Lacking a cultural tradition similar to the “eventful history of the Hebrews”
puts Gypsies at a disadvantage, neither belonging to/in the Europe where they live
(since they are not Christians and have no recollection of the Brahmins who were
their original gods), nor on a par with the Hebrews who were cast out of Egypt or
other peripatetic peoples who were fortunate to possess a written history.44 Borrow’s
admiration for the ancient Jewish people contrasts powerfully with his judgment
regarding the insigniWcance and ignorance of past and present Gypsies, and thus,
although he did not invent it, he helped to perpetuate the notion that Gypsies were
an unworthy people because they lacked a history:

There are certainly some points of resemblance between the chil-

dren of Roma and those of Israel. Both have had an exodus, both
are exiles and dispersed amongst the Gentiles, by whom they
are hated and despised, and whom they hate and despise. . . the
Israelites possess the most authentic history of any people in
the world. . . the Romas have no history, they do not even know
the name of their original country; and the only tradition which
they possess, that of their Egyptian origin, is a false one, whether
invented by themselves or others; the Israelites are of all people
the most wealthy, the Romas the most poor—poor as a Gypsy
being proverbial amongst some nations, though both are equally
greedy of gain; and Wnally, though both are noted for peculiar
craft and cunning, no people are more ignorant than the Romas,
whilst the Jews have always been a learned people, being in pos-
session of the oldest literature in the world, and certainly the most
important and interesting.45

In the above passage, Borrow bases his comparative analysis on histor-

ical, religious, and civil rather than physiological differences. Claims such as these
or others, for example, that Gypsies would not likely be rehabilitated in a coun-
try like Spain “unsound in every branch of its civil polity, where right has ever
been in less esteem, and wrong in less disrepute” or that Gypsies like Jews have
never distinguished themselves as soldiers, abound in The Zincali.46 Predictably,
however, anatomical differences also play a role in establishing the dissimilarities
between Gypsy and Jew. Even a Gypsy, he reported, can readily ascertain the

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difference between the two: “The Jews, therefore, and the Gypsies have each their
peculiar and distinctive countenance, which, to say nothing of the difference of
language, precludes the possibility of their having ever been the same people.”47
Scattered throughout Borrow’s texts are other references to the Gypsies’ white
teeth, “mulatto” skin, thick lips, large eyes, all the characteristics that for the new
Weld of ethnography constituted the “soft parts” of an individual’s ethnic identity.48
For Borrow, as for most contemporary anthropologists and ethnologists, the “soft”
elements of Gypsy physiognomy were linked to distinctive instinctual drives and
behaviors or the “hard,” most immutable, elements of ethnic identity. The overall
picture he painted was of a race with closer ties to the animal species than the rest
of mankind:

One of the most remarkable features in the history of gypsies

is the striking similarity of their pursuits in every region of the
globe to which they have penetrated; they are not merely alike in
limb and in feature, in the cast and expression of the eye, in the
colour of the hair, in their walk and gait, but everywhere they
seem to exhibit the same tendencies, and to hunt for their bread
by the same means, as if they were not of the human but rather of
the animal species, and in lieu of reason were endowed with a
kind of instinct which assists them to a very limited extent and
no farther.49

Because of his often-dim view of Spanish, Jewish, and Arab peoples or

customs, there is a good deal of ambivalence in Borrow’s representation of Gypsies.
He repeated, or illustrated with examples ostensibly drawn from his own experience,
all the commonplace stereotypes in circulation at the time, but he also challenged
them when it suited him, namely, to impugn the knowledge of less initiated Payos
or to criticize other racial groups. Conversely, he sometimes interpreted as positive
or reasonable an attribute that others had previously judged reprehensible, perhaps
because to convince his readers that he was an exciting adventurer and important
philologist-historian-cultural ambassador he had to exalt his subjects at least some
of the time, proving them worthy of his generosity, proselytizing, and instruction.
In other words, to secure the admiration and validation of his readers, Borrow
necessarily had to create a multifaceted, complicated portrait that would provoke
wonder, pity, and, especially, admiration for his ability to identify so closely with
his subjects that he was able to pass for a Gypsy when it suited him. Passing for a
Gypsy, then, had to seem a remarkable and worthy exploit, and in many ways The
Bible and The Zincali narrate the adventures of a Bible man who can pass as the
abject object of his study and thus make it seem less abject or unfamiliar. However,

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this insider knowledge curiously led to a reafWrmation of some of the most egre-
gious stereotypes, for while ridiculing commonplace misconceptions, Borrow would
often reinforce them. Bragging of his watchfulness, for instance, he warns a Gypsy
he meets on the road not to treat him like a naive busnó (non-Roma) and then pro-
ceeds to describe for his readers the trickery and illegal business deals of his fellow-
travelers that he alone understands and can avoid.
Criticism of Borrow’s vision of Spain and the Gypsies has had a lengthy
history. Richard Ford, an early supporter of Borrow whom he nicknamed el gitano,
felt that his portraits of Spain provided readers with a “camera lucida” of what he,
Ford, had also witnessed on his trips to Spain.50 On the contrary, many twentieth-
century Andalusian writers echoed Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo’s 1883 conclu-
sion that Borrow was “an eccentric and uneducated character, as credulous and
naive as the simpletons who climb up the ladder to greet the Three Kings.”51 More
recently, Borrow’s credibility has been somewhat rehabilitated. Manuel Azaña, The
Zincali’s Spanish translator, maintains that Borrow presented a faithful portrait of
the Gypsies, “without any romantic appeals in their behalf, by concealing the
truth, or by warping the truth until it becomes falsehood.”52 The same opinion
validating Borrow’s own statement was recently expressed separately by Carmen de
Zulueta and Juan Goytisolo. Commenting on one of Borrow’s descriptions of an
Andalusian Gypsy, Zulueta writes: “After reading these texts, we are convinced
that the author is describing for us a lived experience, ‘without any romantic
appeals in their behalf, by concealing the truth, or by warping the truth until it
becomes falsehood’ as he himself says in his prologue. This is something he saw,
and even though it refers to the era of the Catholic Kings, it is clear from this text
that Borrow is describing a Wrst-hand experience.”53 The passage that Zulueta cites
so approvingly may indeed have been drawn from a lived experience, but with its
animal imagery and other appeals to nature it typiWes the long line of Romanti-
cized Gypsy portraits that naturalized Gypsy animality:

She is of the middle stature, neither strongly nor slightly built,

and yet her every movement denotes agility and vigour. As she
stands erect before you, she appears like a falcon about to soar, and
you are almost tempted to believe that the power of volition is
hers. And were you to stretch forth your hand to seize her, she
would spring above the house-tops like a bird. Her face is oval,
and her features are regular but somewhat hard and coarse, for
she was born amongst rocks in a thicket, and she has been wind-
beaten and sun-scorched for many a year, even like her parents
before her; there is many a speck upon her cheek, and perhaps a
scar, but no dimples of love; and her brow is wrinkled over,

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though she is yet young. Her complexion is more than dark, for
it is almost that of a mulatto; and her hair, which hangs in long
locks on either side of her face, is as black as coal and coarse as the
tail of a horse, from which it seems to be gathered. There is no
female eye in Seville that can support a glance of hers—so Werce
and penetrating and yet so artful and sly is the expression of their
dark orbs.54

Zulueta corroborates Borrow’s assertion that he was not a Romantic since

he did not dwell on the exotic and picturesque, but despite his protests (and
Zulueta’s), Borrow in many respects conforms to the image of the Romantic
tourist. He does not, it is true, dwell on sentimental portraits of Andalusia, but his
interest in folklore, Gypsies, primitive places, and harrowing adventures shows
that his debt to the Romantic era was more than superWcial as Zulueta describes
it. The animal imagery that Borrow used to sketch the Gypsy portrait could have
come straight from Victor Hugo’s description of Esmeralda, with her Xaming eyes,
salamander body, dragonXy airiness, and nightingale voice.55 Blanca Krauel Heredia
adopts a more skeptical, and in my opinion credible, view of Borrow’s “objectiv-
ity,” pointing out that British travelers tended to conXate the other with whatever
preconceived notions or stereotypes were part of their subjective baggage: “For
our part, we don’t believe that this desirable objectivity can be applied to the case
in point. The British traveler, especially the hurried tourist, is rarely objective in
his comments, manifesting, on the contrary, numerous prejudices just like visitors
from other nations, who embellish their narratives.”56 The Spain invented by the
British, and by extension the Gypsy who represented Spain’s most colorful resi-
dent, was thus a deformed invention constructed in opposition to a more genteel
British reality.
Unlike many of the travelers who preceded and followed him, Borrow ex-
hibited no interest in the presumed eroticism of Spanish dance, and, ever the prude
as Mérimée correctly asserted, he did not fetishize Gypsy women. His descriptions
of Gypsy women, however, inspired writers like Mérimée to imagine them as wild
animals, a tradition that we saw began with Cervantes and that survives today in
popular culture throughout Europe. On the other hand, as part of his general pro-
gram to demonstrate that Gypsies were everything other than what they appear
to be to the uninitiated, Borrow denounced the popular myth that Gypsy women
were sexual adventurers. Their gestures and songs may be obscene, he conceded,
but there is no more faithful wife than the Gypsy. Because his discourse was intent
upon magnifying Gypsy difference, however, he used the complex play of nation-
alities and races one against the other to communicate, in the way strong contrasts
inevitably do, an idea of vast difference between himself and all the others whose

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paths he crossed. One of the more unusual techniques by which he accomplished

this was by registering the gulf that separates Gypsies and non-Gypsies from the
perspective of the Gypsies themselves. Their “hearts’ blood would freeze” if the
Spaniard knew what curses Gypsy women utter under their breath, he warned;57
Gypsies wish all busnés (non-Gypsies) were dead. The chilling contrast between the
spoken blessings (“O may the blessing of Egypt light upon your head, you high-
born lady!”) and the curses the Gypsy woman mutters under her breath (“May an
evil end overtake your body, daughter of a Busnee harlot!”) must have been edify-
ing for Borrow’s intended readers.58 If the Spanish Gypsy so hates the Spanish lady,
what of the raggle-taggle Gypsies who traveled the byways of England telling for-
tunes and lavishing Gypsy blessings on their gullible patrons?

The Guiding Light

Not all of Borrow’s compatriots shared his prudishness. During the 1840s and
50s, at the height of the French craze for Gypsy haunts in Andalusia frequented
by Latour, Gautier, Dumas, and others, British tourists also began publishing
descriptions of late-night entertainment in the Albaicín or Sacromonte districts of
Granada. Most accounts were written by male tourists who possessed only superW-
cial familiarity with Spanish dance. Typical of these pleasure seekers was Captain
Samuel Widdrington Cook, who in 1843 gathered together a group of bachelor
friends to witness a dance performance, with the help of his French valet de place,
whom, he speculated, had been left behind after the retreat of Napoleon’s armies:
“The dancing was a good deal in the oriental style, and more remarkable for the
activity and the contortions the girls gave to their supple forms, than for any grace
displayed on the occasion.”59 Widdrington Cook’s bachelor friends enjoyed the
dances but found the women’s bodies unattractive: “Many of their movements,
indeed the greater part, were extremely voluptuous, but their Wgures were too slight
and defective in development, to give much effect to them.”60 Widdrington Cook’s
“Hints for Travellers” in his book Spain and the Spaniards announced the forthcom-
ing publication of Richard Ford’s Handbook for Travellers in Spain, which precluded
a lengthy section of traveler advisories in his own work.61 He did, however, strongly
recommend the services of Bailey, his temporary valet, a man “well read in gypsy
poetry and other lore, and from what he stated, must have studied their manners
very deeply.”62 The reason that in Spain and the Spaniards in 1843 Widdrington
Cook dwelled on his traveling valet (whom he failed to mention in Sketches in Spain
During the Years 1829, 1830, 1831, and 1832) was to perform a duty that he and
others before him had apparently neglected. Bailey had complained bitterly that he
had recited all his best anecdotes to British travelers (possibly referring to George

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Borrow) who had promised but failed to cite him in their tour books. The mention
of this anecdote is signiWcant because it indicates that already in the 1840s it was
a tradition for expatriates in Spain to collect and pass on anecdotes about Gypsies
that travelers like Widdrington Cook and his bachelor friends eagerly snatched
up to enliven the pages of their guides and travelogues. These anecdotes were then
taken as Wrsthand knowledge and added to the store of lore and exaggerated truths
about the Andalusian Calés.
Borrow’s erudite friend Richard Ford played a role equal to that of Borrow
in the construction of Spain’s national character in English-speaking countries.
Ford established himself in 1830 in Seville where he remained until 1833. His
interests in Spain were manifold, or as the adage on the title page of his 1845 Hand-
book for Spain so aptly put it, “Who says Spain, says it all.” Ford was a passion-
ate historian of antiquity and philologist who enjoyed sorting out etymologies of
Spanish words, especially those of Moorish origin, and devising Oriental and clas-
sical roots for Spanish customs and character traits. He was also a devotee of travel
letters and travel guides, quoting diaries, guides, histories, and literary texts on
every occasion, but also providing a wealth of practical information to assist the
thousands of travelers whom he hoped would follow in his footsteps. In his letters
to his friend and collaborator Pascual Gayangos, he expressed pleasure at the
number of copies of each edition of his Handbook that had been sold, often adding
comments such as “It will certainly send a large supply of ricos ingleses (‘rich English-
men’) into Spain”63 or “You will soon have plenty of English travellers in Spain que
gastarán un dineral: mientras más moros más ganancia (“who will spend a fortune: the
more foreigners, the more money”): Spain just now is all the fashion, and I have
done much to undeceive cockneys as to the dangers and difWculties which are
patrañas (‘tall stories’).”64 Thus Ford initiated a new stage in the vision of Spain
by debunking British fears of highway robbers and poor traveling conditions and
minutely describing everything he saw, so that his readers could take guided walk-
ing tours without hiring Spanish guides. His decision to publish in the Murray’s
Travel Series guaranteed him a large readership, and by the beginning of the twen-
tieth century Ford’s guide had been reedited numerous times and seen countless
reprints. Virtually every British holiday traveler to Spain carried his “Ford” along
and cited him as the greatest authority on Spain.
After the Handbook for Spain, and its sequel Gatherings from Spain (1846),
British travelers would Wnd it more difWcult to imagine that they had “discovered”
Spain, for, as Krauel Heredia points out, “after Ford the only recourse left to them
was to compare what they had seen with their own point of view.”65 This is borne
out by examining any tattered copy of Ford’s Handbook in American libraries: The
one consulted for this study had annotations, exclamations, queries, and discrep-
ancies penciled in the margins as if the traveler who used it never let it out of

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his/her hand during the entire trip in Spain. This new type of guidebook, more
than just a travelogue or memoir like those of the authors studied in the previous
chapter, could Wt in the hand and therefore serve as an on-the-spot guide. It con-
tained useful travel information; for example, Henry Blackburn’s Travelling in Spain
in the Present Day (1866) listed steamer timetables and the names of the most suit-
able hotels for tourists. These guidebooks also invariably described the Gypsy sec-
tions of Seville and Granada and summarized the dance performances that readers
by then would Wnd familiar, although each description offered a slightly different
twist to intrigue readers already familiar with the clichés of the spectacle.
Ford’s favorite region, where he spent the greater part of his Spanish stay,
was Andalusia, especially Seville and Granada. Unlike some of his French con-
temporaries, Ford did not idealize the Spanish Gypsy as a type, but he was one
of the Wrst to attempt a detailed genealogy of their dances, and he recommended
that every antiquarian owed it to himself to see them danced in Andalusia where
they had not changed since they were Wrst witnessed by Martial, Petronius, and
Horace.66 He did not, as did Jean François Peyron, confuse the dances that Martial
described with the fandango; rather he claimed that the Gypsy olé or romalis was
vastly different from both the bolero and the fandango: “This singular dance is
the romalis in gipsy language, and the olé in Spanish; the Χρουοµα brazeo, or
balancing action of the hands, the λακσµα, the zapateado, los taconeos, the beating
with the feet—the crissatura, meneo, the tambourines and castanets, Bœtic crusmatu,
crotola—the language and excitement of the spectators,—tally in the minutest
points with the prurient descriptions of the ancients.”67 The English spectator, he
predicted, would not Wnd these ancient dances to his taste because of their lascivi-
ousness, but however indecent they may seem, “the performers are inviolably chaste;
young girls go through them before the applauding eyes of their parents and broth-
ers, who would resent to the death any attempt on their sister’s virtue; and were
she in any weak moment to give way to a busné, or one not a gipsy, and forfeit her
lacha ya trupos, her unblemished corporeal chastity, the all and everything of their
moral code, her own kindred would be the Wrst to kill her without pity.”68
Following Ford’s advice, numerous accounts were published of dance or
music fests (which came to be known as juergas) organized and paid for by British
tourists, beginning with William George Clark, who in Gazpacho or Summer Months
in Spain (1851) bragged that he had paid only three shillings for a night’s enter-
tainment, while other travelers had paid as much as a doubloon.69 To see this ancient
“Oriental” dance in Seville, Ford had recommended the services of local guides,
several of whom are named in the early editions of the Handbook: Gustave de Will-
inski, José Lasso, Pascual Rose, Frederick Barlow, Gaetano Peickler, and especially
Antonio Bailly, who had been Borrow’s informant and possibly Widdrington Cook’s
as well, and who was one of the more popular valets de place because he could speak

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English and was adept at arranging late-night entertainment. A decade later this
same guide was still arranging for tourists to see authentic Gypsy dances.
In 1854, despite a curfew after a riot in the tobacco factory, Bailly arranged
for the American judge Severn Teackle Wallis to see a dance recital that is described
in vivid detail in Glimpses of Spain. Taking his cue from Ford, Wallis imagined the
olé as a dance that was unmodiWed over many centuries, eternally bound to the
Andalusian landscape. One might move an obelisk or two out of Egypt, but the
olé, like the pyramids or the tomb of Cheops, “must stay forever where it was
planted.”70 Wallis’s reaction to the olé echoed the intensity of Dumas and the other
French romantics who preceded him:

After gliding all around the room, with the melting glances, the
tossed arms, the gyrations and saltations that the case required—
she lingered for an instant just in front of me, and stamping
quickly twice or thrice upon the Xoor, went “docili tremore,”
through a dozen evolutions in a moment, of which, as I am a liv-
ing man, I believe the drawing of a circle with her foot, about my
head, was one! A strange, topsy-turvy feeling came upon me, as if
the room were upside downward, and when my bewilderment
was over, the ole was a shapeless dream.71

When the dancer pauses near an aWcionado and stamps her feet, the polite thing to
do, according to Wallis, was to throw down your hat and let it be smashed, if the
dancer wills it, beneath her feet.
Accounts of Gypsy dance recitals such as the one Wallis described con-
tinued to add just the right touch of adventure to foreign guidebooks published
in the United States and Great Britain throughout the remainder of the century.
Henry Blackburn reported that the dancers went from table to table putting their
arms around the women spectators and touching the male spectators on the shoul-
ders as a kind of “backshish” (tip) for their attention.72 Some travelers, such as Lady
Louisa Tenison, took the artists Henry Phillip or E. Lundgren along with them
to capture the dance spectacle on canvas. The Gypsies whom he witnessed dancing
the bolero and fandango, claimed Henry Blackburn, looked exactly like the ones he
commissioned to model for his guidebook, a sample of which is shown in Figure
13. Readers bored with the hackneyed and lengthy account of Gypsy dances of pre-
vious guidebooks might still enjoy seeing a faithful artistic rendering or perhaps
a newspaper clipping like the one he reproduced from a British newspaper describ-
ing a Gypsy dance that “attained to such a pitch of Bacchanalian preposterousness,
that I am afraid . . . to say that my impression was that the manners and customs
of Moimenta were, at all events, not of the most straitlaced character.”73

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Image not available

fig. 13 Gipsies at Granada, unsigned sketch in Henry Blackburn’s Travelling in Spain in the Present
Day (1866).
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the spanish gypsy

Most British writers narrated these performances as a somewhat risky

adventure that required caution, money, and a talent for arranging “unique” enter-
tainment, not to mention narrative skill. At the same time, some tourists were
beginning to transcend the typical olé experience and record other impressions
and interactions with the Calés, both positive and negative. In Cositas españolas or
Everyday Life in Spain (1875), Annie Harvey visited a group of families living in
poverty in the Sacromonte caves. Once inside the caves, she was surprised to see
that the families who, like “sand-martins,” burrowed holes in the rocks, lived a
clean and orderly existence: “They seemed very industrious, and were always at
work, the men as tinkers, cobblers, or chair menders—the women making and sell-
ing brooms and similar articles.”74 Though she was careful to take along a servant
as her guard when she entered the Calé quarters, she was gratiWed to report that
no fortune-tellers besieged her, no one threw stones at her, and no one was un-
civil. Instead what she witnessed was a gaunt and haggard group whose poverty
was evident but who were far from the savage and rude people she had been warned
to avoid at her hotel.
On the contrary, in his 1873 Wanderings in Spain, Augustus J. C. Hare
could Wnd nothing positive to say about the Calés he encountered. He registered
his shock at seeing an open funeral bier led through the streets on which he saw
a beautiful young girl dressed in white with jasmine and white roses in her hair.
Instead of a group of digniWed pallbearers, the bier was “jerked jauntily along
by six rough boys of thirteen or fourteen years old, some of whom were smok-
ing.”75 Since Hare “could hardly bear to think” of the fate of the girl’s body when
it reached the cemetery, we must take his description of what occurred there as
hearsay: “At the cemetery, where these uncofWned funerals take place, the gipsies,
by an ancient custom, fall upon the body on its arrival, and tearing off all its dress
and decorations, Wght and scramble for them amongst themselves, leaving the
poor corpse to be tossed, naked and desecrated, into its grave amongst the docks
and nettles.”76 Funeral rites aside, for Hare there was nothing very exotic about the
Gypsies: They danced quite well in their own way, but they were so insolent,
coarse, and immoral that they were “the great objection to a lengthened residence
in Granada.”77 Genteel women especially should not venture into the Gypsy quar-
ters unless they want to lose their shawls and parasols or have their pockets picked.
Gypsy women who are not about stealing are telling fortunes, and the children
who are not out begging “roll in the dust in front of their caves, often quite naked,
and without distinction of sex”;78 this is no place for a woman of great sensibility,
he concluded.
Most nineteenth-century women tourists, in fact, did not witness the Gypsy
dances in the Albaicín and the Sacromonte districts of Granada or the Triana dis-
trict of Seville. Lady Herbert, in Impressions of Spain (1866), registered the typical

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British repulsion at the bullWght she attended and seems not to have ventured
into the Gypsy quarters. Women tourists, however, did arrange for performances in
their own lodgings (for example, at the Washington Irving Hotel in Granada) if
they took the trouble to Wnd a local guide to arrange for their entertainment.
Isabella Frances Romer, whose “summer ramble” took place in 1842, obviously
had prepared for her trip to Andalusia through extensive readings of Washington
Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra, and she also consulted numerous historical texts on
the “mysterious race of people” to round out her narrative snapshot of the Granada
Calés. While there, she used the same guide as Washington Irving, Mateo Ximenes,
to organize a “Gypsy ball” for her and her friends at their hotel. Romer likened
the romalis and other dances she saw performed at her hotel to the entertainment
in Turkish harems. A second woman in her party, on the other hand, thought that
the dancers’ gestures corresponded more precisely to the spectacles mentioned by
Horace in his account of the dances of Gades (Cadiz), an opinion that Ford would
echo in his Handbook a few years later but that was evidently already in wide cir-
culation among European Gypsyphiles.
The historical information with which Romer rounded out her descrip-
tion of Gypsy dance performances did not go beyond the hackneyed generalizations
of earlier accounts. For example, she reported that the Gypsies arrived in Europe
without religion and continued to “have no religion whatever,” although “some
writers” afWrm that they have fragments of a dream, a form of “metempsychosis”
that unites them to a Hindu origin.79 On the other hand, she refuted Heinrich
Grellmann’s argument that Gypsies had descended from Egyptian tribes driven into
Europe during the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, citing the fact that the Ottoman
invasion took place 100 years after the Wrst incursion of Gypsies in Europe and
the fact that Romani lacks traces of ancient Coptic and Arabic.80 The similarities
she perceived between the language and customs of Gypsies and those of the lower
castes of India led Romer to suggest that the Hindustan connection was the most
logical, and she concluded that Gypsies were most probably driven out of India
during the invasion of Timur Beg in the Wrst years of the Wfteenth century.81 It was
also “well-authenticated,” she reported, that the Gypsy race survived through the
centuries without mixing with the “white blood” races of their host countries, a
fact that “forms a strong point of similitude between the scattered Jewish people
and the equally scattered Gipsy tribes.”82 By implication this stubborn endoga-
mous streak had not served them well:

[W]hether this identity of prejudice in their own favour, and

against the rest of mankind, which characterizes both races, orig-
inated in the reprobation which has fallen equally upon each, as
outcasts driven forth from the great social compact––wanderers

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upon the face of the earth, unable to lay claim to any nation as
their own––or whether it arises from some peculiarity of organi-
zation, is a question for the philosopher or the physiologist to
decide, and one upon which my own ignorance, alas! will not
permit me even to venture an opinion.83

In a similar vein are the travelogues of Mary Ann Anson (Lady Louisa
Tenison), who set up residence in various cities of Andalusia between 1850 and
1853 and in her eloquent account of her stay contested many of the timeworn
stereotypes about Andalusian women found in the travel books written by men.
In Castile and Andalucia (1853), Anson speculated that tourists with preconceived
notions of the “dark glancing daughters” so famed in poetry will be disappointed
when confronted by real Andalusian women who, sadly, are sacriWcing their man-
tillas and traditional dress for the bonnets and Wnery of their northern neighbors
that leave them looking rather ordinary. With this change of costume, their “dis-
tinctive charms” have vanished. Unfortunately, these changes in dress are not
accompanied by progress in other areas:

Spaniards are losing those peculiarities which have invested their

land with a certain poetical charm, and are adopting many of
the trivial commonplaces of other countries, which, to a passing
observer, may seem to indicate an advancement in civilisation;
but alas! They make but little progress in those more sterling and
intellectual qualities and those industrial pursuits, which would
enable Spain once more to assume that place which the natural
advantages of her soil and position would qualify her to hold
among the nations of the present day.84

For Anson, however, the Calés were even lower on the scale of civiliza-
tion than the Andalusians, who according to her had made so little progress in
their intellectual and industrial pursuits. The Sacromonte caves of Granada were
“swarming” with Gypsies “crawling out of the most extraordinary holes when
you least expect them,” and the Triana district of Seville was charming only if one
thinks dirt and tumbledown walls are picturesque.85 The charm of the “gaudily”
dressed Gypsies mostly escaped her; her description of their physical appearance
reads like a summary of Gautier (whose travelogue she liberally quoted in chapter
2): With their thick lips, brown complexion darkened by sun and dirt, melancholy
looks, and coarse hair carelessly arranged, Spanish Gypsies proclaim their Oriental
origin. The wild, “uncivilised” Gypsy dances that carry one “to Eastern lands”
struck her as “coarse and disagreeable,” at best a rich study for an artist.86 The most

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animated of the dances that Anson reportedly witnessed in the Triana was the vito,
performed by a single dancer who ended her performance by throwing her hand-
kerchief at a male spectator and waiting for it to be returned to her with a peseta
in it. For those who cannot travel to Seville or do not want to have their hat crushed
or to part with a peseta, Anson recommended the exhibit of the artist Henry
Phillip, whose Gipsies Dancing the Vito (Fig. 14) she used to illustrate her chapter
on Seville.87
Lady Tenison’s low opinion of Gypsies was shared by Mrs. H. Pemberton,
who warned visitors against the folly of thinking there was anything romantic
about Gypsies. In A Winter Tour in Spain (1868), Pemberton expressed the views
of many of her British compatriots when she described the dancers as “ungrace-
ful,” “noisy,” and “unmusical.” “They dance heavily, dragging their feet afte them,
hardly raising them from the ground; their arms and heads work instead. Their
singing is dreadfully monotonous, not the least melody in it, and the noise they
make with clapping their hands, deafening.”88 Dirt on canvas, she reported, may
be very picturesque, “but dirt in nature is most repulsive”; Gypsies on canvas may
captivate, but when seen in the Xesh, “they become so repulsive that the pictur-
esque is all lost, and what is disgusting alone is visible.”89 The conclusion of many
women tourists, as these brief quotations show, was that Gypsies were best viewed
on paper or canvas, not in the Xesh.

Image not available

fig. 14 Henry Phillip, Gipsies Dancing the Vito, in Lady Louisa Tenison’s Castile and Andalucia (1853).

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The Children of the Zincali

Apparently immune to the erotic appeal of women performers, British aristocratic

women like H. Pemberton and Lady Tenison formed their opinion of Calés based
on their physical condition and, sickened by their stark living conditions, often
urged their readers to avoid them altogether. But their negative portraits did little
to diminish the popularity of the Gypsy motif in British literature. Even accounts
that boasted of detailed information and accuracy tended to feed the notion of
Gypsies as a Romantic people. For example, though he strove to ground what he
wrote in either reliable historical studies or accounts based on lived experience,
George Borrow rendered both British and Spanish Gypsies so as to reXect the pop-
ular mid-century’s conception of the Gypsy as the embodiment of romance, adven-
ture, passion, violence, and unfathomable codes of conduct, something that carried
over to representations of Gypsies in popular British literature and theater. In 1843,
the same year that Borrow published The Bible in Spain, Alfred Bunn and Michael
William Balfe’s play The Bohemian Girl opened to wild applause in London at the
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, lasting more than one hundred performances. A few
years later (1847) the “gipsy brat” Heathcliff fell in love with Catherine Earnshaw
in Emily Brontë’s most acclaimed novel Wuthering Heights. And the same year that
a disgruntled Maggie Tulliver ran off to live with the Gypsies in George Eliot’s The
Mill on the Floss, John Crawford Wilson’s popular three-act melodrama La Gitanilla
or Children of Zincali opened in London (1860).
According to the editor, Crawford’s play enjoyed an “astounding success.”
What we admire in the descendants of Egyptian lost tribes, suggests the introduc-
tion, is their immutability, an indifference to their pariah status, and the “Poetry
and wild Romance of real Gipsy Life.”90 In addition, audiences of the play appar-
ently enjoyed the moonlight Xamenco concert (set inside the Alhambra in the Court
of the Lions that Ford had popularized for the British traveler), a series of on-stage
knife Wghts and attempted assassinations, and a tumultuous Wnal scene that takes
place in Wales and has Lord Clifford and his rival Pedro tumbling off a bridge
into a roaring waterfall artfully constructed onstage. But what must have seemed
equally fantastic to the British audience was the Wction of a lord courting and
marrying a Gypsy dancing girl. That is, except for those who had already heard the
scandalous account of how the British aristocrat Lionel Sackville-West had fallen
in love and set up house with a professional Spanish Gypsy dancer whom he had
seen perform in Paris in 1852, an affair discussed in Chapter 4.
In Crawford’s Gitanilla or Children of Zincali, the “children” are all played
by non-Roma actors whose costumes resembled the popular stereotype of the
Spanish Gypsy familiar to European operagoers by 1860: Bendito, the tribe’s patri-
arch, is dressed in “velvet jacket and breeches; highly coloured dark mantle; staff;

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scarlet Moorish turban; huge rings in ears; white uncombed hair; heavy projecting
eyebrows; beard; drab cloak.” Pedro, his daughter’s Wancé and chief of the tribe, is
to appear in rich “Catalonian” style: “scarlet gold-laced cap, with large blue tassel;
dark blue velvet-slashed jacket, covered with silver bell buttons; tight breeches,
and laced sandals to knees; India scarf round waist; Spanish cloak, gold chain, knife,
pistols, long curls.” Camilla, the “gitanilla” played by a Miss Page, is to wear a short
and “showy” dress and laced jacket with a “profusion of jet-black ringlets, falling
below her waist at back; Xower wreath and castanets.”91 As in nearly every Wction
about Gypsy women until the twentieth century, the plot concerns the love of a
poor but beautiful Gypsy girl with extraordinary musical talent and a Payo of noble
birth who professes his eternal love for her. Unlike some of his prototypes, however,
Lord Clifford is a Wckle lover who treats Camilla as a mere “holiday toy” and mar-
ries her only to escape the vengeance of the Gypsy tribe. The plot follows Clifford
and Camilla back to England where Clifford’s Wrst love, Lady Emily, patiently
awaits. When Camilla learns that her husband is in love with an English noble-
woman, she dies (on stage) of a broken heart. She is avenged by her Gypsy lover
Pedro, who throws Clifford off a cliff into the falls, after which Pedro is shot by a
group of soldiers as he shouts “Camilla, thou are avenged.”
The true villains of Crawford’s Gitanilla are the ruthless Lord Clifford and
the British soldiers whom he orders to kill Pedro, but the play is not concerned
with the injustice of the Busné treatment of Gypsies. Rather its business is to
show the tragic incommensurability of interracial relationships. Camilla is truly in
love with her British lord but unable to make him happy even though she lavishes
affection on him and bears him a beautiful child. Clifford objects to marrying
Camilla knowing that she could never be respected in England. Camilla’s father is
equally cynical: “What has the Gitana to do with the customs of the Gentile. . . .
What Gitana was ever respected by the Busné?”92 Camilla, as she herself repeats
several times, is the wildXower, her rival, Lady Emily, the favored lily, and the wild-
Xower can only wilt in the shadow of the lily. The feelings that Clifford and Emily
share “can only exist between souls of a higher order,” while Clifford’s feelings
for Camilla are marked by their difference: “I say that there existed no reciprocity
between us. Our thoughts, hopes, feelings, Xowed in different channels; in short,
our natures were altogether opposed.”93 After the death of Camilla and Clifford,
their child will have a second father (her faithful Gypsy lover Pedro) and a second
mother (the Lady Emily who promises to adopt him), but the birth parents of such
a hybrid subject must perish for their racial “mistake.” The nineteenth-century
British festive writer could no more imagine a compatible mixed-race couple than
could Hugo, Sand, or Mérimée, and the tragedy of this essential incompatibility
would soon Wnd a more serious British audience in readers of Marian Lewes (George
Eliot) and her husband George Lewes.

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‘I Must Go with My People’

In the Romantic impulse to dignify the Spanish Gypsy and at the same time vilify
Spain for its contempt and neglect of its ethnic minority, George Eliot’s epic poem
The Spanish Gypsy (1868) Wgures prominently, both because like George Sand’s
Moréna the heroine is a Gypsy raised by non-Gypsies and because a male Gypsy
(Fedalma’s father Zarca) is for once elevated to heroic stature as a selXess and tragic
leader of his people. The Spanish Gypsy, which today some critics judge has “sunk out
of sight under its own weight,”94 partakes of the Romantic exaltation of bohemi-
anism and is consequently no more anchored in a recognizable Calé identity than
Mérimée’s Carmen or Crawford’s Gitanilla. On the contrary, with its medieval set-
ting and dubious claims regarding the historical role and origins of Gypsies, it may
appear more a rejection than a celebration of the kind of sedentary Calé life wit-
nessed by the author Marian Lewes and her husband George during their 1865 trip
to Spain. Yet the poem is signiWcant because it is in close dialogue with nineteenth-
century social scientists who determined the way European travelers such as the
Leweses imagined the nature of Spanish Gypsies. By framing her poem during the
years of the Spanish Reconquest, Eliot chose what had become for the nineteenth
century “a kind of historical laboratory in which experiments on the question of race
could be performed.”95 She also offered a nation exploring its own religious practices
and proselytizing a critique of religious conversion, portraying converts as hypo-
critical and the assimilation of minorities as ineffective and therefore undesirable.
The story unfolds in the Wnal years of the Wfteenth century during the
Reconquest of Andalusia by the forces of the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and
Isabella. Abducted by Christians and raised as a noblewoman, Fedalma is on the
eve of her marriage to Don Silva, the duke of Bedmár, when suddenly she learns of
her Gypsy heritage and is persuaded by her captive father to take up his cause and
help free the Gypsies from Christian jails and Xee to Northern Africa. Even before
her mesmerizing encounter with her Gypsy father, however, Fedalma is unable
to repress an instinctive love of dance and music, and the poem begins with her
slipping away from her palace chambers to a public square, there to dance to the
lively beat of her tambourine, a true daughter of Cervantes’ Preciosa. Her dance is
interrupted when suddenly she encounters her father, a prisoner of the king, being
led to jail for his collaboration with the Moors. Following this encounter Fedalma
will be faced with the decision of keeping her Gypsy identity a secret and marry-
ing the duke or yielding to Zarca’s insistence that she take up a role as dutiful
daughter and “queen” of the Gypsies. Duty, and by inference inherited nature, tri-
umph over love; Wnally unable to place her personal life before the good of her tribe,
Fedalma plots to free Zarca and escape with him to Africa, where they hope to form
a Gypsy homeland.96

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Obsessed with issues of group responsibility versus personal happiness and

acquired characteristics versus innate qualities, The Spanish Gypsy is clearly heavily
indebted to nineteenth-century debates about nations and races that inXuenced
the Leweses and their circle of friends at the Westminster Review. The Gypsies and to
an extent all Spaniards depicted in the poem conspicuously conform to the tem-
perament of the “southern” nations tinged with the völkisch philosophy espoused
by George Henry Lewes in his The Spanish Drama: Lope de Vega and Calderón (1846)
and later by Eliot in Daniel Deronda. Chapter 4 of Lewes’s book, “Characteristics of
the Spanish Drama,” borrowed heavily from Schlegel to distinguish between the
northern and the southern “minds.” In the northerner (Germans and English par-
ticularly), thought and reason predominate over feeling, while in the southerner
(Italians and Spaniards), feeling predominates over thought. Quoting Schlegel,
Lewes wrote that “[t]he stern nature of the North drives man back within himself;
and what is withdrawn from the free development of the sense must in noble dis-
position be added to their earnestness of mind.”97 The southerner on the contrary
is more “objective,” by which he meant that his thoughts turn quickly into passion,
sensuous action, and material objects, while the northerner’s passions get woven
into thoughts, reveries, and memories. With no recurrence to a past, then, Span-
iards dwell in the present, wearing their hearts on their sleeves, “at least as much
heart as they are supposed to possess.”98 Climate is one of the prime determinants
of this deWning characteristic, its inXuence “far greater than has generally been sus-
pected.”99 Because of their warm climate Italians live out of doors and in cafés; they
are on “friendly terms” with nature, while the cold and gloom of Germany account
for the more “subjective” character of the north. Without this knowledge of racial
determinism, a true appreciation of Spanish theater and of Spanish people was,
according to Lewes, impossible.
Given Lewes’s keen interest in racial determinism, it is not surprising that
his wife and intellectual companion Marion should also lend considerable weight to
questions of inheritance and national identity in The Spanish Gypsy. Eliot composed
her poem during a four-year period from 1864–68. In George Eliot and the Politics
of National Inheritance, Bernard Semmel describes The Spanish Gypsy as a curious
mixture of positivism and social conservatism. It is obviously at odds with the more
radical völkisch primordialists such as W. H. Riehl, for whom Gypsies were an
“adversary against whom the host nation could hone its own sense of a superior
identity,”100 but it does respond to the appeal of conservative racial positions of
German writers such as Schlegel and especially Johann Gottfried von Herder, who
had condemned Jews as “parasitical plants on the trunks of other nations.”101 On
the other hand, Eliot’s friend Frederic Harrison, a follower of Auguste Comte, who
had strongly urged her to write a positivist drama or novel, described the work as
a “mass of Positivism,” since Fedalma and her father Zarca sacriWce their happiness

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for the good of the greater Gypsy community. In this conXict between private
and public needs and concerns, The Spanish Gypsy entertained a dual position: The
good of the whole triumphs over the needs of the individual, it is true, but at the
same time blood and race triumph over both passion and reason; the future of a
community is dependent on the pull of nature, not on any acquired or rational sen-
timent. It is some mysterious force in her blood that compels Fedalma to take up
the cause of her people:

See, ’twas my people’s life that throbbed in me;

An unknown need stirred darkly in my soul,
And made me restless even in my bliss.
Oh, all my bliss was in our love; but now
I may not taste it: some deep energy
Compels me to choose hunger. Dear, farewell!
I must go with my people.102

This ambiguity, as Bernard Semmel has shown, explains the mixed reac-
tion to the work among Eliot’s positivist friends. With all the many appeals to
the life that “throbs” within her, her innate impulse to dance, and the inexorable
draw of kindred ties, Fedalma is Wrst a Gypsy and then a woman, just as the char-
acter Sephardo is Wrst and always a Jew, or the duke a “natural” enemy of the Moors:
“Inherited national traditions of a race or a nation–seemingly operating through
the blood–are thus, in The Spanish Gypsy, decisive.”103 The duke, like his prototype
Andrés of La Gitanilla, at Wrst chooses love over honor and duty, agreeing to join
the Gypsy cause and turning his back on his Spanish soldiers. In the end, however,
he is driven back to duty, not out of choice, since he loathes the Spanish priest that
he is attempting to save from execution, but because of the stirrings of race. The
Spaniard is the “natural” enemy of the Arab and Gypsy: Silva kills Zarca to save
a Christian, just as Fedalma leaves Silva to save her people; both sacriWce their love
for a cause that is not of their choosing. As in her later novel Daniel Deronda,
descent is an ordering principle; Eliot sees both the “coercive and the liberating
inXuence” not just of tradition, but of race.104 Fedalma is pulled by ties that are
stronger than any immediate beneWt to her as an individual, so that the “mystic
stirring of a common life” compels her in the end to sacriWce her individual happi-
ness. The conXict in this instance is not between duty and heredity, but between
the call of duty that responds to hereditary condition, and the personal needs of the
individual.
In another sense, however, racial ties are also a liberating force in Eliot’s
poem: The only hope for a better future for Gypsies as a group lies in this inherited
sense of communal mission that will, Zarca predicts, Wnally gather the scattered

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tribes of Gypsies together in one place where a nation can arise. Eliot used botani-
cal metaphors to describe the way a race becomes a nation in an organic sense: Gyp-
sies as a race must be planted: “Where they may make a nation, and may rise / To
grander manhood” (272). They must band together to found a homeland, not in a
Spain that has always oppressed them, but in Northern Africa where it matters lit-
tle that they bear “the marks / Of races unbaptized, that never bowed / Before the
holy signs, were never moved / By stirrings of the Sacramental gifts” (77).105 Scorn-
ing the Spaniards’ Catholicism that has failed to bind the Gypsies together in a
nation, Zarca speaks to his daughter of an even stronger Gypsy faith:

a faith
Taught by no priest, but their beating hearts:
Faith to each other: the Wdelity
Of fellow-wanderers in the desert place
Who share the same dire thirst, and therefore share
The scanty water: the Wdelity
Of men whose pulses leap with kindred Wre.
(137)

The tragedy of the Gypsies is compounded by the fact that they lack a
past, and it is precisely because they are so culturally and materially poor and have
“no great memories” (136) that Zarca feels he must answer the call to be “the
savior of his tribe” (138) by leading them to a better land. In this imaginary land,
Gypsies will possess a banner, national pride, fellowship, common goals, land on
which to sow and reap, and even a “queen,” as Zarca promises Fedalma (147); in
short, they will become a nation like Britain. Despite their lack of a great prophet
like Jesus, Mohamed, or Moses, or any foundational memories, they can still school
themselves in the rich heritage of other nations; for example, they can “catch” the
“Lore from the Hebrew” (136) and learn of the “milder” life “[o]f nations fathered
by a mighty Past” (136). What Eliot was proposing here was a partial revision
of the popular organic conception of a nation: For a nation to exist, it must possess
land, leaders, trades, a religion peculiar to its needs, and a sense of common goals,
but it need not have evolved the myths of origin or greatness that correspond to
the greatest nations of the earth. These can be “borrowed” from other peoples, and,
using them, new leaders can at least “plant” the hope for a mighty, future nation.
The poem, therefore, can be understood as a response to Riehl’s scornful dismissal
of the Gypsies as a pariah culture. Its epic style, heroic treatment of Fedalma and
Zarca, repeated references to mythological and biblical Wgures, are all Eliot’s gift to
an impoverished culture in need of “planting.”106 Zarca and his Wve hundred men,
with Fedalma by his side, will be the seed, as great as the Arab seed that

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Twice grew to empire on the teeming shores

Of Africa, and sent new royalties
To feed afresh the Arab sway in Spain.
(151)

Once in Africa, Zarca promises that he will gather all the wandering
Zincali together “And make a nation––bright light, order, law, / Instead of chaos,”
(151) and there the Gypsies “may spread and ripen like the corn” (309). Old forests
(nations) may die, but new ones will thrive “Into a new and multitudinous life /
That fashions to community, Mother divine of customs, faith, and laws” (250), for
even from scattered seeds a nation may rise: “Huge oaks are dying, forests yet to
come / Lie in the twigs and rotten-seeming seeds” (250). When Zarca dies, how-
ever, Fedalma predicts that the African dream will not come to fruition under her
leadership: She is but “the funeral urn that bears / The ashes of a leader” (347). The
poem’s more optimistic narrator, however, predicts that even though both Zarca
and Fedalma should fail in their messianic plans, they will at least “feed the high
tradition of the world, / And leave [their] spirit in Zincalo breasts” (154). In other
words, they will enable the Gypsies to acquire one of the requisite characteristics
of a nation: a memory of greatness that will encourage other heroes to “ripen,” res-
cue the “lost Zincali” (346), and grow a mighty nation. Fedalma’s mission is not
to lead after all, but simply to “plant” Zarca’s “sacred hope” within the sanctuary
that is her life, there to be used by some future plant-nation.
Besides its debt to Cervantes, Borrow, Pott, and Grellmann, The Spanish
Gypsy was also partially the product of a passionate interest in modern-day Spain,
the country above all others where Marion Lewes longed at the age of forty-seven
to travel to experience Wrsthand the “southern” mind. Granada as the Leweses saw
it has considerable resonance in the poem, for example, in the ecstatic descriptions
of Bedmár’s town square with its “blue broad-sworded aloes,” “white court-walls,”
“lovely light-dipped” things, and “old rain-fretted mountains” in the background.
But according to George Eliot’s journals, the inspiration for The Spanish Gypsy came
prior to this blissful trip, from an Italian painting she saw in Venice, and the plot,
themes, and characters were all worked out well in advance of her trip to Spain.107
In her journals she wrote:

The subject of “The Spanish Gypsy” was originally suggested to

me by a picture which hangs in the Scuola di San Rocco at Venice,
over the door of the large Sala containing Tintoretto’s frescos. It
is an Annunciation, said to be by Titian. Of course I had seen
numerous pictures of this subject before, and the subject had
always attracted me. But in this my second visit to the Scuola de

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San Rocco, this small picture of Titian’s, pointed out to me for

the Wrst time, brought a new train of thought. It occurred to me
that there was a great dramatic motive of the same class as those
used by the Greek dramatists, yet speciWcally differing from them.
A young maiden, believing herself to be on the eve of the chief
event of her life—marriage—about to share in the ordinary lot
of womanhood, full of young hope, has suddenly announced to
her that she is chosen to fulWll a great destiny, entailing a terribly
different experience from that all ordinary womanhood. She is
chosen, not by any momentary arbitrariness, but as a result of
foregoing hereditary conditions.108

Conceiving her poem as a body to be dressed in the most suitable histori-

cal “clothing,” Eliot chose the critical moment in Spanish history when the strug-
gle with the Moors was reaching a “climax.” The idea became more and more
“pregnant,” as she began to imagine how the plot would allow her to explore the
role of hereditary conditions during the “irreparable collision” between the indi-
vidual and the general good. Eliot confronted individual needs, represented in the
poem by the “woman’s truth” that complicates Fedalma’s existence (148), with
the “irresistible” power of heredity, the Nemesis that binds all her characters “with
terriWc force.”109 More than merely a celebration of the Spanish Calé dancers whom
the Leweses admired in their trip to Andalusia, The Spanish Gypsy is the story of a
great physical and emotional binding that mysteriously and inexorably draws indi-
viduals to a sense of group identity and just as unavoidably puts groups in compe-
tition. As a tragic heroine Fedalma transcends local history, rising to the status of
her tragic and driven co-heroes and heroines Iphegenia, Othello, Faust, or Brutus.
Eliot’s poem seeks, as she herself put it in her diaries, “not to expound why the
individual must give way to the general: it has to show that it is compelled [empha-
sis added] to give way.”110
Although Eliot raised Gypsies to heroic status and endowed them with
if not a nation at least the seed of nationhood, The Spanish Gypsy was not exempt
from the type of racialized imagery common to both English and French Roman-
tic painting and literature that was fermenting in the discourses of contemporary
social sciences. Some of the racist images were a product of the poem’s conspicuous
anti-Castilian bias. British readers were probably not shocked to hear Father Isidor
described as “a black eagle with gold beak and claws” (28), since all the priest’s
actions accord with this rapacious description that reXected general British views
of the Spanish clergy. Readers sympathetic to the anti-Castilian sentiment would
probably agree with Zarca about the hypocrisy, greed, and “small heart” of the
Castilians. Spaniards, Zarca complains, consider the Gypsies to be animals “unWt for

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sacriWce” (149), mere worms to be swept aside beneath their feet. Clearly rejecting
these negative animalistic attributions, the text promoted more positive attributes
such as those celebrated by Fedalma who defends her tribe’s nomadic way of life in
a reprise of Cervantes’ ode to the Gypsy life:

What if the gypsies are but savage beasts

And must be hunted?––let them be set free,
Have beneWt of chase, or stand at bay
And Wght for life and offspring. Prisoners!
Oh! They have made their Wres beside the streams,
Their walls have been the rocks, the pillared pines,
Their roof the living sky that breathes with light:
They may well hate a cage, like strong-winged birds. (111)

The attributes assigned to the Gypsies, those “Wery-blooded children of the Sun”
(225), by the poem’s narrator also resonate with the images of French authors like
Alexandre Dumas who, as we saw, celebrated the Gypsies’ animalism in contrast
to a more mechanized and materialistic bourgeois subject. Like George Sand’s
Moréna, Fedalma possesses an inherently Gypsy animal grace and gift for dance
even though she has been raised as a noblewoman:

Maiden, crowned with glossy blackness,

Lithe as panther forest-roaming,
Long-armed naiad, when she dances,
On a stream of ether Xoating––
Bright, O bright Fedalma! (40)

The force of kinship runs deep between Fedalma and her father: “As leopard feels
at ease with leopard” (145). Zarca brags that the Zincali are as quick as serpents,
“loving as the hound” (151), and “lynx-eyed, lithe of limb” (309). The troubadour
Juan playfully dubs Hinda, Hita, and Tralla “docile wild-cats” (229) for their wild
Gypsy spirit:

Earth is good, the hillside breaks

By the ashen roots and makes
Hungry nostrils glad:
Then we run till we are mad,
Like the horses,
And we cry
None shall catch us

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Swift winds wing us––we are free––

Drink the air––Zincali we! (230)

Although mention here of Spain’s “scorching sun” aligns Eliot with her
husband’s (and the German school’s) theory of the preponderant effects of climate
on racial characteristics, it is also possible that intellectuals like Eliot came under
the inXuence of the group of British and French physiologists who were beginning
to discard or at least de-emphasize the theory of climatological determinism along
with the environmental inXuences of religion, government, and economic status,
in favor of other explanations based on biological determinism. The most renowned
spokesman for this new scientiWc racism was John Knox, who, during the period
when Eliot was writing The Spanish Gypsy, lectured extensively in England on his
theory of “transcendental anatomy” to counter the “miserable, trashy, popular
physiologies” of the day.111 Race, according to Knox, was “everything,” by which he
meant that man’s moral nature and all of his literature, art, and science depended
in the Wrst instance on his racial identity or “zoological history.”112 If one was
a Catholic, it was because he was a Celt, if strong and aggressive empire builder, a
Saxon, if akin to the animal world, a Negro or Gypsy. “Seigniories and monkeries,
nunneries and feudality, do not form, neither do they modify, the character of any
people; they are an effect not a cause, let chroniclers say what they will.”113
To demonstrate that physiological principles and not such “accidents”
as religion, environment, or economics governed all living beings, in The Races of
Man Knox divided Europe’s races into three principal groups––Celtic, Saxon, and
Belgian or Flemish––while the rest of the world was divided into such categories
as “Samarians,” “the Phoenician races,” and “the dark races.” He then dedicated
the bulk of his study to the description of the dominant and “inalterable” features
of each subgroup. Races, according to Knox’s “transcendental anatomy,” cannot
amalgamate successfully, nor can they stray extensively from their natural habitats,
which meant that the inequality of the races was a natural fact. Hybrids born of
mixed parents eventually die off: “Nature produces no mules; no hybrids, neither
in man nor animals. When they accidentally appear, they soon cease to be, for they
are either non-productive, or one or other of the pure breeds speedily predominates,
and the weaker disappears.”114 Hence the mulattos of the New World would even-
tually disappear, he predicted, and even in the northern territories where the cli-
mate is more favorable to European colonization the European races will eventually
die out since the mixture of Celtic and Saxon races will not be favorable to a sus-
tainable population.
While Jews, Copts, and Gypsies are not counted among the “great” Euro-
pean races, Knox devotes an entire lecture to describing their moral and physio-
logical attributes. Of the three he predictably sees the Gypsy as having the most

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afWnity with the animal world: They come and go, “like migratory birds or quadru-
peds seeking other lands, to return again with the Wrst snows to their winter dormi-
tory.” Gypsies neither think nor work; “theirs is the life of the wild animal, unaltered
and unalterable.”115 Contradicting his own theory of hybrids, Knox claimed that
Gypsies were dying out because they refused to intermarry, which made them, like
the Jews, susceptible to diseases like leprosy: Nati consumere fruges (“Regret them
not”), he concluded, echoing ideas we have seen in the Spanish arbitristas writing
in the seventeenth century, for they do not cultivate the earth or manufacture any-
thing: “Were Central Africa, from the edge of the Sahara to the Cape of Storms, sunk
under the ocean wave, and with it the gipsy race, what should we lose?––nothing
which can or ever will adorn humanity; no inventions nor discoveries, no Wne arts,
no sublime thoughts, nothing to distinguish man from brute.”116
Eliot clearly believed that climate was a strong determining factor in a
people’s moral makeup, but she decidedly took issue with Knox on the future of
the Gypsy race. At the same time, she also understood that economic advantages
could override climatological and racial determinants. Whether the animalistic
attributes assigned to Spaniards are endearing or repellent depends on their eth-
nicity, but all southerners of the popular classes shared certain traits that distin-
guished them from the more rational “Northerners” as her husband deWned them
in his history of Spanish theater. In Bedmár they lean from their balconies or loiter
about the town square with their “large lazy eyes” (52). Even rats and insects
“being southern Spanish” are ever “ready for a lounge” (39) until some street enter-
tainment Wres their imagination. In contrast, the northerner, Spain’s own “solid-
headed man of Aragon” (214), has “matter in him that . . . Southerners lack” (214).
On the other hand, the elite classes, regardless of provenance or race, escape the
southern mentality: The “brain matter” that southern townspeople lack is not lack-
ing in Fedalma, who was raised as a noblewoman, or in the noble Don Silva, who
is overwhelmed by conXicting thoughts, doubts, and feelings of guilt. In the Gypsy
camp far from his customary military environment, Silva imagines a different world
where “all prejudice / Of man’s long heritage” (291) would dissolve. Yet even there
the “far-off labouring ancestors” (292) tug mightily, and “mysterious haunts of
echoes old and far” call him home among his “people” (293). For a time he strives
to make Fedalma’s family his “people,” but Silva’s tortured thoughts help readers
foresee that the same “mystic stirring of a common life” (138) that Fedalma feels
for the Gypsies will pull Silva back to the Christian camp. As Knox argued, then,
there was something natural about the racial pull that tends to keep races apart,
and something unnatural about the mixing of racial stocks, which never is allowed
to happen in the poem.
Despite the persistent animalistic imagery used to describe her movement,
Eliot’s Fedalma is more goddess than street dancer. In contrast to the sensuous

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“real” Gypsies that Dumas and others created for French readers in their travel
exotica, Fedalma is a mixture of goddess, high priestess, queen, and lady. Her pas-
sionate impulse is tempered by her “virgin majesty”; when she dances she evokes
images now of the roaming panther, now of the joyous Miriam leading the chorus
of song on the shores of the Red Sea, now a Trojan maid swaying in “slow curves
voluminous,” or Eve before the devil’s temptation. “Ardently modest, sensuously
pure” (61), her twirling movements blur the outer edge between earth and heaven,
producing a “rapture” that helps the crowd forget its poverty. Here again it is evi-
dent that George Eliot was devising a cultural and mythical pedigree for a people
that she imagined were lacking a past, creating a queen worthy of remembering, a
queen whom, as we see in Chapter 4, twentieth-century travelers like Walter Starkie
indeed remembered and wove into their descriptions of Gypsy women some hun-
dred years later.
Fedalma the graceful panther, exotic dancer, mythical queen of her people,
tragic lover, may also have been a response to the woman writer’s sense of difference
in a male-dominated society. Deborah Epstein Nord argues that beyond expressing
a characteristic British interest in the anthropological studies of exotic peoples or
the formation of nations, Fedalma is emblematic of the outsider in general, a Wg-
ure that breaks the conventional mold of femininity and as a result becomes a very
public personage. The opposite of the secluded and pampered grand lady she was
raised to be, Fedalma expresses the woman author’s anomalousness and “deviance
to acceptable modes of feminine thought, behavior, and appearance.”117 As a female
version of Freud’s family romance, then, The Spanish Gypsy embodies a “fantasy of
social aggrandizement and aspiration.”118 In running off with her father, Fedalma
breaks all social ties, leaving behind the petty concerns with dress and jewels and
even love, which to a large extent deWned conventional femininity. To convince
her that this leap into the future is the right moral decision, Zarca ridicules the
“debased” femininity of the rich in no uncertain terms:

Round your proud eyes to foolish kitten looks;

Walk mincingly, and smirk, and twitch your robe;
Unmake yourself––doff all the eagle plumes
And be a parrot, chained to a ring that slips
Upon a Spaniard’s thumb, at will of his
That you should prattle o’er his words again!
Get a small heart that Xutters at the smiles. (148)

Read in this way, The Spanish Gypsy is the story of the tension between a “celebra-
tion of unconventional femininity and unhappy obedience to an exigent inheri-
tance.”119 Just as nineteenth-century women writers often used the abused slave to

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ventriloquize the social inequities of middle-class women,120 Eliot displaced her

preoccupations as a woman writer onto British society’s most marginalized group;
the charismatic Gypsy remains “just beyond the limits of respectable emulation”
just as Eliot herself did.121 In the end, however, George Eliot can only see the Gypsy
woman as following in the footsteps of her father; her grand heroic gesture falters
when she realizes she cannot really be the heroic father of her people.

