Do you know that April 8 was International Roma Day? And you know why? If you look for it on Google, you can see that the first Romanesque world congress was held in London on April 8, 1971, and our flag was remembered there (do you know?). and our hymn, gelem, gelem (have you ever heard of it? ).

Don't worry if you've answered no to the above questions, many of us have known these symbols recently. They are an excuse to question a concept that particularly annoys us: integration. How many times have you heard, said or thought that the Roma do not integrate? Where exactly should we integrate? In the country where we were born and raised, has it been the residence of our ancestors?

And who will decide whether it has been integrated enough? Is it going to give us points to have Basque surnames in the integration test, vote for nationalist parties or be followers of Athletic? Because, surprise!, many of us meet these conditions, even being vasophiles: don't forget that we have fought hard for our boys and girls to study on model D in Otxarkoaga.

Integration is pure taxation, says Youssef Ouled, anti-racist activist, or Islamic writer Sirin Adlbi Sibai. For them, the objective of integration is to recognise the subordinate character of these rationalised bodies vis-à-vis the colonizing and genocidal Europe.

Reading the essay The Roma people in Euskal Herria* by David Martin we have confirmed that the discourse of integration is as old as the arrival of the Roma people. In Martín’s words, the reception of the 15th century Basque society was very unfavorable and “only through an assimilating process was the integration aimed at diluting the otherness of the Roma people”.

The antigypsy pragmatics (beginning with the Catholic Monarchs) and the foral laws of Hego Euskal Herria imposed on our ancestors two options: to be expelled from the peninsula or to give up language and customs. Martin speaks of the case of Pedro Yturbide, who in 1697 opened a dossier to expel from Gipuzkoa by gypsy, but the adjuster heard the allegations and let him live in Irún because he was not a “prominent gypsy”.

So our resistance has been to root out a territory where we were not welcome. The Vitorian authorities offered handouts to the Gypsies pilgrims passing through the municipality in exchange for not stabilizing in the city. The strategy to expel and/or lynch was to accuse our ancestors of theft and other crimes. It is not difficult to relate the practices of then to the situations that we live in the twenty-first century, such as criminalization in supermarkets and clothing stores; segregating urban policies; mocking our accent and the lack of institutional will to recover the Romanesque language… Gypsy women for violating the Catholic morality that they used to judge us; on the contrary, for not being empowered women, according to the canons of white feminism.

It is also necessary to identify soft expressions of racism. We have to listen to phrases like "I don't see color" and at the same time answer questions about our weddings and rites, as if we were alien. In the schools of our neighbourhood, although 90% of the students are Roma, they are not offered any Romanesque referrals or the need to celebrate International Roma Day. Instead of doing this kind of work, they blur our presence in the general plans of diversity and interculturality. In the anti-racial areas, we also find resistance to the name of anti-Roma.

Our cousin Pascual Borja, of the Gypsy association Gao Lacho Drom de Vitoria, reminds us that the country is not neutral, that is, that the order of integration is an ethnocentrism. Rather than being integrated, it is about disintegrating our country. Our cousin, Pastora Filigrana, states in his book The Gypsy People Against the World System that the Gypsies are annoying for the system, because we have planted the capitalist system, above all to work for a patron, and we have maintained community life forms.

Furthermore, the discourse of integration is totally hypocritical, because those who send us to integrate do not admit us. This is demonstrated by the Ikuspegi barometer: Basque society does not see us with good eyes (5.8 on a scale from 1 to 10), but they have no relationship with us (about 70% do not know Roma) and, in addition, almost half of the people surveyed blame our discrimination situation. As if that were not enough, a third believes that we should give up our habits to “integrate” ourselves into Basque society.

But this study also provides some positive data: 91.1% agree that the Roma and the rest of the people have to make a shared effort to improve coexistence, and 69% believe that Basque society should make more effort to achieve this goal.

So, after 8 April, instead of judging our people (whether we are integrated or not, whether our habits are appropriate or not, whether we are more macho or not), why not reflect on what it can do to combat the anti-Roma that keeps us marginalised? What will you do when you hear gypsy jokes? Are you part of that 40 percent who would not rent a home to a Roma family (another Ikuspegi data)? Would you be willing to live in Otxarkoaga? And if so, would you enroll your kids in the neighborhood schools?

Finally, on International Roma Day we wanted to celebrate our Roma identity, mixed with Basque cultural identity. The Basques, in our diversity, have many reasons to question the discourse of integration: perhaps their Basque amama was forbidden to speak their language in Franco, his grandfather was called Maqueto or Korean, or perhaps he has been labeled “second-generation immigrant”. Let us also remember that the Catholic Monarchs were the ones who prescribed the first pragmatic against the Roma in the context of the homogenizing national-catholic project. Today, Spanish competition has given continuity to this supremacist ideology, although it uses an allegedly egalitarian discourse to attract Roma voters.

One last note: it is indifferent to replace the word integration with other euphemisms such as inclusion, if the logic is maintained. On the contrary, David Martin gives us another word: rooting. Because whether we're integrated or not is a judgment and an exercise of power, but the historical evidence is that in Euskal Herria we took root six centuries ago.

Association AMUGE

*Note: David Martin will present the book 'El Pueblo Gitano en Euskal Herria' on 21 April, at 18:30 a.m., at AMUGE headquarters in the Otxarkoaga bilbaíno district.