Can citizenship rights be denied to significant groups in a society that regards itself as civilized and self-governing? Is it possible to exclude such people in the name of freedom and reason? Is it plausible to explain classifications that differentiate between first- and second-class citizens as “natural”?

This is the paradox inherent in modern politics, born of the revolutions that ended the Ancien Régime in the western world. Throughout the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, liberalism inspired a representative form of government that appealed to citizenship, yet marginalized many social groups, including natives, women, immigrants, workers, slaves and nomads. In the Hispanic dimension of the Atlantic world that this book deals with, modern politics was based on exclusions explained as natural and necessary. In both Europe and America, a distinction was made between the responsible citizen and those “others” in society, potential “enemies within”, who had to be controlled and supervised.

Sometimes, the most “innocent” images are the most dangerous.

Confirmation of this statement can be found in the children’s stories that have for many years employed characters taken from the world of the gypsies in order to indoctrinate children and teach them obedience. During the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some of the teaching designed to inculcate the values of the official culture and promote family discipline was carried out through stories in which rebellious children—those who dared to disobey their parents and leave their comfortable homes—frequently ended up being stolen by bands of gypsies and vanishing into thin air.

These kidnappers, described as living on the fringes of civilized society, represented all the evils of barbarism—pagan, immoral, uncouth and criminal—in contrast to the alleged virtues of the national culture. Heading the long list of illegal actions attributed to gypsies in these stories, that of child stealing is a hackneyed theme that appears over and over again in European children’s literature.

Las imágenes más “inocentes” son a veces las más peligrosas.

Eso podría afirmarse a propósito de los cuentos infantiles que a lo largo de muchos años han venido empleando a personajes tomados del mundo gitano para adoctrinar a los niños con el objetivo de enseñarles a ser obedientes. Durante los siglos XVIII, XIX y XX, una parte de la pedagogía orientada a infundir los valores de la cultura oficial y de la disciplina familiar se ejerció a través de historias en las que frecuentemente los niños rebeldes -esos que se habían aventurado a desobedecer a sus padres y abandonar la comodidad de sus hogares- acababan siendo robados por bandas de gitanos que les hacían desaparecer de la noche a la mañana.

This woman of stunningly light eyes was called Teresa Gabarre.

So says, at least, her “anthropometric card”, a document required by French State to all nomad people, ever since a law passed in 1912 and still applicable in 1968 made it mandatory. This is an example of how were treated in liberal and democratic states, before and after the Second World War, a largest transnational Roma community who found in trip its economy and its way of life.

In 1945, Walter Winter, a German Roma (actually, Sinto) who survived Auschwitz along with his brother Erich, came back home. At Cloppenburg “the lads with whom we had gone to school and played football were now local authority civil servants”, he remember in his Memoirs, Winter Time.   But this fact didn’t make easier the hard effort to recuperate their property, families and lives after so much suffering: Walter and Erich were send to several concentration and extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen), before been forced to serve as soldiers on the Russian front in April 1945. Miraculously, both of them survived.

Hoy, 30 de julio, se conmemora el aniversario de la «gran redada» de los gitanos españoles en 1749. Junto con las asociaciones y movimientos de la sociedad civil, la historiografía académica puede contribuir a mantener viva la memoria de las persecuciones del pasado, como un recordatorio de los obstáculos que hay que superar en el camino hacia una ciudadanía democrática plenamente integradora.