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4
The Legacy of the
Romany Rye

It is true that their difference is always better accepted if hidden in the

depths of virgin forest, thousands of kilometers from our horizon.
––bernard leblon, Les Gitans d’Espagne (The Gypsies of Spain), 232

What draws us to these savage daughters is our enduring love of the

unknown, the distant, the illusory.
––catulle mendès, Les Belles au monde (World beauties), 5

the decade of the 1880s marks the pinnacle of interest in the subject of
Gypsies in Great Britain, with debates raging about Roma itinerancy versus
assimilation, education, morality, racial purity, and language. Census Wgures show
the number of Romany Travelers declining and Romani language slowly disap-
pearing in Great Britain.1 The Romantic image of the Gypsy living in the open
countryside and traveling from place to place in gaily painted wagons was fading
as an itinerant lifestyle became more difWcult to pursue and the Romany began
settling on the fringes of the metropolis:

The Gypsies pitched their tents and halted their vans in areas
of transition, on brickWelds and on waste ground, on sites of
intended buildings and where buildings had been pulled down.
They encamped in the midst of ruins, chaos, and Wlth, and many
of their camps were in such depressed areas that they were said
to be satisWed to put up their tents “where a Londoner would
only accommodate his pig or his dog.” The degeneration of the
commons from pleasant green lands to industrial waste sites was

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marked as the clear phase that accompanied the development of

the metropolis as a major industrial center.2

The fear and loathing of urbanized Gypsies expressed a general anxiety

accompanying the Industrial Revolution, whose British promoters were devel-
oping the double notion of the progress and perfectibility and, conversely, the de-
generation and regression of races. Both movements were inevitable because they
were natural processes, and, as Kenan Malik has argued, the discourse of race in
the modern, scientiWc sense developed out of this conviction.3 While the level of
civilization advanced for some races, anthropologists argued that others were re-
gressing to a more animal state.
Interest in foreign Gypsies was also heightened during the latter decades
of the century, especially the Gypsies of Eastern Europe, including Hungary, Ger-
many, Austria, Russia, and the Balkans. The well-traveled route to Andalusia still
counted as a special adventure although it was increasingly difWcult to imagine
this cultural pilgrimage as a voyage of discovery. By the 1880s, the Sacromonte
caves of Granada were widely regarded as a tourist trap, and foreign visitors there
complained of being accosted with the familiar “Good morning, gentlemen” or
“Bonjour, Messieurs” by hawkers of “authentic” Gypsy dance. Those who visited
the caves or ventured into the Albaicín district of Granada were usually greeted by
a Wgure who claimed to be the king of the Gypsies, described here by the British
tourist Samuel Parsons Scott in 1886:

The king was a man of about forty-Wve years of age, well made,
and active, and as swarthy as a dark mulatto. His dress presented
quite a singular, if not a regal, appearance. His head was bound
with a red silk handkerchief, upon which rested a broad-brimmed
felt hat. A rufXed shirt, brown velveteen breeches, with rows of
silver buttons down the seams, hempen sandals, and a sash of the
most brilliant scarlet, wound tightly about his waist, completed
his attire. His Wngers were covered with silver rings, and from his
ears hung curious ornaments of solid gold, so heavy that they were
suspended by little chains passed around the ears, instead of the
latter being pierced in the ordinary way.4

With a mixture of condescension and awe British and American tourists were
beginning to take account of the physical attractions not just of the colorful Calé
women but of the men like this Gypsy “king,” who was adept at exacting a trib-
ute in exchange for the privilege of rambling around the Gypsy sectors without
being accosted by the “beggars who abound in his dominions.”5

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Unlike Richard Ford, Scott judged that the olé and jaleo dances, de rigueur
performances for everyone who visited Spain, were merely pale imitations of the
original spectacles performed by the Phoenicians. They no more resembled what
they once had been than the minuet resembles the “frenzied contortions of the
Egyptian ghawazee.”6 Still, he was delighted when his new acquaintance, the Span-
ish artist Francisco de la Cuesta, offered him the “rare” opportunity to see a Gypsy
“ball” in the Triana district of Seville. Don Francisco and his friend Don Antonio
arrived at the appointed hour in full majo dress, popular among guides and some
idle señoritos, and even emulated by the more adventurous male tourists: green
velveteen jacket adorned with metal buttons, knee breeches, and the rounded
“washbowl” hat called the calañés. The desire on the part of the tourist to portray
these dance performances as an entry into a private and forbidden Gypsy world
was clearly understood and encouraged by the guides as well as by the Calés them-
selves. With their highly “Xamencoized” dress and gestures, performers conformed
to the stage versions that by the end of the century were widely familiar to British
theatergoers.
The Spanish guides led Scott through the gloomy streets of the Triana to
a crumbling building, once a nobleman’s residence but now a “mouldy and totter-
ing” ediWce with battered statues in its niches and a forbidding exterior, a Wtting
stage for the “semibarbarous” performance of dances that had degenerated from
the Phoenician spectacles of centuries past. Entry was gained only after a heated
exchange with a gatekeeper. At last the master of the house welcomed the visitors
with polite greetings and seated them near a raised platform as a “special favor” to
his old friend Don Francisco, while some two hundred members of the restless
crowd glanced suspiciously at the “unwonted” presence of strangers. Everything in
Scott’s description, sketched here, leaves the impression that he was a privileged
witness to a rare event, and, true to Romantic form, he read into the gestures of the
Calé performers a passion that he imagined was a reXection of an innate, southern
love of pleasure:

The audience, growing excited, crowded about the platform, and

cries of Arre! Arre! Wlled the court, as the lithe bodies of the
dancers swayed to and fro, keeping perfect time to the wild and
furious music. The roguish girls, tearing their wreaths to pieces,
showered roses upon the performers or pelted them with oranges,
and some enthusiastic individuals threw in their hats, which were
instantly kicked over the heads of the bystanders amid tremen-
dous applause. As the attitudes varied, bringing with each move-
ment some fresh surprise, some startling exhibition, one needed
only a glance at the frenzied gestures and Xashing eyes of the

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Gitanos, to detect the ardent passions that lurked beneath the usu-
ally impassive exterior of this singular, semibarbarous people.7

To justify the escalating prices of recitals, functional distinctions had to be

established between performing groups, and as a result an entire discourse emerged
about the way for tourists to recognize and obtain the “authentic” article. The
French novelist Héctor France understood, as he and his friends warily made their
way to the Albaicín district of Granada in 1888, that they would be “robbed” by
their local guides, but he chose to take the risk anyway, for the sake of experienc-
ing authentic Gypsy dance that he had been told would make other dances seem
like a “minuet” in comparison.8 He was disappointed not only because what he wit-
nessed resembled very little the exotically dressed Gypsies described by Dumas in
1846, but because he had to pay an exorbitant 20 francs for dances that he, like his
hero Dumas, found so repellent that he asked that the curtain be drawn on them.
France’s disappointment was echoed by “The Irish Bohemian” John Augustus
O’Shea, who described Gypsies as a dying race and dedicated only a few disparag-
ing remarks to them in his two-volume Romantic Spain (1887):

The excessively dirty and extremely picturesque race, with parch-

ment skins and high cheek-bones, is dying out. A few stray mem-
bers of the tribe remain in the remotest and raggedest part of the
transpontine suburb, and sheer mules, cope horses, and do tin-
kering jobs generally, Wlling their spare time with petty larceny.
Their women shufXe cards and tell fortunes. A splendid people
they are, those gipsies—in Borrow’s book and on canvas. If you do
not want to see them, they are sure to show up; if you do, as I did,
you must look for them, and not always with success.9

O’Shea expressed the disillusionment that many Wn-de-siècle travelers experienced

at Wnding no Carmens and Esmeraldas among the ragged Calés encountered in
Spain. He advised his readers against attending Gypsy dance recitals, condemning
the fact that they were driven by a love of money and not of music:

Your hopes of assisting at a gipsy dance at Seville will be dis-

appointed. If you give a courier two pounds sterling, he may be
able to improvise you one; a pack of Wlthy, bony men and women
will execute epileptic saltatory movements before you—not the
Esmeralda dance, but lewd swaying of the body from the hips,
and vehement contortions; and Wnally one creature will throw
her handkerchief at your feet. A well-bred caballero will Wll the

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handkerchief with shining dollars, and hand it back to her with a

bow. This dance is work, downright hard work; but it is a dance
for money. Mammon, not Terpsichore, is the genius to whom
worship is paid.10

Despite an obvious loathing for the Calés they encountered in Granada

or Seville, Héctor France and John O’Shea are some of the key Wgures in the cre-
ation of the discourse of the disappearing Gypsy that would continue to feed the
nostalgia of Gypsyphiles both in Spain and the rest of Europe into the early 1900s.
France’s lament that the Gypsy, having donned shoes, socks, watches, and collars
and given up short skirts, scarves, sequins, and even castanets, was becoming “civ-
ilized” meant that determining Gypsy identity would have to rely more on physi-
cal characteristics, language, or conduct than on clothes. At the same time, it
also issued a challenge to heartier travelers to go to the “remotest and raggedest”
regions and districts in search of the disappearing “breed” that still wore the right
clothes and deWed modern inventions. While the terms “degeneracy,” “disappear-
ance,” and “authenticity” crept into the discourse about Gypsies at this time, so
also did race-based stereotypes become more assertive in descriptions inXected by
French Naturalist narrative. Jews and Gypsies were often contrasted physically and
intellectually or, conversely, as in the case of Héctor France’s account of his trip
to Spain in Sac au dos (1888), grouped together in a common racial stereotype. At
the same time, attempts to justify the more offensive traits of the Gypsy character
through reference to the centuries of persecution they had suffered were woven into
many of the historical narratives as it became fashionable to censure Spanish cru-
elty. A popular assertion among late nineteenth-century historians was that owing
to Spanish repressive laws and persecution the Gypsy had played only a minor role
in the history of the host country, but that, on the other hand, abject poverty had
spared the Gypsies from the hatred that resulted in the expulsion of the Jews.
The year 1889 marked a resurgence in interest in the Spanish Gypsy in the
Parisian press. In the 1889 Universal Exposition that gave birth to the Eiffel Tower,
Ferdinant Dutert’s “Palace of Machines,” and other evidence of Europe’s obsession
with the machine age, a group of human expositions reminded the 28 million vis-
itors of world treasures that were magically immune to human progress, or perhaps
on the verge of disappearing and therefore worthy of a last glimpse. The Spanish
exhibit was among these with its daily show of Xamenco dancers and musicians
who helped to coalesce in the minds of the French the identiWcation of Spain with
Gypsies. This is clear from the curious set of texts by Catulle Mendès written in col-
laboration with Rodolphe Darzens, entitled Les Belles au monde: Gitanas, Javanaises,
Egyptiennes, Sénégalaise (The world beauties: Gypsies, Javanese, Egyptians, Senegal-
ese; 1889), which attempted to capture all the excitement of four categories of

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women that counted among the more “exotic” human displays at the Exposition.
On the cover of the Belles au monde pamphlet (Fig. 15), four women, one from each
of the named groups, arc around a sketch of a rather sterile-looking Venus de Milo,
apparently the ultimate standard of beauty. The Senegalese woman sits, legs tucked
beneath her, in an obsequious position; the Egyptian brandishes a sword and scarf
as she executes an exuberant dance step; and a Javanese woman gestures with her
palms up and long-nailed Wngers extended away from her body. Finally the Gypsy,
partially obscured by a large fan, executes a contorted dance step that seems to
defy gravity.
Mendès understood perfectly both the attraction of the Gypsies for the
Fair’s public, and his role in collapsing Gypsy and Spanish identity for a generation
still clinging to Romantic visions of Spain, at least during the great moments of
celebration of common knowledge such as the Universal Exposition: “What draws
us to these savage daughters is our enduring love for the unknown, the distant,
the imaginary.”11 The predominant imagery used to sketch the Spanish dancers
Macarona, Soledad, Juan, Matilda, Lola, and Pepa ranges from the more conven-
tional: demons, cats, birds of prey, savage beasts, and others that we have seen in
previous chapters, to the more exotic such as salamanders (an image probably bor-
rowed from Victor Hugo) and monkeys, for, as Mendès explains, “it is from their
animality that springs their strange and brutal charm.”12 Mendès, however, does
not imagine the Spanish dancers as decadent vestiges of a disappearing race; rather
he interprets them as an antidote to a decadent society, and he hopes that instead
of succumbing to the banalities and repetitiousness of Parisian life these “savage
daughters” might Wnd their way back home to the Albaicín, where they will con-
tinue to tell fortunes, dance, marry a horse thief, display their virgin cloth in the
window the day after their wedding night, and produce a new generation of little
Gypsy girls: “simple, crude, wild, and dancers like they.”13
Though it had lost some of its luster, enthusiasm for the “savage” Anda-
lusian Gypsy would feed the French taste for exoticism until the turn of the cen-
tury. For example, an 1898 production of Bizet’s Carmen was performed before an
enthusiastic audience at the Opéra Comique in Paris under its new director Albert
Carré. The theater critic Gustave Larroumet praised this updated version for its
appealing realism, asserting that Carré had managed to bring to the stage authen-
tic scenery and costumes that had fallen into disuse in a Spain that, he implied,
lacked interest in preserving its national heritage. The French actress Celestine
Galli-Mari appeared to be an atavistic reincarnation of Mérimée’s original, and the
costumes reproduced in minute detail the Andalusian-inspired watercolors of
Eduouard Detaille and Georges Clairin. Though a thoroughly French production,
Larroumet boasted that Carré’s stage art rivaled nature because of its regard for
detail and realism; now that the colorful Andalusia captured by Mérimée in 1847

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fig. 15 Cover of Catulle Mendès, Rodolphe Darzens, Les Belles au monde (1889).
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had faded from memory in Spain, he suggested, it was left to the French to revive
it as best they could on stage.
Larroumet’s assessment of the modern version of Carmen comes close to
suggesting that, apart from the Gypsies performing in France, Andalusia no longer
existed as a referent beyond French culture. If Andalusia existed at all, it was thanks
to the music of Bizet, the Wction of Mérimée, the images of Clairin, Regnault, and
Edouard Detaille, or the staging genius of Albert Carré. Spain’s most authentic
product, its dancing women, have been appropriated by France as a kind of well-
deserved affront to an indifferent Spain unworthy of its national treasures. For it
was only in France that Xamenco dancers could receive the recognition and proper
attire to conform, ironically, to the imaginary Andalusia created earlier by French
artists and writers, who had embellished Spanish locales to appeal to their Roman-
tic readers. Thus the troupe of authentic Calé mosca dancers that Carré contracted
for the 1898 stage production of Carmen, including the famous performer “Trin-
idad la Gata,” were properly refashioned by French genius that rescued them from
neglect and allowed the Wction of Carmen to endure. Larroumet recalls seeing
Trinidad as a young girl in her original habitat in the Albaicín district, where she
danced for him at the behest of the Gypsy “captain.” So poor was the Wve-year-old
with the nearly naked “golden bronze body” that she had to use shards of pottery
instead of castanets; yet she already provoked an eroticized response:

The director of the Opera-Comique has girded his little Gypsy

with the most beautiful attire that national luxury can offer. When
I saw her down there, on the banks of the Daro, she was half-
naked and beneath her sordid, tattered clothes, this small, golden
bronze body offered the slender, pure lines of a Florentine statue.
Her eyes shown like jade marbles, through a crop of black hair,
and her white enamel teeth traversed the dark coral of her lips.
She sang and danced, with shards of crockery in her hands, instead
of castanets, her head to one side and her leg outstretched, her
look full of innocent provocation. It was painful and charming.14

Just as for Catulle Mendès, what constitutes the charm of Gypsies for Lar-
roumet is their savagery, their playful maliciousness, and their afWnity with “agile”
animals (monkeys) and other “primitive” races such as Negros. Alone among the
Spaniards, they were a living memory of ancient civilizations, which they were
keeping alive through their music and customs. That this past had no written
record makes the Gypsies, as living relics, all the more attractive and worthy of
preservation: “Everywhere and always the race remains true to itself, laughing
and wild, lazy and violent, sensual and treacherous, with its instinct for liberty and

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hatred of laws. Beneath what conWnes of the ancient world, under what burning or
freezing skies, during what feasts and what funerals did the ballads that today Xoat
in the valley of Granada and echo in the Arab walls of the Alhambra Wrst ring
out?”15 The Gypsies were not, Larroumet conceded, the only Spaniards. For exam-
ple, they did not represent the heroic types associated with other icons such as
the Cid, Don Juan, Gil Blas, or the barber of Seville, but while other Spaniards
were swiftly abandoning their Spanishness (as interpreted by French writers, at
least), Gypsies remained their same raw selves, something that can be seen, accord-
ing to Larroumet, not only in the Albaicín district of Granada but at the wonder-
fully “real” performance of Carré’s Carmen in Paris where they can be properly
appreciated.
For Catulle Mendès and the thousands of 1889 fairgoers, as well as for
the enthusiastic public of Albert Carré’s remake of Bizet’s Carmen in the Opéra
Comique, the Gypsy woman had become the emblem of Andalusia and Andalusia
a trope for an idealized Spain: “the violent, passionate Spain, the Spain that plays
the guitar and the knife, the Spain of vast routes where are heard the sound of mule
hoofs and bandits’ gunshots, the Spain of bloody corridas with Xashing swords and
the red of wounded bulls illuminating the eyes and hearts of its beautiful daugh-
ters.”16 This fusion of Andalusian, Gypsy, and Spanish identity had serious reper-
cussions in Spain as a whole as well as for the Spanish Calés. If Spanish Gypsies were
overwhelmingly imagined as passionate, mysterious, physically attractive, bizarre,
primitive, tragic, musical, picturesque, demoniacal, anarchic, lazy, deadly, a sym-
bol for creativity and imagination and poetic liberty (to name the most common
stereotypes), the Calés as a group were bound to be misunderstood, patronized,
infantilized, or neglected when they did not conform to the image. And for many
travelers who invested heavily in the ideal, the confrontation with real Calés was
apt to prove a great disappointment (a feeling often expressed by the more gullible
tourists), precisely because they were so distant from that ideal.
Spain remained a popular if somewhat faded watering hole for French
writers until the end of the century; between 1880 and 1890 thirty French “Voy-
ages” went to press.17 Maurice Barrès, René Bazin, Pierre Loti, Gaston Routier,
Pierre Louÿs, and André Gide were among those who traveled to Spain in an often-
futile search for an exoticism that they believed no longer existed in France.18 Res-
cuing the Gypsy woman by converting her into either a martyr or an admirable
spectacle was still fashionable for some British and French Hispanophiles, but for
Barrès, Louÿs, and others, the Gypsy romance had been tarnished. The requisite
visit to the tobacco factory made famous in Mérimée’s Carmen left Barrès melan-
cholic. He thought that the “precious jewels” there deserved better than to run
barefooted through the streets of the Triana district, caressed by “unworthy hands.”
“It’s like casting pearls. So much wasted beauty.”19 A true aesthete, Barrès was

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highly appreciative of Moorish inXuences on Spanish customs and racial identity

but not particularly under the spell of Gypsy music. He and his fellow travelers
were especially scandalized by the precociousness of the young girls who winked at
them as they danced barefoot in the courtyard of a church in Granada. The Xash-
ing eyes of the Gypsies spoke not only of the “the liberties of young animals” but
the old go-betweens that these girls were quickly destined to become since Gypsy
beauty was so Xeeting.20 The loathing mixed with attraction expressed by Barrès
was shared by the novelist Pierre Louÿs, who made a pastime of seducing young
girls on his trip to Spain and later Wctionalizing his adventures.21 He made the
Carmenesque heroine of his novel La Femme et le pantin (The woman and the pup-
pet; 1898) a racial hybrid with “those wonderful looks that are born of the mixing
of Arabs with Vandals—Semites with Germans—which quite exceptionally brings
together, in one small European valley, all the contrasting elements of perfection of
both races.”22 The Gypsy dancer who appears brieXy in La Femme may be “on Wre”
from her “waist down to her calves,” but she is also, “like most women of her race,
extremely ugly,”23 an opinion that Louÿs expressed about Sevillan women in gen-
eral in his travelogue Voyage en Espagne.24 Nevertheless, the drawing of tobacco
workers in Seville (Fig. 16) that Louÿs included in the 1899 edition of La Femme et
le pantin on both the frontispiece and the beginning of chapter 5 might have left
readers with a different impression.

The Legacy of the Romany Rye

In 1874 the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland suggested to the British
Orientalist E. H. Palmer that a society of Gypsy folklorists or “Romany Rye” be
formed, which would publish its own journal professing “devotion, hobbyism,
afWnity with Gypsies.”25 George Borrow was their model for on-location investiga-
tion into the language, customs, folklore, music, and history of the Roma world-
wide. A product of Romanticism’s earlier preoccupation with authenticity, the
Romany Rye that clustered about the Gypsy Lore Society in its early years feared
that the “real” Gypsy was disappearing, and so it generally opposed laws aimed
at Roma assimilation and dedicated a great deal of energy and ink to searching out
and acknowledging “racially pure” Romany both in Great Britain and abroad.
Knowledge and preservation were the dual goals of this group of approximately
one hundred Gypsyphiles, and to Wnd the answer to the poet Pierre Jean de
Béranger’s question that inaugurated the Wrst number regarding the mysterious
origins of the “Gay bohemians,” the Romany Rye traveled throughout Europe,
Brazil, even Africa, for information that they then posted to Leland for inclusion in
the Journal. The more radical of the Romany Rye, such as Francis Hindes Groome

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fig. 16 Pierre Louÿs, illustration from La Femme et le pantin (1899), 56.

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(1851–1902), lived among the Romany for many years and even married Romany
women. These “heirs of George Borrow,” as Wim Willems calls them, who con-
tributed to the publications of the Gypsy Lore Society, would in turn have a
considerable impact on twentieth-century Gypsyologists.26 They also contributed
to a burgeoning twentieth-century tourist industry that fed off the publications of
societies such as this one when promoting out-of-the ordinary holiday adventures.
The Wrst Series of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society (1888–92) featured
very few articles on Spanish Calés despite the wide variety of Roma groups and
dialects canvassed. Word lists, stories, family registries, letters from informants,
and other bits of what was sometimes termed “Romani Xotsam” Wlled its pages.
Much discussion was devoted to distinguishing Gypsies from tinkers and other
travelers who were either of mixed descent or unrelated to the “true” Romany. For
example, in a brief note David MacRitchie called the Catalán Gypsies very “thor-
oughbred,” although he lamented that they were losing their tongue and mostly
spoke only Catalán.27 In a later volume MacRitchie took Borrow to task for in-
correctly placing Caló words in the “o” group, some of which were preceded by
the article “o” and should therefore have been placed elsewhere in Borrow’s word
list. MacRitchie’s improbable explanation for this lapse, since he believed that
Borrow was well versed in Caló, was that he was distracted when he wrote out the
list and failed to catch the errors in the proofs.28 Several comments in the “Notes
and Queries” section mentioned an incident that took place in Córdoba, in which
an American doctor named Middleton shot and killed a Caló who was allegedly
trying to rob him in the tower of the Cathedral. Some who commented on the inci-
dent denied that visits to the Gypsy quarters were dangerous, while others warned
against taking Gypsies as guides.
The longest article on Gitanos (or Spanish Gypsies) in the Wrst series of
the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society was by the Italian Romany Rye Adriano Colocci,
who based his “The Gitanos of To-Day” on his travels to Spain in autumn 1888.
Colocci was happy to conWrm MacRitchie’s report that the “pure type of the tradi-
tional Gitano” could still be found in Spain.29 However, he was inclined to believe
that their morality was “not worth much” and that all Gypsies were thieves,
although he admitted that in all of his dealings with them the Gitanos had been
honest and trustworthy. Colocci stated categorically that the reputed prudishness of
the Gypsy woman as claimed by George Borrow was a myth, and as proof he cited
many instances of prostitution of which he apparently had Wrsthand information.
Of the many locales where he was able to verify instances of Gypsy prostitution
(and pass along the useful information to his fellow Rye), the following quota-
tion perhaps shows that Colocci was himself no prude: “At Granada I knew a
Gitana who accepted an invitation to dinner which I gave to her and to her hus-
band. After dinner she found an excuse for sending away her Othello, and, being

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then left alone with me, she made such advances to me as no virtuous Desdemona
would have made.”30
Like Francis Groome, most of the earlier Romany Rye conducted their re-
search into authentic Gypsy culture in Hungary, Rumania, or other Eastern Euro-
pean countries, but Spain remained an important tourist destination for British
Gypsyphiles, in part because of the notoriety it had gained in the works of George
Borrow, but largely because of accessibility. By the early twentieth century, rail-
roads and modern shipping lines made Spain accessible to more than just the dig-
nitaries, missionaries, wealthy adventurers, and artists of the past, which meant that
its cities became a popular destination even for those with very modest incomes
such as college students, scholars, and middle-class tourists on summer holiday.
Long after Romanticism languished as a dominant literary movement, scores of
British and American travelers daily reinvented Spain as a permanently romantic
locale, a place untouched by the savagery of modern industry and progress, where
with a bit of luck and determination one could participate in the intoxicating life
of wine, women, and song.
This was the Spanish aura that fueled intense tourism between the 1898
Spanish-American War and the 1936 Spanish Civil War and produced a spate
of personal travelogues to satisfy an avid American and British wanderlust. A few,
like Laurie Lee and Walter Starkie, brought along their Wddles to subsidize their
travel by singing in bars and on the streets, and, as can be seen in this partial list,
many sang the enchantment of the open road that they liked to imagine stretched
endlessly before them, at least for the duration of their summer holiday: James
Russell Lowell, Impressions of Spain (1899), Katharine Lee Bates, Spanish Highways
and Byways (1900), Maud Howe Elliot, Sun and Shadow of Spain (1908), John Lomas,
In Spain (1908), Philip Sanford Marden Travels in Spain (1909), John D. Fitz-
Gerald, Rambles in Spain (1910), Harry A. Franck, Four Months Afoot in Spain
(1911), Keith Clark, The Spell of Spain (1914), Irving Brown, Nights and Days on
the Gypsy Trail (1922), John Dos Passos, Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), Jan
Gordon and Cora Gordon, Misadventures with a Donkey in Spain (1924), Eleanor
Elsner, Spanish Sunshine (1925), J. B. Trend, Spain from the South (1927), Vernon
Howe Baile, New Trails in Old Spain (1928), Joe Mitchell Chapple, Vivid Spain
(1926), and Dorothy Giles The Road Through Spain (1929).
For the more casual or hurried holiday travelers, contact with Spanish Calé
populations was limited to roadside encounters with beggars, whom they usually
described as “audacious and persistent.”31 “They sight the stranger from afar, and
come down upon him. They Xatter with glance and word; they wheedle and im-
portune; they fasten upon one’s body and spirit until one gives wildly, desperately,
ready to do anything to be rid of them. . . whatever one gives, it is never enough.”32
Whatever cultural knowledge of Roma history these travelers cited came primarily

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from Borrow; they lifted their knowledge of dance and living conditions from
guidebooks such as Ford’s or Cook’s, while their internalized vision of the ideal
Gypsy woman probably came from the Doré collection of sketches. Not surpris-
ingly, the “real thing” often did not live up to the idealized image. Philip Sanford
Marden lamented that Borrow’s Gypsies had all but disappeared, and he refused to
pursue the Gypsy haunts of Granada at night after he found to his astonishment
that some of the caves were lit with electricity. He contented himself instead with
gazing down on the Albaicín from the lofty heights of the Alhambra, conjecturing
that Gypsy dance performances “had too much the appearance of being a show,
instead of an unstudied state of nature, and as such it lacked convincing qualities.
It was partly this feeling that the gypsy life of the day was more or less artiWcial
and theatrical.”33
Among some travelers speculation about Gypsy physiology reXected a
growing popularity of casual descriptions of regional types along racial lines. Paus-
ing in his descriptions of Algeciras and Ronda, the music aWcionado John Brande
Trend distinguished three types of Andalusians––Roman, Moorish, and Gypsy,
subdividing the last into olive-colored Gypsies with straight shoulders and narrow
hips, ocher-colored Moorish Gipsies, and sienna-colored Roman Gipsy types with
straight noses and Wrmly drawn eyes, lips, nose, forehead, and cheekbones. Since
the irrefutable George Borrow had stated that Gypsies and non-Gypsies do not
intermarry, Trend speculated, somewhat skeptically, that the Roman and Moorish
traits of some Gypsies could have resulted from “simple contact, or proximity.”34
That is, something of the Andalusian might have rubbed off onto the Gypsy pop-
ulation, but this was more than likely the result of clandestine relationships:

The Andaluz gipsy differs from other gipsies; he can be distin-

guished from the Asturian gipsy or from the English, or the Hun-
garian; and this observation leads to the idea that if the Gipsy has
had some inXuence on the other Andalucían types, the Andaluz
has also inXuenced the Gipsy, “Romanizing” him, so to speak, and
giving him Wrmer lines. This may be due to the inXuence of the
bull-Wghter, who has derived so many characteristic traits from
the gipsies, by blood or by some other means. Again, clandestine
unions between gipsy-girls and others do happen even in my
knowledge.35

At the same time, Trend indicated that certain Gypsy characteristics had
also pervaded the non-Gypsy population of Andalusia: “At all events, the Anda-
luces have a certain gipsy grace, which is attractive and quite unmistakable. They
have other gipsy qualities as well: the mixture, or rapid change from garrulous

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merriment to gloomy silence, show most of all when they pass from the ritual sen-
suality of the gipsy dance to the passionate sincerity of cante hondo, with words
which alternate between the extremes of the macabre and the erotic.”36 With spec-
ulation such as Trend’s on the origins and characteristics of cante hondo, the non-
Spanish traveler entered into the great debates about the origins of Xamenco that
had been Xamed by the 1922 competition organized by Federico García Lorca and
Manuel de Falla, a topic studied in the next chapter.
Nineteenth-century guidebooks were followed in the twentieth century
by a new phenomenon, the guided tour, a more economical and less exasperating
mode of travel for the busy middle-class tourists of the new century. Traveling in
groups, these tourists were not at leisure to roam the streets of the Albaicín on their
own or to arrange a late night zambra in the Sacromonte caves. Maud Howe Elliot
reported that on her visit to Seville she saw a group of three hundred tourists who
toured Seville in only four hours, each one “tagged with the card of the hotel where
they were billeted to dine.”37 Howe was relieved not to be among these tagged
tourists; instead she and her entourage ventured to the Sacromonte for a tour of
the most important cave of the Gypsy “king” there to hear a “Xamenca” concert.
By this time the tradition of greeting the “king,” which dates back at least to the
1880s as we saw, and of paying a Gypsy to keep away other Gypsies, was considered
part of the charming (or odious, depending on the frame of mind of the tourist)
Albaicín etiquette. Clearly the Calés were Wnding ways to proWt from the tourist
gaze, not just through entertainment but by becoming tour organizers and pro-
curers. But once the Calés began earning a proWt by selling their own picturesque-
ness, their attraction waned in the eyes of the more jaded tourists. Maud Howe’s
traveling companion for one was not amused by Calé entrepreneurship: “You saw
those men tip the wink to our coachman as we passed? The whole village is on
its good behavior. We are not to be shocked, annoyed, or begged from; it’s all put
down in the bill we must pay the rufWan King for protecting us from his tribe, pre-
venting us from seeing the real thing and giving us this fake show.”38
On the other hand, more positive assessments of Spanish Calés came
from a new generation of Gypsyphiles, some of whom modeled themselves after the
more enthusiastic Romany Rye or its Spanish equivalent, the aWcionado, who dis-
pensed pocketfuls of money to hear lyrics and folklore by Romany informants and
musicians.39 For example, in 1898 the world traveler Cunningham Graham pub-
lished a sketch about his favorite Seville dancer, Aurora la Cujiñi, paying tribute
to her large and brilliant eyes, seductive hip movements, and trancelike dancing
evocative of some ancient religious ritual.40 Into the 1900s Andalusia especially
was invaded by a small army of zealous Americans and British anxious to cap-
ture the last gasps of the colorful past that was popularized in the second series of
the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society. Some Gypsyphiles were seeking not merely to

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record the minutia of everyday Spanish life but to participate fully in that life, not
by retracing the steps recommended in their Baedeker or Cook Guide, which
scarcely even mentioned the pleasures of the Triana or Sacramonte districts, but by
striking off on less traveled routes that would lead them to the true heart of Spain,
the wild Gypsy Spain that was still imagined as a frontier of adventure where only
Borrow and a few others had gone before.41 What these travelers expected from
their holiday was a pleasurable escape from civilization, “an encounter with life
in its barest essence free from the unessentials, vivid and intense without nerve-
wearing tension; it is an eternal holiday.”42
For most of the carefree pre–Civil War travelers, the attraction of the
Spanish tour was not only the expectation that the trip would erase all “personal
cares and problems” but also the affordability resulting from favorable exchange
rates. The American bullWght aWcionado Harry Franck, “given to mingling with
‘the masses,’” as he put it in his Four Months Afoot in Spain (1911), bragged that
his vacation jaunt cost him a mere $172 and provided him all of the Xavor of a
hobo existence.43 He included a photograph of himself in hobo garb to lend credi-
bility to his claim (Fig. 17). Many of these travelers still cited Borrow, envious that
he could “speak Romany so well that gypsies all over Europe took him for a
brother.”44 The American Irving Brown also traveled “far and wide on the open
road” in search of the true Gypsy, the “glorious wanderers” whom he had read about
in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society and in Borrow’s The Bible in Spain.45 Like
his fellow Romany Rye, Brown associated Gypsy life with an open revolt against
civilization, but, together with many other Anglo-Americans who seldom ven-
tured beyond the Danube, he considered Spain to be the true home of the European
Gypsy: “Spain is, par excellence, their country––Wts them romantically, tempera-
mentally, locally––they harmonize.”46 According to Brown, Andalusia was unique
in the world as a place where Gypsies were not held in contempt. On this “shore
of romance” where art and life were one, Brown arrived and penetrated deep into
“the heart of the Gypsy life” in 1922 and fed back to his readers salty accounts in
his Nights and Days on the Gypsy Trail Through Andalusia and on Other Mediterranean
Shores (1922).
Brown’s travel journal is unique in that his goal was to pass as a real Gypsy
instead of just a Romany Rye or honorary Gypsy like his hero George Borrow. Prior
to his trip he had spent his free time at the University of Wisconsin memorizing
Borrow’s Caló vocabulary and tanning his face on the shores of Lake Mendota so
that he could disguise himself as a Spanish Gypsy. He described masquerading as
a Gypsy as a natural instinct everyone feels to travel to the land of make-believe,
part of “the game of transforming one’s self and moving in strange surroundings.”47
Perhaps, he speculated, he was really part Gypsy, since Brown was a common name
of Welsh and English Gypsies and his fondness for them was so entrenched. By the

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Image not available

fig. 17 Harry Franck, unsigned photograph of author in Four Months Afoot in Spain
(1911).
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the spanish gypsy

end of his travels Brown had all but convinced himself that he was in fact a Rom,
and he began avoiding at all costs contact with the despised Payos. InXuenced by
the early twentieth-century trend to grieve the loss of a “pure” Gypsy race, Nights
and Days on the Gypsy Trail reads like a detective plot. Everywhere he went Brown
measured the subjects he met against a yardstick of authenticity that depended
largely upon their ability to speak Caló Xuently. He constantly moved on in search
not only of places where true Caló was still spoken but where his linguistic per-
formance could best validate his passing for a Calé. For example, having judged the
residents of the Triana district of Seville too hybrid for his tastes, he extended his
visit to Coria “where the Gitanos were said to be unspoiled by mingling with the
natives.”48 However, the living conditions that Brown found in Coria, or in other
remote settlements like the caves of Guadix, usually sent him scurrying back to the
“traditional gaiety and color” of taverns where wine, women, and song allowed him
to forget that the Spanish Gypsies were becoming more and more like the con-
temptible “Gentiles.” The idea that he himself might be contributing to the vul-
garized portrait of Andalusian Gypsies never crossed his mind. By the end of his
trip, his late-night serenades, drinking bouts, and skirmishes led him to the con-
clusion that his quest for romance and local color had been a success. In fact,
Brown’s travelogue might have been more aptly called Nights in Gypsy Cafés, since
he traveled from city to city by rail, not trail, and spent a good deal of his time
organizing juergas or late-night music fests in taverns frequented by various “Caloré
brothers” whom he met on his travels.
Brown’s pride and pleasure at passing for a Gypsy are especially keen when
he is invited to witness dances that he claimed Sacromonte residents performed
only among themselves: The coveted “We’re all Gypsies here!” is music to his
ears. His satisfaction culminates in Barcelona, when a fellow reveler insists that he,
Brown, was a Spanish, not an American, Gypsy: “I can tell a Spanish Caloró when
I meet one.”49 A Wtting conclusion for Nights and Days on the Gypsy Trail, since it
represents for Brown the highest tribute anyone could pay a Romany Rye: “It was
a far cry from the time when, with fear and trembling, I had barely hoped to be
taken for a Gypsy at all.”50 Brown’s last night in Spain was spent in the Café Villa
Rosa drinking with his friends José and Curro and taking pleasure in the Xamenco
dance review: “With what a quickened rhythm my whole being seemed to pulse
as I watched these children of nature in their marvelous Manila shawls of daring
color and design, with fragrant starry jasmin in their black hair, with white teeth
and Xashing eyes, saw them sway and stamp, and strike sudden attitude of pride
and freedom.”51 More than any other, this timeworn description of Gypsy women
identiWes Brown for all time as an outsider, whose knowledge of Calés derived from
the literary and artistic idioms of the nineteenth century, when the inXuence of
bohemianism and exotic locales was at its peak.

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As we have seen, one of Brown’s professed missions in Spain was to col-

lect and classify authentic Gypsy ballads, a tribute to the very popular Journal of
The Gypsy Lore Society that inspired a second generation of Romany Ryes to seek and
record vanishing folk customs outside Great Britain. Prominent among this new
conglomeration of travelers were amateur guitarists, artists, photographers, musi-
cologists, and folklorists, who not only collected ballads, images, and stories of
Gypsies but strove to learn and perform the Gypsy or capture them on paper, Wlm,
and canvas. The best known of the folklorists who combined Brown’s penchant for
late-night carousing, Great Britain’s proverbial wanderlust, and the genuine efforts
of folklorists to assemble collections of ballads and to record disappearing music,
was Professor Walter Starkie, the author of Spanish Raggle Taggle, Adventures with a
Fiddle in North Spain (1934); Don Gypsy. Adventures with a Fiddle in Southern Spain
and Barbary, (1936); and In Sara’s Tents (1953). Starkie’s books are particularly
important because they straddle Spain’s Second Republic and mark important
stages in the evolution of the Spanish imaginary Gypsy.
Spanish Raggle Taggle is the account of a summer journey that Starkie made
on foot and by rail while earning a living playing his Wddle. The journey traverses
Spain from San Sebastián in the north to Madrid, passing through Bilbao, Burgos,
Segovia, and dozens of villages in between. On holiday from a teaching post in Ire-
land, Starkie begins his journey with a “baptism” of alcohol inspired, he explains,
by Gypsy wine festivals in honor of the onset of summer travels. Spain represented
a destination of inWnite possibility for a pleasure seeker like Starkie longing to
escape from the straightjacket of a modern, utilitarian society. Goodbye to white
shirts and bowler hats, dickies, spats, and “all the accoutrements of citizen number
one and two,”52 no more gulping down a cup of tea, rushing through meals, and
dashing back to work, or meeting to discuss whether commercial Spanish was or
was not a worthwhile enterprise. For three months Starkie would substitute the
“Time is money” dictum for the more pleasurable El tiempo es Westa (“Time is a
feast”) that he can be seen putting into practice in Figure 18. In many respects,
Starkie’s Xight from the routine of his teaching post reads like one long spree. The
stated goal of his travels may have been, as it was for Brown and others, to col-
lect and learn Spanish tunes and lyrics, but like Brown Starkie imagined himself a
modern-day picaroon, an “Alonso of the Many Masters” who longed for the adven-
ture of pretending to be poor and passing for a Gypsy. To this end he tried out
his linguistic skill on the very Wrst Calé he meets in San Sebastián: “Come now,
paloró,’ . . . you are going to help me, for I am one of the Calés and it is right for
one of Egypt to help another.”53
While Starkie seems to have had little difWculty carousing with the Span-
ish Romany and learning the requisite music and social rituals, what he passed along
regarding Gypsy character and traditions was primarily gleaned from histories and

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the spanish gypsy

travel accounts that he consulted in his study at Trinity College in Dublin, George
Borrow chief among them. Spanish Raggle Taggle shows evidence of a broad range
of literary readings: The Cid, Celestina, Alacá Yáñez’ Alonso, mozo de muchos amos,
Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes’ Novelas ejemplares, Zorilla’s Don Juan, virtually every
novel or story about scoundrels, picaroons, brigands, or men like himself with an
abiding wanderlust. From these readings and his own personal observations Starkie
sketched a composite image of the Spaniard as innately individualist and antiau-
thoritarian, polite, loyal, honor–bound, and pious. Little wonder, then, that his
representations of the outcast Gypsies abounded with turn-of-the-century clichés
culled from previous histories and travelogues. He found Gypsy men to be won-
derfully illogical, crafty, and generous with the wineskin, while the women epito-
mized exotic and sensual attraction: “In the light of the moon her skin looked a
ghostly alabaster, but as she turned, the glow of the Wres would suddenly kindle her
face into burnished copper. I then noticed that she had a Wercely sensual face, with
large animal mouth and brilliantly white teeth. The gold and silver chains and
bracelets she wore sparkled in the light of the Wres, giving me the illusion that
Xames sprang from her body as she moved.”54

Image not available

fig. 18 Walter Starkie, The author playing the Wddle. . . . Unsigned photograph in In Sara’s Tents
(1953), 246. Courtesy of Michael Starkie.

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Writing during the Second Republic, a pivotal time when Spain was
struggling to redeWne its national identity, Starkie was decidedly nostalgic for a
prerevolutionary decadence that reXected his own personality and tastes. In this
he joined the group of post–World War I travelers who a decade earlier had both
bemoaned the disappearance of “Old Spain” and ratiWed the Gypsies as Spain’s most
Spanish people. To conjure up images of Gypsy Spain, Starkie rehearsed all the
more unusual customs mentioned by previous chroniclers, even if he did not him-
self witness them: the tradition of the diclé or virgin cloth as evidence of a bride’s
virginity, the hokkano baró or great trick that George Borrow had copied from
Gerónimo de Alcalá’s seventeenth-century picaresque novel, the elaborate wedding
feast and celebration of the birth of a child. Wherever he went Starkie purposely
chose to see Gypsy life through the forgiving, mellow glow of a wine bottle or
Gypsy campWre. Because daytime activities interested him little, he was able liter-
ally to block out the changes that Spain was undergoing, and, ever glamorizing
those whose lifestyle matched his own, he assiduously avoided contact not only
with the upper middle class but with the classes of wage earners whose growing
discontent he completely failed to register in Spanish Raggle Taggle. Though he
would likely have denied it, his contempt for wage earners and other non-Romany
groups rather than a rebellion against the bourgeoisie shows his afWliation with
the group of señoritos or Andalusian aristocrats whose management of the Xamenco
complex helped to foster the notion of its purity and conserve it for posterity
through their mythologizing of the Gypsy performer.
Don Gypsy begins where Spanish Raggle Taggle left off; another summer
(1935) Wnds Starkie back in a Republican Spain on the eve of the Civil War, this
time to explore the southern tier in a wide circle from Tangier, Tetuán, and Ceuta,
with their beautiful Fátimas and Rebeccas and wonderful Indian-looking “Gypsy
princesses,” across the channel to Algeciras, Ronda, Antequera, Granada, Jérez,
Cadiz, and Wnally Seville, the “climax” of Andalusia. InXuenced by the widespread
notion that José-Carlos de Luna was promoting at the time about the African ori-
gin of Spanish Gypsies, Starkie embellished his descriptions of women with refer-
ences to Egypt and the pharaohs, and, even more so than in Spanish Raggle Taggle,
he remarked on women’s animal and queenly attributes as well as his privileged
vantage point as exotic specimen hunter:

As I gazed at her sitting there, combing her hair, entirely uncon-

scious of my presence, I felt like a hunter in the forest stalking a
gorgeous bird of Paradise. I was afraid to move lest she should
awake from her daydreaming, spread out her wings, and Xy away.
Her haughty indifference thrilled me more than any restless famil-
iarity of manner, for I felt that she was Pharaoh’s daughter—the

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chosen bride of the Gypsy chief, bringing with her the magic of
the East.55

She is like a racehorse fretting in the stable, pawing the ground,

and shaking its mane for eagerness. . . like a true-born daughter
of Egypt, however, she was able to fawn and whine and cloak her
face, but her eye Xashed and her nostrils were dilated like a
warhorse scenting the coming battle.56

She was no longer a mere member of the tribal cuadro but a

priestess of rhythm improvising according to an arabesque pat-
tern handed down to her race through the centuries. Hers was the
true dance of the “Faraona” or Pharaoh’s daughter.57

A true connoisseur, Starkie understood better than most the allure of

this exotic feminine icon that forged together two opposing images: the base, avail-
able animal and the exalted, untouchable, high priestess. Borrowing a line from
the Spanish playwright Jacinto Benevente whom he clearly was emulating, he
describes the desired effect of the dancing Gypsy woman: “Her Xesh burns with the
consuming heat of all eternity, but her body is like the very pillar of the sanctuary,
palpitating as it is kindled in the glow of sacred Wres. . . . The loves and hates
of other worlds pass before our eyes, and we feel ourselves heroes, bandits, hermits
assailed by temptation, shameless bullies of the tavern—whatever is highest and
lowest in one.”58
Unlike the romanticized Spanish Raggle Taggle, Don Gypsy registered the
discontent of at least some Andalusians, for example, the lottery seller Juan José,
who complained that Spain was worn out, agotada, after four years of the Repub-
lican government, and that the only salvation for the country was Libertarian
communism. Starkie was given ample evidence of Juan José’s poverty but quickly
obliterated this unpleasant reality by organizing a music fest in his lodgings to
which he invited his many neighbors. To the material poverty of the Andalusians
like Juan José, Starkie was always able to counterpose the “astonishing wealth” of
popular poetry and music. Secure in the knowledge that this wealth could never
be taken away and resigned to the fact that poverty was a permanent and even
endearing feature of Andalusian life, Starkie took a neutral stance regarding repub-
lic or dictatorship, although with his typical folksy assessment he speculated that
Andalusians would beneWt if the army stepped in to restore order “on the principle
that the Devil you know is better than the Devil you do not know”59
As Wller between the juergas that he organized in taverns and private houses,
in Don Gypsy Starkie added to the store of Gypsy lore that he earlier interspersed in

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Spanish Raggle Taggle: tales of child snatching, the by now well-worn hokkano baró
trick (that would reappear in his next book as well), snippets of Romany philoso-
phy, the practice of eating mulo mas (carrion), and a number of folktales such as
the legend of the Nails of the Cross, borrowed from Spanish informants, F. H.
Groome’s collection of Gypsy Folk Tales, and the pages of the Journal of the Gypsy
Lore Society. It was a tradition among Romany Rye to contrast their superior knowl-
edge of Caló and Gypsy lore with that of the often linguistically deWcient subjects
whom they described, and Starkie exempliWed this practice on numerous occasions.
Like Irving Brown before him, he emphasized the fact that his superior linguistic
skills opened many doors to him that were closed to other Xamenco-seeking tour-
ists. Following a very long tradition that began with George Borrow, he wove all
the direct quotes or paraphrases of his informants into a narrative that on the one
hand stressed the allure of the carefree life for the foreign guest and on the other
the moral and intellectual superiority of the observer over the observed.
The carousing and folklore-gathering jaunts of the early decades of the
century largely came to a halt during the Spanish Civil War, and especially by
the end of World War II it became increasingly difWcult to imagine Spain as the
eternal vacation spot where sleepy towns were immune to the outside world.
Laurie Lee’s A Rose for Winter (1955), with its assertions about the immutability
of the Spanish character and way of life, is one of the notable exceptions. Most
post–Civil War writers on the contrary interjected pessimistic notes about Spain as
a state of mind that it was time to lay to rest. Gerald Brenan’s The Face of Spain
(1956) painted a dreary picture of post–Civil War poverty and bitterness against
a backdrop of more pleasant memories of prewar travels. The African-American
writer Richard Wright traveled to Spain in 1954 and painted a similarly bleak
picture of poverty, fear, and prostitution in Pagan Spain. He was fascinated by
the Xamenco reviews he saw in Andalusia with their raw and “animal” sexuality,
but when he caught one of the dancers yawning he understood perfectly that what
he was seeing was a commercial for a Spain that did not exist. If there ever had
been anything romantic about the Xamenco performed by Spanish Gypsies, Wright
mused that “it had long since been swallowed up in commercialism.”60 Reminisc-
ing in Farewell Spain (1937) about her prewar travels, the Irish novelist Kate
O’Brien perhaps said it best: “I write as a sentimental traveller in a country long-
suffering at the hands of such. But Spain must forgive the last stragglers among
her foreign lovers, as she has forgiven and condescended to the Wrst. There will be
no more sentimental travellers—anywhere. Their excuse and occasion will have
been removed in that day of uniformity which we are agreed is the distracted
world’s only hope.”61 After such a bloody conXict, it would take a heroic measure
of nearsightedness to pursue the Spanish dream of the “eternal vacation.”
The spell has been somewhat broken even for the optimistic Starkie, as

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can be seen in his third book on Gypsies, In Sara’s Tents (1953), which dealt mostly
with southern France but included several portions on Spain. Already toward the
end of Don Gypsy Starkie had begun to fathom the depth of crushing poverty
behind the portrait he so earnestly wanted to corroborate of the carefree Gypsy. For
example, it was difWcult for him to idealize the inhabitants of the Benalúa caves
other than to praise them as authentic Gypsies who had maintained their tribal
ways in their purest form, in comparison with the customs of the residents of the
Guadix and Sacromonte caves who had already been corrupted by modern urban
life. Now in Cadiz he is stunned by the dilapidated dwellings of the Calés near the
city dump, which he compared to the Black Hole of Calcutta and, a few pages later,
Dante’s sixth circle of Hell. In retrospect, however, his memory of these pockets
of poverty melded together with all the other picturesque scenes and stories he had
seen and heard to become a mere footnote in the gay account of a self-styled
vagabond as he would forever be remembered by his readers.
Between Don Gypsy and In Sara’s Tents, Starkie made numerous trips to
Spain, even at the height of the Civil War, and afterward he heard Wrsthand
accounts of the tragic crimes against Romany groups caught in the grip of Nazi
Germany’s extermination policy, yet he remained largely silent about these atroci-
ties. At the end of World War II, however, he felt released from his “rash” vow
never to write about Gypsies until the conXict ended, and he began collaborating
with the artist José Porta on an edition of sketches entitled Bajo los Puentes (Beneath
the bridges), which put a face on the poverty of the Roma of Barcelona and its
environs. Still he avoided detailed accounts of Holocaust atrocities that might have
tarnished the idealized portrait of a people unchanged that he had for so many
years helped to forge. Instead, In Sara’s Tents includes a collage of traditions, his-
tory, legends, and diary entries of journeys made in 1926 and later from 1940 to
1951, which took Starkie from Murcia in southeastern Spain to Saint Sara’s shrine
in southern France. By 1953 when he published Tents, Starkie had accepted a new
post as founding director of the British Institute in Madrid, which may explain
his slightly more sober tone when describing present-day Romany groups of Barce-
lona in the second half of his book. The fanciful lore of Tents is also moderated
by the sketches of Pichi (Dusa Hotorovich) and other Barcelonan Wgures drawn by
José Porta (Fig. 19, of Pichi, and Fig. 20, Gypsy Nomads), which acted as a reminder
that life inside “Sara’s tents” did not always resemble what Starkie and other enthu-
siasts described in the caves of Sacramonte or the Triana district of Seville. Never-
theless, even in his comments on Porto’s sketches of Pichi, Starkie found recourse
to the stereotypes that had always nourished his Romany Rye imagination:

The mother’s expression reXects the melancholy that is so char-

acteristic of the race, but the artist also suggests the witch-like

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Image not available

fig. 19 Pichi Hotorovitch: The Gypsy Princess, photograph by José Porta in In Sara’s Tents (1953),
n.p. Courtesy of Michael Starkie.
04chap4.qxd 28/01/2004 8:34 AM Page 150

Image not available

fig. 20 Gypsy Nomads: Barcelona, photograph by José Porta, in In Sara’s Tents (1953), n.p.
Courtesy of Michael Starkie.
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qualities of the Gypsy matron. The girl is dishevelled and bare-

footed, but she has none of the servility of poverty; she wears a
gold necklace, and her slender hands and feet are those of a Gypsy
princess. In spite of hunger, poverty, and squalor she is a true
Indian Gypsy, and will never part with her gold chain and coins
which are her heirlooms.62

After seeing Pichi in person at a zambra in the village of Llavaneras, Starkie

reverted one last time to his by now familiar portrait of the Gypsy woman’s fren-
zied, erotic, dance postures. Pichi is fourteen years old when Starkie composes this
description of her body, but she is already a “Gypsy princess” in his eyes and no
doubt in the imagination of his delighted readers:

She was fair-skinned with hair the colour of old gold; dressed in
nothing but a ragged shift her body had the translucent appear-
ance of alabaster as she danced before the blazing Wre: a gold
cross glittered between her breasts. It was a dark night, but the
Wre illuminated the swarthy faces of the men as they stood round
the dancer, transforming them into Wgures of burnished copper.
They began to sway in rhythm to my kolo, and the clapping of
their hands roused the devil in Pichi and her body seemed to
quiver in the Wrelight. Her excitement passed to me, forcing me
to quicken the pace of the music, double the notes, and mark
the accents. She resembled a white moth fatally attracted by the
Xames, which seemed actually to envelop her and drive her to yet
madder speed.63

Clearly Starkie’s imaginary “priestess of rhythm” has remained largely

unchanged since he Wrst described her ghostly alabaster skin and sensuous face
in Spanish Raggle Taggle. But the sensuous zambra in Llavaneras is soon forgotten
in the last events of Starkie’s stay in Barcelona en route to the shrine of the
Saintes Maries. In 1951, Starkie heard Wrsthand the harrowing news that a nearby
Romanichal settlement had been torched by a group of racist protesters. Dozens
of residents took refuge in La Parra tavern, where José Porta arranged for them
to be fed while he and Starkie listened to the details of their forced evacuation
and planned an intervention on their behalf. Starkie felt understandably proud of
his role in this crisis and ends his Spanish portion of the book with details about
his confrontation with the assistant mayor and a member of the City Council,
Luys Santamarina, a personal friend. In Sara’s Tents he never reveals whether the
Barcelona ofWcials did anything to remedy the plight of the group of displaced

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Romanichals, but at least in this one instance Starkie was able to imagine himself
as a “true” Romany Rye and plead for his people “in cold blood.”
Apart from the sobering account of the 1951 eviction, In Sara’s Tents epit-
omizes all the trends that I have been tracing in the representation of Spanish
Roma beginning with the Romantics. In the Wrst place, Starkie understood that
every journey he took was a double journey through time and space. While every
step carried him forward toward a new place and adventure, it also required a jour-
ney back to some dim moment in the past: “No sooner do I come across a tribe
of Gypsies than my mind travels back over the centuries, and I mentally compare
these wanderers of today with the description written by chroniclers who witnessed
the arrival of the Original Band in 1417.”64 The journey back in time helps him
to substantiate that although Gypsies were succumbing to the attractions and obli-
gations of modern life they had been able to fuse together the new mechanized civ-
ilization with an ancient, patriarchal way of life. In this he sided with the Scottish
Romany Rye Walter Simson, who took George Borrow to task for suggesting that
the race was everywhere in decline. Furthermore, he argued, Gypsies were key
Wgures in the evolution of European nationalisms because they expressed “the pri-
mary instincts of the nation more effectively than the original race.”65 The great
myth of the eternal Gypsy way of life with its correlative “once a Gypsy always a
Gypsy” holds sway even in this book that takes a closer look at the stark evidence
of Spanish repressive tactics. All the miraculous developments in science and tech-
nology would not be enough to change a way of life that he imagined as immut-
able: “While the great mass of mankind is being regimented into Wxed types, the
Gypsy is becoming more Gypsyish than ever before. He has gone back spiritually
to the outlook of his grandfather, and he possesses the almost fantastic quality of
the Gypsies of a hundred years ago. He sees the modern inventions, the motor,
electricity, telephone, but he makes use of them in accordance with his Gypsy tem-
perament.”66 In retrospect, it is easy to see that this is the way that Walter Starkie
imagined himself, or at least his better self, to be. Even though after World War II
he began to understand the Calés not just as a valuable repository of culture and
music but a besieged minority, he simply could not surrender the more idealized
portrait that he had fashioned for himself during his carefree youthful travels.67

Old Men, Old Stories

Starkie’s enduring devotion to Gypsy haunts and lore that he transmitted to

English-speaking Hispanophiles in Spanish Raggle Taggle, Don Gypsy, and In Sara’s
Tents perpetuated the notion of Spain as a romantic destination, even for those with
considerably more aristocratic tastes and Wnances than his. The Spanish Gypsy, the

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“aristocrat” of Gypsies in Federico García Lorca’s words, even found her way into
the eccentric biographies of aristocratic families who might be thought to be
the least likely to boast of a Gypsy heritage. For example, in the biography Pepita
(1937), Vita Sackville-West fantasized at length about the romance and eccentric-
ities of her great-grandmother Catalina Ortega and grandmother Pepita Duran,
embellishing with details when facts were sketchy and inventing an extravagant
personality for them that was then bequeathed to her mother, Victoria Sackville-
West. In tracing inheritable Gypsy traits through this female genealogy, Sackville-
West stressed the unconventionality that for her characterized all “southerners,”
especially those who are Gypsies. The “southern” heritage even predominates in
forming the character of Pepita’s daughter Victoria, who, although only one-fourth
Spanish, could hardly be expected to conduct herself as an English lady:

Heredity entered into it, too. Although on one side of her lineage
she had the opulent Sackvilles aligned behind her, on the other
she had all that rapscallion Spanish background, that chaos of the
underworld, tohu-bohu, struggling and scheming and bargaining
and even thieving for a living. It was the descendant of all those
people––the old-clothes peddlers, the smugglers, the fruit-sellers,
the gypsies, the rascals––that her critics expected to behave as an
ordinary English lady.68

According to Vita Sackville-West, her mother Victoria never shook off her
Spanish background even after decades as the common-law wife of Lionel Sack-
ville. Although Vita sees all southerners as extravagant and colorful, the Gypsies
in her account are especially prone to capriciousness, generosity, passion, whimsy,
and scandalous business ventures. The Hebrew word tohu bohu, meaning “chaos”
and “confusion,” perfectly describes Victoria’s personality, especially during her
later years after she had left her husband. Sackville-West also fancied that she had
inherited some of her grandmother Pepita’s traits and that she therefore shared the
dual heritage that explained her mother’s conXictive personality. She indirectly
explored this “dual heritage” in characters such as Ruth and Rawdon in her novel
Heritage: Ruth is cursed with a double personality, one side “coarse and unbridled,
the other delicate, conventional practical, motherly, reWned. . . . And is it, can it
be, the result of the separate, antagonistic strains in her blood, the southern and the
northern legacy?”69
In addition to her own fertile imagination, Sackville-West’s sources for
whatever she could not know Wrsthand about her maternal ancestry were travel-
ogues and guides familiar to readers by now: George Borrow, Alexandre Dumas,
and especially Richard Ford, whom she quoted at length as the most reliable

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authority on Spanish customs and character.70 The remainder of her information

came from documents taken in lengthy depositions that were part of the protracted
legal battle over the estates and peerage that her mother and her siblings fought
after the death of her grandfather, who had been Pepita’s lover.71 Sackville-West’s
claim that nothing was invented or even embellished in her account of her family’s
genealogy is untenable in view of her constant interpretations of the motives and
reactions of her grandmother and great-grandmother whom she had never known.
Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West’s son and biographer, disputes details of his
mother’s imaginary biography of Pepita and leaves us with an interesting quandary
about her desire to Gypsyfy her personality:

My mother (whom I shall now call Vita, except occasionally) was

understandably hazy about her own mother’s origins. . . . Pepita
was not the illegitimate daughter of a gipsy and a Spanish duke.
Both Vita and her mother would certainly have preferred it that
way, and in a further dramatization of the legend, the duke was
named as the Duke of Osuna. Nor was Catalina Ortega, Pepita’s
mother, an ex-acrobat. There was certainly gipsy blood in her, but
she was happily married to a barber of Malaga, Pedro Duran, and
after husband’s early death supported her family by patching and
selling old clothes.72

Evidently the duke of Osuna was an invention that served to lessen the
unsavoriness of Vita Sackville-West’s Gypsy heritage. On the other hand, the fam-
ily mystery obviously lent the unconventional Vita a romantic aura that was much
admired by her friends and lovers. For example, when she learned of her classmate’s
heritage, Rosamund Grosvenor began referring to her friend as “Carmen” or “Prin-
cess,” much to the delight of the dreamy Vita. In a note passed in class, Rosamund
asks her friend: “Princess, why do you make one so sad? . . . It is a good thing you
are living a in civilized time because there is no knowing what you might not do
if anything roused your Spanish blood––is there?”73
Well into her adult years Vita Sackville-West enjoyed the notoriety that
her Spanish heritage lent her. In Pepita she re-created the image of her grandmother
as a Gypsy princess, an exception among all other Gypsies in the same way that
Cervantes’ Preciosa stands out from the Gypsies who brought her up, or the way
Starkie’s “priestess of rhythm” contrasts with her sordid surroundings, and for
exactly the same reasons: She was beautiful, talented, generous, and not quite a
Gypsy. In an effort to further disconnect her grandmother from any petit bourgeois,
Payo identity, Sackville-West never uses the surname Duran when referring to her
or her family. Chapter 2 of Pepita, “Gypsies in Spain,” traces Pepita’s genealogy,

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Wlling in with supposition wherever facts elude her: Pepita was the illegitimate
daughter of the duke of Osuna and a Gypsy woman who had been an acrobat. She
was a dancer of modest talent whose success was owing chieXy to her beauty and
the fact that outside Spain, the criteria for dancing the olé were less stringent than
in Spain. In a lengthy address, Sackville-West invokes Pepita Duran to inspire her
re-creation, so that she can revive her for her readers:

Pepita, can I re-create you? Come to me. Make yourself alive again.
Vitality such as yours cannot perish. I know so much about you:
I have talked to old men who knew you, and they have all told me
the same legend of your beauty. . . . Why should I be afraid of
invoking you or my own mother, who are both dead though you
were both once so much alive––more vitally and troublesomely
alive than most people? You both made trouble for everybody
connected with you. You were both that sort of person.74

Sackville-West cited a host of “old men” who helped her re-create Pepita
as the quintessential Xamenco dancer, the “star of Andalusia,” as she was called,
who enthralled theater audiences in Germany and France in the mid-nineteenth
century: her dance teachers and impresarios, her servants and coachmen, butchers,
lawyers, lovesick swains, delivery men, neighbors, and casual observers. Their
memories coincided in regard to Pepita’s extreme beauty and in all the other Gypsy
traits that together molded her into a striking copy of one of Walter Starkie’s
imaginary princesses. But it was not only from these written sources that West con-
structed her vision of Pepita; she herself traveled to Spain in search of models and
found them in the Xamenco dancers of the Triana district of Seville. She describes
a late-night “private party” in much the same terms as tourists such as Starkie
described the dancers in “those places in Seville where foreigners might go to watch
gypsy dancing,” except that the performance took place in a private home, not a
tavern or cave:

The patio, after the dusk of the streets, seemed brilliantly lit, but
in fact it only glowed with the coloured lights of many lanterns
festooned along the balconies of the upper storey. . . . Someone
struck a few chords on a guitar . . . one by one the indistinct
Wgures came out from the shadows. I saw then that they were all
Gypsies, for by the lineaments and their garments they could have
been nothing else. They were without exception the most beauti-
ful human beings I ever wish to see. Some of them, of course, were
old and wrinkled, but even those still bore the traces of their

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youthful looks in the bony architecture of their features and in the

tragic dignity of their sunken eyes. Others were in their prime,
adult and arrogant; but others were divinely young, elusively
adolescent, like wild things that never ought to have submitted
to the coaxing of even the kindest hand. There was one pair in
particular, a girl of perhaps eighteen, a youth perhaps two years
older; they kept close together, suspicious and alert as though the
outside world threatened the afWnity between them; he watched
her with a close and jealous eye, ready to snatch and guard her;
and she, for her part, shrank close to him whenever another man
by chance came near; they were both as Wne and graceful as a pair
antelopes, and seemed just as ready to bound away.75

Like her idol Starkie, Sackville-West is quick both to mystify her impres-
sion of the Xamenco performance and at the same time to evoke its participants as
graceful (female) and predatory (male) animals whose “undercurrent of truth” bring
her closer to her grandmother:

There was no thought of sex in it; or perhaps it might be said that

the whole thing was an expression of sex, love, passion, so imper-
sonal as to transcend anything trivial or ephemeral in the emo-
tion, and to translate into eternal terms with which the music, the
night, and color were inherently mixed. The extraordinary purity
and beauty of the performance was only enhanced by the vast
black Wgure seated by the fountain, powerfully obscene goddess
immortalized by some sculptor of genius.

Then he sank onto one knee, watching her, clapping softly, half
in admiration, half in a menacing derision, as she danced alone.
The wild animal in him crouched, waiting to spring. Provoca-
tive, she would pass a little closer to him, when he made a half
gesture as though to catch her; elusive, she would glide away,
and all the time there was an undercurrent of truth running with
a snarl between them. . . . I had seen unforgettable beauty in
human form, and they, all unaware, had brought me nearer to
Pepita.76

Sackville-West included no photographs of Pepita Duran in her biogra-

phy, and, as her son notes, one must take the dancer’s beauty on trust. However,
in 1852, at the height of her dancing career, an artist depicted Pepita not as the

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Xamenco dancer as she was seen on the posters advertising her performances, but as
a proper Spanish señorita: delicate Wngers holding a closed fan, face turned to the
left with serene, unremarkable eyes (Fig. 21). This is the sole image included in
Pepita since all the other photographs that Sackville-West possessed were either too
faded or “fanciful” for the author’s tastes. The painting reduces Pepita’s trademark
sortijilla (“side lock”) that many of her admirers especially remarked to a small curl
slightly protruding from her braided hair, which is coiled on either side of her head
in traditional Andalusian (but not Calé) fashion. Her jewelry is elegant but petite,
with the exception of a circular gold earring that is proportionately large for the
delicate necklace and brooch that accompany it. In all, the artist has signiWcantly
reduced Pepita’s Gypsyness and Europeanized her to serve as a suitable ancestor
for the inhabitants of Knole, one of the grandest estates of England, owned by
the Sackville family since the mid-sixteenth century. This dainty and aristocratic
image bolstered Vita Sackville-West’s conviction about her grandmother’s secret
ambition. Pepita, she explains, always strove for the “greatest prize,” to be recog-
nized as an aristocrat. Unlike the sham Bohemian who rejects bourgeois life, the
“true” Bohemian like her grandmother “strives after the thing which, to him or her,
represents a mixture between security and romance.” Romance and respectability
for Pepita were achieved by reinventing herself as “Countess West.”77 A counterfeit
countess, Pepita died in 1871 in Arcachon, France—where she was kept hidden
from Lionel Sackville-West’s aristocratic family—while giving birth to her seventh
child, far from the Knole estate where Vita spent her childhood but which Pepita
never saw.
Pepita was an instant best-seller: The Hogarth Press sold 10,000 copies in
the Wrst two months, and the book was favorably reviewed both in England and the
United States.78 The reviewer Ivor Brown commended Sackville-West for outing
her family tree, “as rich in strange and gaudy elements as a Christmas one,”79 while
Amy Loveman marveled that in this case truth was indeed stranger than Wction,80
and R. M. concluded that the story was “almost incredible.”81 Writing for the New
York Times, P. W. Wilson described the Spain of George Borrow as a most Wtting
setting for such an exotic woman as Pepita:

A proud, poor land still unaffected in the main by the industrial

revolution. We see how families lived from hand to mouth, yet
reveled in the life they lived so hardly. Out of the squalor there
grew Werce passions, voluble speech, graceful gestures, brilliant
costumes, deep mysticism, all the varied self-expression that is
sometimes concentrated on the embitterment of irreconcilable
dissensions. It is as a daughter of this immemorial Iberia that
Miss Sackville-West unveils the intimacies.82

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Image not available

fig. 21 Pepita, illustration from Vita Sackville-West’s Pepita (1938), frontispiece. Reproduced
with permission of the Curtis Brown Group, Ltd., London, on behalf of the Estate of Vita Sackville-
West. Copyright © Vita Sackville-West.
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the legacy of the romany rye

Pepita was an effort to put the “demons” of her past to rest, but following
the book’s success Sackville-West continued to be haunted by her Spanish ances-
tors, and she undertook to track down the birthplace of her grandmother Pepita.
She toured Madrid accompanied by Walter Starkie and was obligingly assured that
her grandfather was indeed the duke of Osuna, not the humble barber listed in her
family papers. But after touring the “slum” where her mother was born in Málaga,
Sackville-West took ill and had to hurry back to England. Perhaps the sickening
reality of her grandmother’s humble origins led her to renounce further trips to
Spain.

“In Granada I Have a Hundred Gypsy Friends”

During the mid- to late twentieth century, the number of European travelers to the
south of Spain gradually increased, but reports by foreigners about happy-go-lucky
visits with the Gypsies did not keep apace. Yet for some determined travelers
southern Spain still represented the most accessible destination where true Gypsies
could be observed in their daily routine without really living with them, and the
economic boom following World War II resulted in a market for travelogues that
would engage the fantasies of a new leisure class. The British herbalist Juliette de
Baïracli Levy fed popular myths about Granadans “with hair darker, faces swarthier,
eyes more Xashing than any Spaniard’s”83 in her travelogue As Gypsies Wander (1953),
followed later by Spanish Mountain Life (1962). She, like Starkie, Brown, and other
later Romany Ryes, spoke Caló and loved the Gypsy way of life, “the freedom, the
irresponsibility, the constant adventure of living close to nature: how can I help
but praise!”84 She did not intend for her book to be autobiographical, yet she took
great delight in being photographed among her “Gypsy friends” (Fig. 22) and in
hearing them cry “Gitana! Gitana!” whenever she walked among them. Having
made the friends of the Amayas, one of Granada’s most important families of Xam-
enco performers, Baïracli Levy was not required to pay for dance performances that
other tourists paid 100 to 400 pesetas to see: “I never paid one peseta,” she boasted,
for the “endless” visits that she paid the house of the “Faraona” (“Pharaohess”)
Juanita Amaya.
Anticipating later ethnological studies, notably Isabel Fonseca’s Bury Me
Standing, Baïracli Levy provided women readers with the Wrst discrete information
about the daily routines and hardships of a select group of friends: Lola Aragón,
Moka Eppafrita, Juanita Amaya, Margarita Bustamante Poora, and others whose
life entailed more than dancing at night for male clients in or near the Sacromonte
caves. An important aspect of her narration was the exchange of gifts that helped
to purchase the time and trust of her informants. Still, because of her desire to

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Image not available

fig. 22 Gypsies of Sacro Monte, unsigned photograph in Juliette de Baïracli Levy’s As Gypsies Wander
(1953), n.p.
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celebrate the joyous side of Gypsy life, Baïracli Levy for the most part saw her
“hundreds” of friends through the lens of male Gypsyphiles, whose singular pleas-
ure was subventing Xamenco dance and creating the illusion of an eternally pas-
sionate and available exotic Óther. Garcia Lorca was her acknowledged muse, but
it was the Paris artist Georges Brunon whom she invited to accompany her during
part of her stay in Granada, and who captured all of the color and passion of the
“Gypsy dream-world” in which she immersed herself. His painting Les Gitanes was
a great success in the Paris Autumn Salon of 1951, evidence of the enduring attrac-
tion of the Gypsy subject even among the sophisticated and ponderous entries in
that year’s salon, such as the works of the avant-garde painters Georges D’Espagnat
and Henry de Waroquier.
From the 1950s onward, the zeal to travel with Gypsies to civilize them,
live like them, or Christianize them, the legacy of Borrow and other nineteenth-
century missionaries, also diminished but did not altogether disappear. One par-
ticularly curious example is that of Lillian B. Polhemus, an American freelance
writer, who in her late sixties set out to live with Gypsies in southern Spain to
satisfy a “burning” desire to write about “their roamings, their struggles, and dis-
crimination” as well as to shatter some of the myths and fallacies that she had
learned from American and European sources.85 As a girl she had once been scolded
for giving the best rose of her mother’s garden to a Rom woman whom she had
allowed to enter her yard. In return the woman had patted her head and said
“You’se a nice kid” (15). Polhemus was to remember the pat on the head and the
kindly, mispronounced words, but especially the gift of the rose, which would
become the central metaphor for her interactions with Calés in Good-bye Gypsy
(1968). Her basic instinct to glamorize Spanish Gypsies was also reinforced by
readings of George Borrow’s Bible in Spain and Romany Rye and her close contacts
with a variety of Methodist preachers, notably Dr. Henry Van Dyke, who preached
that traveling alone was the best way to see wondrous things; Norman Vincent
Peale whose Power of Positive Thinking clearly inXuenced her outlook; and especially
the evangelist Rodney (“Gypsy”) Smith, the “Gypsy boy preacher,” who had risen
from the depths of poverty to an exalted rank as “the greatest preacher and evan-
gelist of his day” (157). Lillian Polhemus was one of Smith’s most ardent disciples,
enlisting in his campaigns whenever he traveled to America, and it was to join his
ministry among the poor and forgotten that she embarked on the greatest adven-
ture of her life in Granada.
With an utter lack of insight and pertinent knowledge (she wonders
whether there is such a thing as a Romani dictionary at one point), together with
a somewhat astounding naïvete, it is perhaps inevitable that Polhemus should per-
petuate instead of challenge the stereotypes she had set out to debunk. For example,
her stated desire to put to rest the notion that Gypsies steal babies (“Why should

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they when they have so many of their own?” “They are as proliWc as rabbits” [127;
48]) does not accord well with the central anecdote of her book about the woman
she calls Granny, with whom she lives for a brief spell in a camp near Guadix.
Polhemus felt that her crowning achievement was to befriend the reticent and bil-
ious Granny by wrenching her life story from her and transforming her into a more
human (weepier, more talkative, and feminine) Wgure. She accomplished this feat
through a complex system of both spontaneous and calculated gifts of affection,
jewelry, and money, her “wampum” as she called it in several places. Polhemus doc-
uments how her Wrst gesture of friendship (a hand reaching out to show affection)
was rebuffed: Granny becomes friendly only when Polhemus Wnally pays the three
dollars she owes for the Wrst three nights’ lodging and later presents her with a pair
of silver earrings that sealed their friendship for good.
The emphasis on Granny’s positive response to these gifts reinforces rather
than challenges the myth of Gypsy avarice; it also does little to dispel the myth
that Gypsies abducted babies. In a Wt of weeping Granny confesses that she is not
a Gypsy at all but the English-born daughter of a schoolteacher and a soldier who
died in World War I. As a child in the 1920s she remembered swimming with
her mother at a beach near their seaside village. One day her mother drowned, and
she was given refuge by a group of Gypsies who were camping near the site. The
Gypsies returned to the beach several times to search for traces of the mother or to
see if anyone was there to claim her, but when they found no one, they boarded a
ship for Spain, taking the blond-haired, blue-eyed girl with them. Eventually the
girl’s memories of England and her family faded, and she married a Gypsy and
became fully integrated into the Gypsy community. Polhemus’s presence served to
revive (or inspire) these faded memories and in a way to release “Granny” from her
“prison of loneliness” but also in a way to free her from her Gypsyness and restore
her to a better identity, since her life “had taken on new depth” after her confession
(114). Polhemus also indirectly casts aspersions on the conduct of Granny’s adop-
tive family by repeating questions that another American woman had posed years
ago about whether efforts to contact the police or notify the Bureau of Missing
Persons had ever been made. Granny, according to Polhemus, had lived with this
thorn in her heart for many decades, her love for her adoptive family tempered
by a feeling of deep resentment: “They had failed her in one respect, but they had
also been her Wrst and best benefactors in a time of great need. Why could she
not let one outweigh the other?” (92). By encouraging her to confess her story and
pain, Lillian Polhemus believed that she had made it possible for Granny to resign
herself to both the love and anger that had rendered her such a sorrowful Wgure.
Once Polhemus has helped to remove the “thorn” that pierced Granny’s heart, she
smiles more, takes part in local festivities, and showers her guest with signs of
affection.

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Polhemus was also proud of the fact that she brought a bit of culture to
this primitive place, so it is important to examine what stood for “culture” for her,
exactly what she thought she had accomplished (and what she may have accom-
plished but not acknowledged), and Wnally how, if at all, her imaginary Gypsy
changed subsequent to her trip to Spain. Although Polhemus believed that Span-
ish Gypsies were the Wnest, both morally and physically, of the world’s Gypsies,
she found their living conditions disgusting. She did not provide exact dates in
her travelogue, but it seems that she kept her visits relatively short because of
the primitive sleeping and sanitary conditions. She never adjusted to not having a
bathroom and would rush to a hairdresser the minute she returned to “civilization.”
When a particularly reWned and digniWed Gypsy (whom she fantasized was not
really a Gypsy at all because of her reWnement) invited her to dinner, she expressed
her great relief to be eating a meal with “someone who ate like a human being,” for
had Ralph Waldo Emerson not said that “manners are the happy ways of doing
things”? (110). She had expected to Wnd the food spicy as in Mexico but was re-
lieved to discover that it was not, although she found much of the meal unsavory
or at best “palatable.” She especially disliked the daily ration of goat’s milk, which
she eventually refused to drink, and the gazpacho whose aroma she dreaded. She
went into great detail about table manners, everyone grabbing from a single dish
and wolWng down the food, and fretted that, like a German Shepherd Dog after war
service, she would have to be “detrained” when she returned to civilization.
Polhemus also found the Calés morally deWcient, although she, like her
missionary predecessors, tended to justify their immorality on the grounds of igno-
rance. She categorized their philosophy regarding stealing as “perverted,” con-
demning the notion that stealing from “white folk is not stealing as long as it is for
food” (137). While Polhemus was staying with Granny’s family, a nearby couple
celebrated their union of Wfty years by throwing a large party, leading the mission-
ary to wonder how it would be possible to explain the sanctity of marriage to a
people who have “fewer separations outside of marriage than we of the States have
within” (99). Undaunted, she walked to the nearest village and paid the reluctant
parish priest $2.50 to consecrate the marriage. Money, Polhemus concluded, was the
only thing that could overcome Gypsy reticence. Everyone in the camp was very
impressed with the ceremony, and she was approached by other couples whom she
directed to the parish priest to avoid the additional fees herself. With the young
people starting to feel the “pangs of matrimony,” she was proud to have brought
them “from the old culture into something higher and better” (102).
Polhemus’s stereotypical view of the Calés of Guadix does not seem to
have altered substantially during her stay with them. Before meeting the Calés, she
vowed that hers was to be no exotic adventure in the castles of Spain, no “shoddy
deception.” Yet both before and after her trip, she deWned her subject in exotic

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terms as the antithesis of modern society: The essence of Gypsy life was all that her
fast-paced American society was not. She had grown up in a changing world, while
for Gypsies the world nearly stood still. Before going she believed that Gypsy life
might offer tranquility, freedom from routine, a release from materialism, and,
Wnding truth in this axiom, she explained toward the end of her book that Gypsies
did indeed live from Westa to Westa. She would have liked to dispel myths about
the backwardness and the materiality of Gypsy life, but in her travels she never
found a Gypsy who had composed a single sheet of music or written a single poem,
and she had come across only one artist. She readily admitted that dance perform-
ances were pleasurable to watch because “rhythm is truly the gypsy’s middle name
if not his Wrst,” but she concluded that Gypsies had not contributed much to world
culture even if their music had inspired great composers and Romantic poets (124).
In short, Polhemus used the same arguments about Gypsies that Ameri-
cans had been making for several decades about African-American and native cul-
tures. She questioned any ability for abstract thought but readily praised their
capacity for unstructured activities and spontaneous gaiety (in this, she explains,
they resemble Mexicans). She repeatedly infantilized them by describing their be-
havior as “adolescent,” even though she began her story by saying that the opinion
she held of them as a happy-go-lucky people was erroneous. Finally, in a move typ-
ical of racist laissez-faire policies, she compared Gypsies with American Indians,
who have lived in “ignorance, poverty, and squalor and yet have no apparent desire
for this condition to be changed” (46). To be fair, Good-bye Gypsy included a lengthy
list of Gypsy accomplishments. There are no hippie cults and no teenage runaways,
the families are close-knit, they have a “natural” skill for making baskets and fur-
niture, they are generous to those in need, and so forth. But she left the Gypsies
much as she found them, “in great need of the knowledge of hygiene, sanitation,
educational facilities, and some with real spiritual hungers” (39). A photograph
of the white-gloved Lillian Polhemus on her book’s frontispiece (Fig. 23) proudly
exhibited what was restored to her upon her return to America. The caption tell-
ingly reads: “The Author. A few days after her return from Spain. In perfect health
after her unique experience living with the gypsies.”
Quaint accounts such as those of outsiders like Polhemus who wanted to
experience Gypsy life Wrsthand now gather dust on the shelves of European and
American libraries. Guidebooks for foreigners have all but obliterated the Calés
even from a cultural point of view. Modern editions of Baedeker’s Spain mention
only in passing the Sacromonte caves where Gypsies “once” lived, and although
it recommends tourists see a tablao, or staged performance, it deWnes cante hondo
(“deep song”) as an Arab-inspired music without mentioning Calé contributions
to the art form. In its historical notes on Granada, the Michelin Guide speaks
about the Moorish heritage of Granada without mentioning Gypsies. The Albaicín

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quarter is now simply the ancient quarter where the Moors retreated when the
Christians reconquered the city, and the caves of the Sacromonte hillside are only
a passing attraction where a noisy and colorful crowd gathers to entertain the
tourists. In recent years, foreign missionaries too have largely disappeared. Protes-
tant proselytizing among the Calés is now mostly a function of Evangelical pastors,
originally French, but now Spanish Calés themselves who have been converting
in large numbers to a religion that on the surface at least seems less hierarchical
and demanding than the Catholic Church.86 Part of the success of the movement,
according to Merrill McLane, is that these pastors work and live in the same bar-
rios as their converts. The “stage” has now been set for a generation of cultural
anthropologists whose objectivity is more difWcult to assess because of their more
measured style of reportage and their adaptation of modern Weldwork techniques.

Modern Histories and Ethnological Studies

With the waning of belief that the exotic Gypsy encapsulated Spanishness and that
Gypsy dance was the nation’s single noteworthy contribution to world culture,
literature on Spanish Gypsies written by non-Spaniards has not vanished, but it
has become more reWned, less ecstatic, and more probing and seemingly objective.

Image not available

fig. 23 Lillian Polhemus, The author. A few days after

her return from Spain. . . . Photograph by Pharaba
Shirley, in Lillian Polhemus’s Good-bye Gypsy (1968).

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Four areas dominate the literature on Gitanos in the second half of the twentieth
century. The Wrst are historical studies on European Romany that include sections
on Spanish Calés, such as Jean Paul Clébert’s Les Tziganes (The Gypsies; 1961),
François Vaux de Foletier’s Mille Ans d’histoire des tsiganes (A thousand years of
Gypsy history; 1970), and, more recently, Angus Fraser’s The Gypsies (1991).
The second category are anthropological and sociological studies describ-
ing and analyzing the present status of Spanish Rom, such as Jan Yoors, The Gyp-
sies of Spain (1974), Bernard Leblon’s Les Gitans d’Espagne: Le Prix de la différence
(The Gypsies of Spain: The price of difference; 1985), and others that delve into
particular aspects of Spanish Calé identity or populations, such as Stanley Brandes’s
Metaphors of Masculinity (1980), Bertha B. Quintana and Lois Gray Floyd’s ¡Qué
gitano! (How Gypsy! 1972), and Merrill F. McLane’s Proud Outcasts. The Gypsies of
Spain (1987). Some of these studies are written by amateur anthropologists who
share a deep regard for their subject through prolonged personal contact, while
others are by professional anthropologists who focus on narrow issues and popula-
tions using textbook methodologies for gathering information about their subjects.
A third series of books, much more numerous, explores the origins of
Spanish cultural traditions in which the Calés have played a signiWcant role, such
as William Washabaugh’s Flamenco: Passion, Politics, and Popular Culture (1996),
Timothy Mitchell’s Flamenco Deep Song (1994), and Bernard Leblon’s Musiques tsi-
ganes et Xamenco (Gypsic music and Xamenco; 1995), among others. Finally, a very
short list of books, which includes the present book, studies Payo cultural tradi-
tions that represent Gypsies stereotypically, including a 1958 dissertation entitled
“The Gitano in Spanish Literature,” by Carlos Wendler-Funaro, Frank Dougherty’s
1980 dissertation “The Gypsies in Western Literature,” and Bernard Leblon’s
comprehensive Les Gitans dans la littérature espagnole (Gypsies in Spanish literature;
1982).
The face of Spanish Gypsy studies changed radically in the 1960s and 70s
with the important work of the French historians Jean-Paul Clébert and François-
Vaux de Foletier, who challenged the more pernicious stereotypes and focused
on understanding the migratory patterns, both ancient and modern, of the Calés
and Romanichals and the social and cultural differences that distinguish these Rom
groups. Among these historians, two differing views of the origins of Spanish Anda-
lusian Roma emerged: either that they were groups that migrated south subsequent
to their earliest arrival in Catalonia in the 1400s, or that at some nonspeciWed time
in history they migrated into southern Spain from the shores of Northern Africa
en route from Egypt. Thus historians continued the debate initiated by Passa and
Rochas in the previous century about the essential difference of Andalusian Gyp-
sies. For his part Vaux de Foletier found no evidence of a south-to-north migration,
claiming that the dialect spoken by Andalusian Gypsies contains no words derived

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from Arabic. On the contrary, “one remarks that they know Greek words, and they
are sometimes called the Greeks or ‘Griegos.’”87
For his part, Jean-Paul Clébert accepted the Passa thesis that the Gitanos
of southern Spain differ fundamentally from other Romany groups such as the
Romanichals and that in fact the two groups “Wnd it difWcult to tolerate one another.
Their dialects are so different from each other as to be mutually incomprehensi-
ble.”88 As part of his strategy to establish his own credibility about Roma migra-
tions, Clébert provided a sampling of the capricious ethnologies of the Spanish
Gypsies that show to what degree the lack of a written history has made the Calés
fodder for nineteenth-century speculators. For example, he reported, Blaise Cen-
drars and Dr. Capistan, the director of the Paris Museum of Natural History, stood
by the view that Spanish Gypsies originated in the Canary Islands and were descen-
dents of ancient Guanches. The marquis de Baroncelli, on the other hand, noted
the similarities between the Spanish Gypsy and the American Indian. Baroncelli
had invited his friend Colonel Cody (Buffalo Bill) to accompany him on a trip to
the Camargue, where the two men discovered a striking resemblance between the
red man and the Gypsy, which suggested a “common racial stock.” Putting to rest
all of these quaint theories, Clébert stated that “we must admit that the Gitanos
arrived in Spain via Africa” and that their arrival had to have occurred prior to 1452
when the Wrst Gypsies arrived at Barcelona.89 Since no documentation exists to val-
idate this southern migration, however, Clébert quickly moves on and cursorily
collapses the Spanish Gypsies migrating into Barcelona with southern Gypsies
from Africa under the general rubric “Gitano.” In recounting the various anti-
Roma edicts and sanctions, Clébert noted that on the Iberian Peninsula the Gitanos
quickly multiplied “like rabbits in Australia,” “made an extremely bad reputation
for themselves,” and, as a logical consequence we must assume, made settlement
and assimilation difWcult.90
Another researcher whose work on Spanish Gitanos has been inXuential is
Bertha Quintana, who received her training in cultural anthropology at New York
University. In ¡Qué gitano! (1972), a followup to her doctoral thesis on cante jondo,
Quintana collaborated with the psychologist Lois Floyd to lend an interdisciplinary
focus to her work and thereby better “stress in contemporary Andalucian Gypsy
culture, changing aspirations, and minority/majority accommodation patterns.”91
She dedicated her study of Andalusian Calés to her mentor Walter Starkie, who
wrote its preface and no doubt was gratiWed by the dozens of references to his
works sprinkled throughout the text. The authors also relied on the contemporary
anthropologists Robert RedWeld, Morris Opler, Hadley Cantril, Leo Simmins, and
Mary Ellen Goodman, who at the time were theorizing the relation of individu-
als to group patterns. Quintana and Floyd conducted their interviews with Calé
informants during seven Weld trips to Andalusia, focusing on the residents of the

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Sacromonte caves and the nearby La Chana district of Granada. They used taped
interviews, photographs, and Weld notes to arrive at their conclusions about the
Spanish Gitano, whom they characterized from the outset as “brooding, restless,
loyal, Wercely proud, and aloof,”92 exhibiting “tradition-oriented behavior” that re-
inforced their sense of belonging and community.93 At times reminiscent of Starkie’s
idealized positions, their work emphasized the timelessness of the fundamental
Gypsy character and the preservation of ancient customs and endogamy. At the
same time they noted the felicitous symbiotic nature of the Andalusian-Calé rela-
tion that marked the current acculturation of the Gitanos, which, they hopefully
predicted, would not necessarily lead to complete assimilation.
In their summary of the origins of the Spanish Gitanos, Quintana and
Floyd supported Jean-Paul Clébert’s thesis that they had originated in Northern
Africa and were not descendants of the groups that migrated through the Balkans
into Europe. Thus they lent credence to the Calé myth of Egyptian origin, and, in-
directly, to the post–Civil War Spanish Gypsyologists such as Carlos de Luna who
were celebrating the superior pedigree of Andalusian Calés. They did not, however,
attempt to distinguish between the two migratory branches, and they acknowl-
edged the scarcity of information about the putative Northern African migration.
As cultural anthropologists they were more concerned with the traditional themes
of Gypsy culture, by which they meant those that have endured in the culture for
more than three generations: ethnic pride, Gypsy law as opposed to Payo law, loy-
alty, freedom, and fatalism.94
Despite the ready efforts to weigh in on the issue of the origins of south-
ern Spanish Roma, general histories of European Romany as well as histories of
the Spanish Gitano often fall short on objective information about the origins
and assimilation of Spanish Calés, even though some recent texts provide a more
reasoned account of migrations and customs than what had previously been avail-
able, for example, in Grellmann’s Die Zigeuner, J. M.’s Historia de los gitanos, or
Charles G. Leland’s The Gypsies. The notable exception is Bernard Leblon’s above-
mentioned Les Gitans d’Espagne: Le Prix de la différence (1985), a social history that
goes beyond a mere empirical study to offer insightful interpretations of the ideol-
ogy subtending documentary evidence. Les Gitans examines legal texts, ofWcial state
and local pronouncements, and church records pertaining to the Gypsies especially
during and after the period of the Enlightenment, by which time more than 88
percent of Spanish Rom, with the exclusion of Cataluña, was sedentary.95 Contrary
to the suppositions of Clébert and many of the Spanish historiographers, Leblon
reasons that the Calés are descendants of groups of Rom who ventured south dur-
ing what he calls the brief “Golden Age” before the onset of Romany repression in
the sixteenth century. As evidence he cites the arrival in 1462 of two counts, Tomás
and Martín, from what was termed “Little Egypte” in Jaén (98 kilometers north of

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Granada) at the invitation of the constable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo.96 Documents

also indicate that in 1470 a count Juan arrived in Andújar (103 kilometers east of
Córdoba), again at the invitation of their host Iranzo. These peripatetic groups were
remnants of earlier groups migrating westward from what they called “Egipto
Menor,” Little Egypt, who claimed to have been expelled from their country by the
“Great Turk”97 entering Spain via the Pyrenees. On the other hand, the húngaros
or “Hungarians,” as they are called by some to differentiate them from the Calés,
according to Leblon migrated to Spain during the twentieth century.
Because Leblon was writing in a revisionist post-Franco era and had made
such an exhaustive survey of pertinent juridical and ecclesiastical documents relat-
ing to the Gitanos, he is particularly attuned to the ideological and political stakes
involved in the repression of minority populations during the Counter Reformation.
For example, he understands better than his predecessors how Romany repression
is a logical consequence of an emerging bourgeois society appropriating religion
as a means of maintaining public order. In this way he avoids the easy conclusion
of historians such as Clébert that the Roma simply “wore out” their welcome over
the centuries because they refused to adapt to the customs of the territories they
entered, or, worse, that they degenerated into a group of vagrants and petty thieves.
By combining historical and ideological analysis Leblon arrives at a notion of the
diversity and contradictions of modern Calé ethnicity divorced from Romantic,
racialized notions of purity and decadence. He also calls on modern readers to weigh
the many problems and consequences of assimilation in the current era, a debate
that Les Gitans clearly leaves to others but not before setting down some precau-
tionary comments about the dangers of uniformity:

Integration is not a panacea: while one can rejoice at seeing a few

Gitanos succeed in the business world, undertake brilliant uni-
versity studies, or, more rarely, a political career, or simply insert
themselves into dominant society through their music or bull-
Wghting, on the contrary the spectacle of thousands of them tossed
into the vast human dumping sites of the city slums cannot excite
enthusiasm, even when we see in practice the modern method of
vertical cramming in ant colonies! By the Twentieth century
obstinate laws have managed to extract, piece by piece, the last
exterior vestiges of an ancient culture. Somewhere in the jails of
the Eighteenth century, the Gitanos left behind the shreds of their
ancient dress and the relics of their Indian language, but they
managed to save a less obvious but more essential particularity:
a social organization founded on the solidarity of the family clan,
which complements a form of justice that is theirs alone and

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the survival of certain customs. As long as the more well-to-do,

assimilated Gitanos continue to marry according to their rites,
and take under their protection less fortunate relatives, as long as
they insist on identifying themselves as Gitanos against all odds,
then the total, exterminating assimilation will continue to be a
failure, which we should not mourn. The cultural genocide of a
minority adds absolutely nothing to dominant society, except
perhaps some supplementary dregs; on the contrary, it signiWes
a mutilation of the patrimony common to all humanity.98

With his antibourgeois attitude tinged with nostalgia, however, Leblon

is unable to confront at least the possibility that a sizable portion of those who
claimed a Gitano identity in another age may have also lost such customs as he
still attributes to them and become fully integrated, either denying or ignoring
any Gitano heritage altogether. Unknown are the many who over the centuries
have intermarried and completely lost a sense of shared Gitano identity. Unknown
also is the degree to which the ethnic heritage of the Gitanos as imagined by his-
torians and anthropologists has any hereditary basis, so often have their groups
been inWltrated by other itinerant groups with whom they were sometimes forced
to afWliate. Leblon’s appeal for the preservation of difference that he so prizes as an
antidote to the monotony of modern existence fails to undertake a serious discus-
sion of what is wrong with the notion of ethnicity, and this question has relevance
to his call for ethnic tolerance. Should the tolerance and generosity he recommends
be extended to the Gitanos as a reward for holding out against Spanish repres-
sion, clinging to a difference that others have relinquished or undeservedly lost? Or
should tolerance and understanding be extended to Gitanos because many of them
are still counted among the most destitute of Spain’s underclasses? Despite years
of repression and the destruction of their customs and language, Leblon claims
that Gitanos still hold to their close kinship relations, never abandoning a needy
family member or turning anyone away from the door. “Perhaps a slightly idealist
portrait,” he admits in his conclusion, but it is his belief that the “exemplary par-
ticularism” of the Gitano “is beginning to seem like a light of hope for our pro-
grammed humanity, with its malady of uniformity.”99 Sadly, Leblon’s optimism
seems unrealistic given the renewed antagonism toward the Spanish Romanichals
and Calés in the years following the publication of Les Gitans d’Espagne. The “price”
being paid for maintaining Roma ethnic identity in Spain today is still very high,
and rising.
In the past thirty years, many studies, including Jan Yoors’s The Gypsies of
Spain (1974), have eliminated lengthy discussions of history, concentrating instead
on demystifying the Spanish Romany by describing present-day living conditions

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and customs. Yoors, a Roma sympathizer from the time he was twelve years old
and ran off from his village in Belgium, was part of an underground network of
Roma sympathizers arrested by the Germans for pro-Roma activities during World
War II. Condemned to death, he eventually escaped to Spain and there was arrested
by the Civil Guard and spent time in the Miranda del Ebro concentration camp. In
the early 1970s, decades after his release, Yoors returned to Spain to gather notes
for his book on the status of Spanish Roma. His long familiarity with European
Roma customs allowed him to move freely even among the Spanish Calés, whom
he described as tragic losers of Gypsy identity because they had been forced to for-
get their Romani dialect. Thus he perpetuated the notion that language was the
distinguishing feature of ethnicity and that, conversely, loss of language translated
into a tragic loss of identity. For him the “true Rom” were the ones he knew when
he was growing up with whom he could converse “in their own language.”100
Yoors’s search for the “untamed, uncontaminated Calé” that would spark his child-
hood memories needs to be seen in this way as the survival of the Romantic notion
of group purity. His search for the “true Rom” is a geographical, temporal, and
ethnic concept that reXects a non-Rom state of mind. Thus, like Borrow, Starkie,
Brown, and so many others before him, Yoors’s search entailed rejecting sedentary
Calé populations of larger populations and traveling to the remotest regions of
Spain where civilized, unadventurous, in short, uninitiated Europeans would not
dare to venture.
Contradicting the views of many contemporary non-Rom Spaniards, Yoors
asserted that the Gypsies of Spain had undergone a more prolonged persecution
than elsewhere in Europe. The European Rom were still “forever wild,” while
Spanish Gitanos had been “trapped” in poverty and sedentary lifestyles. The Wrst
chapter of The Gypsies of Spain describes the Seville feria, where crowds of revelers
are putting on the Gypsy and where the highest compliment one could be paid
would be to hear que tío más gitano (“what a Gypsy type”), as long as the phrase
did not mean that the person described was really a Calé. “Gitano,” he learned from
this exchange, was a picturesque performance: “I realized that the adjective Gitano
was not meant radically or literally but more to denote rascal, said in fun or in
admiration; somebody full of life, irrepressible, somebody with wit and charm,
frivolous and vain, mischievous.”101 No one really wanted to be a Gypsy, Yoors
explains; it was merely a masquerade to adopt on certain holidays. In fact, when
Yoors Wnally locates and describes groups of “real” Gitanos, the contrast with the
pseudo-Gitanos is shocking. The encampment near the Guadalquivir River that
Yoors visited after attending the Seville feria stood in stark contrast to the colorful
and gay Seville scene: “Rarely had I seen such apparent poverty or such excessive
indifference to shelter and environment”102 In other Rom enclaves in and around
Granada––Zaidin, the Barrio de la Virgencica, La Chana, the caves of Guadix––

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Yoors searched for and photographed ample evidence of the crushing poverty of
the Spanish Rom that distinguished them from the groups he knew as a boy. André
A. López’s photography, favoring an Ansel Adams technique of high contrasts with
low light and extensive depth of Weld, was ideally suited to Yoors’s pessimistic
vision of the impoverished Calés: craggy, shadowy faces against the background of
crumbling ediWces as in Figure 24, reproduced from Yoor’s book.
Yoors’s empathetic yet pessimistic assessment of Spanish Romany would
be for many a welcome antidote to the romanticized portraits of the nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century traveler. But just as Starkie saw the Gitano world
through the disWguring glass of a wine bottle, Yoors’s vision is clouded by the post-
war anti-Castilian sentiment that in many ways perpetuated the relentlessly critical

Image not available

fig. 24 Untitled photograph by André A. López in Jan Yoors’s

The Gypsies of Spain (1974). Courtesy of André A. López.

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view of Northern Europe toward the Spanish “black legend.” Like so many Euro-
pean and American anthropologists before and after, he also regarded only the most
alienated, seminomadic, and unassimilated Gitanos as worthy of Rom status and
therefore of ethnological interest. Loyalty to the horse traders, the “gitano gitanos”
that he met outside Seville, made him dismiss the gitanos apayados (the Hispani-
cized Gitanos) of the urban areas as overly assimilated. It was only with isolated
groups such as these that Yoors felt a sense of kinship “that verged on the illusion
of being understood.” Yoors is proud that the “benevolent shadow” that he casts
allows him to share the spiritual bond with his new friends: “The experience had
been intense, impossible to forget. I had a sense of completion and at the same
time, inexplicably, a sense of beginning. It left me groping for a deeper reality, the
extent of which I could not then grasp. I knew it had been an act of friendship rare
among men, not so much a meeting of minds as of hearts, which nothing that had
preceded it made me feel I deserved.”103
For Yoors, visiting the remotest of Spain’s “gitano gitanos” resembled a
personal, quasi-religious pilgrimage to recapture a past that wars, world travels,
and sedentary life in the United States had dimmed. Similarly, Merrill F. McLane’s
1987 Proud Outcasts reXects an intimate acquaintance based on a rapport with
informants that Bertha Quintana and Lois Floyd would not have been able to estab-
lish during their Weld trips to Andalusia and would probably have assiduously
avoided at any rate. True to convention, McLane’s preface boasts that readers will
Wnd no Wctional Gypsies or “story-book distortions” here, yet in his conclusion he
paints the Gypsies as a timeless race: “Antonio, Carlos, and all the other gitanos are
as resistant to assimilation as the Twentieth century draws to a close as on their
arrival in Iberia at the beginning of the Fifteenth, and I feel certain that their
descendants will be Gypsies for many years after I voyage to a permanent refuge.”104
This imagined permanence is obviously consolatory, permitting the retired colonel
McLane to imagine that he too will live on, since he now fancies himself an hon-
orary Gypsy: “It may be that for a few of these years, an occasional Gypsy, whether
in Guadix, Badajoz, or Avila, will remember the tall extranjero (‘stranger’) who was
a friend of the Gypsies while journeying among them, and of whom Rodrigo, the
blind lottery vendor, would say, ‘He is of the family.’” Being “of the family” means
that McLane will be accepted and remembered among a people who were resisting
the accelerated pace of modern civilization, a kind of immortality that so many
people have dreamed of as they go off to Wnd the Calés.
In 1963 many of the Sacromonte caves were badly damaged by Xoods
and their occupants relocated elsewhere in Granada or in nearby towns. Those caves
still habitable at the foot of the Sacromonte remained showplaces for Xamenco
dance and the tourist-book version of “Gypsy life.” Gradually the Calés living there
became for many researchers simulacra of the real Romany who had Xed elsewhere

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to continue their “primitive” and more “authentic” lifestyles. Indifferent to Xam-

enco performances in Granada, McLane opted instead to focus on the provincial
town of Guadix, where he knew from his readings of Irving Brown that the most
“primitive” Calés lived, ones that “might still be walking through Afghanistan
en route to the West from India a thousand years ago” (1). He also rejected the
Weldwork techniques of anthropologists like Quintana and Floyd, although he
read their work for background information. Instead he installed himself in a one-
star hotel and observed his subjects from his window for many weeks before Wnally
befriending a bootblack by the name of Antonio and his wife Isabel. Over a period
of ten years during which he traveled back and forth from the United States to
Spain, McLane gradually was introduced into the Calé community as Antonio’s
friend, and he spent untold hours in the tavern of Ramón de la Toñica, where he
gathered most of the information that subsequently he incorporated into Proud
Outcasts.
McLane’s literary muses reXect the months of research he conducted on
Gypsies at the Library of Congress prior to and between trips: Ernest Hemingway,
Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico García Lorca, Walter Starkie, and other twentieth-
century writers, together with the standard authorities we have so often mentioned
here: Washington Irving, Théophile Gautier, Heinrich Grellmann, and others. He
quotes George Borrow often, although he judged his stories apocryphal and his
descriptions inadequately lyrical. Lorca’s estimation of Spanish Gypsies as the aris-
tocrats of world Gypsies better reXected McLane’s admiration of the “proud out-
casts.” A proud Gitana walking past his window struck him as one of Wordsworth’s
“haughty” Gypsies, or she could have come right out of Ramón Jiménez’s Platero y
yo (Platero and I): “There she comes down the street, holding her body straight and
erect . . . without so much as a glance at anyone” (1). The bright and jaunty Juan
could have stepped out of one of Cervantes’ stories, and another “bronze Gypsy
amazon” looked to McLane like the Gypsy described by Ramón Jiménez “whose
coppery nakedness overXowed inside her rags” (39).
As might be expected, McLane perpetuated Borrow’s “apocryphal” stories
by modernizing them in the context of his own experience. For example, chapter
6, entitled “The Hokkano Baro,” begins with Cervantes’ now hackneyed intro-
duction to “The Little Gypsy Girl”: “Gypsies seem to have been born into the
world for the sole purpose of being thieves” (53), and includes summaries of the
“great trick” from El donado hablador o Alonso, mozo de muchos amos by Jerónimo de
Alcalá, which Borrow had excerpted, as well as Starkie’s more modern version
about a moneymaking machine that he included in In Sara’s Tents. The “great trick”
played on McLane was simply a rouse by his friend Antonio to get him to donate
money to an older Calé couple who were having Wnancial difWculties. Antonio
introduces them as his parents, and much to his chagrin an embarrassed McLane

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feels obliged to hand over one hundred pesetas. But the Gypsies’ “real” hokkano
baró, as far as McLane was concerned, is the Wfteenth-century Gypsy fable of their
origin as penitents forced to leave Egypt for refusing to help the Holy Family.
McLane is surprised that the Payo inhabitants of Guadix do not mention cannibal-
ism and baby snatching in their criticism of their Calé neighbors. He does, how-
ever, note the claim that like American Negros they have larger genitals than the
Payos. Isabel dispels the myth that Gypsies eat mulo mas (“carrion”) by serving
him only the freshest of foods when he is invited to dinner. All of these timeworn
topics sprinkled here and there in his text mark the retired colonel McLane as a
worthy disciple of George Borrow, Walter Starkie, and Irving Brown.
Walter Starkie and Irving Brown were McLane’s closest models for infor-
mation gathering in another sense: Like them he found that the best way to
approach his subjects was by drinking with them. Wherever he went in Andalu-
sia, he searched out the taverns where he could interface with Calé informants,
often by exchanging Caló vocabulary words, making up short poems, and listening
to Gypsy lore. Many of the incidents in Proud Outcasts take place in the Ramón
de la Toñica tavern near the Guadix caves. He borrows Starkie’s description of a
tavern (“a gloomy smoky hole it was” [64]) to describe the taverns he visits, and
like both Starkie and Brown he found that he could enhance his access to the Calés
if he introduced himself to them in Caló dialect. He was clearly proud that his
knowledge of Caló surpassed that of most of the Guadix Calés. By the conclusion
of his Spanish trips, he had eventually acquired a vocabulary of 270 words, less than
7 percent of the 4,000 words that Borrow claimed existed in the 1830s. Part of
this pride stems from his desire to see whether he can pass for a Gypsy. Since he
was widely known as a Payo in Guadix, this could be done only when traveling to
places where his ethnicity was unknown. When visiting a bar in the province of
Jaén, for example, McLane claimed that his grandmother was a Gypsy, something
his interlocutors accepted easily because of his knowledge of Caló.
Apparently McLane’s preparatory reading at the Library of Congress had
not led him to expect that Payos and Calés could live together, so that he registers
his surprise, and obvious disappointment, upon discovering that the Gypsies of
Guadix shared their caves with Payos: “My Wrst reaction was one of disappointment
that the ‘savage’ Gypsies of Guadix did not live by themselves in a mountain retreat,
expelling non-Gypsies, guarding their Romany language, and, perhaps, ruled by a
tribal chief or at least a phuri dai (matriarch)” (35). Later, however, the intermin-
gling of Gypsies and Castilians in the caves and local taverns made it seem to
McLane all the more remarkable that his subjects still preserved their Gypsyness.
What the Gypsies had preserved, and what now marked their difference, he specu-
lated, was a deep sense of honor, a remnant of the Spain of the 1600s that caused one
of McLane’s Payo patrons to remark that the Gypsies were more Spanish than the

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Spanish themselves. At other points in Proud Outcasts, however, McLane recognizes

that there are great similarities between the Castilians and the Calés owing to their
shared lifestyle. Paraphrasing Manuel Azaña, the president of Spain’s Second Repub-
lic, McLane concedes that it was the poor of Spain, not only its Calés, who had pre-
served in their “purest” form Spain’s “national roots” (75).
McLane’s study is important for shifting the focus of Gypsyphiles and cul-
tural anthropologists away from the Calés involved in the entertainment industry
and also for his extensive reports of the customs and daily life of the Caló men of
Guadix. Despite his closing statement that he is conWdent that Gypsies will remain
“as resistant to assimilation as the Twentieth century draws to a close as on their
arrival in Iberia at the beginning of the Fifteenth,” McLane was forced to acknowl-
edge that this assimilation was taking place right before his eyes (168). When his
friend Carlos the blacksmith closed his shop in 1977, the centuries-old tradition
of Gypsy blacksmiths ended in Granada, and “[n]o Lorca would again visualize
the smiths as lighting the evening darkness by striking out arrows and suns on
their forges” (110). So although McLane’s prose is saturated with the conventional
longing for permanence, for example in his claim that Gypsies as a people had
against all odds resisted change, everywhere in Proud Outcasts there are signs that
great changes are taking place in the living conditions and group identity of the
Spanish Calé. One thing that has not changed, however, is the foreigner’s desire
to exoticize the Calé woman performer. As critical and astute as McLane is in de-
bunking common stereotypes about Gypsy men, some of whom he came to love
and respect, his descriptions of Gypsy women often tread very familiar ground.
Although he claims in his introduction that Xamenco dance did not interest him,
he obviously was able to overcome his indifference when witnessing a young girl
named Lola execute an improvised, “real” Gypsy dance outside Antonio’s cave. In
his description of Lola’s body movements are echoes of Walter Starkie, and before
him Theophile Gautier:

Lola stood up, a Gypsy princess continuing an ancient tradition of

her race. Her right arm was above her head; her left arm rested on
her hip supported by the back of her wrist. This time, the dance
was wilder and more abandoned. When she held both arms out-
stretched, her short blouse rose to expose the taut skin of her
midriff, and when she whirled, her skirts Xew above her knees,
exposing Wrm, bronze thighs. Her dance was Wlled with passion,
and I felt a sensuousness emanating from her body. (124)

McLane also uses Lola to reminisce about his own adolescent sexual fan-
tasies, reminding us how useful the Gypsy icon has been in the male imaginary:

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the legacy of the romany rye

Was she the Gypsy girl I had dreamt about as a boy? Because,
despite my mother’s implanting the fear of the Gypsies in me
with her tales of kidnapping, I had heard about the pretty, brown-
skinned Gypsy girls who sold baskets from door to door, and
had imagined their sensuality. Was she the Xamenco dancer I had
fancied embracing as a young man? Perhaps . . . but then I re-
membered Borrow, who had written that no females in the world
can be more licentious in word and gesture, in dance and song,
had quickly added that a gleaming knife awaited anyone who
tried to take advantage of them. . . .
As I watched her spin around the Wre, her long hair Xy-
ing, she seemed to my imagination to be a descendant of the
pre-Roman Celto-Iberians who, according to Strabo, the Greek
geographer, lived here along the river Guadix (then the river
Dourios) and danced in front of their dwellings until dawn.
A daydream, of course, because Lola’s ancestors didn’t
arrive in Spain until fourteen hundred years after Strabo. But I
still like to think of Lola as carrying on a tradition ante-dating the
Christian era, a tradition perhaps rediscovered in the 1400s when
the Gypsies met indigenous peoples in the caves of Andalusia who
still remember the Celtic dances. (124–25)

Finally, with a nod to García Lorca’s description of the magical moment of

cante jondo when an especially gifted performer achieves the sublime, called duende,
McLane equates the conclusion of Lola’s dance with sexual ecstasy: “With the sup-
port of Luis’ guitar and our jaleo, Lola had achieved a state of duende. . . on her face
was an expression of ecstasy. The climax of the dance had been reached. It lasted for
only a few seconds, but in that brief period we experienced a oneness with Lola and
her primitive dance” (125).
Apart from the groundbreaking work of Bernard Leblon, there are no
comprehensive modern histories of the Spanish Roma to serve as a yardstick with
which to judge the superWcial histories that often accompany monographs on the
current status of Spanish Roma. Beginning in the 1970s, modern anthropological
Weldwork revolutionized the way information was gathered and analyzed, moving
the Weld away from unfounded historical claims often based on oral folklore toward
implications that could be drawn strictly from observable cultural data. One would
expect, consequently, that modern ethnologists would hold a more objective view
of their subject, would cite Borrow or the authors studied above mainly as curiosi-
ties, if at all, but this is not always the case. In fact, many authors writing about
Spanish Calés in the 1970s and 80s still followed a basic pattern modeled after

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Borrow’s Los Zincali and Starkie’s In Sara’s Tents and Don Gypsy. Starting with a gen-
eral historical background on the origins of the Roma, they move on to speciWc
knowledge based on Wrsthand observation, Wnally summing up with further gen-
eralizations gleaned from case studies and a conclusion regarding the permanence
of the Gypsy ethnos, the disappearance of that ethnos, or a combination of both
discourses. They typically establish their credentials for speaking on the subject of
Spanish Gypsies by emphasizing the importance of Wrsthand experiences but then
rely heavily on established Gypsyologists who preceded them to bolster their argu-
ments. Even if they distance themselves nominally from the sources they have
consulted––Cervantes, Borrow, Starkie, Brown, and others––they still recognize
their authority and liberally cite them, especially in their historical summaries.
They often recount the odyssey of their personal discovery that Gypsies are indi-
viduals (for example Merrill McLane was surprised to Wnd that they suffered from
discrimination) and do not conform to type. Finally, they summarize not only what
they have learned about their new Gypsy “friends” but what they have learned
about themselves, and they often close with an appeal to the reader’s sense of shared
human experience. In this process of review, discovery, and humanistic conclusion,
they express their shock that the stereotypes they grew up with were after all un-
founded and that through their own skill, ingenuity, and persistence they have
been able to scratch the surface and discover the “true” Gypsy essence, which, as we
have seen, unfortunately often largely substantiates “false” stereotypes of the past.

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5
“Our” Gypsies

Gypsies have not created anything that has been attributed to

them. . . . The Gypsy has not been nor will ever be a creator, only a
perpetuator and interpreter.
—rafael lafuente, Los gitanos, el Xamenco y los Xamencos
(Gypsies, Xamenco, and the Xamencos), 19

As far as the Gypsy is concerned, the superiority of the Spanish type

above all others of this singular race does not require scholarly proofs
since it sufWces to observe the living examples found in Andalusia.
—salvador de madariaga, España. Ensayo de Historia
contemporánea (Spain: An essay on contemporary history), 34

this chapter is concerned with the ways in which Gypsyness came to

symbolize Andalusia, and eventually Andalusia came to symbolize all of Spain, at
least for the more exportable and admired characteristics of Spanish cultural iden-
tity, within Spain’s own borders, leading up to and following the Spanish Civil War
of 1936. We have already seen that as early as the Wrst decades of the nineteenth
century in the French popular imagination Gypsies began to be identiWed with
Andalusians in general, and by mid-century British writers readily applied adjec-
tives earlier reserved for Spain’s Andalusian Gypsies to all Spaniards. There was,
to be sure, no shortage of Calés, Cinganos (Portuguese Roma), and Romanichals
in Madrid, Barcelona, and other northern Spanish cities at this time, but they
often went unnoticed by foreign tourists, since they had not yet fully capitalized
on the French desire to see authentic “Bohemians” in colorful dress. They were no
competition for the Andalusian Xamenco dancers whose performances in the caves,
taverns, and patios of Granada, Seville, and Cadiz attracted so many adventure-
seeking tourists. George Borrow in the 1840s felt that the Gypsies were simply
worst-case examples of the general Spanish population with whom they shared

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sundry defects, and subsequent authors from George Eliot in the 1860s to Catulle
Mendès in the 1890s equated all Spaniards with the passionate Gypsy in their
Wctions. So, while foreign tourists continued to validate their knowledge of Span-
ish Gypsies by making requisite visits to the cities of Andalusia, they increasingly
invited their readers to associate all of the peoples living south of the Pyrenees with
the passionate Gypsy stereotype.
As a byproduct of their fascination with Orientalism, in the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, Northern Europeans of the leisure classes
came to Andalusia primarily to seek evidence of Spain’s Moorish heritage, and
this love of things Moorish, or “maurophilia” as it has been called, would continue
well into the second half of the century and eventually inXuence the way Spanish
authors promoted their imaginary Gypsies as unique among all of Europe’s Gyp-
sies. Books such as James Cavanah Murphy’s Arabian Antiquities of Spain (1813),
with its intricate engravings of Moorish architecture and art, fed Europe’s taste for
the visual vestiges of ancient empires. Nearly all of the French Romantics in their
“picturesque voyages” regaled their readers with enticing evidence that Europe
ended at the Pyrenees. By the mid-eighteenth century, Andalusian writers too were
beginning to recognize the cultural advantages of researching and parading their
Moorish heritage, yet they had not granted full status of citizenship to Andalusia’s
Calé groups, and Caló dialectology was still nonexistent. In 1764 Juan Velázquez
de Echeverría published a two-volume series, Paseos por Granada y sus contornos
(Strolls around Granada and its environs), consisting of a running dialogue between
a local antiquarian and a foreigner who idle their time discussing the meaning
and signiWcance of Arabic and cabalistic inscriptions on the houses and buildings
of Granada. As they stroll through the Albaicín district, the Granadan explains the
derivation of the word “Albaicín” from a combination of the Arabic Baeza (Baeza)
and al (the). The Albeazim, as it was once called, was one of the oldest Moorish dis-
tricts of the city, and both men recognized that it still maintained its Moorish
character, but the local Spanish guide remains silent about the character or origin
of its present, apparently unremarkable inhabitants. During this time repressive
statutes continued to be issued in various Spanish cities in attempts to assimilate
or expel the Calés, and for many civil authorities the Roma were still unwelcome
neighbors. For example, tensions in the Triana district of Seville between Calés and
Payos exploded periodically in the early decades of the nineteenth century when
there was a forced dispersal of Calés to nearby towns.1
Despite this repression and neglect, however, the transformation of the
Gypsy from despised pariah whom the state strove to assimilate at all costs to
prized national icon, during what Angel Alvarez Caballero has dubbed the nacional
Xamenquismo (“national Xamenquism”) craze of the 1940s, can be traced to the late
eighteenth century even as the antiquarians were scouting around Andalusia to

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ferret out its Moorish Xavor. This was when a kind of osmosis took place between
some members of the Andalusian aristocracy, for example, the famed writer of the-
atrical interludes Juan Ignacio González del Castillo, and enterprising Gypsy
entertainers of Cadiz and other southern cities with whom they associated.2 The
majo, a Spanish version of the petit-maître of the 1700s, like the señorito, the leisured
landowner of the 1800s, was often passionate about popular entertainments such as
the bullWght and Gypsy dance fests called juergas, and the inclusion of Caló vocab-
ulary in popular literature Xourished.3 In España exótica (Exotic Spain), Jesús Torre-
cilla concurs, suggesting that the nineteenth-century Gypsy craze was primarily a
product of the eighteenth-century plebiWcation of Spain’s upper classes, something
that is evident, for example, in the Gypsy scene in José Cadalso’s Cartas marruecas
(Moroccan letters; 1773–74) or in various of González del Castillo’s interludes.
According to Torrecilla, this phenomenon represents a nationalist reaction against
what was construed as an invasion of French high culture that threatened a more
authentic Spanish culture that had been remaindered to the margins of society.4
Marginality and celebratory nonconformity became symbols of non-contamination,
which simultaneously raised the status of groups such as the Calés and fed the xeno-
phobic nationalism of the eighteenth century.5
While the trend to popularize the Gypsy dates from the second half of
the eighteenth century, in part as a reaction against French cultural hegemony
as Torrecilla argues, the Gypsy as an exotic and exportable cultural icon is a later
phenomenon strongly associated with French and British Romanticism and Spain’s
growing fascination with local color. With a rise during the mid- to late nineteenth
century of Xamenquismo, that is, the Xaunting of Gitano-identiWed activity and
dress, the Gypsy began to occupy the imaginary space previously held by the
Moor, if not in the mind of antiquarians, at least in the popular imagination.6 The
collection of songs, vignettes, and jokes entitled El pueblo andaluz, sus tipos, sus cos-
tumbres, sus cantares (The Andalusian people: Their types, customs, and songs), com-
piled by José María Gutiérrez de Alba in 1860, shows a strong predilection for
Gypsy themes, as do the theatrical interludes and dances by José Sanz Pérez, such
as Juzgar por las apariencias (Judging by appearances; 1846), and No Warse de com-
padres (Don’t trust your buddies; 1848). Enrique Zumel’s drama El gitano aventurero
(The adventurous Gypsy; 1854) offered a more serious exploration of Spain’s eth-
nic heterogeneity, suggesting that no Spaniard lacked a distant relative who was
a town crier, courtesan, farmhand, or Gypsy, and he echoed Preciosa’s statement of
more than two hundred years before, that true nobility was earned, not inherited,
a quality that all Spaniards could possess:

Society be damned,
For demanding such a thing:

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True nobility,
Is what is held in one’s heart;
For inherited nobility,
Possessing it, means nothing.7

Unlike the Gypsies of El gitano aventurero, however, most theatrical Gyp-

sies provided comic relief to nineteenth-century stories and plays, while performing
a useful function in Spain’s growing national discourses. Comic operas especially
used the Gypsy to make good sport of foreign tourists whose dream of Andalusia
was already in the 1850s a target of satire. Gypsy women were often the heroines
of these operas, aggressively guarding their honor, ridiculing foreign tourists, and
advertising their strong predilection for their own kind: a message that played well
to all classes of Spaniards. In José Sanz Pérez’s El tío Caniyitas o el Mundo Nuevo
de Cádiz (Uncle Caniyitas or the Mundo Nuevo barrio of Cadiz; 1843), a play
that inspired some of Gustave Doré’s sketches, a befuddled Mr. Frich comes to the
Gypsy quarters of Cádiz to learn to speak “like a Gypsy woman,” but the real les-
son he learns is to respect Gypsy women, who scorn the foreigner and conserve their
honor at all costs. Similarly, Mariano Soriano Fuertes’s comic opera La fábrica de
tabacos de Sevilla (The Seville tobacco factory; 1850) is a gleeful look at the women
workers of the tobacco factory and other denizens of Seville’s Triana district, whose
colorful localized speech is the play’s principal attraction. The comic target in this
instance is one Jacobo Jubert, a German painter whose efforts to convince the fac-
tory women to permit him to paint them in situ result in mayhem. The foreigner’s
love song to Chavala, the most spirited of the cigar rollers, unites in a single stro-
phe what for travelers like Frich and Jubert and their real-life counterparts such
as Dumas and Merimée represented the enchantment of Romantic Seville. The
broken Spanish, impossible to translate, is included here to give a taste of the comic
mistakes the German makes in expressing his great admiration for his Sevillan
“Bohemian.” The inferred message is that the foreigner’s ignorance of language is
a metaphor for his ignorance of the “great nation” that is Spain:

Oh española niña, [Oh my Spanish girl

tener grand dulor,
nein posil me fora
vivir san tu amor.
E si mi quisiero
mi quisierro yo
sampre! sampre! sampre!
La mi corazon.
Mi cantar nein sabo
how I suffer
nein, I cannot live
without your love.
And if you loved me
I would love you
always! always! always!
My dear heart.
I don’t know how to sing

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“our” gypsies

y tan solo só and I only know

qui Jubert sa morre that Jubert is dying
par grande pasion. from a great passion.
Sevilia! Bohemia! Seville! Bohemia!
Ma grande nacion! My great nation!]8

By the late nineteenth century any mention of the Triana district in Seville
or the Albaicín and the Sacromonte caves of Granada always included descriptions
of its colorful Gypsy inhabitants, such as the salty Caniyitas or the spirited Chavala,
who, Spanish authors reported, accounted for the joyous “spice” of the Andalusian
character that many non-Roma residents by this time admired if not envied. Jubert’s
Seville and Bohemia, that is, Andalusia and its colorful Gypsies, had clearly become
a useful medium in Spain’s nation-building rhetoric.

Capturing the Spanish Gypsy in Popular Art

The European Orientalist genre in which the Gypsy eventually Wgured promi-
nently did not peak in Spain until the beginning of the twentieth century, long
after its eclipse in European art and just as some French authors were foretelling
the demise of the true Gypsy, or at least peddling their own version of the Spanish
Gypsy as the most authentic specimen. In Spain, by contrast, the fevered quest for
exotic portraiture was not in full swing until the last decades of the nineteenth
century, when the representation of nonwhite, non-European women played an
important role in all the better-Wnanced illustrated weeklies such as Ilustración
Artistica (Artistic illustrated), Ilustración Ibérica (Iberian illustrated), and Ilustración
Española y Americana (Spanish and American illustrated). Descriptions of exotic
women abounded both in the lavish engravings of these expensive productions as
well as in the stories, poems, and serialized novels that dotted more modest literary
magazines such as Prometeo (Prometheus), Album Salón (Salon album), and others.
Beginning in the 1880s editors vied with one another to publish engravings and
descriptions of the most beautiful non-Western women, as different as could be
imagined from the fussy bourgeois mannequins on parade in the fashion section of
their same magazines with whom they are sometimes favorably compared. Spain’s
exoticized Gypsy, then, was merely one in a long list of fantastical women icons,
the product of the turn-of-the-century taste for the other-worldly.
The majority of these exotics were stock characters of historical and bib-
lical narrative so far removed in time and place that they encouraged free Xights
of fancy. For example, in José María Esbrí’s serialized novella El poder de la hermo-
sura (The power of beauty), published in La Caricatura (The caricature; 1892), a

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languorous Vasantasena stretches out on her magniWcent bed of rare wood, marble,
and crystal, there to cast her spell on Aristotle’s disciple Alexander. The beautiful,
fair-skinned Moraima awaits the return of her beloved Boabdil in Esposas modelo
en España (Model Spanish wives) by Josefa Gutiérrez, published in Album Salón in
1900. Exoticism became even more the rage in early twentieth-century magazines
with modernist ambitions. In her magniWcent tent hung with Babylonian tapes-
tries, surrounded by enameled bronzes, elephant tusks, incense of myrrh, cinnamon,
rose, musk, draped in pearls, coral, ruby necklaces, and precious tunics, Judith of
biblical fame decapitates Holofernes in Ramón Goy de Silva’s prose poem “Judith”
(Prometeo, 1910). In that same year, Promoteo published Isaac M. Vaahnon’s short
story “Nómadas” (Nomads), in which a barefooted Sephradite walks silently behind
her father as they cross out of Spain, her perfect head, sublime, Asiatic, with “great
wide eyes, diaphanous as the summer sky, large eyes from which the soul looks out,
revealing such an innocent, candid soul, . . . a submissive child who has desired
nothing because she knows nothing but to obey and remain silent and content with
what people tell her to do.”9
Spanish bourgeois culture also contributed to this belated orientalist vogue
by exoticizing and feminizing its southern cities and locales. During the last two
decades of the nineteenth century a handful of writers and artists looked no further
than Seville, Granada, or other cities that had played key roles during the reign
of the Arab caliphs for their exotic female types and equated these types with the
cities and climes that projected their beauty. In this they both imitated earlier
European and American models, from George Eliot to Gustave Flaubert and Wash-
ington Irving, and inXuenced the way that northern Spain interpreted the south-
ern character as indolent, sensuous, and passionate, that is, in need of the manly
north for protection and exploitation. In fact, Andalusia slowly became the desir-
able female to an increasingly industrialized, “virile” northern Spain, much the same
way that earlier, as Edward Said has argued, the Orient became the female to a male
Europe during the height of European colonialism. But the collapsing of the two
cultures, Andalusian and Gypsy, also participated in a broader nationalist endeavor
to enhance and capitalize on Spain’s self-image as a nation with a highly export-
able exotic underside. In the process of this Andalusian/Gypsy assimilation, which
evolved over many decades, some of the prevailing strategies of Spanish writers
and Gypsyologists would be (1) to rehabilitate Spain as a nation in which the Roma
had always been welcome by burying its repressive past; (2) to exonerate the image
of Spanish Gypsies by celebrating cultural contributions and de-emphasizing de-
linquency and racial degeneracy; (3) to catalogue the relative accomplishments of
Andalusians and Calós and thereby enhance the stature of Gypsy culture; and (4)
to separate racially northern Romanichals and southern Calés and foreground the
accomplishments of those of North African descent.

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Feminizing southern cities was a common motif among turn-of-the-

century Spanish graphic illustrators. A 1900 engraving by the artist José García y
Ramos depicts a Sevillana who represents not just a seductive Andalusian woman,
but the city of Seville herself, whose beauty is a prize for the northern appetite.10
Her fan hides the secret treasures that she offers to the eager male visitor, who, the
commentator predicts, must surely surrender himself to Seville in springtime when
she is adorned with her sweetest smile. A visit to woman-Seville, we conclude,
must have been an orgasmic experience for the os (“you,” familiar plural) to whom
the commentator addresses his recommendation: “This is the delightful Seville,
the graceful, picturesque Seville who seduces you with a smile, drives you mad
with a ballad . . , who takes your hand in her small, round, warm hand and leads
you to her cathedral, her palaces, her gardens, her Guadalquivir, hypnotizing you
with her ardent eyes and awakening your thirst with her moist lips . . . until she
conquers you, subdues you, subjugates you, and your brain aWre with so much
light, you cry out for air.”11
In Spain’s evolving self-image as a nation with an abundance of passionate
and lovely woman-cities, one would expect to Wnd that the Spanish Gypsy played
a preeminent symbolic role. As we have seen, this Wgure had long been a stock
feature in European Romantic representations, and Spain at the end of the century
had a relatively large Roma population that had resisted, despite the many edicts
of previous centuries, to assimilate fully into local Payo economies and customs.
But although Spanish Gypsies appeared frequently in Spanish literature, especially
its folklore and legends, and although since the eighteenth century there were
countless aWcionados of the Andalusian Gypsy among the classes who did not have
to live with real Calés, Gypsy women were not at Wrst fetishized in graphic art and
literature to the same degree as the Payo inhabitants of Seville, Cadiz, or Granada,
at least until the turn of the century. Most magazine engravings of southern types
were dainty and Xirtatious Andalusian women peeking out over their exquisite fans,
women who some Spanish elites feared were being replaced by the more passionate
but racially inferior Andalusian Gypsies. Gypsies were not without their Roman-
tic allure as fortune-tellers, Xamenco dancers, or examples of spirited poverty that
appeared in publications such as El Fandango (The fandango), Cartas Españolas
(Spanish letters), El Laberinto (The labyrinth), El Genio de Andalucía (Andalusian
genius), Boletín Gaditano (Cadiz bulletin), and others, but they did not obsess the
Spanish artist in the same way that Eastern European Gypsies had enchanted North-
ern European artists and writers during the heyday of Orientalist art.12
On the contrary, in the racist discourse of the late nineteenth-century
bourgeois press, foreign Gypsies often bore the physical traits of a more favored
race, an opinion that, as we shall see, was reversed by the mid-twentieth century.
For example, commenting on an engraving of the German painter Nathaniel Sichel’s

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La Reina de los gitanos (The queen of the Gypsies), the editor of Ilustración Española
y Americana raved about the white beauty of the northern type: “This is a beauti-
ful specimen, in whose arrogant bust we see the softness, whiteness, and purity of
lines that distinguish the daughters of the North, with their black eyes, sensuous
mouth, and black curly hair that constitute the indelible characteristics of the
nomadic and mysterious race of the Gypsies.”13 Similarly, the commentator of La
cartomancera (The fortune-teller) by the German painter Wally Moe compared
Spanish Gypsies unfavorably with those who camp near the Danube: “Our engrav-
ing certainly does not represent the sordid type of fortunetellers from around here;
rather it refers to the prophet of that beautiful country washed by the blue waves
of the Danube.”14 More overt in his racism, the commentator of J. F. Portael’s Rosa
la gitana (Rosa the Gypsy) attacked the Romanticized images offered by German
artists as being too white, elegant, clean, and fantastic to be believed: “As far as
real Gypsies are concerned, that is to say, nomadic Gypsies, whether Hungarian
musicians, metal workers, or Spanish horse traders, they are all a pack of thieves,
tricksters, and beggars wherever they roam, and neither is their skin white, nor
have they any taste in clothing, because they forego the Wrst requirement, cleanli-
ness, and they have no talent whatsoever for art or embroidering.”15 The commen-
tator of Gitana (Gypsy) by the Spanish painter Alexandre Inglada ridiculed the
tendency of the British to exoticize the Andalusian Gypsy but noted with satis-
faction her value as a national icon: “The Brit, saturated with spleen, throws his
crushed hat and wallet at the feet of these Gypsy singers, dancers, or both. For the
Andalusian Gypsy the wealthy Brit is a rich silver mine to be exploited; when bal-
ancing the Spanish budget, economists ought to take into account this element of
production, which has a steady foreign market and which nothing, not even time
has been able to diminish.”16
The mixture of sensuality and sentimental appeal of these engravings
attests to the enduring presence of the vagabond woman in the European imagina-
tion even as the popularity of artistic Orientalism generally waned. She remained
the quintessential exotic, associated with dance, music, money, and even (implau-
sible as this was) sexual availability and wantonness. And, as the above commen-
tator on Inglada’s painting suggests, some artists and editors too were beginning
to understand that there was a lucrative national market for exotic Andalusian
Gypsies. Once lavish engravings of “Oriental” Gypsies became a mainstay during
the heyday of the high-end Spanish illustrated press (1880–1910),17 more populist
publications such as Blanco y Negro (White and black), Wrst published in Madrid
in 1891, perpetuated the vogue with numerous engravings and photographs of
Spanish Gypsies primarily of the Granada and Seville types. These sketches and en-
gravings were increasingly sympathetic and therefore more in sync with the national
image of Andalusian Gypsies popularized abroad. In turn they inspired a generation

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of folklorists, novelists, poets, and playwrights who succeeded in popularizing Xa-

menquism, and by extension Gypsy culture, both nationally and internationally in
the decades leading up to the Spanish Civil War.
With an increasing presence in late-century graphic illustration, the sen-
sualized Gypsy was also bound eventually to appeal to Spanish writers eager to
capitalize on the native population through homegrown versions of the Carmen
myth. Imitating French convention, the novelist Manuel Fernández y González
opened his serialized novella Las castañuelas de Pepa (Pepa’s castanuelas; 1883) with
a depiction of Andalusia’s most prized natural wonders, which he imagined as a
beautiful, seductive woman: “No more seductive, more elegant, and, we could even
say, more coquettish beauty than that of Nature in these enchanting regions of
Andalusia. . . . Nothing as fresh, perfumed, and young as she.”18 For Fernández y
González the Sacromonte caves of Granada and their Gypsy occupants stood out
among the “little paradises” that made up Andalusia’s natural beauty, which he
believed every man should see. Following his ecstatic portrait of Ms. Andalusia, he
included a litany of Gypsy habitats, virtues, occupations, and customs. A shorthand
reprise of chapter 4 of Mérimée’s Carmen, this list ratiWed many of the commonly
held stereotypes that French authors had gleaned from George Borrow: the Wdelity
of Gypsy wives, the men’s penchant for horse thievery, Gypsy fraternity and racial
solidarity, and the seductive if Xeeting beauty of some of the women, including
the heroine of the novella, “Pepa la Barbalí ” (Pepa the magniWcent), the pearl of
the Sacromonte caves, who has fallen for Don Juan, an upper-class Payo. True to the
convention begun by Cervantes, Pepa’s beauty is deWned in contrast to her cohorts:
Her white skin and blond hair contrast with those of her swarthy companions.
And although she exhibits the irrepressible personality of a “true” Gypsy—and her
castanets speak the requisite “language of feeling” that authenticates her Gypsy-
ness––it is clear that this Carmen will turn out to be a Payo, much more like her
ancestor Preciosa than the more tragic Carmen of Merimée’s novella or Bizet’s opera.
The way Fernández González brings about Pepa’s happy metamorphosis
reXects both the enduring popularity of the Cervantine motif of the Gypsy who
awakens to a better life as a non-Gypsy and the nineteenth-century predilection
for melodramatic plots, such as that of John Crawford’s Gitanilla, which packed
London theaters in the 1860s. Dangling perilously from a bridge embankment
where his Gypsy rival has just fallen to his death, Juan hears the faint sound of
Pepa’s castanets drawing closer and closer. Just as he is about to be swallowed up
by the raging Xood that is pushing him over the edge, he is rescued by the Gypsies
and awakens to his lover’s tender ministrations. But if there is one law by which
Gypsies abide, according to the narrator, it is the prohibition against intermarriage
between Gypsy and Payo, and so, although deeply drawn to each other, Don Juan
and Pepa agree to separate, and Juan decides to remove temptation by hiding her

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castanets in an ancient armoire in his uncle’s house. Opening the armoire, he dis-
covers a secret drawer Wlled with bags of Mexican gold coins and documentation
proving that Pepa is his cousin, the daughter of the duchess of R. The cousins
may marry after all, and Pepa assumes her rightful place as the new duchess of
R. amid the splendor that her new wealth has brought her. The result is a felici-
tous “marriage” of a cleansed Gypsyness and an established gentility, a utopian
fantasy that formed part of the imaginary Andalusian character in the mind of
many northerners.
Real Calés, meanwhile, were often imagined as vagrants prone to lying
and petty thievery, an image revealing the general mistrust and antagonism that
Spanish dominant culture consistently manifested towards its disenfranchised
classes. One of the earliest efforts to rectify the Romanticized portraits of the
Spanish Gypsy such as that of Fernández González appeared just two years after
Pepa seduced Juan with her castanets. Faustina Sáez del Melgar’s encyclopedic
Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas (Self-portraits of
Spanish, American, and Lusitanian women; 1885) included a twenty-page sketch
entitled “La gitana” (The Gypsy woman). not written by a Roma woman despite
the title of the collection, but by Blanca de los Ríos Nostrench de Lámperez, an
aristocratic native of Seville and a celebrated writer and critic who collaborated in
the ultranationalist periodical Raza Española (The Spanish race). Her xenophobic
portrait of Gypsy life in Andalusia is anything but idealized, even though her lan-
guage is as bombastic and sentimental as that of Fernández y González. How sad,
she wrote, that a whole people can be dispersed by the winds of time, “without a
single ray of light or lightning illuminating their dark surface.”19 And yet, she
continued, this stubborn race Xoats above the others, insoluble, Xourishing even in
the remotest places where birds fear to nest: “sinister struggle, desolate existence,
cruel misery, society’s guilty neglect for these sad stragglers of civilization.”20 Like
“eagles,” Gypsy women Xutter about their nests in the caves of Sacromonte. They
have for their only school Mother Nature, and from her they learn the game of
survival, that is, how to eat the smaller Wsh and not be eaten in turn. Yet all their
gifts one by one desert them: their virginity, their beauty, the lustrous color of their
skin, their vibrant voice, quickly vanish. Nature inclines them to be good moth-
ers, but poverty and ignorance school them in trickery and theft.
Despite the above quotations that are here and there tinged with sym-
pathy and pathetic fallacy, De los Ríos’s portrait of the Gypsy woman was over-
whelmingly damning in comparison with that of Sebastián Herrero, who forty-two
years earlier had included a chapter on the Gypsy woman in Los españoles pintados
por sí mismos (Spanish self-portraits). The difference between the 1843 and the 1885
versions marks the progress of a growing völkisch nationalism whose mission was to
distinguish respectable from disreputable national types. Herrero had praised the

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Gypsy woman’s dedication to her children and her husband and in general admired
a race that he believed had remained impervious to “that arrogant matron called
civilization,” unlike the rest of Spain that had become lamentably Europeanized.21
De los Ríos’s portrait, in contrast, was Wlled with dire foreboding, not about the
ability of the Gypsies to survive as a race since they seem to “breed” anywhere,
but about the peoples whom they were displacing. In short, the degenerate Gypsy
race was a product of overbreeding, a message that was circulating widely at the
time years before conservative magazines like Raza Española. According to De los
Ríos, the non-Gypsy maja and the Andalusian folk dancer were no match for the
rapacious Gypsy cantaora (“singer”) and her lascivious dances.
Although she described in great and vivid detail the passionate dances
of this Gypsy “courtesan,” De los Ríos begged her readers’ indulgence since she
had never actually seen a Xamenco spectacle herself and could only imagine it “by
divination.”22 Yet her secondhand knowledge led her to predict conWdently the
demise of the more innocent and happy dances of the non-Gypsy Andalusians that
the passionate Gypsy cantaora was slowly displacing. One can divine the state of a
people in their dance, she reported: “It accompanies them, from their appearance
to their eclipse; it is born, grows, thrives, propagates itself, prostitutes itself, dies,
and disappears with it.”23 Gypsy dance, in this apocalyptic vision, was replacing
the spontaneous dances characteristic of the more youthful Andalusia “people”
unpolluted by Gypsies:24 “Today as songs and customs are being perverted, dance
is being prostituted, nearly forgotten by the townsfolk. Instead it is being taken
up by Gypsy women; feasts are disappearing to be replaced by bacchanals, the maja
has disappeared, and the cantaora remains: the former personiWed the Westa, the
second the orgy; the dance of the maja was free and spontaneous, like the Xight of
birds; that of the cantaora is wanton and brokered, like prostitution.” Thanks to
Gypsy women, Andalusian dance was entering a new phase, and this, in De los
Ríos’s eyes, bode ill for the future of the Andalusian people: “The bright sun of
happiness that shone on this people is sinking forever; on the depressed, dark fore-
head of the Gypsy woman Xicker its last rays, sinister and red, like the last glim-
mers of the sunset.”25
As if to validate De los Ríos’s paranoid portrait of Andalusian decline, four
years later Armando Palacio Valdés contrasted Gitano and non-Gitano Xamenco
dance in his popular novel La hermana San Sulpicio (Sister San Sulpicio; 1889). The
ethereal seguidillas performed by the novice Gloria remind the entranced hero
of “an oriental dancer exhibiting with mystic rapture in the solitude and mystery
of the temple the supreme grace of her Xesh, gilded like the lotus leaves in
autumn.”26 In contrast the Gypsy who dances in the juerga organized at a country
estate on the outskirts of Seville is described as a repulsive “statue of shameless-
ness.” The “Xamencoized” Sevillans witnessing the Gypsy’s dance cheer on her

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sensuous movements, while for the more sensible and civilized Galician her licen-
tious movements merely inspire a “profound repugnance.”27 For less pusillanimous
readers, no doubt, the climax of La hermana was the description of the juerga that
ends in a violent confrontation between a Gypsy bandit and the Galician hero,
much more memorable than the happy union of the hero and Gloria that ends the
novel on a somewhat insipid note. The fourteen-page description of the juerga
leaves little doubt about, on the one hand, Palacio Valdés’s fascination with Seville
underlife and, on the other, his disapproval of the late-night intermingling of classes
on the outskirts of Seville that threatens to spill over constantly into the lives of its
respectable citizens such as Gloria and her Galician suitor. Palacio Valdés used the
novel, then, not merely as a pretext to burrow into the colorful underlife of bull-
Wghters and passionate Gypsy entertainers as had his foreign contemporaries like
Alexandre Dumas, but to defame Payo patrons who exhibited what in the narrator’s
words was an “unbridled enthusiasm” for the Xamenco life. In this sense he entered
into the discussions about bourgeois respectability that played a crucial role in
determining how different classes were perceived in modern Spanish society.
Palacio Valdés’s attention to detail and regionalist brushstrokes allowed a
slightly more complex Wctional portrait of the Gypsy to emerge in the Wnal years
of the nineteenth century. Still, it is clear that his novel ranked Gypsies among
the racially alien and therefore dangerous classes, who, unchecked, contaminate the
citizenry. Despite the disastrous end to the juerga, however, La hermana San Sulpicio
does not offer a wholesale denunciation of Gypsies. The downtrodden women of
the Triana district, such as Paca who works in the tobacco factory, are depicted as
pathetic victims of poverty and abuse, a far cry from the saucy and colorful tobacco
workers of Mérimée’s Carmen or Mariano Soriano Fuertes’s La fábrica de tabacos de
Sevilla. The Valencian novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez would amplify this portrait
incrementally by viewing the Gypsy from the prism of class struggle. In his novel
La barraca (The cottage), published fourteen years after La hermana at the height
of the author’s naturalistic period (1898), Blasco Ibáñez avoided Palacio Valdés’s
by-then clichéd descriptions of late-night juergas and turned his attention to the
daily lives of the working poor on the outskirts of Valencia. His nine-page descrip-
tion of a horse transaction between a Gypsy and a Payo, however, is little more than
a local color gem. A starker image of Gypsies emerges in La horda (The horde;
1905) in which a group of Gypsies is living as the lowest of the working classes
in the Cambroneras tenement area of Madrid. Together with his friend Rubén
Darío, Blasco Ibáñez had gathered his Weldnotes for the Gypsy portions of La horda
near Madrid’s Puente de Toledo, which lends the novel’s descriptions an aura of
verisimilitude.28 However, his lengthy accounts of “primitive” Gypsy customs,
for example, the wedding feast described with all the Xavor of a local color sketch,
are reminiscent of Starkie’s gay descriptions and contrast sharply with the stark

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circumstances of the Payos who are living the worst moments of their lives in the
same neighborhood. The implied message of this seems to be that respectable
citizens are unable to cope with poverty, while Gypsies thrive on it. Gypsy life is,
in other words, a “Westa” as Walter Starkie came to view it, regardless of the hard-
ships they endure.
Gypsies Wgure more prominently in Blasco Ibáñez’s La bodega (The wine
store; 1906), which describes in minute detail the pathetic existence of the impov-
erished Gypsies Alcaparrón and his daughter Mari-Crú. Like Palacio Valdés, Blasco
Ibáñez painted the social mixing of Payo and Gitano as detrimental to the frivo-
lous señoritos, the moneyed youth who seek out Gypsies for their late-night enter-
tainment. But in contrast to his other novels, La bodega also traces the detrimental
interracial relations from the viewpoint of the Calós who have become mere serfs
on the plantations surrounding Jérez de la Frontera. It is they and not the wealthy
señoritos who have the most to lose from Gypsy-Payo interracial contact. They have
had to abandon their horse trading and have been turned into salaried farmhands,
a lot that for them represents the deepest shame imaginable. Immune to the polit-
ical activist Salvatierra who seeks to involve them in revolutionary activities, they
have been reduced to a childlike state, only rousing themselves to clap and sing
when the rich señoritos of Jérez are in need of entertainment. The more physically
beautiful of the Gypsy women have become, willingly or not, the concubines of
the dissolute marquis de San Dionisio and his friends. On one particularly fatal
night, the marquis, for the sport of it, releases a young bull into the patio where
the Gypsies are reveling: “In the patio resounded a scream of terror, accompanied
by brutal laughing. Then, noisy clattering on the pavement, the sound of bodies
hitting the walls, the din of danger and fear. . . . Mari-Crú, the Gypsy, confronted by
the beast had fainted from panic. . . . A complete juerga!”29 Mari-Crú never recov-
ers from her encounter with the bull, and the narrator documents in naturalistic
detail her long and agonizing death that richly symbolizes the disastrous attempts
to assimilate the Gitano into Payo culture.
Fear of Gypsy-Payo intermingling would survive in twentieth-century
texts, but the allure of the Spanish Gypsy at the same time continued to inspire
eroticized portraits that point to Spain’s ambiguous feelings about its primitive
subalterns, whom the rest of Europe persisted in idolizing. For example, Spanish
genre painters were more enthusiastic about the erotic lure of Gypsy women than
was the xenophobic De los Ríos or the naturalist author Blasco Ibáñez. The portrait
artists Carlos Vázquez, Mariano Pedrero, Francisco Masriera, José Casado del Alisal,
José García y Ramos, Joaquín Araujo, Antoni Torres Fuster, Antonio Larraga, Juan
Sala, Antonio Fabrés y Costa, as well as Blanco y Negro’s popular sketch artists José
Llovera, Ceclio Plá, and Angel de Huertas, kept illustrated magazines supplied
with innumerable versions of Carmen, Preciosa, and Esmeralda, whose charms were

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further validated by the captions supplied by magazine editors. Though often

sketchy and not highly aestheticized, like Ángel de Huertas’s Xirtatious Gitana
(Fig. 25), these images set the stage for the decadent modernist art and Wction of
the early twentieth century that by turns eroticized and deiWed Gypsy women, or
both, as in Walter Starkie’s visions examined in the previous chapter. Nevertheless,
Gypsies were not as often humanized in these Wctions and portraits as much as
they were sexualized.30 For example, the same year (1908) that Ilustración Artística
serialized Cervantes’ novella “La gitanilla,” illustrated with tinted half-tone images
of Preciosa like that of Figure 26, Isaac Muñoz’s novel Morena y trágica (Dark and
tragic) projected an exaggerated and repulsive portrait of a modern Andalusian
Gypsy, quite the antithesis of Cervantes’ Preciosa. Inspired by a tardo-Romanticism
tinged with naturalistic touches, Isaac Muñoz saw Gypsies as embodying a myste-
rious and deadly force, but, a great admirer of the Modernist novelist Ramón del
Valle Inclán, Muñoz offers a much more decadent portrait of his book’s fatal hero-
ine, a woman so percolated with connotations of death, perversity, and animality
that even her sexual organs repulse: “Beneath the dark mass, savage, wounding, of
her hair wound tightly like nervous snakes, her sex appeared horrible, Werce, animal-
like, like an open wound, the mouth of a wild animal, giving off a hot breath of in-
satiable and mortal fever, a wrenching odor of rot, lust, death, a marine odor of algae
and waves, a bitter odor of a beast in heat, an odor of putriWcation like decomposed
Xesh consumed by worms.”31
Coinciding with Múñoz’s scurrilous portraits were the more reWned, though
no less eroticized, paintings of Julio Romero de Torres (1874–1930), another great
admirer of Valle Inclán, who disseminated Andalusian themes in a rich and reWned
reworking of classical and popular motifs. Romero’s Musa gitana (Gypsy muse; Fig.
27) is a remarkable reworking of Titian’s Venus and Cupid with a Lute Player, minus
the Cupid but perhaps with just as ardent an appeal to the viewer’s cupidity.32
Romero specialized in portraits of women, many of them modeled after Calés in
the entertainment industry, such as María Caballé, Conchita Torres, María Palau,
Pastora Imperio, Conchita Triana, “Dora la Cordobesita,” “La Niña de los Peines,”
and “Carmen de Cádiz.” His epic painting Cante Hondo (Deep song; Fig. 28), mod-
eled after Asunción Boué, surrounds the classical nude with the by-then popular
Gypsy repertoire of themes: destiny, fatality, jealousy, love, and death, to produce
a pastiche of motifs that by this time was seeping into to the poetry of the gen-
eration of 1927, especially that of Federico García Lorca and Rafael Alberti, with
its taste for ancient and modern ballads. In his stylized Wgures, divinization and
symbolism combine with a realistic style to produce Gypsy women who were dis-
concerting for the Spanish public accustomed to the more conventional represen-
tations fed to them in the illustrated magazines of the time. “European-Western
ethnocentrism, whether of the right or the left, should disappear once and for all.

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fig. 25 Ángel de Huertas, Una gitana, in Blanco y Negro 466 (18 November 1899), cover.
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fig. 26 Y así granizaron sobre ella cuartos. . . . Scene from “La gitanilla,” in Ilustración Artística
27.1357 (1 January 1908), 5.
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fig. 27 Julio Romero de Torres, Musa gitana (1908). Courtesy of Mercedes Valverde Candil,
directora de los Museos Municipales, Excmo Ayuntamiento de Córdoba.
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Our ethnic values, social principles and norms of coexistence are not necessarily the
only or best ones. To impose them by force upon unlike societies results not only
in their ruin and agony; it impoverishes in an alarming way our cultural panorama
and insidiously barbarizes us.”33

The Spanish Dialectologists

One of the more important contributions of George Borrow’s The Zincali was an
appendix containing lists of Caló words and folklore. As mentioned in Chapter 3,
Borrow’s knowledge of Caló was rudimentary, much more so than his knowledge
of British and Hungarian Romani dialects, and the 2,138-word “Vocabulary of
Their Language” included in The Zincali was incomplete and contained numer-
ous errors. But it set a trend that more competent Spanish dialectologists would
quickly follow. Only a handful of Caló vocabulary lists predated Los Zincali, among
them Juan Hidalgo’s Romances de germanía . . . , con el vocabulario (Slang ballads . . . ,
with a vocabulary) of 1609, and the more informative Un vocabulario de caló recogido
en Andalucia (A Caló vocabulary gathered in Andalusia; 1809) by José Antonio
Conde.34 In the wake of George Borrow’s travelogues and a general European inter-
est in dialectology and ethnography, late nineteenth-century Spanish philologists

Image not available

fig. 28 Julio Romero de Torres, Cante jondo (1930). Courtesy of Mercedes Valverde Candil,
directora de los Museos Municipales, Excmo Ayuntamiento de Córdoba.

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began more systematically to collect and edit Caló dictionaries to which they often
appended speculations about Gypsy origins and character. It was Enrique Trujillo’s
1844 Vocabulario del dialecto gitano (Vocabulary of the Gypsy dialect), with its
approximately 1,800 words, rather than Borrow’s lists, that became the source of
most of the Spanish Caló dictionaries to follow. With time the number of entries
began to soar, reaching 9,000 in J. A. Tineo Rebolledo’s “A chipicalli” (la lengua
gitana) (“Chipicalli” [the Gypsy language]).35
In the introduction or appendixes to these Caló dictionaries and word
lists, philologists invariably paraded the “new” information regarding the Indian
origin of Romani dialects, but they also passed on comments regarding race and
character that perpetuated the stereotypes of earlier travelogues and histories. Al-
though they often adopted a skeptical attitude regarding negative legends of the
past, they were quick to quote sources in which negative portraits predominated.
As a group the dialectologists advertised themselves as having more Wrsthand in-
formation about their subject than did their foreign models, but there is little evi-
dence of any Weldwork in their texts, and they did little to dispel the racist myths
and stereotypes that Borrow had immortalized. On the whole Spanish linguists and
ethnographers tended to reinforce the widespread notion that even though they
accounted for the “spice” of the nation and should be tolerated on that score, Gyp-
sies constituted the most criminal element of society. One of the earliest Spanish
linguists to discuss Romani dialects, Lorenzo de Hervás, in 1800 accepted as truth
Grellmann’s claim of Gypsy child theft and anthropophagy, congratulating the
French and Spanish governments for forcibly assimilating their Gypsies.36 Half
a decade later Ramón Campuzano, in Orijen, usos y costumbres de los jitanos, quoted at
length from A. Guy d’Agde’s Dictionnaire de la Conversation (Dictionary of conver-
sation) regarding the indolence and profound ignorance of the Gypsies, comparing
them with “Wlthy animals who enjoy wallowing in the mud.”37
In a trend that would become more popular with time, several of the
dialectologists touted the cleverness of Spanish Gypsies vis-à-vis northern types
because of their afWnity with rogue culture. In his preface, A. de C. cites Grellmann
and others for his information about the origin of the Gypsy race but ends by
asserting that “our” southern Gypsies are more astute and therefore more accom-
plished rogues than those of the north. The anonymous M. de R.’s Manual del
baratero: O arte de manejar la navaja, el cuchillo, la tijera de los jitanos (The haggler’s
manual, or the Gypsy art of handling the razor, knife, and shears; 1849) rein-
forced this idea, describing in great detail the Gypsy art of slashing and stabbing
victims. More innocuous, Manuel Díaz Martín’s Maldiciones gitanas (Gypsy curses;
1901) merely documented what George Borrow had previously asserted about the
inventiveness and virulence of Gypsy curses. In El delincuente español. El lenguaje
(The Spanish delinquent: Language; 1896) and its sequel El delincuente español.

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Hampa (antropólogia picaresca) (The Spanish delinquent and his underworld [pica-
resque anthropology]; 1896), the social anthropologist Rafael Salillas discussed the
close relationship between Caló dialects and “Germanía,” which was the seventeenth-
century slang of the Spanish underclass of rogues and petty thieves.38 Not surpris-
ingly, in the conclusion to his book on language, he reported that “Gypsies by
nature and life style are more akin to the delinquent than the normal elements of
society.”39 Because Gypsies had always lacked all but the most rudimentary notions
of production and commerce and were inclined to extortion and trickery, the in-
corporation of Germanía slang into Caló was, according to Salillas, predictable. In
fact, Salillas postulated that Caló had supplanted the older slang of the picaroons
to produce what he termed a caló jerga, or Caló slang, implying that Spain’s Gyp-
sies had not only ingested Spain’s rogue dialect but had adopted its culture as
well, making it their own. He further speculated that in a more recent trend Caló
had also penetrated and itself been altered by the regional dialect of Andalusia,
primarily because of the afWnity between the Andalusian and Gypsy natures. The
result was a jerga aXamencada or Xamencoized slang that reportedly was enjoying a
national popularity at the turn of the century when Salillas was writing. Similarly,
in 1905 Luis Besses published a Diccionario de argot español o lenguaje jergal gitano,
delincuente, profesional y popular (Dictionary of Spanish argot, or Gypsy delinquent,
and professional slang), in which he, like Salillas, mixed Caló and the jerga (“slang”)
terms used by rufWans and the lower classes that were not of Caló origin. The result
of these pseudoscientiWc investigations into Caló dialects was a reinforcement of
the notion of Gypsy treachery, a validation of the general attitude that reXected the
racialized thinking of the century.
Despite his discussions of Germanía and Caló language assimilation,
Salillas painstakingly argued for a distinction between Gypsies as a group that, he
asserted, had never suffered racial discrimination, and the malefactors of the race
whom he identiWed with the hampa or underworld of petty thieves. He also be-
lieved that the national Spanish character had many afWnities with the Andalusian
character, not all of them despicable, which in turn owed much to the Gypsy. Still,
he and his fellow dialectologists did not otherwise participate in the rehabilitative
trend that I outlined above, whose end result was to assimilate loosely all Spaniards
with the Andalusian Gypsy. Based on his quantitative analysis of Caló vocabu-
lary, Salillas concluded that Gypsies as a race exhibited a natural tendency toward
nomadism, both geographic and psychological, and parasitism, and an equally
entrenched aversion to law, order, religion, economy, country, industry, and other
virtues useful to the nation. Thus he perpetuated the trend to cast the Calés as
undeserving of citizenship, their defects outweighing their charms and astuteness.
One of the most inXuential of the dialectologists to follow in the foot-
steps of Salillas was Francisco Sales Mayo, who appended a dictionary to his earlier

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history Los gitanos, su historia, sus costumbres (Gypsies, their history, their customs;
1867), and entitled it El gitanismo, historia, costumbres y dialecto de los gitanos (Gyp-
syism, history, customs, and dialect of the Gypsies; 1870). By this time a new class
of researchers was replacing or at least rivaling the amateur philologists like Cam-
pusano or Díaz de Martín, whose thirst for novelty had often surpassed their regard
for evidence and attention to documentation. Footnotes, glossaries, grammars, and
dictionaries also lent authority to the otherwise impressionistic histories of the
late century. Gypsy speech was becoming what Angus Fraser called “an orchid in
the philological garden,” and Spanish dialectologists were eager to cash in on the
vogue.40 Citing recent Wndings in comparative philology, Sales Mayo was proud to
retire past myths regarding Gypsy origin while propagating new ones more con-
sistent with modern science and political expediency. For example, inXuenced by the
racialized categories of Arthur Gobineau, he believed that Gypsies were Semitic,
the true sons of Sem, not remnants of the Hebrews and Moors expelled from Spain
in the Wfteenth and sixteenth centuries but immigrants either from Northern
Africa via the Near East and Egypt or from Hungary and Germany via the north.
But now, thanks to the “science” of linguistics, he reported that the original home-
land of the Gypsies could be deWnitively established as somewhere in the vicinity
of the Sind River in India. Sales Mayo’s comment about immigrations from Egypt
and Northern Africa would leave a lasting impression on other nineteenth- and even
twentieth-century Gypsyphiles who eventually used his speculations as a means to
hierarchize Spanish Roma groups at a time when promoting Spain’s difference was
politically advantageous.41
To substantiate his claims about the Hindu origin of Gypsies, Sales Mayo
was eager to establish links between modern Caló customs, features, and charac-
ter and those of their present-day co-descendents in India. Both populations, he
argued, were primitive, “with only the vaguest notions of a natural religion, with-
out religious practices or beliefs of any kind, without the knowledge of any other
moral code than that of an absolute materialism, without leaders or laws, without
property and without asylum.”42 The only code by which both the Sind Indians
and the Gypsies live is that of “the freedom to act according to the dictates of their
own desire and needs.”43 By demonstrating the similarities between two such dis-
parate groups, Sales Mayo simultaneously helped to widen the imagined racial gulf
between Gypsy and non-Gypsy Spaniards and bolstered the notion of superior
and inferior races. While elsewhere in Europe anthropologists were struggling to
sort out their Indo-European and Indo-Germanic pedigrees, tentatively identifying
the Aryan race with Christian peoples and “youthful” races and generally demoniz-
ing the Semitic races, it is not surprising that the conservative Sales Mayo should
be so eager to disavow any link with the “indolent” and “voluptuous” Indian Gyp-
sies. And like his northern models, including his primary source George Borrow,

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he used Jews as a handy device to emphasize Gypsy difference, since the former
were also of a different “stock” and like Gypsies belonged to a degraded and degen-
erate race. Sales Mayo repeated Borrow’s explanation for the reasons Gypsies have
been able to survive in Spain while the Moors and Jews did not, indirectly casting
dispersions on the Jews:

This is how, ever humble, ever strange, ever miserable, the Gypsy
has come down to our day; and unlike the Jews, who persist in
mixing with the other races, in exercising their inXuence, in accu-
mulating wealth, in clinging to their cult and ceremonies, they
can travel easily throughout our Spain, in this country where
a Hebrew wouldn’t dare openly declare himself, although there
are a good number of wealthy Jews from Gibraltar to Bayonne,
from the Baleares to Lisbon.44

Because of its more scholarly pretensions, Sales Mayo’s 1870 El gitanismo

quickly replaced Borrow’s The Zincali as the historical authority on Spanish Gyp-
sies. As late as 1915, F. M. Pabanó would quote Borrow at length in his widely
acclaimed Historia y costumbres de los gitanos (History and customs of the Gypsies),
applauding him as the “indisputable authority” on all things Gypsy. In keeping
with modern historiography’s obsession with myths of origin, Pabanó dedicated
the Wrst part of his book to a summary of the most authoritative historical accounts
of Gypsy migrations, citing non-Spanish scholars such as Adriano Colocci, Franz
Miklosich, Heinrich Grellmann, and Grégoire Luis de Rienzi, among others. He was
especially keen to emphasize that Gypsies were not of European origin, assigning
them to the by-then outmoded notion of biblical tribes popularized by Gobineau.
Quoting Sales Mayo, he asserted: “Their yellow skin, svelte bodies, expressive fea-
tures, sharp wit, and eminently material and positive character reveal the perfect
juncture of the primitive qualities of the race of Sem.”45 He also claimed, again fol-
lowing Sales Mayo, that Egyptian Gypsies migrated into Spain from Northern
Africa along with Saracen invaders, while the Bohemians Xed into Eastern Europe
by a northern route in the wake of Turkish invasions. Even though he judged them
to be a racially dissimilar group, however, Pabanó readily associated Andalusian
Gypsies with the usual myths and tales circulating about northern Gypsies, citing,
for example, the 1782 Frankfurt case of cannibalism reported by Grellmann in Die
Zigeuner. He also played a key role in propagating what could be called the great
myth of Enlightenment benevolence featuring Charles III, who ostensibly restored
the dignity of the Gypsies in his Decree of 1783 that declared Gypsies to be Span-
iards with the full rights of all Spanish citizens, provided they adopted a settled
profession, abandoned their traditional dress, and stopped speaking Caló.

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In describing the eighteenth century as the dawn of a great age of toler-

ance toward Gypsies, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish historians
such as Sales Mayo and Pabanó spawned a new myth that reXected the Romantic
anguish about the disappearance of a colorful, preindustrialized past. Once legisla-
tion destroyed what Pabanó called the ley de casta or caste system in Spain, Gypsy
customs, language, dress, and a whole way of living were destined to vanish. Eco-
nomically successful Gypsies ran the risk of deracination, a warning issued in the
Enciclopedia universal of 1907: “Today in Spain the errant Gypsy, the nomad, con-
serves his original character, but the wealthy Gypsy loses them and little by little
assimilates into the other castes.”46 Most Gypsies were becoming indistinct from
the hated busnós (“non-Roma”), and the true Calorró (Gypsy), the one “free from
contamination,” was becoming more and more rare;47 it was even common to see
Gypsy prostitutes, something unheard of in the old order. The alarm sounded by
Pabanó would be repeated by nearly every twentieth-century folklorist and traveler
as it became increasingly important to establish travel credentials by searching
out and describing the “true” Spanish Gypsy as opposed to the assimilated versions
that were populating the cities’ periphery and harassing tourists and neighbors.
Paradoxically, even as these commentators claimed that the Gypsy was incapable
of change, they would lament the passing of the old ways and the disappearance
of the “true” Gypsy that so many foreign travelogues had been predicting.
An important aspect of Pabanó’s project to archive the remnants of an
authentic racial type are the photographs of real Spanish Calés that he interspersed
in Historia, a major innovation that quickly became standard practice in later
ethnographies and histories as new technologies facilitated the mass production
of images. Emile Bégin in Voyage pittoresque en Espagne et en Portugal (Picturesque
voyage in Spain and Portugal; 1852) and Charles Davillier in Espagne (Spain; 1874)
had earlier illustrated travelogues with Gustave Doré’s engravings; and a sprin-
kling of Spanish authors, for example, Sales Mayo, and before him Campuzano, had
also included some of Doré’s engravings in their books, but Pabanó was the Wrst to
introduce photographic evidence of the Spanish Gypsy’s exotic features and what
he surmised was their afWnity with neighboring African peoples. As seen in Figures
8–12, Doré’s acclaimed etchings had featured exuberant Gypsy street dancers with
castanets and tambourines, tableaus of forlorn women begging in the streets with
small children at their breasts, Werce-eyed Gypsy patriarchs, picturesque Sacromonte
caves, and boisterous tavern scenes. Pabanó sought photographic validation of these
earlier vignettes, but, shot on location by an amateur photographer, his images of
real subjects bear little resemblance to Doré’s elaborate compositions. To enhance
the visual content and thereby evoke the desired response, Pabanó (or his edi-
tors) supplied the book’s photographs with colorful captions that in some instances
surpassed the visual evidence but very much evoked commonplace racialized beliefs:

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“The eyes of the Gypsy woman are vague and sleepy with an expression of pleas-
ure”; “Gypsies resemble bivouacking Arabs”; “The vivid and disorganized imagi-
nation of the Gypsy woman is reXected in her face and all of her gestures”; “The
Gypsy passion for independence increases with age”; “Spanish Gypsies generally
lead an errant life and camp in unpopulated areas”; “Andalusian and Xamenco cho-
reography resemble the dances of harem women and odalisques”; “Even the ragged
children have a singular and profound Wxity about their expression”; “The physical
constitution and skin color reXect their origin in hot climates”; “Sadness is the pre-
dominant feature of the Gypsy physiognomy”; “When self interest does not require
her to conceal it, the Gypsy woman has a melancholic expression full of resentful
passion”; “The physiognomy of the Gypsy male is marked and expressive, with a
mixture of arrogance, coarseness, and astuteness.”48
The contradictions manifest in the photos and captions of Pabanó’s Histo-
ria are evidence of Spain’s ambivalence regarding the worth of Gypsies to the nation.
While he is seduced by the notion of a savage people who, if not noble are at least
worthy of esteem, study, and preservation, Pabanó’s conclusions about faculties
and habits express all the loathing and fear that dominant Spanish culture felt for
the minorities that had been expelled centuries earlier. His personal experiences as
director of a prison in Cartageña, his photographic compositions, and the vast
pseudohistorical readings he drew from largely conWrmed his negative assessment:
Gypsies are indolent, arrogant, and mysterious. They want more than anything
else to obtain money without working, often by begging or stealing what does not
belong to them. They reject any offer of help from the government and never learn
from their mistakes, even when severely punished for them. Ignorant, incorrigible,
unrepentant charlatans, they are at permanent war with upright, civilized people
whom they despise. With such a list of defects it is not surprising that Pabanó
disagreed with A. de C. and, echoing George Borrow instead, judged Spanish Gyp-
sies to be more ignorant than their European counterparts: “The foreign Gypsy
usually surpasses the Spaniard in intelligence, in learning, in life style, and even in
wealth.”49 Thus Pabanó resurrected seventeenth-century debates about the worth
of indigent people to the nation, showing once again that the insistence on racial
difference relied upon economic and social contingencies as much as or more than
any scientiWc criteria.

The Contested Racial Genealogy of Flamenco

Twentieth-century historians and sociologists often cast a wary eye on Spanish

Gitanos, generally regarding them as linguistic and ethnic oddities and minimiz-
ing their contribution to the nation, but other forces were at work to calculate

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the cultural contribution of Gypsies to what was becoming a national art form.50
Understanding the relation between the Roma and Xamenco music is often made
more difWcult because, prior to the local color vogue of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, on-location descriptions of popular art forms were rare,
and commentators on Spanish dance and music did not usually distinguish be-
tween Gypsy and non-Gypsy traditions in their accounts of popular culture. In the
eighteenth century this is perhaps not surprising, since Wnes and imprisonment
were periodically levied against those who refused to relinquish their Gypsy dress,
lifestyle, and language, and it is possible that many Calós complied with state
decrees to avoid detection. In 1783 Charles III went so far as to ban the use of the
category “Gitano,” which he regarded as an insult, decreeing: “that those who
are called or call themselves Gypsies are not so by origin or nature nor do they
belong to any tainted race.51 The monarchy’s goal may have been to restore dignity
to an ostracized group, but such a ban only made speaking about this minority
more complicated and did little to ameliorate the living conditions of most Calés,
who remained a despised underclass incapable of entering the workforce as the king
had wanted.
Abroad, the nineteenth century marked a change in the attitude toward
Gypsy culture, largely as the popularity of Bohemianism grew in France, and
folklorism and ethnographic studies Xourished in England. In southern Spain,
according to Gerhard Steingress, the cultural capital of Gypsies was also enhanced
during this period as groups of Calé performers gathered to produce new dance
forms that would eventually form the basis of the professionalized Xamenco reper-
toire. Several local color sketches of Serafín Estébanez Calderón’s collection Escenas
andaluces (Scenes of Andalusia; 1847), especially Baile en Triana (A dance in the
Triana quarter) and Asamblea general (General assembly), popularized these gather-
ings, which Steingress speculates resulted in a type of Andalusian dance and song
that differed from other eighteenth-century popular forms, as well as from the
dances included in González del Castillo’s sainetes or the campWre dances described
disapprovingly in Cadalso’s Cartas marruecas. Steingress insists that this was not
an exclusive activity of the hermetic Calé culture; rather it arose from the gen-
eral “subcultural, artistic ambits of the Gypsy Quarters,” which were becoming
agitanados (“GypsiWed”).52 In turn, we could speculate that this GypsyWcation of
dances and ballads fed into the Gypsyphilia of the Romantic period, creating new
markets and respect for Andalusian popular entertainment and its imagined Gypsy
progenitors.
The Spanish passion for Gypsy folklore and music, however, really began
in earnest with the compilations of the most serious aWcionado of the century,
Antonio Machado y Álvarez (known by the pseudonym DemóWlo), who published
a series of articles between 1869 and 1879 in the short-lived Revista Mensual de

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Literatura, Filosofía, y Ciencias de Sevilla (Monthly journal of literature, philosophy,

and sciences of Seville) and in a periodical called La Enciclopedia, founded in 1877.
In 1881 DemóWlo collaborated with a Calé singer named Juan del Pueblo (“Juanelo”)
to publish Colección de cantes Xamencos recogidos y anotados (Collection of Xamenco
songs, compiled and annotated) in Seville.53 Around this time he also co-founded
the Society of Spanish Folklore and the Society of Andalusian Folklore, which pub-
lished the periodical El Folk-lore Andaluz (Andalusian folklore), which counted
among its members Antonio Machado, Luis Montoto, Alejandro Guichot y Sierra,
Eugenio Noel, Manuel Díaz Martín, Francisco Rodríguez Marín, among others.
The Gypsy contribution to Xamenco became an intense issue for discussion among
these intellectuals in this Wrst stage of what has come to be called Xamencology. In
attempting to trace its genealogy, DemóWlo argued that the cante Xamenco, or Xa-
menco song, was a modern, artistic hybrid of Andalusian and Gypsy provenance, a
product of Romanticism’s love of popular forms coupled with the creativity of
famous singers or cantaores, many of whom he named in his articles. He speculated
that these hybrid modern forms evolved from a primitive Gypsy music, which had
become so Andalusianized that it no longer resembled its earlier forms. This notion
that a primitive Gypsy music predated Xamenco, though unprovable, carried over
into succeeding stages of Xamencology, fueling debates between the gitanistas and
andalucistas, that is, between those who proclaimed Xamenco’s Gypsy origin and
those who insisted on a more generic Andalusian origin.54
Gitanesque music was also fostered in Spain by an elite class of señoritos
whose elaborate juergas combined heavy drinking, commercial sex, and cathartic
music beginning in the 1850s.55 With the agrarian oligarchy’s gradual migration
to the cities, Gitanesque music and dance gained wider appeal, adding to the pop-
ularity of the café cantante (“cabaret”) that already had its detractors by the 1880s
when Xamenco underwent what many purists describe as a period of decadence.56
The rhetoric of decadence and salvation peculiar to the Xamenco complex is a
reminder that its history is a contested terrain where various classes and groups
still dispute questions of quality, authenticity, and deWnitions, demonstrating that
signiWcant cultural capital is at stake. When confronted by the plethora of books
on this subject, one is immediately struck not only by the vast discrepancies, for
example, in the cante jondo genealogical tree, but also by the passion of those who
claim authority to speak accurately on the subject of Xamenco’s ethnic origins. Part
of the reason for this lack of consensus is that Xamenco origins are tied up with
unresolvable issues relating to Romany ethnic identity as it was perceived by the
Romantics, and so to understand the true import of the “Xamenco wars” one has
to study what is to be gained or lost by those who made certain claims regarding
this identity. Confounding the issue is the fact that because Xamenquism became
such a cohesive force in Spain’s growing nationalism, its purity, like that of the

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nation itself, needed constantly to be nurtured, interrogated, and preserved. The

same degeneration panic of ethnologists who already by the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury were lamenting the disappearance of the “pure” Gypsy subject thoroughly
contaminated the Falla group of intellectuals who set out to rescue Xamenco from
vulgarization in the 1920s by devising a Gypsy pedigree.57
The Xamenquism craze, beginning in the Restoration, later rekindled dur-
ing the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, and afterward resurging during the Franco
era, was what Soledad de Mateo has called “a reactionism disguised as Xamen-
quism,” that is, a useful instrument for fomenting nationalism and centralization.58
It also sparked endless debates about the relation between Gitano and Andalusian
identity. As more enthusiasts began to examine the cultural and ethnic roots of
Xamenco music, Gypsy astuteness and other stereotypical qualities gradually came
to be a point of national pride or, in the case of some turn-of-the-century intel-
lectuals, embarrassment. Some folklorists claimed that the national character owed
many of its most distinguishable negative as well as positive characteristics to the
Gypsies. For example, the antiXamenquist Eugenio Noel believed that the Spanish
lust for freedom, disregard for suffering, persistence, and affability were borrowed
from the Gypsies, together with their rebelliousness, envy, mocking attitude, and
disrespect for authority.59 On the one hand, Noel’s readings of the degenerate
Spanish Gypsy are heavily indebted to the racialized theories of the criminologist
Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), and before him the naturalist George-Louis Buffon
and the anatomist George Cuvier, who had cordoned off undesirable races such
as the Roma by pathologizing them. In his notorious regenerationist campaign to
replace bullWghts with concerts and substitute Xamenco music with a more “virile”
classical music, Noel expressed a loathing for popular culture, especially Gypsy
culture, that was shared by many intellectuals of the day, who felt that Xamen-
quism, that “horrible plague,” was anesthetizing the citizenry.60 The “useless and
coarse” Xamenco music had conquered Spain, lamented Noel, “little by little over-
powering the country, and devouring its energies.”61
By framing his discussion of Gypsies in terms of a battle between good
and bad cultural forms, Noel was echoing the alarmist call of Blanca de los Ríos
about the disappearance of a more authentic culture by culturally inferior forms
that were contaminating the Spanish soul. When the truth came out, he warned,
it would be found that gitanismo, translatable as gypsyism, “has devoured the spirit
of entire provinces, boring like termite ants the very spirit of the Race.”62 Despite
this, Noel’s discourse participated unwittingly in the rehabilitative effort I de-
scribed above for its tribute to the Spanish Gypsy’s canniness, musicality, wit,
vibrancy, and Xamboyance. The importance of Noel’s gesture cannot be underesti-
mated; he was among the Wrst if not to accept at least to understand the beneWts
of playing to the national stereotype forged by Romantic writers, and his ability

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to ingest, albeit grudgingly, the Gypsy into the Spanish national character set the
stage that the genius of Federico García Lorca and Manuel de Falla would occupy
in a more positive sense in the 1920s.
Noel’s vision of Spanish national character was clearly a reprise of foreign
stereotypes, a kind of mimicry of the idealized portrait that he argued Spaniards
should recognize and accept. Spaniards may rankle at the foreigner’s interest in
Xamenquism, Gypsyness, and Andalusianism, he wrote, but “polluted as they are,
collaborating without knowing or wanting to, they have invaded with their ulcers
and their colors the Spanish soul.”63 If Spain loves, needs, and seeks out all three,
it is because they belong to her and she to them. For Noel, the shared gracia or
charmed genius of all three national ingredients proved that their origins were
fatally and eternally fused together in the Spanish character. The Gypsy muse may
be ironic, Xamenco forced, and Andalusianism ingenuous, but it is impossible to
separate them; as three sisters they are condemned “to do nothing useful because
each realizes that she is incomplete without the others.”64 In short, Spain was “in-
fected” with its Andalusianism, but Noel concluded philosophically that “there are
illnesses that are loved more than life, poisons that habit transforms into energy,
and dreams that offer panoramas preferable to the hard, stark reality.”65
While Gypsies and Xamenco dance were synonymous for some nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century Spanish musicologists and ethnographers, a gradual
impetus to dissociate the two and portray Xamenco as a national music form that
was agitanado or “GypsiWed,” as Steingress puts it, by gifted Calé performers
and adapters has been the predominant trend in the twentieth century.66 Walter
Starkie’s belief that “the gypsy does not create, he perpetuates”67 would be repeated
in dozens of contexts up to the most recent studies, such as Timothy Mitchell’s
Flamenco Deep Song (1994).68 To some, writing shortly after World War II, it was a
matter of national pride that the original Andalusians (whoever they were) evolved
the cante jondo or “deep song” that was later appropriated by the Gypsies and Arab
“invaders.”69 To others, like Ricardo Molina, author of Misterios del arte Xamenco
(The mysteries of Xamenco; 1967), it was, on the contrary, critical to establish that
the Calés had played a preeminent role in the evolution of Xamenco, especially in
its “purest” or cante jondo forms.
This seemingly endless debate on the relation between music and Gypsy
ethnicity was especially pronounced in the 1920s, when Federico García Lorca
and Manuel de Falla undertook an important rehabilitation of the Gypsy artistic
heritage. At the time, intellectual antiXamenquism was still raging in the Spanish
bourgeois press, and debate regarding the origins of Xamenco was fueled by the fear
that its bastardization in the widely popular format of the café cantante (“cabaret”)
would prove its death knell. As Timothy Mitchell points out, the presiding meta-
phor in Manuel de Falla’s writing on Xamenco was that of pollution versus purity,

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and the solution, a competition to award the best and most authentic nonprofes-
sional Xamenco performers, was a rescue-fantasy that played well among the elite
classes.70 The 1922 cante jondo competition organized in Granada focused attention
on the afWnities and differences between Andalusian and Gypsy culture. Behind the
competition one can discern not only a quest to vindicate the ethnic “treasure” that
foreign composers such as Claude Debussy, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Mikhail
Ivanovich Glinka, and Igor Stravinsky had incorporated into their music,71 but the
yearning for a return to primitive origins, the same impulse that sent nineteenth-
century Romantics off to Greece in search of ruined temples. Not surprisingly, the
Calés of Granada played a signiWcant role in this rescue, since both Lorca and Falla
believed that the Gypsy creative inXuence on Xamenco was decisive even though
they could not precisely deWne it.72 In addition to staging the competition, that
same year Falla published his inXuential El canto jondo (Canto primitivo andaluz). Sus
orígenes. Sus valores musicales. Su inXuencia en el arte musical europeo (The canto jondo
[primitive Andalusian canto]: Its origins: Its musical values: Its inXuence on Euro-
pean musical art; 1922). Lorca followed suit with a conference entitled Importancia
histórica y artística del primitivo cante andaluz llamado cante jondo (Historical and artis-
tic importance of the primitive Andalusian music called cante jondo; also in 1922),
and later his much celebrated collection Poema del cante jondo (Poem of the cante
jondo; 1931). In his prose work Lorca highlighted the essential contribution of
Gypsies to Xamenco, a musical form that he occasionally equated with canto gitano
(“Gypsy music”).73 Sensitive to a widespread anti-Roma sentiment, however, he
was careful to distinguish between what he termed the canasteros (“basket sellers”)
and gitanos bravíos (“wild Gypsies”), and the masters of cante jondo or what he termed
“Xamencos,” whom he described as honorable Calé families living a sedentary life
in Andalusia for many centuries.
Lorca’s most famous collection of poems, Romancero gitano (Gypsy ballads),
written between 1924 and 1927, also capitalized on Spanish Wn-de-siècle escap-
ism by sustaining the myth of a mysterious and tragic people living outside the
conWnes of bourgeois society. By exalting the Gypsy as poetic object, Lorca lent
prestige to the community that would have international reverberations, but his
relation to the actual Calés otherwise differed little from that of other señoritos
whose patronage system was responsible for perpetuating mercenary relations with
Caló entertainers. In a letter to Jorge Guillén, Lorca confessed: “Gypsies are a
theme, nothing more. I could just as well have been a poet of sewing needles or
hydraulics. Besides, this Gypsyism gives me the uncultured, uneducated air of a
savage poet, which you know I am not.”74 However, one needs to take this passing
statement with a grain of salt, since Lorca’s dedication to the “theme” was sustained
and intense. It is possible that like many of his educated contemporaries Lorca truly
believed that the Gypsy was the soul not just of Andalusia but of Spain itself,

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“the most elevated, the most profound, the most aristocratic of my country, the
most representative of their mold, the keeper of the Xame, the blood, the alphabet
of Andalucian and universal truth.”75 Even though the lyrical Gypsy that roams
Lorca’s poetry is clearly a literary construct, “previously minted and codiWed” cen-
turies before by Cervantes, by now it had gained in stature as a symbol of the
nation, thanks in no small part to Lorca’s genius.76
Their knowledge of Xamenco history might have been slipshod, as
Timothy Mitchell claims, but in the wake of the 1922 competition the Spanish
intelligentsia earnestly undertook to redeWne cante jondo “to save it from the en-
croaching advances of mass culture and urban popular singing.”77 As it became
more important to determine who should take credit for Spain’s most prestigious
cultural product, ethnologists and musicologists were led to ever more polarized
positions regarding Gypsy racial identity. Shortly after the end of World War II,
interest in ethnicity was also fueled by events such as the First Gypsy Exposition
of Granada (1948), and a host of books competed to add to the knowledge of Gypsy
folklore and ethnology and to extend the aura if not the poetic vision of García
Lorca. Sadly, many of the texts of folklorists and musicologists of this time con-
tained lengthy paraphrases from earlier works by Pabanó, Sales Mayo, and even
Borrow, who was still quoted frequently, even by those who denounced his super-
Wcial knowledge of Spanish customs and language.
Of the 1940s folklorists, the most scholarly is Cándido G. Ortiz de
Villajos, whose Gitanos de Granada (Gypsies of Granada; 1949) marked a milestone
for its copious footnotes, detailed references to musicologists and dance historians,
skepticism of the españolada (“espagnolade”) cinema craze, and avoidance of ama-
teur anthropology that marred the texts of contemporaries like José Carlos de
Luna, the poet and civil governor during the Franco regime who will be discussed
below. Ortiz registered his weariness at the picturesque superWciality of previous
Gypsyphiles and invoked a new kind of scholarship more in tandem with con-
temporary ethnographic methodology. Nevertheless, his praise of the First Gypsy
Exposition of 1948, with its typical exhibits such as the dioramic reconstruction
of an authentic Sacromonte cave, his exaltation of Granada as the capitol of authen-
tic Gypsydom, and his abundant photographs of folkloric Gypsies, show to what
extent his work echoed the state-sanctioned desire to construct a Gypsy that was
a distillation of all that was beautiful and exportable about Andalusia and Spain
in general. This undercurrent of Francoist-styled patriotism explains the curious
claims of the chapter entitled “En España no hubo persecución contra los gitanos”
(There was no persecution against Gypsies in Spain), which understandably would
scandalize future Gypsy scholars.78 Understanding this denial is key to interpret-
ing modern Spanish thought about Roma minorities. In the view of Ortiz and some
of his contemporaries, the royal decrees and proclamations of previous centuries

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had never singled out any race for persecution; they merely outlawed the vicious
customs and paganism of those commonly called Gypsies whatever their racial
identity. The conditions stipulated in royal decrees were not, according to Ortiz,
particularly onerous. On the contrary, they humanely attempted to assimilate Gyp-
sies into Spanish cultural life and rehabilitate them as full citizens of the state.79 In
this imaginative revision of history, assimilation had occurred without the repres-
sion and expulsions forced upon other marginal populations such as the Jews and
Moors whose religious beliefs were more entrenched and therefore more censured.
Versions of this benign repression narrative still inXuence the work of even the
most insightful Xamencologists such as Timothy Mitchell.80
Primarily interested in music and dance that were among Spain’s principal
postwar exports, Ortiz focused on the Gypsies of Granada and declared the Sacro-
monte caves as the only authentic locale where the “pure” manifestation of Gypsy
culture could be witnessed. Plaudits of the distinction and purity of Granadan
Gypsies were sure to please the thousands of spectators who visited the 1948 expo-
sitions and dance recitals and who wanted to believe, like the mayor of Granada
who prefaced Gitanos de Granada, that Gypsies represented the “crystallization” of
the Spanish character. For Ortiz and the army of 1950s ethnographers conducting
Weldwork on Andalusian popular culture, Andalusian Gitanos provided the “salt
and pepper” to an already well-seasoned Southern culture that contributed a rich
essence to the Spanish character in general:81

Today the Gypsies of Granada constitute, as they have for cen-

turies, a select group apart from all others of their race. Because
of their unique characteristics, the beneWts derived from shared
residency with the Granadan people, the fact that since the Re-
conquest Granada has concentrated from all points of Spain the
multiple and rich spiritual essences that Xower throughout the
Hispanic world, and because of their lengthy sojourn in the mar-
velous Granadan climate, they have distinguished themselves from
their ethnic brothers scattered throughout the world.82

Ortiz relished the fact that spice and food have fused in the Spanish soul,
but his aim was clearly to identify what was authentically Gypsy and to distin-
guish, to the extent that this was possible, elements of the music spectacle called
the zambra that were authentically Gypsy from those of Moorish-Andalusian
descent.83 What Ortiz “discovered” was that very few zambra elements were of
Gypsy origin, but those that were belonged to the most primitive tradition called
cante jondo: “the most ancient and most integral, the most similar to those that are
still intoned today in certain regions of India and other places in the Orient.”84

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Unfortunately, establishing the purity of cante jondo and identifying it with a sin-
gle race served to reinforce racialized thinking that was to dominate Xamencology
for many decades as researchers continued taking sides on the debate. A careful
reading of his footnotes also reveals that Ortiz, like the sources he cited, believed
that the most primitive of songs are so identiWed because of their resemblance to
the sounds of birds and animals, which made them seem more suited to the Gypsy’s
animal-like temperament. As is clear from these types of distinctions, the apoca-
lyptic attitude of Blanca De los Ríos’s völkisch racism was still infecting writing
about the difference between Andalusian Payo and Gypsy during the Franco
regime. For all their desire to sell Spain’s glorious castizo, that is, its pure-blooded,
imperial heritage, the writers of the Franco era knew that what really sold in the
world-tourism market in which Spain was eager to participate was Andalusianism,
and a deWning element of it, its “salt and pepper,” was its Gypsy heritage.85 The
promotion of Andalusianism with its strong nostalgia for a Romanticized, myste-
rious past helped to construct a collective national identity while camouXaging
unequal relations of power and repressive social structures.86

The “Betic” Gypsy

Some of the myths and anecdotes repeated unremittingly during the nearly hun-
dred years from J. M. (Passa)’s 1832 Historia de los gitanos until F. M. Pabanó’s 1915
Historia y costumbres de los gitanos are missing from the studies of the 1950s, and
refutations of these earlier works became more numerous as the study of documents
yielded to modern Weldwork techniques and social theory. For example, the poet
José Carlos de Luna introduced his Gitanos de la Bética (Betic Gypsies; 1951) by
complaining that “Don Jorgito,” as he affectionately called George Borrow, may
have dealt with Gypsies in jails, inns, and on the road, but he had “penetrated”
their customs very little. Still, Luna and many of his contemporaries continued
to Wll their texts with uncredited paraphrases and direct quotes from Borrow and
other ethnologists and philologists who followed in his footsteps, such as Pabanó.
And, like his predecessors, Luna essentialized Gypsy character by providing a list
of stereotypical traits and behavior discouragingly familiar to readers of nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century tracts. What distinguished Luna was his attempt to
poeticize his material through a discourse interspersed with witticisms, aphorisms,
anecdotes, Wgures of speech, and Caló vocabulary. Under the double inXuence of
early ethnographers and travelers with their taste for the exotic and the rehabili-
tated, poeticized, and later nationalized, icon of the 1920s and 30s, it is perhaps
inevitable that a 1950s poet should still construct the quintessential Spanish
Gypsy as an atavistic creature:

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The Gypsy brain is sometimes as slippery and tortuous as the

paths that capriciously wind between the prickly pear trees and
the magueys upwards to the dark soot-covered cave of bad inten-
tions in which the scorpions of animosity boil over. Other times
it is smooth, dried by the strange light that also blinds it; wide
enough for the atavisms that rumble around inside it, or boiling
like a sea of lava through which fantasy and illusion travel with-
out helm or compass.87

Once Wnished with his hackneyed account of Gypsy character and physi-
cal features, Luna included lengthy sections interspersed with Caló phrases to
re-create daily scenes and conversations. Like all outsiders who hope to convince
readers of their authority, Luna boasted that he was not fooled by the chicanery of
his informants. To demonstrate familiarity with his subject, he inserted personal
testimony and real names to describe some of the characters of his anecdotes, but
he also distanced himself from his subject through his use of sarcasm and the
rehearsal of received knowledge. To his credit, in the second half of Gitanos de
Bética, Luna transcribed a series of legends, folktales, and traditions that the Roma
tell among themselves instead of passing along only the stories (like the Logroño
story) or customs (such as the use of the diclé, or chastity cloth) that he pirated
from previous accounts. Where Luna really shines, however, is in his discussions
and classiWcations of cante jondo and his descriptions of nightclub or tablao scenes
and other more spontaneous dance-ins of which he gave detailed account, combin-
ing his own observations with clariWcation from musicologists whose texts he used
to support his speculations. Cante jondo, he concluded, had its roots in the strange
musica Wcta or false music imported to Spain from Northern Africa during the
Moorish invasion. The Gypsies, some of whom preceded that invasion, were in-
terpreters and disseminators of the earlier lascivious dances of the Romans. They
subsequently branded the Moorish music with their distinct personality to such
a degree that this music resembled very little the Arab music from the north of
Africa or even Morocco.
Luna’s musical classiWcations succumb to many of the racial fallacies of
ethnologists who struggled in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to sep-
arate strains of Aryan and non-Aryan bloodlines, except that he relied on impres-
sion and intuitions instead of on the pseudoscience of earlier anthropologists. What
united them was an unspoken desire to represent some groups as slightly outside
the range of human norm. For Luna, a true Gypsy dance, the opposite of the har-
monious studio dance, was instinctual and animalistic: disconcerting, unpredict-
able, undeWnable, rebellious, and scandalous: “In short, . . . Gypsy dances sting,
scratch, and bewilder because they enrich their simplicity with a wealth of grace

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and bravado intended to arouse, executed by bodies that sway like pennants, leap
and crackle like pine cones in hot embers, and that twist, give off sparks, and burn
like the Xames of pin oaks stirred up by frolicking, lewd devils.”88
Another peculiarity of the Luna text is its insistence on differentiating
between what he called “Betic” Gypsies and Hindu or “Zincali” Gypsies. The
Betic group, according to Luna, migrated to Spain from Northern Africa during
the Arab incursions and in consequence are racially dissimilar to the northern
“Hindu” or “Hungarian” groups. Thus Luna ratiWed the ancient Roma myth of an
Egyptian origin: “Our” Gypsies, he proudly asserted, migrated from southern to
northern Spain centuries before the tribes of India “invaded” Europe.89 At the same
time, Luna’s descriptions of living arrangements and customs also insisted upon
the fundamental, indelible difference between Gypsies and more civilized, non-
Gypsy Andalusians. Spain’s Gypsies were cleaner, more afXuent, and better dressed
and had progressed vis-à-vis the less civilized Hindu Gypsies, since they lived
in Wxed dwellings instead of wagons, but even these “superior” Spanish Gypsies
neglected the comforts and aesthetics of those higher up on the scale of human pro-
gress. Like the birds of the air, one of Luna’s favorite metaphors to describe Gypsy
physiognomy, Betic Gypsies make their “nest” in any abandoned shelter at hand: a
cave, a hut, ruins on a hillside, or a bridge underpass. A member of the Andalusian
gentry and a civil governor in the Franco regime, Luna clearly perpetuated the
señorito attitude toward the popular classes that characterized Gypsy studies in the
Wrst half of the twentieth century. No amount of admiration for his subject dulls
the impression that for him the Gypsies’ animalistic traits were subhuman.
Though he did much to popularize it, Luna did not invent the North
African racial genealogy of Andalusian Gypsies. This undocumented migratory
route was the legacy of ancient myths that sundry writers and the Roma themselves
propagated during their European diaspora. As early as 1618, a character in Vicente
Espinel’s Picaresque novel Marcos de Obregón (Marcos of Obregon) mentioned that
Gypsies reminded him of the children of Israel Xeeing Egypt. As we saw in Chap-
ter 2, writing in 1832, J. M. was one of the Wrst modern historians to suggest a
North African route for the Gypsies of southern Spain, a theory he based on the
divergent skin colors of southern and northern groups. J. M.’s theory was then rati-
Wed by Francisco de Sales Mayo in 1867, although soundly rejected by the French
historian V. Rochas in 1876. Even before the end of the nineteenth century, it was
widely customary in Spain to speak about the Calés, especially the Calé women, as
descendants of the pharaohs. For example, commenting on an engraving of Inglada’s
La gitana (The Gypsy woman) in 1883, the editor of the magazine Ilustración
Artística emphasized the Gypsy woman’s Egyptian charm: “What a female! Good
God! . . . Copper-colored skin, black, rebellious hair, a Wgure as Xexible as a palm
tree, forms whose perfection cannot be disWgured by the ill-Wtting dress that barely

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hides them, a type of embellished sphinx to give us an idea of how beautiful women
were in the time of the Pharaohs.”90 A few years later (1885) Blanca de los Ríos,
less exuberant in her praise as we have seen, described an old Gypsy woman sitting
on the ground in front of her cave as an “Egyptian mummy, who, having left her
pyramid, takes advantage of the sun to repair her shroud.”91 Even today la faraona
(“the Pharaohess”) remains a popular epithet, a badge of honor, for those judged
the most classical of Roma Xamenco entertainers.
For his part Luna validated this problematic Egyptian genealogy with the
aid of photographs and accompanying captions of Andalusian racial types. To illus-
trate the similarity between Gypsies and ancient Egyptians, he superimposed a
sketch of a cantaora printed on tissue paper over a photograph of a statue of what
British archeologists have interpreted as a predynastic Egyptian funeral mourner
pouring ashes on her head. The combined effect, reproduced in separate images
in Figure 29, provides what can only be thought of as a comical proof of ethnic
afWnity. Luna preferred to think of this statue as a dancer rather than a mourner as
she is described by British Museum curators: “She appears to be a dancer with
pronounced curves that the primitive Egyptians preferred. . . . And so with that
theory up in Xames, let her be thought of as a good Andalusian Gypsy in the style
of the Macarrona. Nothing can stop us from imagining that while in London
one throws ashes on the head, here we dance solares instead.”92 It is a pity, writes
Luna, that space does not permit further discussion of Sumerian and Semitic Wgures
and their afWnity with Andalusian Gypsies; sufWce it to offer a series of photographs
of Sumerian goddesses housed in the British Museum, which he helpfully accom-
panied by suggestions validating their similarity with Spanish Calés.
Grasping for any shred of evidence, many Gypsyologists resorted to lin-
guistic etymology to demonstrate the distinct genealogy of Andalusian Calés. The
amateur anthropologist and musicologist Rafael Lafuente (1955) based himself
on linguistic, racial, and character similarities between ancient peoples and their
modern-day descendants to accomplish this. Linguistically the key evidence for
Lafuente’s claim of an Egyptian origin rested on the terms erái and arianó, which
signify “lord” and “noble” but also “oppressor,” or, as he translated it, “lord master
belonging to the barbarous or non-Gypsy people.”93 If Gypsies were Aryans, he
asked, as those who hold for a Indian origin claimed, why would they use the word
Arianó to mean oppressor? More likely, he concluded, Gypsies were originally
Egyptians oppressed by the Aryans who invaded northern India where they had been
exiled. They were, as their name Rom (Romani, Roma, Romné, romanó) implies,
grandsons of the Egyptian romenchemi, possibly inhabitants of Rumanieh. Lafuente
dated their exodus from Egypt in 525 B.C.E. during the reign of the last pharaoh,
Psamtik III, who was defeated by Cambyses II of Persia. According to legend,
which Lafuente interpreted in a literal sense, Cambyses allowed Psamtik to choose

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6,000 of his subjects to accompany him into exile in Mesopotamia. From there, he
theorized, a splinter group of Egyptians found its way into modern Pakistan and
eventually into northern India, where the Egyptians were forced to adopt Aryan
customs and language but swore a pact to remain racially pure by not intermarry-
ing with their oppressors. The name zíngano, and its European variations Zigeuner,
Tzigani, Sinto, Zingaro, he conjectured, was an adoption of surnames of the inhab-
itants of Sind in southern Pakistan where the Gypsies had lived for many centuries.
To achieve a more accurate racial proWle based on evidence supplied by
physical anthropology, Lafuente recommended a comparative study of the facial
features of Spanish Gypsies and statues of the ancient Egyptians from the Wrst

Image not available

fig. 29 Figurita posterior al Diluvio, unsigned photo (left); (right) sketch of a cantaora from
José Carlos de Luna’s Gitanos de la Bética (1951). Courtesy of Pedro Cervera Corbacho, Servicio de
Publicaciones, Universidad de Cádiz.

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dynasties, similar to what Luna had attempted four years earlier with Sumerian stat-
ues. To this end he included in the section of his book entitled “Do They Descend
from the Pharaohanic Egyptians?” three photographs of Egyptian pharaohs, their
similarity with Gypsies apparently so obvious as not to warrant a caption. How-
ever, we ought not, he suggested, lay too much stock in physical similarities, since
in twenty-Wve centuries some racial intermixing was inevitable, especially because
of the age-old Gypsy tradition of baby snatching. Still, he separated what draws
ancient Egyptians and Spanish Gypsies together is a shared temperament: Hero-
dotus described the Egyptians as a happy people given to music and with a formi-
dable zest for life. Surely, this was the character, much of it preserved, of the
people expelled from their native lands in the sixth century? Spanish Gypsies, he
concluded, were the carefree “grasshoppers,” and the rest of Europe’s Gypsies
the hardworking “ants” of the fabled story.94 This carefree disposition continues to
delight Andalusians for whom the Gypsy incarnates individualism, imperviousness
to social imperatives, and rebellious independence. Evidence of this admiration is
the Andalusian custom of dressing up like Gypsies during feast days, which they
do to “avenge themselves, unconsciously, of a world that tends ever more towards
uniformity, insipidity, and the ‘standard’ type.”95
Lafuente laid claim to an illustrious Egyptian origin for the Spanish Calés
to enhance their stature as a deWning element that “speckles” the Spanish national
character: “To get a sense of a vast sector of our social and human makeup, it is nec-
essary to take into account the zíngaro or Caló ferment whose presence speckles not
a few manifestations of national purity.”96 At the same time, he was also keen both
to disassociate Calés and Zíngaros from the Aryan race and to portray Calé charac-
ter as a mere “caricature” of the good and bad traits of the Andalusian Payo. In part
this impulse may have been a byproduct of the Germanomania that earlier in the
century pressed to establish the inferiority of the Gypsy race by divorcing it from
Aryan origins and recasting it as Semitic. Lafuente’s racialized thinking was much
more nuanced, however. He did, after all, abduct and then marry a Calé woman,
Soledad, with whose family he traveled for a period in southern Spain. Still, his
views of an innately Xawed Gypsy character demonstrate the general trend of the
1950s to rehearse the differences between Andalusian and Gypsy character to exalt
the former over the latter. His positive assessment of the Gypsy contribution to
Spanish character was diminished by repeated demotions of their cultural contri-
butions: “The Gypsy has not been nor ever will be a creator, rather he is a perpe-
trator and interpreter.”97 Nevertheless, Lafuente predicted that the Andalusian and
Gypsy character would inevitably dissolve into each other, since by nature the
Andalusian people are “lazy, hyperbolic, gay, extraverted,” and all of this “comple-
ments the Gypsy.”98 Like his contemporaries, he rehearsed the history and deWning
characteristics of the Gypsies as if theirs were a monolithic race, even though he

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believed paradoxically that it was destined to meld into the national character. If
Gypsies added the spice to Andalusian character, as it was fashionable to argue in
the 1950s, it was the more “feminine” Andalusians who accounted for the sweet-
ness that would over time infuse the Castilian character, producing a more pleas-
ing national type: “In regards to the reWned, feminine, and passive Andalusia, the
Castilians have become the new barbarians. The Andalusians, however, will take
care to soften their hard conquerors. Andalusia is the sweet sediment at the bottom
of a bitter drink, and this honeyed sediment will dissolve over the centuries, sweet-
ening the character and language of the Castilians.”99
Linguistic evidence and a more empirical analysis of the few surviving
rites and customs that northern and southern Roma groups share are beginning to
dispel the myth of an Egyptian origin of the Calés. But as mentioned above, the
claim of Calé distinctiveness was still largely held in the late twentieth century,
and schools still teach that Spanish Gypsies descended from two groups, one from
Northern Africa and the other from Northern Europe.100 In 1961 the French eth-
nologist Jean-Paul Clébert would further popularize Luna’s claims of the Egyp-
tian origins of Andalusian Roma in Les Tziganes (The Gypsies), citing as evidence
that there were no Germanic terms in the Caló dialect and that the dialects of the
northern Romanichals and southern Calés were mutually incomprehensible. Clébert
speculated further that the date for their arrival across the Strait of Gibraltar coin-
cided with the Wrst sightings of groups in Barcelona in the mid-Wfteenth century,
and this version of dual migratory patterns is still widely accepted by many Span-
ish Gypsyologists today, demonstrating how the myth endures stubbornly in the
absence of any deWnitive, genetically based studies refuting it. For example, in his
impressionistic Historia del pueblo gitano (History of the Gypsy people; 1990), Juan
José Santos Rivas revived Clébert’s thesis. Similarly in Gitanos, moriscos, y cante
Xamenco (Gypsies, Moors, and Xamenco song; 1989), Manuel Barrios noted the “sig-
niWcant parallels” between modern Gitanos and the Moorish women described
by travelers during the late Wfteenth century: their love of pleasure, vengefulness,
bravura, all “prove” that when the Wrst Roma arrived in northern Spain, there already
were Gypsies in Andalusia, “in all probability originating in North Africa.”101
Later, in his Las oscuras raíces del Xamenco (The obscure roots of Xameco), Barrios
speculated that Gypsies were of Hebrew origin, the two nomadic peoples sharing
words like Adonay and Lilith, and numerous character traits: “bitterness, exalta-
tion, fatalism, traditionalism, dissatisfaction. and cunning.”102
Other commonplaces about Gypsies weave their way through the same
texts that popularized the myth of an Egyptian origin. Up until the mid-twentieth
century, images of the melancholy or, in contrast, intense and Werce-eyed Gypsy were
repeated in nearly every history book, narrative, painting, or song. In 1841 Borrow
reinterpreted the “burning” eyes earlier reported by J. M. as “phosphorous,” and

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this adjective caught favor and was passed along by Francisco de Sales Mayo in
1867, F. M. Pabanó in 1915, and from there to the Irish Romany Rye, Walter
Starkie. Eventually, French authors opted for the term “electric,” used, for example,
by Edmond Goncourt in Les Frères Zemganno (The Zemganno brothers), whereupon
the metaphor traveled into modernity. Carlos de Luna (1951) went a step further by
offering his readers visual evidence of these burning eyes in a photograph he cap-
tioned “¡Los ojos de los gitanos!” (The eyes of the Gypsies!) in which the reXected
light of the subject’s pupils has been accentuated (Fig. 30). If one compares this
photograph with the more melancholy female Wgure on the following page, whose
eyes are “veiled by a morning mist,” it is possible to understand the strange con-
tradictions of human sentiment that the Gypsy helped readers to visualize.103

Mother Andalusia

A host of books published in the 1950s around the same time as Luna’s Gitanos de
la Bética focused on Gypsy racial origins to establish an authoritative genealogy of
cante jondo and to cement its national character: besides Cándido Ortiz de Villajos’s
Gitanos de Granada (1949), the Argentinian Anselmo González Climent’s Flamen-
cología (1955); Domingo Manfredi Cano’s Los gitanos (1959); Rafael Lafuente’s Los
gitanos, el Xamenco, y los Xamencos (The Gypsies, Xamenco, and the Xamencos; 1955);
J. M Caballero Bonald’s El cante andaluz (Andalusian song; 1956) and El baile
andaluz (Andalusian dance; 1957); Manuel García Matos’s Bosquejo histórico del cante
Xamenco (A historical brief on Xamenco song) and Historia del cante Xamenco (History
of Xamenco song; 1958); and J. Amaya’s Gitanos y cante jondo (Gypsies and cante
jondo; n.d.).104 While nearly all these texts designated Andalusian Calés as the “aris-
tocrats” of Roma groups because they had assimilated the artistic and spiritual
qualities of the original inhabitants of the south, historians who argued for a Gypsy
origin of cante jondo tended to emphasize a more endogamic racial identity for
Andalusian Roma, distinguishing them both from northern groups of Romanichals
and from non-Gypsy Andalusians. Writers eager to diminish Xamenco’s Gypsy ori-
gins ascribed to a less racialized notion of Gypsy ethnicity and chose instead to
elevate Andalusia to the status of the true mother of Xamenco and cante jondo. The
aWcionado Caballero Bonald preferred to mystify the music’s origins rather than
make any unpopular assertions regarding the ethnicity of its creators. When he
broached the question of Gypsy origins, he spoke vaguely of a cante gitano-andaluz
(“Gitano-Andalusian song”). The anthropomorphized Andalusia: passionate, musi-
cal, changing, anarchical, was for him the true mother of Xamenco music and dance.
All settlers in the region of the Guadalquivir, whether Iberians, Romans, Gypsies, or
Arabs, contributed to its development, but the original Andalusian dance predated

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Image not available

fig. 30 Los ojos de los gitanos, unsigned photo from José Carlos de Luna’s Gitanos de la Bética
(1951). Courtesy of Pedro Cervera Corbacho, Servicio de Publicaciones, Universidad de Cádiz.
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their arrival, “thanks perhaps to the marvelous and ineffable instinct of a civiliza-
tion that was known to exist prior to that of Greece and Rome.”105
Among the books published in decade of the 1950s were several by authors
familiar with the Xamenco entertainment industry possibly through family con-
tacts. J. Amaya’s Gitanos y cante jondo (Gypsies and cante jondo; 19??) focused on the
origin of the Gypsies to the extent that this was necessary to enhance the Gypsy
connection with cante jondo. The interesting problem in this case is not just the
author’s presumed connection with well-known Gypsy families but the fact that a
sizable portion of the book (chapters 5–11) is a literal translation of George Bor-
row’s Los Zincali, a work that Gypsy specialists by this time were fond of ridicul-
ing for its distortions and inaccuracies. It is somewhat of a mystery why a member
of the Amaya family would challenge the simplistic and erroneous judgments of
“outsiders,” quote a “genuine” description of a Gypsy wedding provided by a Calé
informant, and sing the glories of the rich cultural tradition of “our” Andalusia,
while in the central chapters he included Borrow’s manifestly outsider’s voice with-
out explanation or critique. Even more disturbing is the by-now common justiW-
cation for the ofWcial government policies regarding the Gitanos borrowed from
blatantly racist sources. Representing Spain as a place of tolerance where people
were not killed because of their race clearly reXected a national project to rehabili-
tate Spain’s repressive past during the Franco era, when the government was eager
to show that it “was neither fascist nor intolerant of cultural diversity.”106 Gitanos
also reXected José Carlos de Luna’s desire to distinguish the Andalusian Gypsy from
the Bohemian or “Hindu” Gypsies to imagine the former as more aristocratic. Both
urges were part of an ofWcial government cooption of the Gypsy to sell an imagi-
nary Spain, the happy Spain of the españolada theater and Wlm from which the
Amaya family stood to beneWt. In this image even the most negative stereotypes
were poeticized, as is evident in the caption to the dreamy photograph of a Calé girl
that Amaya captioned “The Gypsies also have their poetry: their themes: animal
theft, prison adventures, vengeance killings.”107
With the resurgence of Xamenco entertainment in the 1950s and 60s,
aWcionados, both domestic and foreign, proliferated theories about the origins of
cante jondo. Many insisted on its Arab pedigree, others on liturgical or Jewish inXu-
ences, and for many, as for Luna and Amaya, the Gypsies were the key to under-
standing its origins. But in the absence of any possible deWnitive solution it is
not surprising that many, such as J. M. Caballero Bonald (El baile andaluz [Andalu-
sian dance; 1957]), avoided taking sides by elevating Andalusia to the status of
the true mother of Xamenco’s cante jondo, welcoming all of her performing chil-
dren to her bosom. In seeing Xamenco as a musical gumbo, Caballero was able to
praise all of its individual ingredients: the Andalusian latent predisposition for Xa-
menco music, the happy admixture of Arab and Gypsy blood, a dash of Jewish and

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Christian Xavor. The anthropomorphized Andalusia––passionate, musical, chang-

ing, and anarchical––had become the true source of Xamenco music.
Controversies over the role of Gypsies in the creation and propagation
of Xamenco music did not die out in the 1960s and 70s, even though by this time
the concept of race was being challenged by anthropologists and researchers were
becoming more cautious in their racialized remarks. More than three dozen books
on Xamenco were published during this period, among the more important for our
purposes those by Ricardo Molina: Cante Xamenco (Flamenco song; 1963), Mundo y
formas del cante Xamenco (The world and forms of Xamenco song; 1963), Misterios del
arte Xamenco; ensayo de una interpretación antropológica (The mysteries of Xamenco art:
An anthropological interpretation; 1967), and Obra Xamenca (Flamenco works).108
In Misterios, Molina appears to accept the new anthropological argument that race
is a poor marker of ethnicity, since no one can really be sure exactly what race is.
Repeatedly he emphasized that there were no “pure races,” and, citing Julio Caro
Baroja, he conceded that there had been a “profound and strange compenetration
of Gypsies and Andalusians.”109 At the same time, however, he clearly segregated
Gypsies as a race by contrasting their endogamy with the miscegenation Andalusia
with its “historical mixture of races.”110 Gypsies who married outside their “caste,”
as he called it, were ostracized.111
Claiming Gypsy endogamy helped Molina distinguish positively the Gypsy
Xamenco-performing families from other groups, adding Xavor to his description
of what for him was a “mysterious people” and its equally mysterious music. But,
contradicting himself, Molina also claimed that a mixing of races had occurred at
the lower echelons of Andalusian society: Gypsies shared a past with other oppressed
groups of the Andalusian lumpen proletariat, and together these two groups gave
birth to Xamenco. “Flamenco is an elemental cry, in its primitive forms—of a
people submerged in poverty and ignorance,”112 which explains its emphasis on
death, misery, jail, injustice, despair, hunger, and fatalism. All people, conceded
Molina, have a biological disposition to be preoccupied with death, sex, food, and
birth, but Gypsies approach these themes in their most primitive forms, because
they are a primitive people. Bolstering this notion with Jungian psychology, Molina
characterized the expressional Xamenco complex as a “return to the unconscious”:
the rhythmic clapping, tapping of feet, and clicking of Wngers were infantile, uncon-
trolled, frenetic responses with the “primitive violence of the hurricane’s wind.”113
Even within the “excitable” Mediterranean people the Gypsy plays a decisive role;
the magical spirit or duende that García Lorca had outlined in his famous confer-
ence is, he surmised, “one-hundred percent Gypsy.”114
The backlash against the neo-Romantic ethnicizing of Xamenco in the
1930s and, more recently, the Gitanophiles, or “tardo romantics,” as Mitchell calls
them, of the 1950–60s such as Antonio Mairena and Ricardo Molina (Mundo y

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formas del cante Xamenco (World and forms of Xamenco song; 1953), and their disci-
ples José Caballero Bonald, Francisco Moreno Galván, Blas Infante, José Monleón,
Félix Grande, and Fernando Quiñones, began almost immediately and continues
today. Whatever position researchers take on the issue of Xamenco’s origins, they
feel equally qualiWed to speak on Roma ethnicity, often questioning any degree of
racial homogeneity among groups that identify themselves as Calés. This is espe-
cially the case with thematic studies of Xamenco that attempt to account for the
predictability of certain themes and practices, such as Gerhard Steingress’s Soci-
ología del cante Xamenco (Sociology of Xamenco music; 1991) or Timothy Mitchell’s
important study, Flamenco Deep Song, which focuses on the fatalistic content of Xa-
menco lyrics. Determined to debunk the ethnic revivalism of the 1950s, Flamenco
Deep Song goes to exaggerated lengths both to deracialize Spanish Gitanos and to
impugn Gitanocentric theories of the origins of the Xamenco complex, even though
Mitchell claims that his intention is not to minimize the role of the former in the
creation of Xamenco.115 He disputes the racial core of Gitano identity by challeng-
ing the “legendary gitano endogamy,” arguing that Gypsyologists have “always”
been aware that Spanish Gypsies are a nonracial conXuence of groups, including
exiled Moors, in the seventeenth century, whose core ethnic identity is deWned by
their mode of life rather than by any physiological afWnity. The hybrid Gitano does
not even speak a Romany dialect, according to Mitchell: Caló is just Spanish with
a few Romany words mixed in.116
Mitchell’s privileging of habitus and class over ethnicity and his thesis
equating Xamenco with a “psychodrama” originating in the “traumatized classes”
are a welcome and necessary corrective to a century of Xamenco mythology, but in
their drive to debunk the Gitano pedigree he leaves readers with an inadequate,
undertheorized picture of Romany ethnicity and with the debatable idea that those
best qualiWed to deWne this ethnicity are non-Gypsies. “A gypsy is not the most
reliable guide as to who is a gypsy and who is not.”117 Racial purity is indeed a
social construct just as Xamenco purity is a mirage, and Spain is admittedly an
“ethnic chaos,” as he argues, but Mitchell’s notion of Gitano identity fails to
discriminate adequately between unreliable sources such as Cervantes, Borrow, or
Merimée, and the more credible reports of Gypsyologists like Bertha Quintana,
Teresa de San Román, Merrill McLane, Paloma Gay y Blasco, or Jean-Paul Clébert.
He uses the word gitano (with a lower-case g) to ensure that readers understand
that the category that he is discussing is sentimental rather than primordial, but
this also implies that some ethnic identities are less “proper” than others. He does
not, for instance, employ the terms “andalusians” and “spaniards,” even though
these groups share the same “ethnic chaos” as the Romany and have a sentimental
content just as unbound as his gitanos. In the end Mitchell’s gitano might serve to
characterize the mixed ethnic element involved in the Xamenco entertainment

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complex, but it leaves us with an inadequate idea of the ethnicity of Spanish

Romany groups.
To advance his theory about the importance of thematic and ideological
analyses in determining the origins of Xamenco, Mitchell must dispel the myth
of Gitano endogamy and completely deracialize groups identifying themselves as
Gypsies. For this reason he dedicates much of his book to framing the discussion
of race and ethnic identity, reaching as far back as possible, for example, to George
Borrow, Prosper Mérimée, and Cervantes, for corroboration. It is of course charac-
teristic of all the books reviewed here that their authors take a stand on the origin
of Xamenco with subtle and persuasive reasoning about racial identity. To further
his argument about racial hybridity, Mitchell argues, quoting George Borrow and
more recently Angus Fraser, that laws enacted against Gypsies went largely unen-
forced, and intermarriage was much more common than previously assumed. He
acknowledges that the Roma were routinely inscripted as galley slaves but argues
that few were executed and that many so-called Gypsies were actually the descen-
dants of Moors in disguise. In short, race is not really a relevant factor in determin-
ing who was or is a Gypsy,118 since a Gypsy’s ancestors could be picaroons, rufWans,
Moors, or Jewish converts. The myth of purity is simply an ethnographic alibi
to create a sense of community and a response to group trauma, in other words, a
consoling group fantasy. As further evidence of the nonracial status of the Gypsy,
Mitchell cites an instance of a pair of child-abusers who were “stripped of their
race” by a Gypsy group. More than any other, this last proof shows to what extent
false assumptions regarding ethnic groups that span a large range of host cultures
can result from incomplete knowledge. One does not need to search very far to
realize that the custom of Mahrime or Magherdi, the group’s declaring a Gypsy
“unclean,” that is, a non-Gypsy, is customary among nearly all eastern as well as
western Roma groups, regardless of the purity of their Romani dialect.119
The contemporary cultural anthropologists and ethnomusicologists: Luis
Lavaur in the 1970s, and afterward Mitchell, Steingress, José Gelardo y Belade,
Enrique Baltanás, Génesis García Gómez, Francisco Gutiérrez Carbajo, and José
Mercado in the 1980s–2000, have reacted against the overly simplistic trend in Xa-
menco studies to attribute too much credit to the Gypsies and consequently to reify
one group as the magical source of Xamenco music. For them the desire to cling to
a notion of a “pure” as opposed to a hybrid or “polluted” cante jondo style by iden-
tifying the former with Gypsies is evidence of the power of dominant ideological
forces to shape the meaning of cultural production. The result is a demotion of
other lower-strata groups that shared a cultural space with the Caló and yet are
unrecognized for their role in the evolution of cante jondo, for example, the blind
balladeers, or Andalusian mine workers. It was the habitus of this “motley crew of
underclass castes,” which forged the earliest Xamenco style and lent it its fatalistic

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caste.120 Thus Mitchell sees Xamenco as a form of psychodrama in which alcohol,

drugs, machismo, prostitution, adolescent youth culture, and self-pity play as an
important role as ethnicity. Payos who live in the same milieu, regardless of their
ethnicity, exhibit the same mentality and thus gravitate toward the same fatalistic
music: “A decoding of cante jondo from a psychohistorical perspective will reveal
self-pity, posturing machismo, hypersensitive adolescent egos, and a defensive Xight
into narcissistic ethnicity.”121
As they impugn racial theories, this recent group of scholars has written
“Gypsies,” in the magical and monolithic sense that is the subject of this book, out
of Xamenco. In their prologue to Flamenco y nacionalismo. Aportaciones para una soci-
ología plítica del Xamenco. (Flamenco and nationalism: Contribution to a sociology
of Xamenco), the editors Steingress and Baltanás even banish the word gitano alto-
gether, denying that Xamenco is the “poetical-musical manifestation of a primitive,
mysterious origin, hermetically conserved.”122 The terms “cultural identity” and
“ethnic identity” have replaced the racial designations so fraught with contradic-
tions; distinction between high and popular culture is under siege; and apocryphal
notions like the once popular castizo (“pure”) national identity are suspect. Like
their precursor Luis Lavaur for whom the Gypsy was a kind of mask that was worn
for strategic purposes and cante Xamenco nothing more than a Romantic, “ersatz”
notion that let Roma in the back door of Xamenco’s origins, modern Spanish musi-
cologists are adamantly opposed to recognizing the Calé as having anything but a
passive role in the creation of cante Xamenco.123
Contradicting this trend to see Gypsy ethnicity as an artiWcial epiphe-
nomenon and Gitanophilia as kitsch, William Washabaugh recently recommended
that we accept the Gypsy myth as an invention but one that has become a reality
with political consequences for all Andalusians. In other words, Gitano ethnicity is
“both invented and politically effective,”124 something that Mitchell and Steingress
fail adequately to take into account. As evidence he revisited Manuel Agujetas’ pro-
Gypsy documentary Wlm series “Rito y geografía del cante” (Ritual and geography
of Xamenco) that Mitchell had dismissed as fraudulent. Far from a mere invention,
Washabaugh Wnds the pro-Gypsy Xavor of the series to be a “shrewd struggle to
respond to Franco’s redoubtable and smotheringly broad centralist politics,”125 not
simply a nostalgic journey to a mythical past, but a subtle opposition to Franco
through the support of regionalist interests. What the series truly exalted, in
Washabaugh’s mind, was Andalusian identity as a powerful mix of traditions and
ethnicities. If the Gypsy could be used as a national symbol to spur Western sym-
pathies, it could also serve to garner opposition to a repressive dictatorship. All such
arguments regarding Gypsy ethnicity should lead us to the conclusion that although
race is a largely social category, as long as society is still organized as if races existed
and were classiWable, something any self-identiWed Caló would probably be able to

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afWrm from personal experience, it is still important to understand what are taken
as its parameters.
In many regards the work of Bernard Leblon takes this into account, chal-
lenging the currently popular deethnicization of Xamenco. Musiques Tsiganes et Fla-
menco (Gypsy music and Xamenco; 1990) and Flamenco (1995) roundly stake a claim
for ethnic Gypsies in the creation of the Xamenco complex. In keeping with his
anachronistic insistence on the survival of ancient ethnic identities, Leblon begins
Musique Tsiganes with the statement that the Calés are Indians: In looks and lan-
guage they strongly resemble the Dom musicians of India. The musical heritage of
the groups of musicians who migrated out of India in the tenth century is evident
in the Andalusian music of the Calés, whose ancestors Leblon argues moved west-
ward from India to Baghdad, where they entertained the kings of Abbassides from
the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. In Iran, they separated into two branches,
one descending south through Syria, the other marching west in the direction of
the Balkans. As in his earlier Les gitans de Espagne, Leblon refutes the claim of many
Spaniards that the Calés are descendants of the southern group: This hypothesis, he
explains, “is today deWnitively abandoned, for it is not supported either by histor-
ical documentation or by the study of language.”126
Leblon speculates that the music the travelers from “Little Egypt” brought
with them to Spain was “very oriental,” and he gives a fanciful description of a
concert that might have been performed for the constable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo
in the Wfteenth century: complicated rhythms interspersed with surprising vocal
gurglings mufXed by the vibrations of large tambourines. The sounds are now
raucous, now wheedling, stirring the older men to cries of approval and tears of
pain. Suddenly a woman steps forward and slowly unwinds the skein of her voice:
“somber and quivering and sweet like new wine. She coils it voluptuously like
an obsidienne skein wrapped around the bared hearts of the Wfteen-year-old boys,
until a Wery frisson, coming from the depths of the blood, obliges them to close
their eyes and abandon themselves to this sweet pain, to this tortuous bliss.”127
Despite this ecstatic description and the conviction that the Gitano is an Indian
several generations removed, Leblon understands that what has come to be known
as Gypsy music is an amalgamation, a “Peninsular folklore” or “popular Hispanic
music interpreted and recycled by the Gitanos in their own manner.”128 Just as
Hungarian Gypsy music shows the inXuence of diverse traditions such as Indian,
Persian, Turkish, and Greek, so the music that the Gypsies perform cannot be
thought of as a pure form. On the other hand, he argues that the Roma did not
arrive in Spain empty-handed, so the delicate question arises of the relation
between authentic Gypsy music and the “purely Iberian” music, which they inter-
preted for their Payo audiences. The answer, he believes, is in large measure un-
fathomable, since the dance and music brought with them to Spain remained

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hidden from Payo culture, handed down from generation to generation for their
private use.
Implied in Leblon’s comments is the popular notion that the most authen-
tically Gypsy music is the most plaintive, with echoes of the funeral chants of the
Rom of Central Europe: the Mulenge dilí (“death song”) and rovimaske dilí (“songs
of sorrow”), which resemble the themes of the modern siguiriya, a form that
Ricardo Molina described earlier as the cry of a man mortally wounded by destiny.
Thus the Spanish Roma advanced two styles of music, one public and the other,
until the twentieth century at least, private and familial: “the one popular, folkloric,
and joyful, intended especially to entertain a foreign public and insure a living;
the other intimate, and sincere, formerly performed strictly among themselves.”129
Modern dances such as the fandango are a happy marriage of indigenous and for-
eign folk forms interpreted and reWned by Gypsy artists. If Gypsies did not invent
Xamenco music, what we call Xamenco today “wouldn’t exist without them.”130
In the section “Et les Gitans?” And the Gypsies?), Leblon rehearses the controversy
between the Gitanophiles who claim that the Rom made an important contribu-
tion to Xamenco music and the skeptics who afWrm that Spain’s “chicken thieves”
were also the thieves of music they merely interpreted rather than imported. Fla-
menco appeared Wrst among the Gypsies of southern Andalusia at a time when
they were, according to Leblon, its only interpreters. By the end of the eighteenth
century when Xamenco emerged as an art form, 67 percent of the nation’s Gitanos
lived in the Guadalquivir valley, the birthplace of Xamenco. Using as their “metal”
the local musical traditions, they “forged” a new music from the “live coals,” which
for Leblon were the tonás, seguiriyas, and soleás intrinsic to the Xamenco complex.131
Writing so passionately in the 1990s, Leblon is evidence that the disputes of Xa-
menco scholars continue, and so also their claims of Gitano identity, except that
now ethnicity has replaced race as the disputed term to refer to Gitano identity.
Representatives of the famous Gitano Xamenco dynasties still perform
today in Granada and elsewhere in Andalusia, although many of the best dancers
now seek foreign venues where the pay is higher and they are less exploited by the
tourist industry.132 Ethnicity still plays an important role in the Xamenco hier-
archy, as can be seen from the 1982 event that took place in Granada to revive
the Xamenco in the Sacromonte caves and to foster interethnic dialogue. In that
year approximately three hundred of Granada’s majority population organized an
encounter with the city’s Calés, whom they honored with marks of distinction:
special seating, gifts of Xowers, and ceremonial presentations. The occasion was the
publication of a major new work by Angel Carmona entitled Romi: Sacro-Monte
1880–1980 (The Romany: Sacromonte, 1880–1980). Well-intentioned though it
was, Bertha Quintana points out that the event did little either to encourage a
resurgence of the Granadan Xamenco venues or to forge better relations between

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Payos and Gitanos.133 Five years later, Quintana still found that the famed Zam-
bras of the Sacromonte district had not been revitalized,134 most of the Calé resi-
dents having emigrated to the city below. In the wistful conclusion of Francisco
Izquierdo Martínez, “the Monte way is no longer inhabited by Gypsies; it is now
the Wall Street of a folkloric capital that is still susceptible to proWteering.”135
As this book goes to press, many of the caves at higher elevation are abandoned,
their lack of electricity and water too harsh for all except the occasional squat-
ters who from time to time make their home there, much to the annoyance of
those in the more established cave dwellings below.136 Nevertheless, a degree of
what scholars call gitanismo or “Gypsyness,” deWned in a hundred different ways,
still pervades the Xamenco complex with its themes of freedom, persecution, and
Gypsy lore.137

The Screening of Gypsyness

The generation following the 1898 Spanish-American War spawned a school of

popular playwrights, notably Rafael de León, Manuel Quiroga, and especially the
Quintero brothers, who featured Andalusian Gypsies in important roles. One could
argue that the prominence of Gypsies in these popular comedies was an improve-
ment over the stock Golden Age representations as well as those of the later
Romantic literature that fed off the GyspyWed popular theater of the eighteenth
century. Fortunately, most modern writers refrained from the type of sensationalism
that characterized Isaac Muñoz’s morbid exoticism or Eugenio Noel’s pessimism,
but few avoided the stereotypes inherited from Romantic and Orientalist authors.
Well into the 1930s it remained fashionable to measure Gypsies according to a
bourgeois standard of human progress and accomplishment, which meant dwelling
on their latent animalistic characteristics and portraying them in art and literature
as mysterious and unknowable, natural beings whose dark beauty was transitory and
whose language, notions of religion, social organization, and conduct were primi-
tive. At the same time, a somewhat brighter image was emerging in the 1930s that
would polish the Gypsy image as a therapeutic antidote to the smug and material-
istic existence of modern bourgeois society; in other words, it became fashionable
to imagine a “good” Gypsy who could by example teach others a better way of life,
in contrast to the femme fatale that she had represented in some modernist Wctions.
The reasons for this transformation are complex and do not represent in any sim-
ple way an abatement of the racism of earlier centuries.
According to their great admirer Rafael Cansinos Assens, the principal
accomplishment of the Quintero brothers and their imitators was to obscure the
darker side of the soul, allowing Andalusians to look at themselves in such a bright

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mirror that all shadows would disappear.138 The bright mirror was bathed in re-
Xections of happy-go-lucky entertainer Gypsies who performed in many of these
comedies. José Quintero and Pascual Guillén’s 1935 Morena clara (The fair brunette/
tawny-skinned woman), shortly after made into a successful movie directed by
Florián Rey, exempliWed this trend to portray the Gypsy as an asset rather than
a nuisance or detriment to modern society. Trinidad, a beautiful young woman
on the wrong side of the law, worms her way into the household of Enrique, the
district attorney who has just prosecuted her. Through her magnetic charm and
generosity she is able to transform him from a righteous, teetotaling prig into a
passionate lover of life, women, and liquor. Trinidad also capitalizes on her skill at
picking pockets to resolve the family’s Wnancial crisis, demonstrating that the
exchange between Gypsy and Payo could be mutually beneWcial. Thus the model
Gypsy woman served both as a humanizing inXuence and a Wnancial asset, and
theatergoers were invited to laugh at themselves and at their Gypsy neighbors who
mingled freely in the same urban spaces.
The celebration of feminine Gypsy “humanity” was further foregrounded
in what has come to be called the españolada or espagnolade craze in Spanish cin-
ema of the 1930–50s that in the beginning drew heavily on the scenarios of the
Quintero brothers and other popular musical reviews like Vincent Lleó’s La corte
del Faraón (The pharaoh’s court; 1910). Racial difference, while visibly marked in
some of the españoladas, is nevertheless undermined in many respects in a complex
play of racial denial and acknowledgment implicit in the “fantasy” of miscegena-
tion, as Jo Labanyi has described it. The star of these musical comedies is usually
a woman of humble origins, often a Gypsy played by a non-Roma folclórica, the
popular ballad singer who helps the audience bridge the gap between Gypsy and
Payo.139 As Eva Woods has demonstrated, moviegoers expected the folclórica to play
the role of, or at least vaguely resemble, a Gypsy, something accomplished through
artful application of makeup, although the fair-skinned entertainers were clearly
not to be mistaken for “real” Gypsies.140 Still, it may seem paradoxical that in this
ultraconservative moment of Spain’s post–Civil War period Gypsies would Wgure
so prominently, especially when, as we have seen, their racial difference was care-
fully scripted in the thousands of pages dedicated to deWning Andalusian popular
culture. One explanation is that the Gypsy woman served as a metaphor for Fascist
Spain’s desired rehabilitation in an international arena following the Civil War.
The Wgure of the performing Gypsy provided a marketing tool for celebrating
Spanish popular culture abroad as well as a handy propaganda tool of the Francoist
government, which used commercial popular culture to mask the harsh realities of
everyday life for many Spaniards, exalting the Romantic vision of eternal Spain,
free from the tyranny of the modern.141
The españolada Wlms avoided the intellectual purism of the Xamenco

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specialists: As in all Andalusian musical comedy Wlms it is low rather than high
art and the poor rather than the rich that triumph, their success measured in terms
of popularity, talent, and material wealth, a populist message that had clear ideo-
logical utility.142 Winner of a beauty contest in Suspiros de España (Spanish sighs;
Dir. Benito Perojo, 1938), discovered in a cabaret in María de la O (Maria O; Dir.
Francisco Elías, 1938), or by a radio station in Torbellino (Whirlwind; Dir. Luis Mar-
quina, 1941), made famous by a portrait painter in Mariquilla Terremoto (An earth-
quake called Mariquilla; Dir. Benito Perojo, 1938), these humbly born women rise
to meteoric success and offer audiences a glamorized, Andalusianized, visions of a
Spanish nation able to embrace popular classes and culture. As Kathleen Vernon
has noted, the españolada “employs the gitana not as an exotic other against whom
Spanish identity is deWned, but as a Wgure of inclusion, . . . an inclusive, feminine
image of stereotyped Andalucian/Southern Spanishness.”143 The trope of Gypsy-
ness, then, was both an avowal and disavowal of racial difference in that as national
icons these women represented all Spaniards while standing out as exceptional sub-
jects who were free from the moral constraints of their admiring middle-class audi-
ences. As such they were not wholeheartedly embraced by Falangist ideologues of
the Franco era, who objected to their seediness and stereotypes and their focus on
Spain’s feudal underdevelopment,144 but they incorporated an acceptable amount
of nationalist discourse to pass the censors and lead some modern historians to
criticize them as exponents of a Francoist aesthetic.145 Their subliminal message,
according to Jo Labanyi, was that Spain needed to present a united front to the
world.146 At the same time, they nostalgically harkened back to a precapitalist
moment, ethnically coded as a Gypsy idyll, alleviating anxiety about Spain’s trou-
bled slide into modernity.
Finally, as Vernon emphasizes, the españolada cast the Gypsy woman as
the overpowering force in Payo male/Gypsy female relationships: In nearly every
case it is not the Gypsy who assimilates Payo culture, but the Payo who is human-
ized by becoming more Gypsy-like (and woe is he if he cannot). This follows a
pattern that as we have seen begins with Cervantes’ “La gitanilla.” In subsequent
prose Wction it is overwhelmingly the case that a wealthy man, typically from
northern Spain or Northern Europe, falls in love with a passionate Gypsy woman
closely identiWed with stock Andalusian scenarios. The same match of a modern,
northern male protagonist with a hot-blooded, southern female protagonist adopted
by nineteenth-century storytellers predictably became the Wlm norm. If, as in
some españoladas, the male hero is Andalusian, he is either a wealthy landowner or
shares with the northerner a disciplined, bourgeois existence, until a confrontation
with a Gypsy whose Xexible value system transforms him into something of a
comic Wgure. In Morena Clara, the Wlm version as well as the play, Trini transforms
the stuffy prosecutor Enrique into a lover of life. In Suspiros de España, a Sevillan

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laundress seduces the Cuban sponsor of a beauty contest. At the conclusion of Tor-
bellino, a Basque radio producer who despises Andalusian culture ends up in Seville
learning how to be more “Xamenco” next to his lover’s grated window. In a series
of steps the Gypsy instructs her suitor to don a wide-brimmed hat, then push it to
one side, lean with his elbow against the grate, and cross one leg in front of the
other. The movie ends with the GypsiWed suitor offering a somewhat anemic olé to
his lover’s singing. In Canelita en rama (Cinnamon stick; 1942), the orphaned Rocío
sparks the Wre of love in Rafael, the son of a wealthy landowner educated in Oxford,
whom she inspires to regain what is cast as a more salubrious Spanishness. Simi-
larly, for the love of a Gypsy singer, José Luis abandons his father’s estate to become
a bullWghter in La Lola se va a los puertos (Lola goes to the ports; 1947). Figure 31
shows an ebullient Lola singing for adoring fans in a port scene, a symbol of the
magnetism of the cinematic Gypsy.
An exception to this rule is the protagonist of Filigrana (Filigree; 1949),
whose heroine María Paz marries the wealthy Mr. Harrison and becomes a lady,
preserving only her wonderful voice as a sign of her Gypsy heritage. With her hus-
band’s wealth María Paz’s is able to teach the wealthy Payo, who earlier had aban-
doned her for a more socially worthy woman, a lesson he will never forget: It is no
sin to love a Gypsy, a common theme running through all the españoladas. It is

Image not available

fig. 31 La Lola se va los Puertos, clip from Wlm directed by Juan de Orduña (1942).

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not that Gypsy identity in these movies is construed as something stable or even
savory, but a mixing of races is no longer seen as something tragic that necessarily
requires the death of either the male non-Gypsy or the Gypsy woman: “Against the
myth of the Numantine, masculine warrior hero, vanquisher of the ‘anti-España,’
promoted Wrst in the political rhetoric and later in the Wlms of the immediate post-
war period, the españolada proposes a counter-myth, an inclusive, feminine image of
stereotyped Andalusian/southern Spanishness.”147 The utopian pleasure that these
Wlms produced was not just for the señorito class of men who relished their role
as sexual conquerors; they offered the consoling idea of a shared national identity,
a felicitous marriage of all Spain’s magical people that as we saw in the previous
chapter foreigners already took as a given. On the other hand, since it is over-
whelmingly the case that the seductive, independent, quick-witted Gypsy woman
falls deeply in love with her Payo suitor, regardless of his age or faculties, it seems
that the excitement of male sexual conquest was very much at the heart of the
españolada, just as it was for the French Romantics who titillated their readers with
Gypsy fantasies in the nineteenth century.

The Rebirth of the Passionate Gypsy in Spanish New Cinema

Just when it seemed that the Gypsy was receding as a cinematic Wgure, a startling
and unconventional resurgence of the Gypsy trope in Spanish cinema occurred in
the 1980s, in the second two Wlms of Carlos Saura’s acclaimed trilogy Bodas de
sangre (Blood wedding; 1981), Carmen (1983), and Amor brujo (Bewitching love;
1986), produced in collaboration with the famed dancer Antonio Gades. Saura’s
Xamenco movies appealed to Spanish high culture through their inclusion of the
music of Falla and Bizet and their avoidance of the grossest musical stereotypes of
the españolada. But they also engaged the popular Wgure of the Xamenco dancer in
a complex play of mirrors and identities. Arguably they are, as José Colmeiro puts
it, “a collective exorcism of the exotic,” a cathartic process that drudges up past
archetypes to evidence their falsity and investigate the alterity implied in the
artist’s and by extension the spectator’s subjectivity.148 In a similar reading Paul
Julian Smith interprets the Saura Gypsy as a crosscultural amalgamation, “a locus
of intersecting discourses” that points to a kind of nomadic subjectivity impossible
to freeze in any moment, because it is constantly shifting.149 Nevertheless, Saura’s
experimentalism, as Smith recognizes, carries a price. The passionate Carmen must
die at the end of Carmen, suggesting that the Wlm offers no true challenge to tra-
ditional notions of the Gypsy; the dance studio in the end is “a site of forced seden-
tarization in which women and gypsies are conWned, abstracted, fetishized.”150 On
some level, then, the resurgence of the Gypsy icon in contemporary cinema can be

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regarded as akin to the escapist and nostalgic gesture of the españoladas, harking
back to a cultural legacy at once reductionist and conservative, even though nos-
talgia can potentially promote agency and change. Despite Colmeiro’s perceptive
reading of the Wlms, one is tempted to question the Wt between his “virtual” spec-
tator attuned to the experimental play of identities and the actual spectators who
saw the trilogy or Saura’s subsequent ¡Ay, Carmela! (Oh, Carmela! 1990), Sevillanas
(Sevillanas; 1991), and Flamenco (1995) that reclaimed the Gypsy theme in Span-
ish cinema. Whatever the case, with such an enduring presence of the Carmen
theme in cinema (to date there are nearly eighty Wlm versions worldwide), it seems
clear that Western cultures still Wnd the myth useful for negotiating gender and
ethnic identity.151
In his conclusion to España exótica (Exotic Spain), Jesús Torrecilla remarks
that the identiWcation of Spain with the Gypsy is “one of the essential factors in
the conWguration of the modern image of the country.”152 It matters little, he points
out, whether Lorca and Falla were accurate in their assumptions about the origins
of Xamenco, since the effect of these authors’ work has been to spread the notion
of Andalusianism as a key to Spanish identity. The españolada Wlms of the 1940s
continued this trend, which was manipulated by the Franco regime that promoted
Xamenquism as a palliative and an escape, as well as what Soledad de Mateo has
called a dialectic between centralism and regionalism and subversive and conform-
ist positions.153 Proof that the confusion of Spanish identity with Xamenco and
Andalusia within Spain serves still today as a cohesive function in solidifying
Spain’s imaginary community is evident in the recent Xamenquism surge in cin-
ema, radio, and television, as well as in the reworkings of españolada Wlms such
as Luis Sanz’s Yo soy esa (I’m the one; 1991), JoseWna Molina’s update of La Lola
se va a los puertos (Lola goes to the ports; 1992),154 and Fernando Trueba’s La niña
de tus ojos (The pupil/apple of your eye; 1998). The renewed popularity of Xamen-
quism, even though now disguised in the genre of meta-españolada, represents,
according to Mateo, a democratic and decentralizing impulse critical of Spain’s
previous Castile-centered nationalism. This ensures the enduring popularity of
the Gypsy/Andalusian trope because it extends its umbrella to both reactionary
and leftist ideologies:155 “The traditional Xamenquist mythology continues to be as
functional to the necessities of Spanish nationalism as it always has been since its
birth a century earlier.”156
Thanks to its obsessive fascination with Xamenquism, mainstream Spanish
cinema of the 1990s was still replete with stereotypes that indirectly documented
Spain’s continuing discomfort but also fascination with its minority populations.
According to José del Pino, however, the exploration of ethnic stereotyping was
by that time becoming more subtle. Pedro Almodóvar’s La Xor de mi secreto (The
Xower of my secret; 1995) and Julio Medem’s Tierra (Land; 1996) avoided overt

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politicizing but documented minutely the way that pernicious stereotypes serve
as justiWcation for rejecting the other. Gypsy thievery, sexuality, and musical talent
are consciously at play in the power relations between Gitano and Payo in both
Wlms.157 Almodóvar offers a conventional, that is to say tragic, ending, but Del
Pino argues that this was the only viable way to nudge the audience toward a social
conscience and to show the profound injustice of racial prejudice.158 La Xor de mi
secreto gambles that the audience will “wake up” and perform the necessary exor-
cism of received stereotypes like that of the legendary Gypsy thief. At the same
time that Almodóvar exploited the Gypsy Xamenco spectacle, he forced recogni-
tion of the marginalization of the Gypsy, which was at once “the privileged repre-
sentation of national identity since Romanticism and simultaneously an essential
example of the marginal in the national social body.”159
Yet another Wlm that explicitly addressed Gypsy stereotypes is Chus
Gutiérrez’s Alma gitana (Gypsy soul; 1995), in which the Gypsyness of the female
protagonist Lucía is crosscut by the heterogeneous urban life that, like the back-
ground Xamenco fusion music by Ketama, dilutes and challenges the meaning
of ethnicity. Rejecting Saura’s fatalism, Gutiérrez chose instead to play with revers-
ing received stereotypes: Lucía’s life is ordered and modern, in contrast to that of
her Payo boyfriend Antonio, the Wlm’s “nomadic outsider, roaming the metropolis
on his motorbike.”160 According to Paul J. Smith, however, the Wlm fetishizes the
Gypsy romance through its ritualistic dance “that transcends and transgresses any
social consciousness,” as if the strains of Xamenco can only freeze time, evoking
ethnic roots whose stereotypes are impossible to erase.161 At the same time, with its
new kind of music bent on bringing Xamenco out of itself, it is clear that Gypsy-
ness is a state of living rather than an ethnic identity, an engagement with every-
day life that transcends ethnicity. Compared with the stark and ritualistic dancing
of Saura’s Carmen, whose Gypsies embodied fatal stereotypes, the screen Gypsies
of Alma gitana are thoroughly “modern,” having assimilated into urban bourgeois
life for better or worse.162

The Gypsy As Not the Problem, or The Discovery of Payo Racism

For four hundred years the ruling classes of Europe have taken the measure of their
Roma populations against a standard of progress, culture, and morality and found
them wanting. Beginning with the earliest Spanish seventeenth-century accounts
of Gypsies discussed in Chapter 1––Francisco de Córdoba’s 1615 Didascalia, Martín
Del Río’s 1608 Disquisitionum magicarum, Pedro Salazar de Mendoza’s 1618 Memo-
rial de un Hecho de los Gitanos para informar . . . Rey nuestro Señor, Sancho de Mon-
cada’s Expulsión de los gitanos, and Juan Quiñones de Benavente’s 1631 Discurso

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contra los gitanos––Spanish Roma have been imagined as a thorny problem for the
state. Between 1499 and 1783 Spanish courts issued more than two dozen state
interventions. In addition there were twenty-eight royal proclamations and decrees
issued by the Council of Castille; twenty-seven laws went into effect in Portugal;
and twenty other edicts were issued by the regional governments of Aragón,
Cataluña, Navarra, Valencia, and Granada.163 The Catholic clergy accused the Gyp-
sies of pagan practices; the state found them to be too peripatetic for any reason-
able control and jurisdiction; and local authorities and tradesmen in the towns
where they camped used them as a handy scapegoat for every crime or mishap. In
fact, of course, like any exploited class, they were also an opportunity, and a succes-
sion of kings would seize that opportunity to use the services of their Roma under-
class to man the galleys that were always in need of manpower or to engage their
metallurgy skills. Their nomadism helped rather than hindered this enterprise,
since the disappearance of a few Gypsies would not likely be noticed by the settled
population. For centuries, solutions to the “problem” of the Gypsies, ranging from
forced assimilation to permanent banning or even mass expulsion, failed to address
the real problems of exploitation that were inherent in the Spanish system of gov-
ernment and land management, for the simple reason that the proponents of these
solutions were themselves spokespersons for the ruling class or the clergy.
In can be argued that in the twentieth century the Roma fared better,
but not all thrived. During the Franco regime, seeking solutions to the problem of
prejudice against the Roma was largely discouraged, for it would have required an
admission of entrenched class inequities and racism. As we have seen, in Franco’s
Spain the Romantic Gypsy migrated to the entertainment industry, especially
to cinema where she became the darling of the post–Civil War españolada Wlms.
Serious literary treatment, on the other hand, is scant during the Franco regime,
some exceptions being the short story by Ana María Matute (“Los alambradores”
(The tinkers; 1961) and Fernando Robles’s novel El barranco de los gitanos (The
Gypsy ravine), Wrst published in French as Le Ravin des gitans in 1965 and only
after Franco’s death in Spanish (1984). Despite its continued popularity in the cin-
ema, the Gypsy icon was gradually eclipsed in Spanish art and prose Wction of the
1980s and 1990s, when these art forms were preoccupied with other social issues,
among them AIDS, immigration, globalization, sexuality, drugs, youth culture, and
urbanization. This reXected a general Europeanization trend that affected all areas of
Spanish culture. Even the tourist industry eschewed stereotypical images of Xa-
mencoized dancers and bullWghters that might perpetuate the rancid images of the
past in an effort to construct a more modern, European identity that would divorce
Spain from its Gitano ethnicity.164 Fernando Robles’s El barranco de los gitanos, as
Juan Goytisolo points out, offered a vindication of the Gypsy by attributing the
violence and poverty of Calé ghettos in which the novel is set to racism and class

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struggle. Still, for readers of El barranco like Goytisolo, the function of the Gypsy
in the new world order does not differ substantially from what it had been during
the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution: a brave symbol of resistance, but
one that sadly seems doomed to annihilation: “European-Western ethnocentrism,
whether of the right or the left, should disappear once and for all. Our ethnic val-
ues, social principles, and norms of coexistence are not necessarily the only or best
ones. To impose them by force upon unlike societies results not only in their ruin
and agony; it impoverishes in an alarming way our cultural panorama and insidi-
ously barbarizes us.”165
Beginning in the 1950s and early 60s, a handful of sociologists and cul-
tural anthropologists set about to address the issue of assimilation raised by Goyti-
solo and to correct the earlier Romantic/folkloric version of the colorful southern
Gypsy by providing readers more precise anthropological information about local
customs and living conditions. The sociologist Juan Sánchez Ocaña scoffed at the
polychromed images of Gypsies with castanets and guitars designed to please the
tourist and called for a more serious, statistically sound appraisal of Gypsy society.
His goal was to counteract the colorful picture with the shameful reality of an
anonymous people that had lived in poverty for centuries on Spanish soil, and he
called for church intervention in Wnding a “solution” to the Gypsy problem. Ocaña’s
Granada y sus gitanos (Granada and its Gypsies; 1963) is one of the Wrst attempts
by a sociologist to document Granadan Roma life that assiduously avoided refer-
ence to historians and folklorists. Like many of the sociologists of his time, Ocaña
regarded the Gypsy question as a problem in need of a solution; he was not inter-
ested in understanding the mysterious attraction of the Granadan guitarists and
dancers but in visiting dwellings where the sound of castanets was never heard,
there was no electricity, and the inhabitants lived a “different reality” from the
one portrayed in the idealized travelogues discussed in the previous chapters.166
While books mystifying the Gypsy such as those of Ortiz and Luna continued
to proliferate, more and more Andalusian authors were daring to look at the sad
spectacle of a people who, in the opinion of Ocaña, needed to be saved in every
sense of the word. A staunch Catholic crusader, Ocaña focused on what he believed
were the most pressing problems, hygiene and morality,167 themes that were also
stressed in the series of 1960s conferences organized by the cardinal of Tarragona,
Benjamín Arriba y Castro, called the Convivencia Nacional sobre Apostolado Gitano
(National Conference on the Gypsy Apostolate). The published report of the con-
ference, Promoción gitana (Gypsy promotion), stressed the importance of integrating
Gypsies into Spanish everyday life through religious instruction as well as cultural
programs and workplace reforms.168
Unlike the paternalistic Ocaña or the organizers of the Convivencia
Nacional, some sociologists writing on “the Gypsy question” in the 1960s and 70s

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“our” gypsies

and onward would concern themselves more with material conditions and less
with spiritual salvation. The last quarter of the twentieth century marked a return
to the notion of the Gypsy as problem, especially for educators, social services, and
municipal governments, which was spearheaded this time by university-educated
anthropologists and sociologists. Some, like Francesc Botey, emphasized culture and
ethnicity and attacked race as a deWning feature of the groups, since “it is always
culture that deWnes a race, not the reverse.”169 Botey warned that modern Western
civilization was imperiling its “folk culture” through indifference, segregation, and
a pervasive cultural leveling brought about by the media. These professionals also
attempted to dispel the myth of the happy-go-lucky Gypsy by studying the eco-
nomic conditions and exploitation of the many Roma populations residing outside
Granada, especially in and around the cities of Catalonia. Other voices, such as that
of Joan Guillamet, joined to weigh in on what was beginning to be called the “Pro-
moción Gtiana” (“the Gypsy promotion”), pointing out that racism and neglect
had played a major role in the negative aspects of Gypsy identity.
To counteract the Quinteroesque vision of the happy Gypsy, these profes-
sionals painted a picture with very stark lines. For example, Juan Castella-Gassol
observed that in the Montjuich district of Barcelona Romany families were living
in conditions that resembled German concentration camps.170 Gitanos were often
compared to African Americans, and increasingly like African Americans they
were regarded as the victims of racism, rapid industrialization, and governmental
neglect. Whether to allow the Romany to preserve their peripatetic lifestyles and
thus their cultural heritage as an object of pride or to encourage them to integrate
into modern urban life by restricting their freedom and bureaucratizing their affairs
became a moot question as horses, donkeys, baskets, fortune-telling, and other
traditional trades and products became obsolete. The sad result, a population with
high unemployment, low literacy and industrial skills, often squalid living condi-
tions, was beginning to be an embarrassment for a Spanish elite that had beneWted
for so long from the tourist image of the carefree Sacromonte cave dwellers, who in
fact made up only a tiny percentage of the Spanish Romany minority.
The solutions suggested to deal with the “Gypsy problem” ranged from
apostolic projects and “promotions” sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church to
the formation of a Gypsy state to be called Romanestán, something seen as at least
plausible by Juan Castella-Gassol writing in 1967.171 For his part, Botey cautioned
against assessing Gypsy culture and progress according to a Western paradigm, and
he saw the Gypsy as organically important to the Body Hispanic. Pursuing the
body metaphor, he argued that it should be possible for the body to exist even with
parts that are traditionally regarded as foreign: “In the past leucocytes of defense
were always mobilized to react against the irruption of foreign bodies. The ques-
tion is changing little by little: How to live as a single organism in which no body

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is regarded as foreign?”172 The real key to the problem for Botey was the eradica-
tion of racism, a “latent microbe” that can suddenly manifest itself and evolve into
a full-blown disease.173 Modern society has as much to learn from the “primitive”
clan organization of the Gypsies, such as their work habits, solidarity, and family
organization, as it has to offer in terms of technological progress. But for the Gypsy
to be able to choose between assimilation and adherence to traditional clan customs
and organization, gitanismo had to evolve from an identity into a cause.174
For Botey the body’s rejection of the Gypsy as a foreign object was a case
of misrecognition on the part of the body, not of contamination by a foreign inva-
sive presence, and this attitude would prevail in the last decades of the twentieth
and Wrst of the twenty-Wrst century as social scientists have begun to de-emphasize
the Romany as the source of the “problem” and look more to the prejudice of the
Payo population as an obstacle to a balanced society. The social anthropologist
Tomás Calvo Buezas especially has spearheaded this effort by undertaking a decades-
long crusade to examine the roots of ethnic prejudice in Los Racistas son los otros:
gitanos, minorías, y derechos humanos en los textos escolares (The racists are the others:
Gypsies, minorities, and human rights in schoolbooks; 1989), El racismo que viene:
otros pueblos y culturas (The racism to come: Other peoples and cultures; 1990), and
¿España racista? Voces payas sobre los gitanos Racist Spain? Payo voices on Gypsies;
2000). In his surveys, Buezas argues that Gitanos are not simply an ethnic group
like Americans or Moroccans living in Spain but an internal, permanently margin-
alized population both in Spain and throughout the world.175 Despite liberal egal-
itarian laws, the extensive testimonies that he has gathered and published show
that xenophobic Spanish Payos have very little tolerance for the Gitano population
for reasons that are economically as well as racially motivated. Strikingly absent
from the extensive Payo testimonials that are transcribed in his books is the ideal-
ized vision of Gypsy life that was the product of Romantic era. What has survived,
however, are many of the same misperceptions and myths that continue to accen-
tuate Gitano difference and inferiority.
The social anthropologist Teresa de San Román’s studies also fall into a
category of their own in the new vision of Payo-Gitano relations. Her Vecinos gitanos
(Gitano neighbors; (1976), Gitanos de Madrid y Barcelona. Ensayos sobre aculturación
y etnicidad (Gitanos of Madrid and Barcelona: Essays on acculturation and ethnic-
ity; 1984), and edited collection Entre la marginación y el racismo: reXexiones sobre la
vida de los gitanos (Between marginalization and racism: ReXections on the life of
Gitanos; 1986) laid the groundwork for her major ethnographic work, La diferèn-
cia inquietant: velles i noves estratègies culturals dels gitanos (The disquieting difference:
Old and new cultural strategies of the Gitanos; 1994), later revised and expanded
for the Spanish edition, La diferencia inquietante. Viejas y nuevas estrategias cultural de
los gitanos (1997). The Disquieting Difference is the most important modern ethnic

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study of the urban Romany of Spain, especially those living in precarious socio-
economic conditions. Having studied for decades the diverse groups of sedentary
Gitanos in Spain’s metropolitan centers, San Román concludes intelligently that
we know very little about the people who call themselves Calés and still less about
the forced assimilation of Romany over the centuries.176 Still she argues for the exis-
tence of an enduring, discrete, and identiWable cultural history shared by some
groups self-identiWed as Calés. Among the elements of this identity she names
(1) fragments of a dialect barely surviving but still in use in certain situations;
(2) a shared sense of difference from dominant Payo culture (3) an antagonism
and resistance (the legacy of centuries of survival strategies) to the dominant cul-
ture’s power and authority; and (4) unique forms of distribution of resources. More
important, San Román recognizes the utility of resisting dominant culture and its
institutions, of claiming a cultural identity for strategic purposes, both political
and social, as well as the beneWts of integration for those same ends.177 Different
strategies can and are used to ensure survival, but it is not for the Payo to sug-
gest the best strategy to ensure cultural survival: “The solution is not to elect for
them,” but to work side by side to “to improve the living conditions of this group
of people.”178
That this kind of cooperation is fraught with difWculty is plain from
Paloma Gay y Blasco’s Gypsies in Madrid: Sex, Gender, and the Performance of Identity
(1999), which weighs the beneWcial and damaging results from state efforts to
assimilate Madrid Romany into mainstream Spanish economies. Like Calvo Buezas,
San Román, Gay y Blasco, and others who are attempting to refocus the Gypsy
problem as a shared Gitano-Payo problem, virtually all social anthropologists writ-
ing today recognize that racism is far from eradicated in modern-day Spain. News-
paper accounts of antiethnic prejudice and violence too numerous to list here
abound in the Spanish press. Racists have also invaded the Internet, as can be seen
from the rantings of a group calling itself Murcia 88 (http://members.odinsrage.
com/cns/Murcia88.htm). Differing radically from the conclusions of Aurelio
Cebrián Abellán about the causes for the marginalization of Gitanos in Murcia and
elsewhere in Spain,179 this group disputes the worth of Gypsies, not just to the
nation but to the entire world, in a series of inXammatory, racist pronouncements
such as this:

The children of a Spaniard and a Norwegian will always be on the

average more intelligent than those of a Gypsy and a Tutsi. . . . In
Spain, where there are 700,000 thousand of them, there are barely
100 studying in the university according to a Gypsy leader in
1992, which signiWes one in every 10,000 Gypsies of university
age, while one in every 46 white Spaniards of university age

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attends college. If the Gypsies of Spain were a country, their uni-

versity level would be the lowest in the world, lower even than
Haiti where one in eight thousand attend, and of course accord-
ing to the Minister of the Interior, in 1995 70% of Spain’s drug
trafWc is in the hands of Gypsies.

It is to be hoped that those making decisions about the identity, worth, and status
of the Spanish Romany will follow the lead of social anthropologists. not just by
promoting racial tolerance and justice, but through a thorough analysis of the eco-
nomic structures that shape the unequal balance of power and wealth in Spain.

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Conclusion

the history of the European Roma is a history of social exclusion and physi-
cal oppression, while the aesthetic landscape of the Gypsy is one of inclusion and
privilege. This paradox is key to understanding the long and tragic history of
Payo-Roma relations in Europe. Fear and loathing are the simultaneous stimulants
that have resulted in exclusionary practices in European societies. While the Roma
have led a largely ghettoized existence, however, in literature the Gypsy milieu is
a place of freedom, unboundedness, and excitement. The lives of Xesh and blood
Roma bear little resemblance to the idealized or demonized Gypsy portraits that
have been studied here, and yet the unchanging, independent Gypsy persists as
a useful rhetorical Wgure of nostalgia for a simpler, more natural way of life. As
James Clifford has shown, the urge to associate cultural change with decay and
lost authenticity has been a powerful force in Western thought,1 and the Gypsy
has long provided a useful object to represent what has been lost and what still is
retrievable of a better life prior to the Industrial Revolution.
As the works cited here demonstrate, the allure of the passionate Spanish
Gypsy responded to national contingencies as well as discrete aesthetic and rhe-
torical conventions of three distinct cultures: French, Spanish, and British, over
a period of four centuries. The Spanish Gypsy/Gitano Wrst became a focus of in-
tense cultural interest beginning in the seventeenth century with Cervantes’ “La

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conclusion

gitanilla,” rising to greatest prominence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

when, although still an object of obsessive interest, it lost some of its luster. The
most common narrative form this Western obsession took was a heterosexual love
story construed as unholy, uncontrollable, impractical, sometimes deeply satisfying
at the sexual or sensual level, but nearly always fatal. Typically this union becomes
a casualty of racial, moral, and class differences too wide to be bridged, too socially
unsanctioned, and too costly for the union to succeed, unless one of the couple
assimilates the customs and living arrangements of the other. Rare instances of
a successful and lasting bond imply just such a felicitous assimilation, but this
variant of the fantasy is rarely entertained despite the enduring literary obsession
with pairing Spanish Gypsy women with non-Gypsy suitors. The more usual fail-
ure of the interethnic bond always implies the destructive power of atavism and the
evidence of racial incommensurability.
Racial or ethnic differences alone, however, do not explain the enduring
centrality of the Gypsy trope. In the vast majority of stories the mismatched union
consists of a man, superior in many ways but often repressed, who is attracted to a
woman whose carefreeness and sensual faculties are magniWed by comparison. The
Spanish aristocrat Andrés of “La gitanilla,” the Basque José of Carmen, the duke of
Bedmár of The Spanish Gypsy, Don Juan de Santistevan of “Las castañuelas de Pepa,”
Captain Phoebus of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the wealthy Jew of Morena y
trágica are all wealthy and educated men who lack something in their own society,
which draws them to the Gypsy life, especially of Andalusia. The suitor quickly
Wnds he cannot hide behind the privileges of his wealth, education, and ethnicity
when he is drawn to a poor, uneducated, bastard Gypsy. At the climax of the story
this woman peels away the layers of social hypocrisy and pseudowealth and offers
the man a more natural life free of social and sexual convention and a way into
a life full of vitality and activity. The consequences of this demolition of walls are
often catastrophic; if the Gypsy woman does not Wnd suddenly that she is not a
Gypsy after all, if the non-Gypsy man cannot release his bourgeois ties, if non-
Gypsy society cannot accommodate the Gypsy and vice versa, the result is failure,
separation, or death. In general the Gypsy woman is a threat to the family (in the
bourgeois sense), the social system (because of her lax morals), the nation (since she
owes allegiance to no one), and even sexuality itself, since the man who falls prey
to her seductions is often portrayed as a castrated, feminized Wgure no longer in
control of his actions. The primary antagonist of all the stories, then, is that of gen-
der difference, the incommensurability of the sexes that is exacerbated by cultural,
ethnic, and class differences. It is not just the case that the feminization of the other
helps to make racial difference more palatable, but that the racializing of women
helps to ratify the myth of woman’s ontological identiWcation with the destructive
forces of nature.

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conclusion

The reasons for this enduring fantasy then have to do with the fatal com-
bination of both gender and racial difference that, combined in the Wgure of the
Gypsy woman, satisfy a lasting need for engaging the other that has been endemic
to Western, male-centered culture. The operative metaphors of many of the works
studied here, and we could add true-life cases some of which have followed the
same pattern, are those of freedom, irresistible feminine seductiveness and passion,
and racial destiny, the favorite tropes of Romanticism that extended their inXuence
into the twentieth century. It is important to add, however, that the Gypsy is more
than simply a trope for otherness intrinsic to the psychological evolution of the
Western male subject; it is also the embodiment of what is lacking in the increas-
ing homogenization of capitalist societies. Overemphasis on the rhetoric of racial,
or in its modern rhetorical guise “ethnic,” and gender differences tends to efface
the vast economic and social disparities that separate Payo and Roma subjects in
actual European societies. For example, the positive image of freedom personiWed
by a Gypsy woman of easy spirit and morals has been possible because there was
an adequate social separation between the Roma and the Payos. Breaking the taboo
against the mixing of the two seems like an act of freedom only as long as the mate-
rial gulf separating Payo and Roma culture persists.
The Gypsy trope also fed into various discourses of nationhood and mod-
ernization. As both an external (alien-seeming) and internal (sexually promiscuous
and morally corrupting) danger, from her earliest appearance in literature the
Gypsy woman was symbolically and socially relegated to the ranks of instinct-
driven animal. As a symbol of primitiveness and irrationality, she gradually became
associated rhetorically with the symbolic enemies that evolving nation-states needed
to foster a sense of shared identity. As such she served usefully as a focal point for a
range of political and social imperatives with which modern states grappled, espe-
cially during the nineteenth century. As biological reproducers of a despised ethnic
group, Gypsy women were eyed with suspicion by historians and anthropologists
until recently, but there has always been a great deal of ambivalence in the liter-
ary and artistic portrait. Central to the conception of the self that is the legacy
of Enlightenment thought and nineteenth-century Romanticism is the idea of
the subject as unique and in control of his own destiny. In all the works discussed
here, the Gypsy has stood for the freedom and independence of the individual. Yet
this Wercely individualistic subject outside the bounds of society was also an object
of terror. Portrayed as neither having nor wanting a family or Wxed abode, the
Gypsy was an easy target in an age when, as George Mosse has shown, respectabil-
ity became the catchall of stable, “normal” urban life. The tendency in the litera-
ture of the Wrst half of the twentieth century to “normalize” the Gypsy reXects a
gradual rejection of nineteenth-century respectability and a tentative embrace
of multiculturalism. Although as classless women the Roma did not even qualify

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conclusion

for citizen status, as a national icon they became, especially in twentieth-century

Spain, a useful symbolic vehicle for national consolidation and cultural exchange.
The Gypsy as symbol of unconventionality, freedom of movement, reli-
gious belief, and unstructured language perpetuates the hope that life exits beyond
the urban-industrial environment, but behind the portrait lurks the fear of con-
tamination and regression. The overpowering attraction of the wild Gypsy woman
is a lesson that the border between same and other is porous; as the fantasized abject
she is always hovering about, threatening the subject with regression. The result is
a predilection for stereotypical images that both express and buffer fears and vali-
date and threaten selfhood. As Homi Bhabha has argued, the stereotype, the scene
of fetishism, denotes the subject’s desire for a “pure origin that is always threatened
by its division.”2 The stereotype insists on difference, but, like the fetish, signals a
desire for sameness. But it also removes the spectator from the reality of the other’s
social being, simplifying him/her in stereotypical fashion. Everyone creates stereo-
types; for some the process is a temporary coping device that helps to overcome
anxiety, while for the pathological personality it is a permanent necessity allowing
the subject to see the entire world in terms of rigid differences. However, as Sander
Gilman notes, stereotypes are not random or personal projections but the “product
of history and of a culture that perpetuates them.”3 The Gypsy stereotype was a
collective expression of national interests and anxieties that determined aesthetic
conventions. In turn artistic and literary convention relied heavily on stereotypes
as a type of cultural currency that united the classes of Europe’s traveling bour-
geoisies and marked off Gypsies as different from the economic, moral, religious
standards of everyday bourgeois life.
In conclusion, the trope of the passionate Gypsy has served a wide range
of sometimes-contradictory uses in the cultures where it has Xourished, feeding
into emerging bourgeois discourses and simultaneously arising from ambiguous
desires and needs, both psychological and economic. The negative brush strokes of
the portrait are a product of the human sciences with their evolving racial theories
that fed the nationalisms peculiar to the industrial age. One byproduct of the in-
dustrial age was the tendency of writers to create a green haven where time and
progress associated with capitalism were not threatening to annul the subject. The
Gypsy satisWed an impulse to create subjects that were static representations of
good and bad, thereby reducing confusing social differences to understandable cat-
egories. The symbolic reduction of Gypsies to pathological, animalistic, or natural
beings in turn helped to justify their exclusion or exploitation by more “civilized”
groups. The tendency on the part of dominant cultures to imagine their separation
from groups they imagined as uncivilized and grotesque also fostered the notion of
the perfection of white Europeans.

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Notes

Shortened references in these notes refer to full citations in the Bibliography.

Introduction
1. James Michener, Miracle in Seville, 3.
2. Ibid., 3.
3. Ibid., 43.
4. In Iberia, Michener elaborates on this version of the arrival of Romany in Spain. See 624–25.
5. Léon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 30.
6. Quoted in ibid., 25.
7. See Angus Fraser, The Gypsies, and Veronika Görög-Karàdy’s article, “Le Folklore du mépris” (The folklore
of contempt), for more details about the various Gypsy myths of origin.
8. Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 187. It should be noted, however, that Schlegel gave great prominence to the
Hebrew language.
9. Fraser, The Gypsies, 192.
10. Charles G. Leland, The Gypsies, 12.
11. Ibid., 14–15.
12. Ibid., 12.
13. Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 329.
14. Leland, The Gypsies, 333.
15. Ibid., 335.
16. Wim Willems, “Ethnicity as a Death Trap,” 19.
17. Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 204.
18. Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 16.
19. Edward Said, Orientalism, 67.
20. Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 329.
21. Willems, “Ethnicity as Death Trap,” 17.
22. Ibid., 19.
23. For a further development of this idea, see José Colmeiro, “Exorcizing Exoticism,” 1–4.
24. Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race, 42.
25. Benedict Anderson, Spectre of Comparisons, 29.
26. Evelyn Gould, The Fate of Carmen, 32.
27. Rafael Sallillas, El delincuente español, 208–9. All translations in this introduction are mine.
28. Judith Okely, “Constructing Difference: Gypsies as ‘Other,’” 56.
29. When referring to the dialects of the Roma/Romany, the common term Romani is used here. In Chapter
5, the term Gitano is used interchangeably with Gypsy to designate Spanish Gypsies.

Chapter 1
1. Fray Huélamo, Quoted in Miguel Herrero García, Ideas de los españoles del siglo XVII (The ideas of the
Spaniards of the XVIIth century), 654.

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notes

2. Teresa de San Román speculates that these early groups that migrated into Spain at intervals of weeks to
several years were bound together by kinship relations.
3. San Román, La diferencia inquietante (The disquieting difference), 13.
4. José Antonio Maravall, Utopia and Counterutopia, 37.
5. Leblon, Les Gitans dans la littérature espagnole (Gypsies in Spanish literature), 118.
6. For a more complete list of early allusions to Gypsies, see Leblon’s Les Gitans dans la littérature espagnole,
11–15. See also François Vaux de Foletier, Mil años de historia de los gitanos (A thousand years of Gypsy history),
231–49, for early references to Gypsies in other national literatures.
7. Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary novels) was approved by the censor in 1612 and published in 1613, when
Cervantes was sixty-six years old.
8. Miguel de Cervantes, “La gitanilla,” 13. I have used R. M. Price for all translations of “La gitanilla.” All
other translations in this chapter and throughout the book are mine.
9. John Huxtable Elliott, Spain and Its World, 116.
10. At the start of the reign of Philip III, 2 million ducats of silver a year Xowed from America to the crown
coffers, but by 1620 this Wgure had dropped to 800,000 (see Elliott, Spain and Its World, 118). The annual cost of
Phillip III’s household was approximately 1,214,000 ducats (see Félix Grande, Memoria del Xamenco [History of
Xamenco], 58). See also Pierre Vilar’s A History of Gold and Money, 1450–1920. Vilar’s graph shows a radical decline
in the imports of precious metals between 1600 and 1605. The period 1606–10 saw a slight improvement, but
the decade of 1611–20 again shows a decline in the portion of gold and silver revenues going to the king (147).
According to Vilar, the illusion of great wealth led the Spanish empire to overspend its revenues (157).
11. Henry Kamen, Una sociedad conXictiva (A conXictive society), 398.
12. Leblon, Les Gitans dans la littérature espagnole, 47.
13. Several historians have recently argued that the links between poverty and bandolerismo are not as direct,
that the bandoleros were lesser feudal nobles and their vassals, feuding clans and factions, and that other geopolitical
factors and social tensions were to blame for their existence (see Jaime Contreras, “Bandolerismo y fueros” [Brig-
andage and judicial power], 55–56). San Román notes that Gypsies were associated with the bandoleros already at
the end of the Wfteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century but that most bandoleros were Payos (La Diferencia
inquietante, 18).
14. The confusion of Gypsies with vagabonds reXected a general Europe-wide trend to assimilate the two,
most notably in Sebastian Münster’s 1552 Cosmographia Universalis (Universal cosmography), which would be the
most inXuential authority on Gypsy identity throughout Europe well into the eighteenth century.
15. Cándido Ortiz de Villajos, Gitanos de Granada (The Gypsies of Granada), 320.
16. Miguel Herrero García, Ideas de los españoles del siglo XVII, 654.
17. Quoted in ibid., 654–55.
18. For a review of this trend of thinking in other European countries as well as Spain, see Leblon, Les Gitans
d’Espagne, 37–42.
19. The arbitristas were a product of the late sixteenth century, when rulers “took it for granted that the vas-
sal had a duty to advise when he had something to communicate of beneWt to king and commonwealth” (Elliott,
Spain and Its World, 243). The advice ranged from pragmatic suggestions regarding monetary reform to crank sug-
gestions such as launching a new crusade to retake Jerusalem.
20. Elliott, Spain and Its World, 235.
21. Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, 79.
22. I use the term “racism” with the full awareness that its accepted meaning as a “value judgment bailed out
by science” (Poliakov, “Racism from the Enlightenment to the Age of Imperialism,” 55) may not strictly apply to
seventeenth-century texts. The fact that the arbitristas and chroniclers were attempting to theorize racial identity
and producing what Todorov would call a “racialist” discourse is evidence enough of a racism avant-la-lettre.
23. Sancho de Moncada, Restauración política de España (The political restoration of Spain), 211.
24. An inverted version of the myth of the Gypsies and the Holy Family appeared in an early sixteenth-
century Auto called Aucto de la huida de Egipto (Auto on the Flight out of Egypt), in which the Gypsies give help
and predict the future of the Holy Family. See Leblon, Les Gitans dans la littérature espagnole, 13.
25. Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, 591.
26. Angus Fraser credits sixteenth-century Swiss chroniclers with the Wrst debates about the ethnic identity
of Gypsies (The Gypsies, 93). Thus the debate initiated in Cervantes’ generation by the arbitristas and fueled by sto-
ries such as “La gitanilla” was already raging for seventy years elsewhere in Europe. In the mid-nineteenth century
popular belief was still divided. In 1841 George Borrow passed on Moncada’s interpretation to a new generation
of Gypsyphiles: “This singular story of banishment from Egypt, and wandering through the world for a period of

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notes

seven years, and which I Wnd much difWculty in attributing to the invention of people so ignorant as the Romas,
tallies strangely with the fate foretold to the ancient Egyptians in certain chapters of Ezekiel, so much so, indeed,
that it seems to be derived from that source” (quoted in Fraser, The Gypsies, 135). Borrow suggested that the tale
about not helping the Virgin was invented when the Gypsies Wrst entered Germany “for the purpose of suiting
the taste of the time; as no legend possessed much interest in which the Virgin did not Wgure, she and her child
are here introduced instead of the Israelites” (quoted in Fraser, The Gypsies, 136).
27. Moncada, Restauración política de España, 213–14.
28. Ibid., 214. The decree of 1633 reiterated that Gypsies were not a “nation” or “people” and ordered them
to call themselves castellanos nuevos (“new Castilians”). See Teresa San Román, La diferencia inquietante, 22.
29. Moncada, Restauración política de España, 214. Moncada may have borrowed these terms from Juan Gero-
pio’s Latin treatise Hermathena (Book 1), cited in Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua española (Treasury of the
Spanish language), 591. Geropio, however, used the analogy to describe the “restlessness and Xighty” nature of the
Gypsies, not their “nesting” habits.
30. Moncada, Restauración política de España, 215.
31. Ibid., 226.
32. Although Moncada’s recommendations were never carried out in a consistent manner, they would resur-
face in proposals made to succeeding kings who sometimes were more aggressive at enacting repressive laws. See,
for example, Antonio Gómez Alfaro’s The Great Gypsy Round-Up, for a detailed description of the 1747 imprison-
ment of Gypsies that was proposed to Ferdinand VI by the bishop of Oviedo, Gaspar Vázquez Tablada. Accord-
ing to Gómez Alfaro, one of the reasons why this particular action was feasible in 1747 was that the Pope had del-
egated to his papal nuncio, Enrique Enríquez, all jurisdiction over rights of sanctuary, effectively making it more
difWcult for the Roma to evade repressive conscriptions and imprisonments.
33. Moncada, Restauración política de España, 226.
34. Quoted in San Román, La Diferencia inquietante, 17.
35. Juan Bautista Avella Arce, “La Gitanilla,” 11; Leblon, Les Gitans dans la littérature espagnole, 176.
36. “La Gitanilla,” 29.
37. Luis Astrana Marín, “Estudio crítico,” xliii.
38. Ibid., 59. The character Maldonado delivers a similar ode to Gypsy life in Cervantes’ comedy Pedro de Urde-
malas: “Look, Pedro, our life is unfettered, free, curious, broad, indolent, extended, whatever desire one seeks and
asks for is never denied. The grassy earth provides us our bed; the sky gives us a canopy wherever we go; the sun
does not burn us, nor the Werce chill of ice alter us. The most watched over garden gives us the best of what good
is grown there. And the white grape or moscatel barely appears before it is in the hands of the daring Gypsy, a
spy of the goods of others Wlled with cunning and courage agile, ready, daring, and healthy” (Cervantes, Pedro de
Urdemalas, 274).
39. José Antonio Maravall, Utopia and Counterutopia, 138.
40. E. Michael Gerli, “Romance and the Novel,” 37.
41. Stanislav Zimic, “La gitanilla de Cervantes,” 106.
42. Vaux de Foletier, for one, describes this ritual as the product of Cervantes’ imagination (see Mil años de his-
toria de los gitanos, 223). According to Alban K. Forcione, the funeral rites attributed to the Gypsies in this story
may have come from a contemporary chronicle on American Indians (“Cervantes’s ‘La Gitanilla’ as Erasmian
Romance,” 89).
43. Maravall, Utopia and Counterutopia, 47.
44. Harry Sieber, in his 1980 introduction to his edition of the Novelas, sparked interest in the topic by inter-
preting the novella as a clash of value systems between that of the Gypsies based on communal property and that
of urban society with an emphasis on private property (20).
45. Robert Ter Horst, “Une Saison en enfer,” 89.
46. Ibid., 103.
47. Ibid., 112. Adam Smith Wrst described this principle as the “Invisible Hand.” Since that time it has
become the basis of the concept of the free market in which competition results in the lowest prices. In this sys-
tem, supply and demand determine production, proWts, and prices. During the Great Depression of the early
twentieth century, the English monetarist John Maynard Keynes argued that a reduction in demand caused by
insufWcient money in the hands of consumers caused the collapse of the world economy, and he proposed a
demand-side view of money Xow as opposed to a supply-side view that economies were best fueled by investment
money in the hands of capitalist producers. In other words, money should be put in the hands of the consumers
during economic downturns. His demand-side argument was embraced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a
way out of the Depression.

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48. Ter Horst, “Une Saison en enfer,” 116.

49. Queen Margarita, the wife of the reigning monarch Philip III, had just given birth.
50. Joan Ramon Resina, “Laissez faire y reXexividad erótica en ‘La Gitanilla,’” 267.
51. Cervantes, “La gitanilla,” 83.
52. William Clamurro, “Value and Identity in ‘La Gitanilla,’” 16.
53. Ibid., 37.
54. Ibid., 84.
55. Francisco J. Sánchez, “Theater within the Novel,” 81.
56. Ibid., 82.
57. Ibid., 87.
58. Carroll B. Johnson, “De economías y linajes en La gitanilla,” 37.
59. Ibid., 40.
60. Julio Rodríguez-Luis, Novedad y ejemplo en las novelas de Cervantes, 1:116.
61. Luis Astrana Marín, Vida ejemplar, 1:140.
62. For example, Maravall makes this link in Utopia and Counterutopia, 63.
63. Kamen, Una sociedad conXictiva, 398.
64. See Vaux de Foletier for some examples (Mil años de historia de los gitanos, 168). See Donald Kenrick and
Grattan Puxon, The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies, 34–35, for a discussion of alleged kidnappings in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.
65. Moncada, Restauración, 215–16.
66. Fraser, The Gypsies, 59.
67. Leblon, Les Gitans dans la littérature espagnole, 34.
68. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 18.
69. The following plays, poems, and librettos derived directly or indirectly from Miguel de Cervantes’ “La
gitanilla”: Alexandre Hardy, La belle égyptienne (The beautiful Egyptian; 1615); Ben Jonson, Gipsies Metamorphosed
(1620); Juan Pérez de Montalván, La gitanilla (16??); T. Middleton and W. Rowley, The Spanish Gipsie (1623–24);
A. de Solís y Rivadeneira, La gitanilla de Madrid (The Gypsy girl of Madrid: 163?); Jean-Pierre Camus, L’Innocente
Egyptienne (The innocent Egyptian; 1630); Jacob Cats, Seltsaam trougeval tuschen en Spaans Edelman en een Heydinne
(The rare marriage of a Spanish nobleman and a heathen Gypsy; 1637–43); James Mabbe, Gitanilla (The little
Gypsy girl; 1640); Sallebray, La belle égyptienne (The beautiful Egyptian; 1642); Mattheus Gansneb Tengnagel, La
Vie de Konstance (The life of Constance; 1643); Catharina Verwers Dusart, De Spaensche Heiden (The Spanish Gypsy;
1644); Matteo Grifoni, Signorina Zingaretta (The Gypsy lady; 1646); Timothoeus Ritzsch and Jacob Cats, Ver-
teutschte Spanische Zigeunerin (The false Spanish Gypsy; 1656); Diego Osorio, La gitanilla (1657); Harsdorffer, Die
Adeligen Komedianten (The aristocratic comedians; 1664); Jean-Baptiste Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), Les
Fourberies de Scapin (Scapin’s knavery; 1671); Florido de Silvestris, Signora Zinaretta (Lady Zinaretta; 16??); L’His-
toire du baron de Merarques et de la belle Egyptienne (The story of the baron of Merarques and the beautiful Egyptian;
1685); Heinrich Ferdinand Möller, Die Zigeuner (The Gypsies; 1777); Anon., El gitano de Cartagena (The Gypsy of
Cartagena; 17??); Jean Guillaume Antoine Cuvelier de Trye, C’est le Diable ou la Bohémienne (It’s the devil or the
Gypsy woman; 17??); Louis Charles Caigniez, La Petite Bohémienne (The little Gypsy girl; 17??); José Castel,
Gitanilla en el coliseo (The Gypsy girl in the Coliseum; 1776); Eugene Scribe, La Bohémienne ou l’Amérique en 1775
(The Gypsy girl or America in 1775; 17??); Carl Maria von Weber, Preziosa (Preciosa; 1810); Canuto Mojarra, El
gitano (The Gypsy; 1817); Pius Alexander Wolff, Preziosa (Preciosa; 1821); Alfred Bunn and William Balfe, The
Bohemian Girl (1843); Ruggero Manna, Preziosa (Preciosa; 1845); Gabriel Estrella, La gitanilla. (The Gypsy girl;
1851–52?); Francisco V. García Cuevas, La gitanilla (The Gypsy girl; 186?); D. M. C. S., La gitanilla de Madrid
(The Gypsy girl of Madrid; 1863); Antonio Smareglia, Preziosa (Preciosa; 1879); Gregorio Corrochano y Ortega,
La gitanilla (The Gypsy girl; 18??); Crawford Wilson, The Gitanilla, or, The children of the Zincali (1890).
This list does not include the countless works that have afWnities with “La gitanilla,” such as Prosper
Mérimée’s Carmen (1845), Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (1831), George Sand’s La Filleule (1853), C. L.
Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon (1866), and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy (1868), which is discussed in the fol-
lowing chapters.
70. G. Hainsworth, Les “Novelas exemplares” en France au XVIIe siècle, 34, 236.
71. Fraser, The Gypsies, 147.
72. In the Netherlands, Gypsies were called heiden (related to the English “heathen”).
73. Antonio de Solís y Rivadeneira, La gitanilla de Madrid, 621. All further page references to Solis y Riva-
deneira’s La gitanilla de Madrid are parenthetically inserted in the text.
74. Leblon, Les Gitans dans la littérature espagnole, 204.

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Chapter 2
1. Poliakov, The Ayran Myth, 225.
2. Ibid., 227.
3. Malik, The Meaning of Race, 71.
4. It is useful to compare this with the naturalist Georges-Luis Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (1778), which claims
a monogenesist origin of the species. Buffon also placed the European nations on the summit of the hierarchy of
nations, but he based his criteria on rationality and sociability, not on the classiWcation of bodies. For example, he
placed Australians and American Indians on the bottom of the human heap because of what he regarded as their
lack of social organization. As Tzvetan Todorov points out, however (in On Human Diversity, 102), Buffon sug-
gested a coordination between moral and physical characteristics, which was to be highly inXuential in the fol-
lowing century because of the seemingly scientiWc approach to classiWcation.
5. Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, 446, 444.
6. Ibid., 453.
7. The principal popularizer of mid-century concepts of race was Ernst Renan, the “high priest of the cult of
science” (Todorov, On Human Diversity, 118), whose Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (General
history and comparative system of Semitic languages; 1847–55) popularized the misconception that the Aryan
race “became ‘Masters of the planet,’ thanks to reason and science, or, in other words, thanks to ‘a search which
was thoughtful independent, strict, courageous, and philosophical, in a word, a search for the truth, which seems
to have been the characteristic of this race’” (Poliakov, The Ayran Myth, 208). Like Gobineau, Renan divided
humans into three principal groups, which he hierarchized on the basis of their cultural superiority or inferiority
and their ability to be “civilized.”
8. According to Todorov, it is easy to see why Gobineau’s work would be of such importance to the Nazis,
since its racialism follows a “major current of thinking about race that we can follow from Buffon and Voltaire to
Renan and Le bon” (On Human Diversity, 129).
9. Malik, The Meaning of Race, 84.
10. Todorov, On Human Diversity, 106.
11. See Robert Miles, “The Articulation of Racism and Nationalism,” 45ff., for a discussion of the relation
between capitalism and nationalism.
12. Ibid., Miles, 47.
13. Manuel Bernal Rodríguez, La Andalucía de los libros de viajes del siglo XIX (Andalusia in nineteenth-
century travelogues), 15.
14. Ibid., 163–67.
15. Also see the comments of the German traveler Chrétien-Auguste Fischer and British Henry Swinburne in
Margarita Torrione, “Del viajero ilustrado al viajero romántico” (From the Enlightenment traveler to the Roman-
tic traveler), 12–13. Torrione provides an important, multicultural discussion of the fandango as a Gypsy dance
and gathering (12–20).
16. In this same year the Italian Giuseppe Baretti, in his Voyage de Londres a Gênes passant par l’Angleterre, le Por-
tugal, l’Espagne, et la France (Voyage to London and Genoa passing through England, Portugal, Spain, and France),
mentioned the Gades dances that had been satirized by Martial, and in 1770 the English traveler Edward Clarke
also claimed the dance to be of classical origin (see Torrione, “Del viajero ilustrado al viajero romántico,” 13).
17. Jean François Peyron, Nouveau Voyage en Espagne fait en 1777 et 1778 (New voyage in Spain made in 1777
and 1778), 1:247–48. According to Torrione, Peyron’s comments referred, if indirectly, to Andalusian Roma
dancers. Peyron’s description was taken from a letter in Latin sent to him in 1712 by José Martí, a deacon of the
Cathedral of Cadiz. Martí described the dancers as “Etíopes,” one of the many names by which the Roma were
commonly known in early Spain, and stated that their movements reportedly excited the spectators’ “erection and
lasciviousness” (Peyron, Nouveau Voyage en Espagne fait en 1777 et 1778, 13).
18. Bourgoing, Nouveau Voyage en Espagne, 247–48.
19. Elena Fernández Herr, Les origines de l’Espagne romantique (The origins of romantic Spain), 109.
20. Bourgoing, Tableau de l’Espagne moderne (A tableau of modern Spain), 2:343–44.
21. Henry Swinburne, Travels Through Spain and Portugal in 1775 and 1776, 354.
22. Ibid., 354.
23. Beaumarchais, Cartas sobre el viaje de España (Letters on the voyage to Spain), 1516.
24. Ibid., 516.
25. M*** (Anon.), Viajes hechos en diversos tiempos en España (Voyages in Spain during various times), 501.
26. Gustave Philipe Creutz, “Carta a Marmontel” (The letter to Marmontel), 586.

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27. Hew Whiteford Dalrymple, Viaje a España y Portugal (Voyage to Spain and Portugal), 667.
28. Torrione, “Del viajero ilustrado al viajero romántico,” 13.
29. Etienne François Lantier, Viaje a España del caballero San Gervasio (A voyage to Spain by the gentleman San
Gervasio), 1152.
30. For a summary of the fandango’s imagined pedigree, see Leblon, Musiques tsiganes et Xamenco (Gypsy music
and Xamenco), 90–98.
31. Jean-Marie-Jérôme Fleuriot, Voyage de Figaro en Espagne (Figaro’s voyage to Spain), 51.
32. Gerhard Steingress, “El Cante Xamenco” (Flamenco song), 186.
33. Viajes de extranjeros por España y Portugal (Voyages of foreigners to Spain and Portugal), 526.
34. Ibid., 526.
35. Ibid., 526.
36. M*** (Anon.), Viajes hechos en diversos tiempos en España, 507.
37. Bourgoing, Tableau de l’Espagne moderne, 2:366.
38. Ibid., 2:263–64.
39. Chrétien-Auguste Fischer, Voyage en Espagne aux années 1797 et 1798 (Voyage to Spain in the years 1797
and 1798), 2:201.
40. Ibid., 2:202.
41. Willems, In Search of the True Gypsy, 12. According to Willems, the burgeoning interest in the theme of
Gypsy history that took place in the late eighteenth century was partially the result of the announcement of an
essay prize that the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences offered on the subject of “The Origin of Gypsies” (In Search
of the True Gypsy, 25). In addition to Grellmann’s history, also inXuential were Etienne Pasquier, Recherches de la
France (Research on France; 1633), Franz Miklosich, Uber die mundarten und die Wanderungen der Zigeuner Europa’s
(On the dialects and wanderings of Europe’s Gypsies; 1872–81); A. F. Pott, Die Zigeuner in Europa und Asien (Gyp-
sies in Europe and Asia; 1844); Paul Bataillard, Les derniers Travaux relatifs aux Bohémiens dans l’Europe orientale (The
latest works relative to the Bohemians of oriental Europe; 1872); and Adriano Colocci, Gli Zingari, storia d’un
popolo errante (The Gypsies: A history of an errant people; 1889). Among the more cited Spanish historical sources
are Covarrubias y Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish language;
1611); Martín del Río, Disquisiciones Mágicas (Disquisition on magic; 1616); Juan Quiñones de Benavente, Dis-
curso contra los gitanos (Discourse against the Gypsies; 1631?); and Moncada, Restauración política de Espana (The
political restoration of Spain; 1746), cited in Chapter 1 above.
42. See also Willems, “Ethnicity as a Death-Trap,” 20.
43. Fraser, The Gypsies, 195.
44. J. M. is identiWed by the name François Jacques Jaubert de Passa in the Library of Congress catalogue, but
this name appears nowhere either in the original edition or later editions. Since the text is in Spanish and the
author makes mention of nuestra España (“our Spain”), I cite the author as J. M. According to Victor de Rochas,
J. M. was the translator of Jaubert de Passa’s Nouvelles annales de voyages en 1827 (New annals of voyages in 1827),
a work that is not credited in the Historia de los gitanos. Rochas maintained that de Passa’s work was deWcient
because it failed to take into account language, “the true criterium,” and was more a history of Moors in Spain
than of Gypsies (Les Parias de France et d’Espagne [The pariahs of France and Spain], 288, note 2).
45. J. M., Historia de los gitanos, 56, 13.
46. Ibid., 29.
47. Nineteenth-century travelers who cited popular histories such as that of J. M. or Grellmann to reinforce
their casual on-site observations ignored the fact that these historians had assembled their composite image of both
ancient and contemporary Roma by copying and enlarging on earlier histories, documents, and literature, includ-
ing plays, newspaper accounts, poetry, and Wction, which they cited liberally to validate their conclusions. For
example, in addition to Grellmann, J. M. cited Benito Jerónimo Feijóo, Teatro crítico universal (Universal critical
theater; 1726–1739); Cervantes, “La gitanilla”; Martín del Río, Disquisitionum Magicarum (Disquisition on magic),
and a host of repressive Spanish legislation culled from historical chronicles from the late 1500s through the
1700s, such as Gerónimo Zuritas, Anales de la Corona de Aragón (Annals of the Aragonese crown; 1578–79); Geró-
nimo Pujades, Crónica Universal de Cataluña (Universal chronicle of Catalonia; 1609); Juan de Mariana, Historia de
España (History of Spain; 1650); and Vicente Branchat, Tratado de los derechos y regalías que corresponden al real pat-
rimonio en el Reyno de Valencia (Treatise on the rights and regalia that correspond to the royal patrimony of the king-
dom of Valencia; 1784).
48. J. M., Historia de los gitanos, 11.
49. Ibid., 37.

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50. The text Rochas cites is François Jacques Jaubert de Passa’s 1827 Nouvelles annales de voyages (New annals
of travels), not the above-cited Historia de los gitanos.
51. Rochas, Les Parias de France et d’Espagne, 288.
52. Ibid., 223.
53. Rochas demonstrates the linguistic evidence against a North African route with a chart comparing ten
words in Sanskrit, Bohemian-Hungarian, Gitano, and Moorish-Arabic. The selectivity of the method clearly dis-
counts the conclusion, but Rochas believed that it proved deWnitively that Spanish Gypsies formed a branch of
“the great Bohemian family” (Les Parias de France et d’Espagne, 304) that originated in India and migrated to West-
ern Europe via Hungary.
54. See also Jules Edouard Alboize du Pujol and Paul Fouché’s tragic play El Gitano ou villes et montagnes (The
Gypsy or towns and mountains; 1836); Eugene Sue’s “Gitano” in Plik et Plok (1831), and Gerald de Nerval’s “La
Main enchantée” (“La Main de gloire, histoire macaronique”) (The enchanted hand [The hand of glory, a farcical
story]), in the collection Contes et facéties (Stories and farces).
55. Victor Hugo, Han d’Islande, 135–36.
56. Max Peter Baumann, “The ReXection of the Roma in European Art Music,” 98.
57. Curiously Madrid is not listed in Baumann’s tables. I am unaware whether the opera was ever performed
in Madrid.
58. Baumann, “The ReXection of the Roma in European Art Music, 98.
59. Ibid., 100.
60. Its pull continues into the present era. As one of many examples, see Chapter 4, the account of Lillian Pol-
hemus, who lived for a brief period in the 1960s with a Romany family in Guadix and tells the story of “granny,”
who claimed to be the English-born daughter of a schoolteacher and a soldier who died in World War I.
61. Baumann, “The ReXection of the Roma in European Art Music,” 124.
62. The Fábrica de Tabacos opened in 1758. During its early years the workforce was largely masculine, but
in the nineteenth century more and more women were hired to roll cigars and cigarettes. Bizet immortalized the
factory through his cigarrera or cigar roller Carmen. Before Carmen, however, José Sánchez Albarrán and Mariano
Soriano Fuertes had produced a comic opera entitled La fábrica de Tabacos de Sevilla (1850). No statistics are avail-
able about the number of Gypsy women working in the factory.
63. F. Héran, “L’Invention de l’Andalousie au XIXe” (The invention of Andalusia in the XIXth century), 21.
According to Heran, one-fourth were British, one-Wfth German, and one-sixth North American.
64. Léon-François Hoffmann, Romantique Espagne (Romantic Spain), 34.
65. For a list of these theatrical works, see ibid., 167–78.
66. The Romantic tendency to idealize the Moorish occupation and culture of southern Spain played an
important role in the eventual popularization of modern-day Andalusian topics such as the sensual Gypsy.
Chateaubriand’s Les Aventures du Dernier Abencérage (Adventures of the last Abenceraje; 1826) sparked a prolonged
love affair with the topic that would occupy the travelogues of the Romantic travelers for decades to come. No
doubt the French conquest of Algeria, beginning in 1830 and ending in the rendition of Abd el-Kader in 1847,
helped to feed French tastes for exotic Arab culture, which the French exalted in Andalusia.
67. Peyron, Nouveau Voyage en Espagne fait en 1777 et 1778, 765.
68. Théophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 295.
69. Fernández Herr, Les Origines de l’Espagne romantique, 13.
70. Consult Margaret Rees, French Authors on Spain, 1800–1850, for a more complete list. Rees’s checklist con-
tains 774 works published, and an additional 52 written, during the period. Also see Jean René Aymes’s very use-
ful L’Espagne romantique (Romantic Spain), which includes a map showing the most common routes that French
travelers took during the Wrst half of the nineteenth century (11).
71. Alberto González Troyano, “Los viajeros románticos y la seducción ‘polimórWca’ de Andalucía” (Romantic
travelers and the polymorphic seduction of Andalusia), 15.
72. Ibid., 15.
73. Edgar Quinet, Mes Vacances en Espagne (My vacation in Spain), 38.
74. Ibid., 39–40.
75. Xavier Darcos, Prosper Mérimée, 96.
76. Ibid., 280–81. The duro is a Wve-peseta coin whose value was considerably more than today’s Wve cents.
77. Evelyn Gould, The Fate of Carmen, 60.
78. Ibid., 77.
79. Ibid., 87.

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80. Ilse Hempel-Lipschutz, in “Andalusia, de lo vivido a lo escrito” (Andalusia, from the lived to the writ-
ten), 87.
81. It should be noted that Mérimée added this chapter two years after the book’s original publication in
1845.
82. Maurice Parturier, Carmen: Romans et nouvelles (Carmen: Novels and novellas), 2:676.
83. Quoted in Fraser, “Mérimée and the Gypsies,” 10.
84. Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 295.
85. Ibid., 115.
86. See Héran, “L’Invention de l’Andalousie au XIXe,” 37, for a further discussion of this.
87. Laura Otis, Organic Memory, 3.
88. Some of George Sand’s borrowings from Carmen are listed in the footnotes to the 1989 Éditions de l’Au-
rore cited here.
89. Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dudevant), La Filleule, 45. Subsequent citations of page numbers for La
Filleule are parenthetically inserted in the text.
90. Otis, Organic Memory, 40.
91. Frank Dougherty argues that Sand’s knowledge of the Gypsies was “sound” (The Gypsies in Western Liter-
ature, 166), although he criticizes her “pre-Darwinian racial assumptions” (170).
92. Alexandre Dumas, De Paris à Cadix (From Paris to Cadiz), 211–12. The performance of Gypsyness would
continue the next day when Giraud and Boulanger paid the Romany to return to their lodgings and pose for them.
He would have gladly sent the incestuous couple packing, Dumas reports, if Giraud and Boulanger were not in
need of models to sketch, or if Maquet and he did not need to complete their “impressions and studies” (213).
Apparently Dumas wrote his impressions of the dance, published in De Paris a Cadix, after he had returned to
Paris (Alfonso Figueroa y Melgar, Viajeros románticos por España [Romantic travelers to Spain], 24).
93. Dumas, De Paris à Cadix, 213. The earliest mention of a paid dance recital that I have found is in Gil
Vicente’s 1521 Farça de las çinganas (Gypsy farce). After dancing before a group of nobles, the Gypsy dancers
express their disappointment at how little they were paid for their entertainment.
94. Bernal Rodríguez, “Tipologías” (Typologies), 121–22. Serafín Estébanez Calderón’s celebrated sketch
“Baile en Tirana” (Dance in the Triana) is also instructive in this regard.
95. Gould, The Fate of Carmen, 32.
96. Dumas, De Paris à Cadix, 212.
97. Quoted in Aymes, L’Espagne romantique, 22. Traveling at about the same time, on the contrary, a more
enthusiastic Emile Bégin held that “he who has not known the Granadan Gypsy, the Madrid manola, or the Seville
cigarette worker, misses some of the great feminine types of Spain” (Voyage en Espagne et en Portugal [A voyage to
Spain and Portugal], 465).
98. Quoted in Aymes, L’Espagne romantique, 164.
99. Bégin, Voyage en Espagne et en Portugal, 430.
100. See also the jokes recounted in Jean Charles Davillier’s L’Espagne.
101. D. A. de C., Dicccionario del dialecto Gitano (A dictionary of the Gypsy dialect), x–xi.
102. Marilyn Ruth Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians, 4.
103. Slaves were freed in Walachia in 1848, and in Hungary from 1848 to 1849.
104. Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians, 6.
105. Since interest in “real” Bohemians Xourished in the art community for most of the nineteenth century,
Brown dedicates an entire chapter to opposing myth with reality as much as this is possible. The problem, as
becomes clear in her chapter “The Real Bohemians,” is that the pseudoanthropology of the nineteenth century (she
cites George Borrow and Paul Bataillard as prime examples) does not afford a sufWciently accurate picture of the
Romanichals, Gitans, Gitanos, or Tsiganes, as they were variously called in France. Brown’s summary of facts
shows the pitfalls of attempting to counterpose the imaginary with the real Gypsy; her summary of known facts
about the Gypsies is superWcial and, in some instances, unreliable.
106. Brown, Gypsies and other Bohemians, 51.
107. Ibid., 42.
108. Ibid., 57.
109. Quoted in ibid., 58.
110. Quoted in ibid., 94.
111. Quoted in Gabriel Séailles, Alfred Dehodencq, Histoire d’un coloriste (Alfred Dehodencq, the history of a col-
orist), 44.
112. Quoted in ibid., 48.

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113. Ibid., 49.

114. Montpensier was the son of Louis-Philippe, married to the Infanta María, the sister of Isabel II of Spain.
He took refuge in Seville after 1848 and was a central Wgure of the Seville cultural scene.
115. Quoted in Séailles, Alfred Dehodencq, 62. Antoine Latour, secretary to the duke of Montpensier, reveled
in the portrait of an idealized Andalusia, as distant as possible from the present (F. Héran, “L’Invention de l’An-
dalousie au XIXe.,” 30).
116. Quoted in Séailles, Alfred Dehodencq, 73.
117. Ibid., 70.
118. Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians, 86.
119. Ibid., 77.
120. Ilustración Artística (The artistic illustrated magazine) 2.72, 14 May 1883, 154.
121. For Achille Zo’s Family of Voyaging Bohemians, see Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians, Wg. 52; for Étienne
Esbens’s Gitanos d’Alcala de Jenarez, see ibid., Wg. 69.
122. Dan Malan, Gustave Doré, 129.
123. Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians, 89.
124. Davillier, L’Espagne, 126.
125. Davillier, L’Espagne, 208.
126. Many popular jokes recount confession scenes in which a Gypsy confesses a crime and is forgiven by the
priest, who is unaware the crime has been committed against him. In his version of the joke, Davillier cites a
Gypsy who confesses to stealing a mule’s rein, to which the priest objects that this sin is trivial. “But the reins
were attached to a harness,” continues the Gypsy, “and the harness to a saddle” “and under the saddle a mule.”
“What a black deed that was,” exclaims the priest, whereupon the Gypsy replies: “Not as black as the mules I stole
after that one!” (Davillier, Spain, 362).
127. Davillier, L’Espagne, 368.
128. Séailles, Alfred Dehodencq, 60.
129. Ibid., 77.
130. Ibid., 60.

Chapter 3
1. Siân Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity, 42.
2. Edward Burnett Tylor, Anthropology, 109.
3. Miles, “The Articulation of Racism and Nationalism,” 47.
4. George Behlmer, “The Gypsy Problem in Victorian England,” 231.
5. Miles, “The Articulation of Racism and Nationalism,” 46,
6. Behlmer, “The Gypsy Problem in Victorian England,” 243.
7. Carl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel, On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, 12.
8. Willems, “Ethnicity as Death-trap,” 19.
9. Behlmer, The Gypsy Problem in Victorian England,” 237.
10. Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 128. See also Ragussis’s excellent analysis of the relationship
between British literature and “the Jewish question” in Figures of Conversion.
11. Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 129.
12. Ana Clara Guerrero, “El peso de la tradición en los viajeros británicos contemporáneos por España,” 266.
13. Torrione “Del viajero ilustrado al viajero romántico,” 10.
14. Richard Twiss, Travels Through Spain and Portugal, 157.
15. Ibid., 156.
16. The term “salt” was already used by foreign travelers in the Wrst half of the nineteenth century. See the
marquis de Custine’s comments in Aymes, L’Espagne romantique, 72, where he explains that the term was used
among the Spanish to describe Xirtatious women.
17. William Jacob, Travels in the South of Spain in Letters Written A.D. 1809 and 1910, 288.
18. Henry D. Inglis, Spain in 1830, 2:231.
19. Arthur de Cappell Brooke (Sir), Sketches in Spain and Morocco, 231.
20. Bonnie McMullen’s contention that Spain was “never part of the Grand Tour” (see “‘The Interest of
Spanish Sights’: From Ronda to Daniel Deronda,” 124) is misleading. For an excellent overview of the history of
the extension of the grand tour to Spain, see Blanca Krauel Heredia, Viajeros británicos en Andalucia de Christopher

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Hervey a Richard Ford (1760–1845) (British travelers in Andalusia from Christopher Hervey to Richard Ford
[1760–1845]), especially chap. 1.
21. Krauel Heredia, Viajeros británicos en Andalucia de Christopher Hervey a Richard Ford (1760–1845), 109–12.
22. See Behlmer’s “The Gypsy Problem in Victorian England,” and especially Mayall’s Gypsy-Travellers in
Nineteenth-Century Society, for a description of the British home missionary projects.
23. Severn Teackle Wallis, Glimpses of Spain, 226.
24. Frances Elliott, Diary of an Idle Woman in Spain, 144.
25. Elizabeth M. Leveson Gower, Narrative of a Yacht Voyage in the Mediterranean in the Year 1840–41, 1:124.
26. Krauel Heredia, Viajeros británicos en Andalucía de Christopher Hervey a Richard Ford (1760–1945), 79.
27. See ibid., 79, and María Antonia López-Burgos, Por los caminos del Poniente Granadino relatos de viajeros ingle-
ses durante el siglo XIX (On the byways of western Granada: Stories of English travelers during the nineteenth
century), for more details of the travel accounts of British tourists.
28. In his scurrilous Discurso contra los gitanos (Discourse against Gypsies), Quiñones used the tale of the book-
seller of Logroño as one in a series of examples demonstrating Gypsy treachery. In Alcalá Yáñez’s picaresque novel,
however, the “great trick” is one in a host of other events described that have nothing to do with Gypsy malfai-
sance. The “great trick” is a heist in which a Gypsy woman gains the conWdence of a gullible but greedy widow.
The Gypsy tells the woman that in her wine cellar there is a great treasure that can be tapped only in Wve days,
on the eve of San Juan, through a secret incantation. The woman is instructed to gather together all her jewels and
gold and silver coins, because “gold attracts gold and silver, silver” and have them ready for the speciWed night.
On the eve of San Juan, two Gypsy women descend into the basement to conjure up the young saint to release the
treasures buried there. Then, imitating a child’s voice, one of the women responds that the treasure is theirs for
the taking. The women then return to the widow and tell her to fetch her best dress to complete the conjuration.
When the woman exits the room, the Gypsies abscond with the coins and jewels (Jeronimo Alcalá Yáñez, Alonso,
mozo de muchos amos o el donado hablador, 204–5). Both the bookseller tale and the “great trick” will be repeated
dozens of times by future historians and ethnologists.
29. George Borrow, The Zincali, 73.
30. Ibid., 81.
31. Ibid., 83.
32. J. M., Historia de los gitanos, 46; Borrow, The Zincali, 308.
33. See especially chapters 9 and 10 of Borrow, The Bible in Spain 1.
34. Fraser, “Los olvidados colaboradores de George Borrow en España” (The forgotten collaborators of George
Borrow in Spain), 40.
35. Carlos Clavería, “Gitano-andaluz devel, undevel” (The Gitano-Andalusian words “devel” and “undevel”),
56–57.
36. Robert R. Meyers, George Borrow, 21.
37. Behlmer, “The Gypsy Problem in Victorian England,” 241.
38. Quoted in Willems, In Search of the True Gypsy, 180.
39. Meyers, George Borrow, 122.
40. William I. Knapp, Life Writings and Correspondence of George Borrow (1803–1881), 122.
41. Borrow, The Zincali, 50–51. Borrow’s negativism regarding the Spaniards was not shared by earlier
travelers. See, for example, Patricia Shaw Fairman, España vista por los ingleses del siglo XVII (Spain as seen by the
English in the seventeenth century), 133–77.
42. Borrow, The Zincali, 50–51.
43. Borrow, The Bible in Spain, 1:xix.
44. Borrow, The Zincali, 130.
45. Ibid., 132–33.
46. Ibid., 51, 27.
47. Ibid., 1:xx.
48. See Robert Gordon Latham, Man and His Migrations, 27, for a discussion of man’s “soft parts” that was
common during Borrow’s time.
49. Borrow, The Zincali, 56–57.
50. Carmen de Zulueta, “El enigma de George Borrow” (The enigma of George Borrow), 57.
51. Quoted in ibid., 58.
52. Manuel Azaña, ed., Los Zincali, 9.
53. Zulueta, “El enigma de George Borrow,” 60.

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54. Borrow, The Zincali, 110.

55. Hugo’s descriptions of the presumably Andalusian-born Esmeralda are in chapter 3 of Notre Dame de Paris.
Like Cervantes, Hugo paints the faux Gypsy and the real Gypsy in chiaroscuro relief. In Le Roi s’amuse, for exam-
ple, Saltabil and Maguelonne are the instruments of Satan and evil. Bechlie, the subject of Hugo’s early novel Han
d/Islande (1823), is the Wgure of the grim reaper.
56. Krauel Heredia, Viajeros británicos en Andalucía de Christopher Hervey a Richard Ford (1760–1945), 152.
57. Borrow, The Zincali, 109.
58. Ibid., 111
59. Samuel Edward Widdrington Scott (Captain), Spain and the Spaniards in 1843, 1:360.
60. Ibid., 1:360.
61. Ibid., 1:432–35.
62. Ibid., 1:434.
63. Richard Ford, Letters to Gayangos, 48.
64. Ibid., 48.
65. Krauel Heredia, Viajeros británicos en Andalucía de Christopher Hervey a Richard Ford (1760–1945), 102.
66. Ford, Handbook for Travellers in Spain, 1:104.
67. Ibid., 1:104.
68. Ibid., 1:104.
69. William George Clark, Gazpacho: or Summer Months in Spain, 127.
70. Severn Teackle Wallis, Glimpses of Spain; or, Notes of an UnWnished Tour in 1847, 188.
71. Ibid., 188.
72. Henry Blackburn, Travelling in Spain in the Present Day, 209.
73. Ibid., 209–10.
74. Annie Jane Tennant Harvey, Cositas españolas; or, Every Day Life in Spain, 52.
75. Augustus J. C. Hare, Wanderings in Spain, 166.
76. Ibid., 166.
77. Ibid., 167.
78. Ibid., 168.
79. Isabella Frances Romer, The Rhone, the Daro, and the Guadalquivir: A Summer Ramble in 1842, 2:106–7.
80. Most mid-century British travelers had accepted J. M.’s inXuential racial genealogy, and some even ques-
tioned the Sanskrit derivation of Romany. Martin Haverty, in his Wanderings in Spain (1847), explained that the
“gitano tribe” (194) were remnants of the Moors expelled from Spain in the Wfteenth century, who, “adhering to
the soil, . . . continue to lead the wandering life to which their Bedouin origin disposed them” (194). Some experts
held that their language contained traces of Sanskrit, he continued, but others laugh at this “whimsical” sugges-
tion, claiming that the language Gypsies speak was “invented by themselves, about the early part of the sixteenth
century, that they might, as need might be, understand each other without being understood by others” (195).
81. This legend is quite ancient. Already in 1777 Sir John Brand, in his Observations on Popular Antiquities . . . ,
claimed that the Gypsies were chased from Hindustan by Timur Beg.
82. Sir John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities . . . , 111.
83. Ibid., 111.
84. Mary Ann Anson (Lady Louisa Tenison), Castile and Andalucia, 9.
85. Ibid., 99, 181.
86. Ibid., 183.
87. Foremost among the British artists known for their paintings and sketches of Andalusia is the Scottish
David Roberts (1796–1884), who spent three weeks in Granada and Wve months in Seville from 1832 to 1833
and sold thousands of his lithographs (entitled Picturesque sketches in Spain, Taken During the Years 1832 and 1833)
when he returned to Great Britain. Most of his paintings are architectural sketches with distinctively romantic
hues, the buildings standing out and majestically dwarWng the tiny Wgures used primarily to exaggerate the
imposing architecture. Thomas Roscoe used many of these same sketches to illustrate his history of the fall of
Granada in The Tourist in Spain. Granada. For other samples of Romantic-era paintings of Andalusia, see La
Granada de David Roberts. See also John Frederick Lewis, Sketches of Spain and Spanish Character, Made During his
Tour in That Country in 1833–34. Cristina Viñes dedicates a section to these artists in Granada en los libros de viaje
(Granada in travelogues).
88. Mrs. H. Pemberton, Winter Tour in Spain, 245.
89. Ibid., 167, 168.

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90. Quoted in J. Crawford Wilson, The Gitanilla, or The Children of the Zincali, 2.
91. Ibid., 50.
92. Ibid., 19.
93. Ibid., 32, 33.
94. Sylvia Kasey Marks, “A Brief Glance at George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy,” 184.
95. Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity, 153.
96. According to Deborah Epstein Nord (“‘Marks of Race’: Gypsy Figures and Eccentric Femininity in
Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing,” note 10), the idea of the homeland for Gypsies was probably inspired
by the plot of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Leila (1837). See Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National
Inheritance, and Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity, for a discussion
of Bulwer-Lytton’s inXuence on Eliot.
97. George Henry Lewes, The Spanish Drama, 100.
98. Ibid., 105.
99. Ibid., 101.
100. Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance, 105.
101. Quoted in ibid., 14.
102. George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy, 274–75. All further page references to The Spanish Gypsy are parenthet-
ically inserted in the text.
103. Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance, 113.
104. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction,
201. According to Beer, in Eliot’s last three novels, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, questions of
descent and inheritance become even more dominant (219).
105. Although she uses here the term “race,” it is clear from the argument of The Spanish Gypsy that Eliot, like
Herder, believed that national character surpassed race as a deWning category of human personality. In Book VII
of Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, Herder stated that he saw no reason to use the word “race” at all
when there is only one species of man. “Complexions run into each other: forms follow the genetic character: and
upon the whole, all are at last but shades of the same great picture, extending through all ages” (7). Human char-
acter, however, is determined by the way of life and “genius” of each nation. The nature of a people, its völksgeist,
was dependent upon its heritage; each people was unique, and this meant that many cultures were incommensu-
rate. Thus, as Malik points out (see The Meaning of Race, 78), Herder “unwittingly” gave impetus to the Roman-
tic notion of race.
106. For discussion of the heroic characteristics of the poem, see “A Brief Glance at George Eliot’s The Span-
ish Gypsy” by Sylvia Kasey Marks.
107. McMullen, “‘The Interest of Spanish Sights’: From Ronda to Daniel Deronda,” 133.
108. Eliot, George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, 32.
109. Ibid., 34.
110. Ibid., 35.
111. John Knox, The Races of Man, 31. Knox’s Wrst series of lectures was delivered before the Philosophical
Society of Newcastle, England. Later he repeated these lectures at Birmingham and Manchester. He attributed the
events of 1848 and 1849 during the Prussian War to the fact that his theories were not sufWciently understood.
112. Knox, The Races of Man, 7–9.
113. Ibid., 91. Knox is referring here to Macaulay and other journalists who in his day were beginning to
argue forcefully for environmental determinism.
114. Knox, The Races of Man, 52.
115. Ibid., 103.
116. Ibid., 107, 108.
117. Epstein Nord, “‘Marks of Race’: Gypsy Figures and Eccentric Femininity in Nineteenth-Century
Women’s Writing,” 190.
118. Ibid., 190.
119. Ibid., 205.
120. The most conspicuous example is perhaps Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (from the novel by the
same name).
121. Epstein Nord, “‘Marks of Race’: Gypsy Figures and Eccentric Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Women’s
Writing,” 205. In addition to Fedalma, Epstein Nord explores Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha and Rochester ( Jane
Eyre), Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver (The Mill on the Floss), and Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights).

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Chapter 4
1. Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth-Century Society, 26.
2. Ibid., 35.
3. Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race, 73.
4. Samuel Parsons Scott, Through Spain: A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the Peninsula, 118–19.
5. Ibid., 188.
6. Ibid., 185.
7. Ibid., 194.
8. Héctor France, Sac au dos à travers l’Espagne, 218.
9. John Augustus O’Shea, Romantic Spain, 2:309.
10. Ibid., 2:309.
11. Catulle Mendès, Les Belles au monde, 5.
12. Ibid., 30.
13. Ibid., 32.
14. Gustave Larroument, Nouvelles Études et de critique dramatiques, 309–10.
15. Ibid., 313.
16. Ibid., 9.
17. Héran, “L’Invention de l’Andalousie au XIXe, dans la littérature de voyage,” 22.
18. Brian Dendle, “Sobre algunos escritores franceses en España” (On several French writers in Spain), 169.
19. Maurice Barrès, Du sang, de la volupté, et de la mort (On blood, voluptuousness, and death), 155.
20. Ibid., 58.
21. Dendle, “Pierre Louÿs et l’Espagne” (Pierre Louÿs and Spain), 85.
22. Pierre Louÿs, La Femme et le pantin, Roman espagnol (The woman and the puppet, a Spanish novel), 11. Like
his model Mérimée, Louÿs was fascinated by Andalusian culture. His Wrst trip to Spain was in 1895, in the com-
pany of the playwright A.-Ferdinand Hérold. He returned to Seville the following year and began to write La
Femme et le pantin, which he completed in Egypt in 1898 (see Dendle, “Pierre Louÿs et l’Espagne,” 86).
23. Louÿs, La femme et le pantin, Roman espagnol, 48.
24. Pierre Louÿs, Voyage en Espagne.
25. Willems, In Search of the True Gypsy, 174.
26. Ibid., 171.
27. Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 1 (July 1888): 39.
28. Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 3.1 (1891–92): 63–64.
29. Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 1.5 (1889): 286.
30. Ibid., 288.
31. Philip Sanford Marden, Travels in Spain, 92.
32. Dorothy Giles, The Road Through Spain, 195.
33. Marden, Travels in Spain, 92.
34. John Brande Trend, Spain from the South, 69.
35. Ibid., 10.
36. Ibid., 11.
37. Maud Howe Elliot, Sun and Shadow in Spain, 128.
38. Ibid., 128.
39. These two terms do not mean exactly the same thing. A Romany Rye, according to a member of The
Gypsy Lore Society quoted by Walter Starkie, is more than a mere aWcionado: “Besides acting as private secretary,
legal, medical, and spiritual adviser, general arbiter, and tobacco-jar to his Romany friends, the complete Rye is
supposed to possess a more or less exact knowledge of divination” (Starkie, In Sara’s Tents, 58).
40. Other early British travelers who helped popularize southern Spain as a tourist destination were Augustus
J. C. Hare, Henry David Inglis, Robert Dundas Murray, William George Clark, and Alexander Slidell. See José
Alberich, Del Támesis al Guadalquivir (From the Thames to the Guadalquivir), 247–56.
41. Karl Baedeker’s Spain and Portugal, Handbook for Travellers (New York: C. Scribner’s, 1898); Espagne et Por-
tugal: Manuel du voyageur (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1900); Spanien und Portugal. Handbuch für Reisende (Leipzig,
K. BÆdeker, 1897); and the 1912 Cook’s The Travellers Handbook for Spain by Albert F. Calvert mention only in
passing Gypsy districts.
42. Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians, 13.

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43. Harry Alverson Franck, Four Months Afoot in Spain, 180.

44. Katherine Lee Bates, Spanish Highways and Byways, 132.
45. Irving Henry Brown, Nights and Days on the Gypsy Trail Through Andalusia and on Other Mediterranean
Shores, xi.
46. Ibid., xiv.
47. Ibid., 9.
48. Ibid., 93.
49. Ibid., 259.
50. Ibid., 260.
51. Ibid., 263.
52. Starkie, Spanish Raggle-Taggle, 16.
53. Ibid., 45.
54. Ibid., 187.
55. Starkie, Don Gypsy, 95.
56. Ibid., 152.
57. Ibid., 329.
58. Ibid., 329.
59. Ibid., 329.
60. Richard Wright, Pagan Spain, 196.
61. Kate O’Brien, Farewell Spain, 3.
62. Starkie, Don Gypsy, 239.
63. Starkie, In Sarah’s Tents, 241.
64. Ibid., 12.
65. Ibid., 13.
66. Ibid., 14.
67. It is sobering to compare Starkie’s fanciful books on Spain with those of the British political historian
Gerald Brenan, who traveled to many of the same places as Starkie and lived in Spain during the opening stages
of the Civil War, returning several years after World War II. See The Face of Spain, South from Granada, and The
Spanish Labyrinth. Brenan was more interested in the vicissitudes of Spanish politics and the relations between the
working and the upper classes and had very little to say about Gypsies in any of his books.
68. Vita Sackville-West, Pepita, 251.
69. Quoted in Victoria Glendenning, Vita, 89–90.
70. For example, to give a “realistic” portrait of Spanish servants, she quotes a lengthy passage from Richard
Ford on the defects of Spanish servants, happy that Ford will corroborate her own impressions (Pepita, 91).
71. The suit was brought in 1910, but Sackville-West obtained the depositions only in 1936, as she was going
through her mother’s papers (Victoria Glendenning, Vita, 285). According to Glendenning, writing in 1983,
Pepita was Vita’s attempt to “make some artistic sense of her own childhood and mixed heritage,” which resulted
in the “exorcism of the Spanish gypsy in herself” (Vita, 285).
72. Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage, 49.
73. Quoted in Glendenning, Vita, 31.
74. Sackville-West, Pepita, 25–26.
75. Ibid., 27–29.
76. Ibid., 30.
77. Ibid., 136.
78. Glendenning, Vita, 289.
79. Ivor Brown, “Stranger Than Fiction,” 7.
80. Amy Loveman, “Family History,” 7.
81. R. M., “Tohu-bohu,” 695.
82. P. W. Wilson, “Pepita,” 9.
83. Juliette de Baïracli Levy, As Gypsies Wander, 263.
84. Ibid., 16.
85. Lillian Polhemus, Good-bye Gypsy, 18. All further page references to Good-bye Gypsy are parenthetically
inserted in the text.
86. Merrill F. McLane, Proud Outcasts, 114. The movement had its roots in France, where a non-Romany of the
Assembly of God converted many French Romany and other itinerant workers to the Evangelical denomination
(see McLane, Proud Outcasts, 112).

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87. Vaux de Foltier, Mil años de historia de los gitanos (A thousand years of Gypsy history), 51.
88. Jean-Paul Clébert, The Gypsies, 114.
89. Ibid., 116.
90. Ibid., 117.
91. Bertha Quintana and Lois Gray Floyd, ¡Qué gitano! vii.
92. Ibid., vii.
93. Ibid., 26.
94. Ibid., 28.
95. Leblon, Les gitans d’Espagne, 101.
96. Ibid., 22. See also Leblon, Musiques tsiganes et Xamenco, 40, for further details.
97. Ibid., 22. As Leblon and Fraser both note, “Pequeño Egipto,” or “Little Egypt,” was likely either Izmit (or
Isnikmid) in Turkey, Epirus in Greece, or a place situated near Modon on the Peloponnesian coast (Leblon, Les
Gitans, 10).
98. Leblon, Les Gitans, 102–3.
99. Ibid., 234.
100. Jan Yoors, The Gypsies of Spain, 122.
101. Ibid., 25.
102. Ibid., 55.
103. Ibid., 59.
104. McLane, Proud Outcasts, 168. All further page references to Proud Outcasts are parenthetically inserted in
the text.

Chapter 5
1. Luis Lavaur, Teoría romántica del cante Xamenco (Romantic theory of Xamenco song), 71.
2. For example, see his El maestro de la tuna (The band leader), La feria del Puerto (A feast day in the port), and
El soldado fanfarrón (The blustering soldier). As Torrione points out, González del Castillo identiWed Gypsies as
morenos or gente morena (“the dark-skinned”), possibly in compliance with the 1783 decree of Charles III, forbid-
ding the use of the word Gitano (“Del viajero ilustrado al viajero romántico,” 17).
3. Torrione, “Del viajero ilustrado al viajero romántico.” 16.
4. Jesús Torrecilla, España Exótica, 50.
5. See also Julio Caro Baroja, Ensayo sobre la literatura de cordel, for a discussion of other eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century musical interludes that popularized the Wgure of the Gypsy. Early examples of interludes
include Juan Ignacio González del Castillo’s La boda del Mundo Nuevo (A New World wedding).
6. Enrique Baltanás, “La gitanoWlia como sustituto de la mauroWlia” (Gypsyphilia as a substitute for mau-
rophilia), 210; Caro Baroja, Ensayo sobre la literatura de cordel (Essay on popular literature), 273.
7. Enrique Zumel, El gitano aventurero, 31–32.
8. Mariano Soriano Fuertes, La fábrica de tabacos de Sevilla, 44.
9. Isaac M. Vaahnon, “Nómadas,” 169–70.
10. See Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press, 110, for a repro-
duction of this engraving. For other examples of this identiWcation between cities and Andalusian women not
reproduced here, see José García y Ramos, Un rinconcito de Sevilla (A corner of Seville), La Ilustración Española y
Americana 37.1, 8 January 1893, 8, showing a group of Sevillian women, one of whom stares arrogantly and seduc-
tively out of the frame; Sevillana (Seville woman), La Ilustración Artística 20.1027, 1 September 1901, 576; En un
balcón de Sevilla (On a Seville balcony), La Ilustración Ibérica 14.704, 27 June 1896, 401; and Antonio Fabrés, La
Xorista granadina (The Grenadine Xorist), La Ilustración Artística 7.337, 11 June 1888, 193.
11. Album Salón 4 (1900): 157.
12. For an early example of graphic images of Spanish Gypsies, see El Museo Universal 6.11, 16 March 1862,
80, Baile de gitanos en Granada (A Gypsy dance in Granada).
13. Ilustración Española y Americana 32.9, 8 March 1888, 160. Reproductions of German, Italian, and French
paintings of seductive Gypsy women from a wide variety of regions throughout Southern, Central, and Eastern
Europe abounded in the Spanish press, whose editors built stories to accompany the images and weighed their
authenticity. Examples include George Homm Mignon (Ilustración Artística 1.5, 29 January 1882, 37), Robbed in her
infancy by some acrobats, the brutal treatment by the chief of the Bohemian family has annihilated her body and broken down
her dignity (p. 34); E. Herbert’s Gitanilla (The little Gypsy girl; Ilustración Artísica 1.11, 12 March 1882, cover),

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Poor girl! She belongs to a degraded race, an outlawed family, a people damned centuries ago, if this swarm of tribes scattered
throughout Europe and throughout Europe despised can even be called a people; Bouguereau, Gitanas (Gypsy women; Mundo
Ilustrado 6.139, n.d., 2d series, 43, 588–89); E. Lancerotti, La gitana (The Gypsy; Ilustración Ibérica 7.355, 19
October 1889, 660), You would have to be a real malcontent not to Wnd this engraving to be a good thing; and Alexis Har-
lamoff, Gitanilla (Little Gypsy girl) that graced the cover of the La Ilustración Ibérica, 13.656, 27 July 1895.
14. Ilustración Ibérica 5.213, 29, January 1887, 65.
15. Mundo Ilustrado 6.126, also listed as 302, 2d series (1883?), 184.
16. Ilustración Artística 2.88, 3 September 1883, 283.
17. See Charnon-Deutsch, Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press, chap. 5, for more details.
18. Manuel Fernández y González, Las castañuelas de Pepa, in Ilustración Artística, 2.85, 13 August 1883, 259.
19. Blanca de los Ríos Nostrench, “La gitana,” 589.
20. Ibid., 591.
21. Herrero, “La gitana,” 121. See also the Romantic story by Joaquina García Balmaseda, which used a Gypsy
foundling, Consuelo, to promote women’s roles as nurse and housekeeper in the magazine La Educanda.
22. Herrero, “La gitana,” 604.
23. Ibid., 606.
24. It is useful to remember the paternalistic connotations of the word “pueblo” in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, when it often meant the nameless members of the popular classes who preserved “things
of value which others . . . might cull and polish” (Alison Sinclair, “Elitism and the Cult of the Popular in Spain,”
227–28).
25. Herrero, “La gitana,” 607.
26. Armando Palacio Valdés, La Hermana San Sulpicio, 59.
27. Ibid., 268.
28. See Frank T. Dougherty’s dissertation, “The Gypsies in Western Literature,” 214, for more details regard-
ing the writing of La horda.
29. Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, La bodega, 406–7.
30. In the 1890s, the image of the Bohemian woman underwent a similar transformation; no longer distant
and innocent, she became the femme fatale: “She now inspired the artist with her passionate abandon: she lured
him on with a combined acquiescence and assault.” (Marilyn Ruth Brown, The Image of the Bohémien from Díaz to
Manet and Van Gogh, 461).
31. Isaac Muñoz, Morena y trágica, 115.
32. Musa earned Romero a gold medal in the Exposición of 1908, after which it was acquired by the state.
33. Juan Goytisolo, “Presentación crítica de J. M. Blanco White” (Critical presentation of J. M. Blanco
White), 7.
34. The only foreign Caló vocabulary preceding Borrow’s was the one Richard Bright appended to his book
Travels from Vienna Through Lower Hungary; With Some Remarks on the State of Vienna During the Congress, In the Year
1814. It was written by Richard Twiss and entitled Estado de los gitanos en España en 1817 (The state of Spanish
Gitanos in 1817). According to Torrione, Borrow may have collaborated in the compilation of his list with
his philologist friend Luis Usoz y Río, who left in his papers an incomplete manuscript containing 1,268 Caló-
Spanish vocabulary entries written between 1836 and 1838 (Torrione, Diccionario Caló-castellano de don Luis Usoz
y Río, 16, 23).
35. See also Augusto Jiménez, Vocabulario del dialecto jitano (Vocabulary of the Gypsy dialect; 1846), which
contained 4,000 words; Ramón Campuzano, Orijen, usos, y costumbres de los jitanos (Origin, habits, and customs of
the Gypsies; 1848), which included 4,500 words; D. A. de C., Diccionario del dialecto gitano (Dictionary of the
Gypsy dialect; Barcelona, 1851), also with approximately 4,500 words; Francisco de Sales Mayo (Quindalé), El
gitanismo. Historia, costumbres, y dialecto (Gypsyism: History, customs, and dialect; 1867 and 1870), with approxi-
mately 3,400 words; and F. M. Pabanó, Historia y costumbres de los gitanos. Diccionario español-gitano-germanesco (His-
tory and customs of the Gypsies: Spanish-Gypsy-Rogues dictionary; 1915), with close to 5,000 words.
36. The Wrst edition of Lorenzo de Hervás’s catalogue was in Italian, entitled Catalogo delle lingue conosciute e
notizia della loro afWnita, e diversita (1784). The edition cited here is the Spanish translation of 1800.
37. Ramón Campuzano, Orijen, usos, y costumbres de los jitanos, xviii.
38. Salillas based his work on the earliest extant vocabulary list of Caló words, Juan Hidalgo’s Romances de ger-
manía con vocabulario. Discurso de la expulsión de los gitanos (Slang romances with a vocabulary: Discourse on the
expulsion of the Gypsies), compiled around 1609 and Wrst published in Madrid in 1779.
39. Rafael Salillas, El delincuente español. El lenguaje, 208–9.
40. Fraser, The Gypsies, 197.

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41. The myth of Egyptian origin was already circulating in Europe in the Middle Ages. In Spain the “Egip-
tos” were considered a subgroup of Gypsies in the early 1600s. For example, in the picaresque novel by Juan de
Luna entitled Segunda parte del Lazarillo (Second half of the Lazarillo; 1620), a character makes reference to “Gyp-
sies born in Egypt.” The anthropologist Teresa de San Román distinguishes three groups of Spanish Roma today:
Calés (the largest group on the peninsula), Ciganos (Portuguese Roma with a mixture of Payos), and Húngaros,
who have a common ancestry in migratory groups that entered northern Spain in the Wfteenth century, even if they
are now completely autonomous groups. François de Vaux de Foletier argued in 1974 that there was no linguis-
tic evidence that Gypsies had migrated north from Africa and that, on the contrary, the Caló of the Gypsies of
southern Spain contained Greek words. Some historians still make the North-African claim, but the issue of a
North-African descent of southern Spanish Gypsies has not been settled. See, for example, María Rosario de
Parada’s El pueblo gitano en España y Aragón (The Gitano people in Spain and Aragon; 1997), 39–40. In the absence
of proof, I tend to agree with Amada López de Menezes, who gives a detailed account of the Wrst appearance of
“egiptos” in Spain, based on archival work showing their dispersion from a northern point of entry beginning in
1425, when Alfonso V of Aragón granted a group of wanderers authorization to remain for a trimester (“La inmi-
gración gitana en España en el siglo XV,” 3).
42. Francisco de Sales Mayo, El gitanismo, 7.
43. Ibid., 7.
44. Ibid., 9.
45. F. M. Pabanó, Historia y costumbres de los gitanos, 23.
46. See the entry “Gitano” in the 1907 edition of the Enciclopedia universal, 227.
47. Pabanó, Historia y costumbres de los gitanos, 47.
48. These images with their corresponding captions are found in ibid., 21, 27, 33, 55, 61, 67, 81, 199, 196,
197, 192.
49. Ibid., 89.
50. According to Steingress, the word “Xamenco” was Wrst used in 1830 in a tonadilla called “El tío Conejo”
to designate a peculiar and incomprehensible way of speaking (Sociología del Xamenco, 187). By mid-century the
term came to stand for a certain type of song (188).
51. Quoted in J. M., Historia de los gitanos, 83.
52. Steingress, Sociología del cante Xamenco, 275. Steingress follows in the footsteps of an earlier musicologist,
Hugo Schuchardt, who in Dies Cantes Flamencos (Flamenco cantes; 1881), debunked the Machado theory of Gypsy
cante Xamenco. Torrione, “Del viajero ilustrado al viajero romántico,” 18–21, on the contrary, sees a more direct
relation between modern Xamenco dance and the fandango, usually described as a Gypsy dance by eighteenth-
century writers such as González del Castillo.
53. The collection contained 881 Gitano-Andaluz coplas (“ballads”) and other compositions of various types:
Siguiriyas, martinetes, cañas, and so on, together with more than 260 footnotes and a biography of 80 cantaores
organized according to city. It was followed in 1887 with a second volume entitled Cantes Xamencos. Colección
escogida (Flamenco songs: Selected collection).
54. Steingress, Sociología del cante Xamenco, 105.
55. See Timothy Mitchell, Flamenco Deep Song, 47, for a fuller development of this argument.
56. Manuel Ríos Ruiz, “Causas y efectos del antiXamenquismo,” 63.
57. See Mitchell, Flamenco Deep Song, chapter titled “How Flamenco Became Art.”
58. Soledad de Mateo, Castañuelas para Franco, 109.
59. Eugenio Noel, Señoritos, chulos fenómenos, gitanos, y Xamencos (Señoritos, cocky phenomena, Gypsies, and
Xamencos), Señoritos, 225.
60. Noel, Escenas y andanzas de la campaña antiXamenca (Scenes and fortunes of the antiXamenco campaign),
169. Between 1911 and 1926, Noel published thirty books. Those that formed part of the “antiXamenco cam-
paign” were published in Valencia by Sempere. Besides the above cited Escenas y andanzas de la campaña antiXa-
menca, these include Pan y toros (Bread and bulls), El rey se divierte (The king amuses himself), and El as de oro o Las
capeas (The golden ace or the bullWghts).
61. Noel, Raíces de España (Spanish roots), 286.
62. Noel, Señoritos, chulos fenómenos, gitanos, y Xamencos, 224.
63. Ibid., 254.
64. Ibid., 256.
65. Ibid., 257. The celebratory note of Señoritos is not carried through in all of Noel’s books. In Escenas y andan-
zas de la campaña campaña antiXamenca (1913), for example, he uses metaphors of illness to describe Xamenquism
as a plague.

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66. For Steingress, the primitive traditional saeta musical form that gave birth to cante jondo was not a Gypsy
tradition; rather it was a musical form that was agitanado, by which he meant that it had been willfully infused
with Gypsy Xavor: “The ‘jondo’ is not a Gypsy characteristic, rather ‘Gypsyness’ is a characteristic of the ‘jondo,’
deriving from medieval liturgical chant, both Mozarabic and Muezzin” (Sociología del Xamenco, 81). There was,
according to Steingress, no autochthonous Gypsy poetry in the nineteenth century or before the appearance of
Xamenco.
67. Starkie, In Sara’s Tents, 92.
68. See also Baltanás, “La Gitanofília como sustituto de la mauroWlia.”
69. Domingo Manfredi Cano, Los gitanos, 10.
70. Mitchell, Flamenco Deep Song, 167.
71. See Torrecilla, España exótica, 80, for a discussion of this.
72. Steingress, Sociología del Xamenco, 66.
73. Leblon, “Granada, 1922,” 75.
74. García Lorca, “Cartas de Federico García Lorca,” 1205. See Alberto Egeo-Fernández-Montesinos, Garcia
Lorca, 155–81, for a recent discussion of Lorca’s negotiation of Gitano subjectivity.
75. Quoted in Baltanás, “La gitanoWlia como sustituto de la mauroWlia,” 9.
76. Ibid., 2.
77. Mitchell, Flamenco Deep Song, 8, 160.
78. For a discussion of the uses of Xamenco to further regional identity, see Steingress, “Ideología y mentali-
dad en la construcción de la identidad cultural” (Ideology and mentality in the construction of cultural identity).
For further discussion of the Franco regime’s collaboration with the Gypsy myth, see William Washabaugh, “La
invención del ‘cante gitano’” (The invention of Gypsy song), 64ff. Washabaugh suggests that Franco Xirted with
what the Spaniards called gitanismo in an attempt to suppress Andalusian regionalism and that this gave the green
light to Gitanophiles such as Mairena to glorify and mystify the Gypsy contribution to Xamenco. However, he
also argues that the GypsiWcation evident in the series of documentary Wlms directed by Manuel Agujetas entitled
Rito y Georgrafía del Cante (Rites and geography of cante) was not a simple case of Mairenismo but a response to the
stiXing centralist Francoist politics (65). Unlike Mitchell, who judges the Wlms as retrograde attempts to mystify
Gypsy culture, Washabaugh sees them as promotional of regional interests.
79. Ortiz de Villajos, Gitanos de Granada (The Gypsies of Granada), 30.
80. Recent studies, such as Gómez Alfaro’s The Great Gypsy Round-up, offer a much bleaker picture of Spanish
tolerance. Gómez Alfaro studies the 1847 roundup and imprisonment of between 9,000 and 12,000 Gypsies
ordered by Ferdinand VI to resolve once and for all the “Gypsy problem.”
81. The notion of Andalusian Gypsies as “salt” has a lengthy history. It was used as early as 1845 by Richard
Ford to describe the language and manners of Andalusians (Bernal Rodríguez, La Andalucía de los libros de viajes
del siglo XIX, 114), but Ford no doubt borrowed it from an undocumented Spanish source. In 1799 the Basque
folklorist Iza Zamácola y Ozerín, for example, used the term to describe fandangos, coplas, seguidillas, and other
popular dances and guitar pieces (Juan de la Plata, “Los orígenes de la literatura Xamenca” (The origins of Xamenco
literature), 36.
82. Ortiz de Villajos, Gitanos de Granada, 98.
83. A zambra is an informal music and dance performance that takes place in the patios, caves, or cafés of
Granada. Implied in the term is a recognition of the Moorish character and origin of the dances, but the modern
zambra (from the Arabic zamra or “Xute”) is usually a Gypsy performance staged for tourists and local aWcionados.
84. Ortiz de Villajos, Gitanos de Granada, 20.
85. José B Monleón, “El oriente, revisitado,” 97.
86. Steingress, “Ideología y mentalidad en la construcción de la identidad cultural,” 176.
87. José-Carlos de Luna, Gitanos de la Bética, 11–12.
88. Ibid., 190.
89. This insistence on a separate racial identity for southern Gypsies found great favor with the Spanish
folklorists and ethnologists who argued for a Gypsy origin of the much-disputed cante jondo. For example, in Los
gitanos (The Gypsies; 1959), Manfredi Cano quoted Luna as his principal authority on the difference between the
various Spanish Roma groups. At every turn Luna drums into his readers that “our Gypsies” are distinct from
Hindu Gypsies.
90. Ilustración Artística, 2.88, 3 September 1883, 283.
91. Ríos Nostrench, “La gitana,” 593.
92. Luna, Gitanos de la Bética, n.p.
93. Rafael Lafuente, Los gitanos, el Xamenco, y los Xamencos (The Gypsies, Xamenco, and the Xamencos), 169.

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94. Ibid., 84.

95. Ibid., 20.
96. Ibid., 18.
97. Ibid., 19. This quote became a popular refrain among Xamencologists in the 1960s. For example, it was
repeated nearly verbatim in Máximo Andaluz, Gitanerías: Rumbo y gracia de la raza calé (Gypsyisms: The course
and grace of the Calé race; 1964), 53, and in Hipólito Rossy, Teoría del cante jondo (Theory of cante jondo; 1966), 14.
98. Lafuente, Los gitanos, el Xamenco, y los Xamencos, 40.
99. Ibid., 39.
100. For example, the Asociación Secretariado General Gitano distributes Pedro Rincón Atienza’s pamphlet
“Historia del pueblo gitano (síntesis para educadores)” (History of the Gypsy people [Synthesis for teachers]) for
use in adult education courses.
101. Barrios, Gitanos, moriscos, y cante Xamenco, 43.
102. Ibid., 52.
103. The convention of depicting the startling Gypsy eyes continued long after Luna’s book. See, for example,
Andaluz’s 1964 Gitanerías: Rumbo y gracia de la raza calé (Gitanoisms: The progress and grace of the calé race), 40,
which speaks of the “strange fulgency that, in the eyes of the female, looks phosphorescent.”
104. Both Garcia Matos in Sobre el Xamenco: Estudios y notas (On Xamenco: Studies and notes) and José Manuel
Caballero Bonald in Luces y sombras del Xamenco (Lights and shadows of Xamenco) published updated versions of
Xamenco’s origins in the 1980s.
105. Caballero Bonald, El baile andaluz, 57.
106. Washabaugh, Flamenco: Passion, Politics, and Popular Culture, 80.
107. J. Amaya, Gitanos y cante jondo, 33.
108. Among other important contributions of this era is Teresa Martínez de la Peña’s Teoría y práctica del baile
Xamenco (Theory and practice of Xamenco dance; 1969).
109. Ricardo Molina, Misterios del arte Xamenco, 71.
110. Ibid., 27.
111. Ibid., 147.
112. Ibid., 42.
113. Ibid., 82.
114. Ibid., 92.
115. Mitchell, Flamenco Deep Song, 95. For Mitchell, who cites contemporary ethnographic theory as well as
numerous Spanish experts in support of his arguments, the popular success of Xamenco in the modern era is attrib-
utable more to the señoritos or aWcionados than to performers of Xamenco, while the roots of Xamenco are to be
found among the quasi-ethnographic subcultures that sprang up in southern Spain beginning in the seventeenth
century. He calls them “quasi” since they are made up of four principal groups with primarily social rather than
racial identity: an urban subproletariat of picaroons, drifters, and peddlers; a rural subproletariat of horse thieves
and traders; miners and other incipient industrial workers; and destitute peasants who populated the areas from
which the Moriscos had been expelled. The music that these groups collectively evolved was eventually “discov-
ered” and patronized by Madrid señoritos, Andalusian aristocrats, and other groups of hedonistic Gypsyphiles,
such as the French Romantics or other foreign tourists seeking the pleasures and catharsis of the late-night drink
and music fests called juergas. Evolving from the taverns and backroom juergas, Xamenco became institutionalized,
some would say Andalusianized, in the café cantante (“cabaret”) and reached an ever broader public by the early
twentieth century.
116. Mitchell, Flamenco Deep Song, 58.
117. Ibid., 60.
118. Many foreigners, such as Steingress (Sociología del Xamenco, 198), agree, and increasingly Spaniards as well
assert that “the actual Gypsies do not constitute, for a long time now, a true race but rather a lumpen subgroup
comprised of the lowest strata of society” (Baltanás, “La gitanoWlia como sustituto de la mauroWlia, 6). Gypsies,
according to Baltanás, have assimilated completely and are now indistinguishable from Andualusians.
119. For other statements about Gypsies that are open to discussion, see Mitchell, Flamenco Deep Song, 210,
where he talks about Andalusian wedding customs and songs.
120. Mitchell, Flamenco Deep Song, 41.
121. Ibid., 39.
122. Steingress and Baltanás, Flamenco y nacionalismo, iv.
123. Lavaur, Teoría romántica del cante Xamenco (Romantic theory of Xamenco song), 77.
124. Washabaugh, Flamenco: Passion, Politics, and Popular Culture, 77.

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125. Ibid., 81.

126. Leblon, Musique Tsigane et Xamenco, 19. See also Leblon’s article “Los Gitanos,” in Manuel Lineros Ríos,
ed., Historia del Xamenco, 1:149–70.
127. Leblon, Musique Tsigane et Xamenco, 42.
128. Ibid., 61.
129. Ibid., 82.
130. Ibid., 105.
131. Ibid., 127–28. See also the last part of Musiques Tsiganes (Gypsy music), where Leblon outlines the ele-
ments of the complex that he believes are attributable to the Gypsies.
132. Bertha Quintana, “The Duende Roams Freely This Night,” 168.
133. Ibid., 172. See also Quintana’s “Only the Dogs Bark at Night: A Retrospective of Granada’s Sacro-Monte
Zambras.”
134. Quintana, “Only the Dogs Bark at Night,” 279.
135. Francisco Izquierdo Martínez, “El Sacromonte gitano” (The Sacromonte Gypsy), 253.
136. In my visit of 2002, it seemed to me that the number of these “squatters” in the highest caves still unser-
viced by electricity was growing.
137. Peter Manuel, “Andalusian, Gypsy, and Class Identity in the Contemporary Flamenco Complex,” 184.
138. Rafael Cansino Assens, La copla andaluza (The Andalusian ballad), 101.
139. Jo Labanyi, “Raza, género, y denegación en el cine español del primer franquismo” (Race, gender, and
denial of Spanish cinema during the early Franco period), 27, 41.
140. Eva María Woods, Ideological Contradiction in the Representation of the Folklórica Stardom in Andalusian Musi-
cal Comedies, 12.
141. For various views on this, see Raymond Carr, Spain 1808–1975, 766; Helen Graham, “Popular Culture
in the ‘Years of Hunger,’” 238; Isolina Ballesteros, “Mujer y nación en el cine español de posguerra” (Woman and
nation in postwar Spanish Wlm), 54; and Jo Labanyi, “Raza, género, y denegación en el cine español del primer
franquismo,” 23.
142. Woods, Ideological Contradiction in the Representation of the Folklórica Stardom in Andalusian Musical Come-
dies, 126.
143. Kathleen Vernon, “Culture and Cinema to 1975,” 254.
144. See Soledad de Mateo, Castañuelas para Franco, 136, and Kathleen Vernon, “Culture and Cinema to
1975,” 249, for further discussion of the popularity of the españolada.
145. See, for example, Román Gubern’s “El cine sono (1930–1939).”
146. Labanyi, “Raza, género, y denegación en el cine español del primer franquismo,” 33.
147. Vernon, “Culture and Cinema to 1975,” 254.
148. José Colmeiro, “El espectáculo tras el espejo de Gades/Saura” (The spectacle behind the mirror of
Gades/Saura), 161, 169.
149. Paul Julian Smith, The Moderns, 168.
150. Ibid., 170.
151. In March 2002, a conference on Carmen Wlms was held at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in
Great Britain. Information about the conference, together with a list of the Carmen Wlms, can be found at
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/crif/carprog.htm.
152. Jesús Torrecilla, España exótica, 91.
153. Mateo, Castañuelas para Franco, 18. According to Mateo, Xamenquismo was successful in erasing the
history of Andalusia’s agrarian and class conXicts, creating a mythic other in need of direction and control (40),
and, by extending the myth to all Spaniards, the nation could be seen as in need of a strong government (42–44).
The Gypsy, as representative of the most exotic and popular other, was a key element in this process, and racializ-
ing the Gypsies puts them in a position of easy exploitation.
154. The 1947 cinematographic version directed by Juan de Orduña was based on a 1929 play by Antonio
and Manuel Machado of the same title.
155. Mateo, Castañuelas para Franco, 148.
156. Ibid., 169.
157. Pino, “Estudios culturales,” 260.
158. Ibid., 271.
159. Colmeiro, “Del rosa al negro: Subtextos culturales en La Xor de mi secreto” (From rose to black: Cultural
subtexts in The Xower of my secret), 122–23.
160. Smith, The Moderns, 172.

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notes

161. Ibid., 173.

162. Ibid., 168.
163. See San Román’s La diferencia inquietante, for a summary of repressive laws against the Romany in Spain.
See also María Helena Sánchez Ortega, Documentación selecta sobre la situación de los gitanos españoles en el siglo xviii.
164. Dorothy Kelly, “Selling Spanish ‘Otherness’ Since the 1960s,” 32.
165. Juan Goytisolo, “Presentación crítica de J. M. Blanco White” (Critical presentation of J. M. Blanco
White), 7.
166. Juan Sánchez Ocaña, Granada y sus gitanos, 15.
167. Ibid., 35.
168. Included in the dialogue was Juan de Dios Ramírez Heredia, who would go on to become the most
important Calé crusader of the twentieth century.
169. Francesc Botey, Lo gitano: Una cultura folk desconocida (The Gypsy: An unknown folk culture), 40.
170. Juan Castella-Gassol, El problema gitano (The Gypsy problem), 50.
171. According to Castella-Gassol (El problema Gitano, 39), the site suggested by Romanichal Lionel Rotaru
was somewhere in Somalia on the shores of the Red Sea or in the Sudan on the Indian Ocean.
172. Botey, Lo gitano: Una cultura folk desconocida, 148.
173. Ibid., 166.
174. Ibid., 177.
175. Tomás Calvo Buezas, ¿España racista? 23.
176. San Román, La Diferencia inquietante, 239.
177. Ibid., 257–48.
178. Ibid., 249.
179. See A. Cebrián Abellan’s 1992 study, Marginalidad de la población gitana española (The marginalization of
the Spanish Gitano population).

Conclusion
1. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 14.
2. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 75.
3. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 20.

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Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.

Achard, Amédée, 67 Baltanás, Enrique, 222, 223, 257 n. 6, 260

Adams, Ansel, 172 nn. 68, 75
A. de C., 197, 202 Baretti, Giuseppe Marco Antonio, 247 n. 16
Agde, A. Guy d’, 197 Barlow, Frederick, 105
Agujetas, Manuel, 223, 260 n. 78 Baroncelli, Folco de, Marquis, 169
Albéniz, Isaac, 57 Barrès, Maurice, 133–34
Alberti, Rafael, 192 Barrios, Manuel, 216
Alboize du Pujol, Jules Edouard, 249 n. 54 Bataillard, Paul, 248 n. 41
Alcalá Yáñez, Jerónimo de, 62, 94, 144, 145, 174 Bates, Katharine Lee, 137, 256 n. 44
Alemán, Mateo de, 18 Baumann, Max Peter, 55–56, 249 n. 61
Alfonso V, of Arragón, 259 n. 41 Baxter, William Edward, 94
Almodóvar, Pedro, 231–32 Bazin, René, 133
Álvarez Caballero, Ángel, 180 Beaumarchais, Pierre, 50
Amade, 58 Beckford, W[illiam], 93
Amaya, J., 217, 219 Beer, Gillian, 116 n. 104
Amaya, Juana, 159 Bégin, Emile, 59, 63, 70, 79, 201
Andaluz, Máximo, 261 n. 103 Behlmer, George K., 90, 96, 251 nn. 4, 6, 252
Anderson, Benedict, 11 n. 22
Anson, Mary Ann. See Tenison, Louisa Benavente, Jacinto, 146
Aragón, Lola, 159 Béranger, Pierre Jean de, 134
Araujo, Joaquín, 191 Bernal Rodríguez, Manuel, 47, 250 n. 94, 260
Arriba y Castro, Benjamín, 234 n. 81
Astrana Marín, Luis, 26, 246 n. 61 Besses Luis, 198
Auto de la huida de Egipto (anon.), 244 n. 24 Beyle, Marie Henri. See Stendhal
Avella Arce, Juan Bautista, 245 n. 35 Bizet, George, 86, 130–33, 187, 230
Avellaneda, Gertrudis Gómez de, 254 n. 120 Bhabha, Homi K., 38, 242
Aymes, Jean René, 249 n. 70, 251 n. 16 Blackburn, Henry, 63, 94, 104, 105–7
Azaña, Manuel, 101, 176 Blanchard, Pharamond, 59, 72
Blanqui, Adolphe, 59
Baedeker, Karl, 255 n. 41 Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente, 190–92
Bahram Gor, 5 Blayney, Andrew Thomas, 93
Baile, Vernon Howe, 137 Borrow, George, 15, 53, 54, 61, 62, 63, 79, 91,
Bailly, Juan Antonio, 96, 103, 105–6 104, 112, 118, 128, 134, 136, 137, 138,
Baïracli Levy, Juliette de, 159–61 40, 144, 145, 147, 152, 153, 157, 169,
Balfe, William, 246 n. 69, 55, 112 171, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 187, 196,
Ballesteros, Isolina, 262 n. 141 199, 208, 210, 216, 245 n. 26

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Borrow, George (continued ) Carmona, Ángel, 225

The Bible in Spain, 94–103, 140, 161, 197, Caro Baroja, Julio, 220, 257 nn. 5–6
250 n. 105 Carr, John, 93
Romano Lavo-Lil, 96 Carr, Raymond, 262 n. 141
Romany Rye, 161 Carré, Albert, 130–32
The Zincali, or An Account of the Gypsies of Casado del Alisal, José, 191
Spain, 61, 62, 94–103, 178, 196, 197, Casanova de Seingalt, Jacobo, 50–51
200, 202, 219, 221, 222 Casinos, Marquis of, 51
Botey, Francesc, 235–36 Castel, José, 246 n. 69
Boucher de Perthes, Jacques, 59 Castella-Gassol, Juan, 235
Boué, Asunción, 192 Catholic kings (Ferdinand and Isabel of Spain),
Boulanger, Louis, 67, 72, 250 n. 92 17, 25, 101, 114
Bouguereau, William Adolphe, 258 n. 13 Cats, Jacob, 39, 246 n. 69
Bourgoing, Jean-François, 47, 48–49, 51–52, Cayley, George John, 94
58, 67, 92 Cebrián Abellán, Aurelio, 237
Branchat, Vicente, 248 n. 47 Celestina (anon.), 18, 194
Brand, John, 253 nn. 81–83 Cendrars, Blaise, 167
Brandes, Stanley, 166 Cervantes, María de, 34
Brenan, Gerald, 147, 256 n. 67 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 26, 54, 65, 102,
Bright, Richard, 99, 258 n. 34 118, 178, 187, 208, 221, 222
Brontë, Charlotte, 254 n. 121 Coloquio de los Perros, 19
Brontë, Emily, 112, 254 n. 121 Don Quijote, 74
Brown, Irving Henry, 137, 140, 142–43, 147, “La gitanilla,” 12, 14, 18, 20, 21, 26–44,
159, 171, 174, 175, 178 54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 64, 79, 114, 116,
Brown, Ivor, 157 120, 174, 192, 228, 237, 240
Brown, Marilyn Ruth, 71–72, 78, 93, 251 La ilustre fregona, 35
nn. 118–19, 255 n. 42 Pedro de Urdemalas, 19, 42, 245 n. 38
Brunon, Georges, 161 Novelas ejemplares, 18, 144, 244 n. 7
Buffon, Georges-Louis, 45–51, 205, 247 n. 4 Céspedes y Meneses, Gonzalo de, 22
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 91, 254 n. 96 Chapple, Joe Mitchell, 137
Bunn, Alfred, 112, 246 n. 69 Charles III, Bourbon King of Spain, 21, 26,
Bustamante Poora, Margarita, 139 200, 203
Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 87 Charnon-Deutsch, Lou, 257 n. 10, 258 n. 17
Chateaubriand, François-René, 249 n. 66
Caballero Bonald, José Manuel, 217–20, 221 Cid (anon.), 133, 144
Caballé, María, 192 Clairin, Georges, 130, 132
Cabanis, Pierre, 46 Clamurro, William, 332, 33
Cadalso, José, 181, 203 Clark, William George, 94, 105, 255 n. 40
Caigniez, Louis Charles, 246 n. 69 Clark, Keith, 137
Callot, Jacques, 63, Clarke, Edward, 247 n. 16
Calvert, Albert Frederick, 255 n. 41 Clavería, Carlos, 252 n. 35
Calvo Buezas, Tomás, 236–37 Clébert, Jean-Paul, 166, 167–68, 169, 216, 221
Cambyses II of Persia, 213 Clifford, James, 239
Campuzano, Ramón, 197–201 Cody, William Frederick, Colonel, 167
Camus, Jean-Pierre, 39, 246 n. 69 Colmeiro, José, 30, 231, 243 n. 23, 262 n. 159
Cano, Domingo Manfredi, 217, 260 nn. 69, 89 Colocci, Adriano, 136, 200, 248 n. 41
Cansinos Assens, Rafael, 226–27 Comte, Auguste, 115
Cantril, Hadley, 167 Conde, José Antonio, 196
Capistan, Dr., 167 Contreras, Jaime, 244 n. 13
Cappell Brooke, Arthur de, 92, 93 Cook, Samuel Edward. See Widdrington Scott,
Carmen de Cádiz (pseud.), 192 Samuel Edward

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index
Cook, Thomas, 255 n. 41
Corrochano y Ortega, Gregorio, 246 n. 69
Courbet, Gustave, 76, 78
Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de, 23, 244
n. 25, 245 n. 29, 248 n. 41
Crabbe, James, 93
Crawford Wilson, John, 112–13, 114, 187, 246
n. 69
Creutz, Gustave Philipe, 50
Cruz, Ramón de la, 61
Cuesta, Francisco de la, 127
Custine, Astolfe, Marquis of, 59, 251 n. 16
Cuvelier de Trye, Jean Guillaume Antoinem,
246 n. 69
Cuvier, George, 205
D. A. de C., 70, 258 n. 35
D. M. C. S., 246 n. 69
Darcos, Xavier, 249 nn. 75–76
Dalrymple, Hew Whiteford (William), 50, 91
Darío, Rubén, 190
Darzens, Rodolphe, 129–33
Dauzats, Adrien, 59, 72, 74
Davillier, Jean Charles, Baron, 45, 59, 78–85,
201, 250 n. 101
De Amicis, Edmondo, 59, 79
Debary, Thomas, 94
Debussy, Claude, 207
Defoe, Daniel, 97
Dehodencq, Alfred, 59, 64, 72, 7, 76, 85
De los Ríos Nostrench de Lámperez, Blanca. See
Ríos Nostrench, Blanca de los
Del Pino, José M., 231–32
Del Río, Martín, 54, 232, 248 nn. 41, 47
De Nerval, Gérard, 54
Dendle, Brian, 255 nn. 18, 21–22
Dennis, George, 93
Desbarolles, Adolphe, 67, 73
D’Espagnat, Georges, 161
Detaille, Edouard, 130, 132
De Wendler-Funaro, Carl, 166
Díaz de la Peña, Narcisse, 71, 74
Díaz de Martín, Manuel, 197, 199, 204
Didier Charles, 59
Disraeli, Benjamin, 93
Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio, 192
Doré, Gustave, 73, 77–85, 138, 182, 201
Dos Passos, John, 137
Dougherty, Frank T., 166, 250 n. 91, 258 n. 28
Dumas, Alexandre, père, 58, 59, 67–70, 73, 74,
79, 103, 120, 123, 128, 153, 182, 190
[281]
Dunoyer, Barthélemy, 46
Duran, Pedro, 154
Duran, Pepita, 152–59
Dutert, Ferdinand, 129
Egeo-Fernández-Montesinos, Alberto, 260 n. 74
Elías, Francisco, 228
Eliot, George (Marion Lewes), 99, 113, 179, 184
Daniel Deronda, 115, 254 n. 104
George Eliot’s Life As Related in Her Letters and
Journals, 118–19
Middlemarch, 254 n. 104
The Mill On the Floss, 112, 254 n. 121
The Spanish Gypsy, 15, 29, 57, 91, 113–24,
240, 246 n. 69
Elliot, Frances, 87, 94
Elliott, John Huxtable, 20, 244 n. 19
Elsner, Eleanor, 137
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 163
Enríquez, Enrique, 245 n. 32
Ensenada, Marquis of, 91
Eppafrita, Moka, 159
Epstein Nord, Deborah, 123–24, 254 n. 96
Esbens, Etienne, 76
Espinel, Vicente de, 22, 212
Esprí, José María, 183
Estébanez Calderón, Serafín, 61, 96, 203
Estrella, Gabriel, 246 n. 69
Fabrés y Costa, Antonio, 191, 257 n. 10
Falla, Manuel de, 139, 205, 206, 206, 230, 231
Feijóo, Jerónimo, 248 n. 47
Ferdinand VI, Bourbon king of Spain, 245
n. 32, 260 n. 80
Fernández de Córdoba, Francisco, 232
Fernández y González, Manuel, 187–88
Figueroa y Melgar, Alfonso, Duke of Tovar, 250
n. 92
Fischer, Chrétien-Auguste, 48, 52
Fitz-Gerald, John D., 137
Flaubert, Gustave, 59, 184
Fleuriot de Langle, Jean-Marie-Jérôme, 48, 50
Floyd, Lois Gray, 166, 167–68, 173
Fonseca, Isabel, 13, 159
Forcione, Alban K., 30, 245 n. 42
Ford, Richard, 63, 79, 85, 93, 101, 109, 112,
128, 138, 153, 209, 256 n. 70
Gatherings from Spain, 94, 104
A Handbook for Travellers in Spain, 94, 103–5
Letters to Gayangos, 253 n. 63
Formalaguez, Julia, 50
09Index.qxd 28/01/2004 8:36 AM Page 282
index
Fouché, Paul, 249 n. 54
France, Héctor, 59, 128, 129
Franck, Harry Alverson, 137, 140
Franco, Francisco, 205, 208, 210, 219, 223,
227, 228, 231, 233
Fraser, Angus, 243 nn. 7, 9, 244 n. 26, 246 nn.
66, 71, 248 n. 43, 250 n. 83, 252 n. 34
Fulton, John, 3
Gades, Antonio, 230
Galen, 29
Galli-Marie, Celestine, 130
Galofre y Jiménez, Baldomero, 77, 78
García Balmaseda, Joaquina, 258 n. 21
García Cuevas, Francisco V., 246 n. 69
García Gómez, Génesis, 222
García Gutiérrez, Antonio, 56
García Lorca, Federico, 139, 153, 161, 174,
177, 192, 206, 207, 220, 231
García Maroto, Eduardo, director, 229
García y Ramos, José, 185, 191
Gautier, Théophile, 45, 58, 59, 63–64, 72–76,
79, 85–86, 103, 110, 174, 176
Gay y Blasco, Paloma, 221, 237
Gayangos, Pascual de, 96, 104
Gelardo y Belade, José, 222
Gerli, E. Michael, 28
Geropio, Juan, 244 n. 29
Giancarli, Luigi, 56
Gide, André, 133
Gil Blas (anon.), 133
Giles, Dorothy, 137
Gilman, Sander, 9, 242
Giraud, Alexandre, 67–68, 73
El gitano de Cartagena (anon.), 246 n. 69
Glendenning, Victoria, 256 nn. 69, 71, 73, 78
Glinka, Mikhail Ivanovich, 56, 207
Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de, 46, 62, 97, 199,
200
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 56
Gómez Alfaro, Antonio, 245 n. 32
Goncourt, Edmond, 217
González Climent, Anselmo, 217
González del Castillo, Juan Ignacio, 181, 203
González Troyano, Alberto, 59
Goodman, Mary Ellen, 167
Gordon Cora, 137
Gordon, Jan, 137
Gould, Evelyn, 12, 61–62, 69
Goy de Silva, Ramón, 184
Goytisolo, Juan, 101, 233–34, 258 n. 33
[282]
Graham, Cunningham, 139
Graham, Helen, 262 n. 141
Granados, Enrique, 57
Grande, Félix, 221, 257 n. 10
Grellmann, Heinrich, 6, 7, 12, 15, 36, 52, 54,
79, 95, 109, 168, 174, 197, 200, 248
n. 47
Grifoni, Matteo, 246 n. 69
Groome, Francis Hindes, 96, 134, 137, 147
Grosvenor, Elizabeth, 94, 154
Gubern, Román, 262 n. 145
Guerrero, Ana Clara, 251 n. 12
Guichot y Sierra, Alejandro, 204
Guillamet, Joan, 235
Guillén, Jorge, 207
Guillén, Pascual, 227
Gutiérrez, Josefa, 184
Gutiérrez, Chus, director, 232
Gutiérrez de Alba, José María, 181
Gutiérrez Carbajo, Francisco, 222
Hainsworth, G., 246 n. 70
Hall, Frank Standish, 94
Hamsa of Esfahán, 5
Hardy, Alexandre, 39, 246 n. 69
Hare, Augustus John Cuthbert, 94, 108, 255
n. 40
Harlamoff, Alexis, 258 n. 13
Harrison, Frederic, 115
Harsdorffer, 246 n. 69
Haverty, Martin, 94, 253 n. 80
Harvey, Annie Jane Tennant, 94, 108
Hébert, Ernest, 76, 257 n. 13
Hemingway, Ernest, 174
Hempel-Lipschutz, Ilse, 61
Héran, F[rançois], 249 n. 63, 250 n. 86, 251
n. 115, 255 n. 17
Herbert, Mary Elizabeth, 76, 257 n. 13
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 6, 115
Herodotus of Halicarnassus, 215
Hérold, A-Ferdinand, 255 n. 22
Herr, Elena Fernández, 49, 249 n. 69
Herrero, Sebastián, 188–89
Herrero García, Miguel, 243 n. 1, 244
nn. 16–17
Hervás, Lorenzo de, 197
Hidalgo, Juan, 196
L’histoire du baron de Merarques et de la belle
Egyptienne (anon.), 246 n. 69
Hoffmann, León-François, 249 nn. 64–65
Homm, George, 257 n. 13
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Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 105, 109 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 45, 65

Hoskins, George Alexander, 94 Lancerotti, E., 258 n. 13
Hotorovitch, Dusa, 148–49 Lantier, Etienne François de, 50
Howe Elliot, Maud, 137, 139 Larraga, Antonio, 191
Huélamo, Melchor de (Fray), 15, 17, 22–23, 35 Larroumet, Gustave, 130, 132–33
Huertas, Ángel de, 191, 192 Lasso, José, 105
Hugo, Victor, 54, 58, 59, 60, 69, 70, 130 Latham, Robert Gordon, 97, 252 n. 48
Han d’Islande, 55, 113 Latour, Antoine de, 59, 74, 103
Notre Dame de Paris, 15, 55, 56, 102, 240 Lavaur, Luis, 222, 223, 257 n. 1
Le roi s’amuse, 253 n. 55 Lazarillo de Tormes (anon.), 144
Hurtado de Mendoza, Diego, 34 Leblon, Bernard, 177
Les gitans d’Espagne Le prix de la différance,
Imperio, Pastora, 192 43, 125, 244 nn. 5–6, 12, 18, 24, 245
Infante, Blas, 221 n. 35, 246 n. 67
Inglada, Alexandre de Riquer, 162, 186, 212 Les gitans dans la littérature espagnole, 166,
Inglis, Henry David, 92, 93 168–70
Iranzo, Miguel Lucas de, 168, 224 “Los gitanos,” 263 n. 162
Irving, Washington, 109, 174, 184 “Granada, 1922 Manuel de Falla reivindica
Isabel II, Bourbon Queen of Spain, 251 n. 114 al Xamenco,” 260 n. 73
Musiques Tsiganes et Xamenco, 166, 224–25,
J. M. (François Jacques Jaubert de Passa?), 53, 248 n. 30, 257 n. 96
54, 62, 79, 94, 95, 97, 166, 167, 168, Lee, Laurie, 133, 47
253 n. 80 Leland, Charles Godfrey, 7–8, 96, 134, 168
Jacob, William, 92, 93 Leleux, Adolphe, 71
Jaubert de Passa. See J. M. León, Rafael de, 226
Jérôme, Jean-Marie, 48 Leveson-Gower, Elizabeth M., 93
Jiménez, Augusto, 258 n. 35 le Sage, Alain René, 97
Jiménez, Juan Ramón, 174 Lewes, George Henry, 113, 114, 115, 119, 122
Johnson, Carroll B., 29, 33–34 Lewis, John Frederick, 253 n. 87
Jollivet, Pierre-Jules, 71 Lizt, Franz, 56
Jones, Siân, 251 n. 1 Lleó, Vincent, 227
Jones, William, 6 Llovera José, 191
Jonson, Ben, 246 n. 69 Lomas, John, 94, 137
Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis), 48 Lombroso, Cesare, 13, 205
López, André A., 172
Kamen, Henry, 20, 244 n. 11, 246 n. 63 López, Antonio, 96
Kant, Immanuel, 6 López de Menezes, Amada, 259 n. 41
Keating, Maurice, 93 López de Ubeda, 22
Kelly, Dorothy, 263 n. 164 López-Burgos, María Antonia, 252 n. 27
Kenrick, Donald, 246 n. 64 Loti, Pierre, 133
Kenyon, Arthur, 94 Louÿs, Pierre, 133, 134
Keynes, John Maynard, 31 Loveman, Amy, 157
Knapp, William, 96, 252 n. 40 Lowell, James Russell, 137
Knox, John, 121–22 Lucas, Prosper, 36
Kopernicki, Izydor, 54 Luna, José-Carlos de, 52, 145, 168, 208,
Krauel Heredia, Blanca, 93, 102 210–13, 215, 217, 218, 219, 234
Luna, Juan de, 259 n. 41
Labanyi, Jo, 227, 228 Lundgren, E[gron], 106
Labat, Jean, 48, 50
Laborde Alexandre de, 72 M***, 48, 50, 51
Lafuente, Rafael, 179, 213, 216 M. de R., 197

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Mabbe, James, 246 n. 69 Mitchell, Timothy, 166, 206, 208, 209,

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 254 n. 113 220–23, 259 nn. 55, 57, 260 n. 70
Machado y Álvarez (DemóWlo), 203, 204 Moe, Wally, 186
Machado, Antonio, 204, 262 n. 154 Mojarra, Canuto, 246 n. 69
Machado, Manuel, 262 n. 154 Molière, Jean-Baptiste (Jean Baptiste Poquelin),
MacRitchie, David, 136 246 n. 69
Madariaga, Salvador de, 179 Molina, JoseWna, 231
Madrazo, Federico de, 72 Molina, Ricardo, 206, 220, 225
Mairena, Antonio, 220 Möller, Heinrich Ferdinand, 246 n. 69
Malan, Dan, 251 n. 122 Moncada, Sancho de, 12, 15, 22, 23–26, 27,
Malik, Kenan, 5, 126, 243 n. 24, 247 nn. 3, 29, 35, 38, 43, 248 n. 41
10, 254 n. 105 Monleón, José B., 221
Manet, Edouard, 72, 76 Montijo, Manuela, 60, 61, 62
Manna, Ruggero, 246 n. 69 Montpensier, Louis Phillippe, Duke of Orleans,
Manuel, Peter, 262 n. 137 74
Maquet, Auguste, 67 Montoto, Luis, 204
Maravall, José Antonio, 18, 245 nn. 39, 43, Moreno Galván, Francisco, 221
246 n. 62 Mosse, George L., 241
Marden, Philip Sanford, 137, 138 Münster, Sebastian, 15, 23, 244 n. 14
Margarita, Queen, wife of Philip III of Spain, 32 Múños, Isaac, 192, 226, 240
Mariana, Juan de, 248 n. 47 Murger, Henry, 71
Marks, Sylvia Kasey, 254 n. 94, 261 n. 106 Murphy, James Cavanah, 180
Marquina, Luis, 229 Murray, Robert Dundas, 94, 255 n. 40
Martí, José, 247 n. 17 Musset, Alfred, 60
Martial (Marcus Aurelius Martialiis), 48, 85,
105 Napoleon, 59, 103
Martínez, Francisco Izquierdo, 226 Negueruela, Diego de, 18
Martínez de la Peña, Teresa, 261 n. 108 Nerval, Gérard, 54
Masriera, Francisco, 191 Nicolson, Nigel, 154
Massias, Nicolas, 47 “La Niña de los Peines” (pseud.), 192
Mateo, Soledad de, 231, 262 n. 144 Nodier, Charles, 59
Matute, Ana María, 233 Noel, Eugenio, 204–6, 226
Mayall, David, 252 n. 22, 255 n. 1
McLane, Merrill F., 165, 166, 173–78, 221 O’Brien, Kate, 147
McMullen, Bonnie, 251 n. 20 Okely, Judith, 243 n. 28
Medem, Julio, director, 231 Opler, Morris, 167
Mendès, Catulle, 125, 129–33, 179 Orduña, Juan de, 229, 262 n. 154
Mendoz, Diego Hurtado de, 34 Ortega, Catalina, 153–54
Mendoza, Martín de, 26, 34 Ortiz de Villajos, Cándido G., 209–10, 217
Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino, 101 O’Shea, John Augustus, 94, 128–29
Mercado, José, 222 Osorio, Diego, 246 n. 69
Mérimée, Prosper, 14, 46, 59, 69, 70, 72, 79, Otis, Laura, 250 nn. 87, 90
96, 102, 113, 182, 221, 222
Carmen, 54, 60–63, 64, 76, 114, 130, 132, Pabanó, F. M., 52, 200–202, 208, 210, 217,
133, 187, 190, 246 n. 69, 249 n. 62 258 n. 35
Mes réminiscences de l’Espagne, 58 Palacio Valdés, Armando, 189–91
Meyers, Robert R., 97, 252 n. 36 Palau, María, 192
Michener, James, 1–3 Palmer, E[dward] H[enry], 134
Middleton, Thomas, 246 n. 69 Palmireno, Lorenzo, 18
Miklosich, Franz, 54, 200 Parada, María Rosario de, 259 n. 41
Miles, Robert, 47, 251 nn. 3, 5 Parturier, Maurice E., 62

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Paspati, Alexandre, 10 Renan, Ernst, 247 n. 7

Pasquier, Etienne, 248 n. 41
Passa, François Jacques Jaubert de. See J. M.
Peale, Norman Vincent, 161
Pedrero, Mariano, 191
Pemberton, H., 94, 111, 112
Pérez de Montalván, Juan, 246 n. 69
Perojo, Benito, 228
Petronius Arbitur (Gaius), 105
Peyron, Jean de, 48, 51, 58, 105
Phillip, Henry, 106, 111
Phillip II, King of Spain, 21
Phillip III, King of Spain, 20, 21, 25, 26
Phillip IV, King of Spain, 26, 94
Peickler, Gaetano, 105
Pichi. See Hotorovich, Dusa
Plá, Cecilio, 191
Plata, Juan de la, 260 n. 81
Pliny (Gaius Plinius Secundus), 48
Polhemus, Lillian, 161–69, 249 n. 60
Poliakov, Léon, 6, 8, 9, 24, 243 nn. 5–6, 247
nn. 1–2, 7
Porta, José, 148–51
Portael, J. F., 186
Pott, A. F. (August Friedrich), 61, 62, 96, 118,
248 n. 41
Prangey, Girault de, 72
Price, R. M., 244 n. 8
Prichard James Cowles, 97
Psamtik III, Egyptian Pharaoh, 213
Pujades, Gerónimo, 248 n. 47
Pushkin, Alexander, 59
Puxon, Grattan, 246 n. 64
Quillinan, Dora Wordsworth, 94
Quinet, Edgar, 59–60
Quinn, Michael Joseph, 93
Quiñones, Fernando, 221
Quiñones de Benavente, Juan, 36, 79, 94, 95,
232, 248 n. 41
Quintana, Bertha B., 166, 167–68, 173, 221,
225–26
Quintero, José, 226, 227
Quiroga Manuel, 226
R. M., 157
Ragussis, Michael, 90–91, 254 n. 95
Ramírez Heredia, Juan de Dios, 263 n. 168
RedWeld, Robert, 167
Rees, Margaret, 249 n. 70
Regnault, Henri, 72, 76, 132
Resina, Joan Ramón, 31–32, 33
Rey, Florián, 226, 228
Riehl, W[ilhelm] H[einrich], 115, 117
Rienzi, Grégoire Luis de, 200
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nicolai, 207
Rincón Atienza, Pedro, 261 n. 100
Río, Martín del, 15, 22, 25, 54, 232, 248
nn. 41, 47
Ríos Nostrench, Blanca de los, 188–89, 191,
210, 213
Ríos Ruiz, Manuel, 259 n. 56
Ritzsch, Timothoeus, and Jacob Cats, 246 n. 69
Rivera, Primo de, 205
Roberts, David, 93, 253 n. 87
Roberts, Richard, 94
Robertson, William, 94
Robles, Fernando, 233–34
Rochas, Victor de, 53–54, 166, 212
Rodrigo, Joaquín, 57
Rodríguez, Juan Carlos, 28, 29
Rodríguez-Luis, Julio, 246 n. 60
Rodríguez Marín, Francisco, 204
Romer, Isabella Frances, 94, 109
Romero de Torres, Julio, 192, 195–96
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 245 n. 47
Rosa, Salvator, 63
Roscoe, Thomas, 253 n. 87
Rose, Pascual, 105
Rossy, Hipólito, 261 n. 97
Rotaru, Lionel, 263 n. 171
Rougeron, Jules, 72, 76
Rosset, François de, 39
Routier, Gaston, 133
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 90
Rowley, William, 246 n. 69
Rueda, Lope de, 18, 35, 56
Sacheverell Darwin, Francis, 93
Sackville West, Lionel, 112, 153, 157
Sackville West, Vita, 153–59
Sáez del Melgar, Faustina, 188
Said, Edward, 9, 11, 59, 184
Sala, Juan, 191
Salazar de Mendoza, Pedro, 232
Sales Mayo, Francisco de (Quindalé), 298–301,
208, 212, 217
Sallebray, 39, 246 n. 69
Sallilas, Rafael, 13, 197, 198
San Román, Teresa de, 13, 20, 221, 236–37,
244 nn. 2–3, 259 n. 41

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Sánchez, Francisco J., 33 Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), 59

Sánchez Albarrán, José, 182–83, 249 n. 62
Sánchez Ocaña, Juan, 234
Sánchez Ortega, María Helena, 263 n. 163
Sand, George (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile
Dudevant), 15, 54, 57, 59, 63–67, 70,
113, 120, 246 n. 69
Santamarina, Luys, 151
Santos Rivas, Juan José, 216
Sanz, Luis, 231
Sanz Pérez, José, 181
Sarasate, Pablo, 57
Saura, Carlos, 230–32
Schlegel, Carl Wilhelm Friedrich von, 7, 89,
115, 251 n. 7
Scott, Charles Rochfort, 93
Scott, Samuel Parsons, 126–28
Scribe, Eugene, 246 n. 69
Séailles, Gabriel, 74–76, 85–86
Semmel, Bernard, 115, 116, 254 n. 96
Semple, Robert, 93
Severn, Walter, 94
Shaw Fairman, Patricia, 252 n. 41
Sherer, Moyle, 93
Sichel, Nathaniel, 185
Sieber, Harry, 245 n. 44
Silvestris, Florido de, 246 n. 69
Simmins, Leo, 167
Sinclair, Alison, 258 n. 24
Slidell, Alexander, 255 n. 40
Smareglia, Antonio, 246 n. 69
Smith, Adam, 31
Smith, Paul Julian, 230, 232
Smith, Rodney (“Gypsy”), 161
Soriano Fuertes, Mariano, 182–83, 190, 249
n. 62
Solís y Rivadeneira, Antonio de, 41–42, 44,
246 n. 69
Southey, Robert, 91
Starkie, Walter, 42, 123, 137, 155, 156, 158,
167, 168, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176,
190–01, 192, 217
Don Gypsy Adventures with a Fiddle in
Southern Spain and Barbery, 143, 145–48,
152, 159, 178
Spanish Raggle-Taggle, 143–45, 151, 152
In Sara’s Tents, 143, 144–46, 151–52, 174,
178, 255 n. 39, 260 n. 67
Steingress, Gerhard, 203 nn. 50, 52, 204 n. 54,
206 n. 66, 207 n. 72, 208 n. 78, 210
n. 86, 221, 222, 223
Steuben, Charles Auguste, 71–72
Steward, Charles William, 93
Strabo, 177
Stravinsky, Igor, 207
Schuchardt, Hugo, 259 n. 52
Sue, Eugène, 58, 249 n. 54
Swinburne, Henry, 49–50, 91, 247 n. 15
Tamerlane, 24
Taylor (Isidore Justin Séverin, Baron), 93
Tengnagel, Mattheus Gansneb, 39, 246 n. 69
Tenison, Louisa, 94, 106, 110–11, 112
Ter Horst, Robert, 33
Teste, Luis, 59
Thomas, C. L. Ambroise, 15, 56, 246 n. 69
Thomson, J[ohn], 78, 94
Timoneda, Juan de, 18
Timur Beg, 109
Tineo Rebolledo, J., 197
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 118–19, 192
Todorov, Tzvetan, 47, 247 nn. 4, 7–8
Tollemache, Marguerite, 94
Torrecilla, Jesús, 181, 231, 260 n. 71
Torres, Conchita, 191
Torres Fuster, Antoni, 191
Torrione, Margarita, 247 nn. 15–16, 248 n. 28,
251 n. 13, 257 nn. 2–3, 258 n. 34, 259
n. 52
Trend, John Brande, 137, 138–39
Triana, Conchita, 192
Trueba, Fernando, 231
Trujillo, Enrique, 197
Tylor Edward Burnett, 251 n. 2
Twiss, Richard, 92, 258 n. 34
Usoz y Río, Luis de, 96, 258 n. 34
Vaahnon, Isaac M., 184
Váli, István, 6
Valle Inclán, Ramón del, 192
Valon, Alexis de, 59, 69–70
Van Dyke, Henry, 161
Vaux de Foletier, François, 166–67, 244 n. 6,
245 n. 42, 246 n. 64, 259 n. 41
Vázquez, Carlos, 191
Vázquez Tablada, Gaspar, 245 n. 32
Vega, Lope de, 21
Velázquez de Echeverría, Juan, 180
Verdi, Giuseppi, 15, 56
Vernon, Kathleen, 228, 262 n. 147

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Verwers Dusart, Catharina, 39, 246 n. 69 Willinski, Gustave de, 105

Viardot, Louis, 59 Wilson, John Crawford. See Crawford Wilson,
Vicente, Gil, 18, 250 n. 93 John
Vilar, Pierre, 244 n. 10 Wilson, P. W., 157
Vilar Berrogain, Jean, 23 Wolff, Pius Alexander, 246 n. 69
Viñes, Cristina, 253 n. 87 Woods, Eva María, 227, 262 n. 142
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet), 4 Wordsworth, William, 94
Wright, Richard, 147
Wallis, Severn Teackle, 94, 106, 252 n. 23
Waroquier, Henry de, 161 Ximénes, Mateo, 109
Washabaugh, William, 166, 223, 260 n. 78,
261 n. 106 Yoors, Jan, 166, 170–73
Weber, Carl Maria von, 246 n. 69
Wells, Nathanial Armstrong, 94 Zamácola, Iza, 260 n. 81
Wendler-Funaro Carlos, 166 Zo, Achille, 76
Widdrington Scott, Samuel Edward Cook, 93, Zorilla, José, 133, 144
94, 103, 105, 138 Zulueta, Carmen de, 101–2
Willems, Wim, 10, 52, 136, 243 n. 21, 251 Zumel, Enrique de, 181–82
n. 8, 252 n. 31, 255 n. 25 Zuritas, Gerónimo, 248 n. 47