Then, the actor who interprets the king of the Buhames shouts the rules of life of the group: "It is forbidden to take anything if it is not of the other; in the houses we have gummy, we have to enter through the door, but when there is no one, shut out from the window, etc.."

I am once again surprised and wish to denounce that part of the masks.

I will hear again: "It's self-derisio!"

Lie: Basques play the role of gypsies.

"Buhame's characters have always mocked the human order in their sermons, in this case the reds of the masks!"

Lie: This is the interpretation of the researchers who have investigated our customs, when they did not know how the gypsies had become sedentary in Euskal Herria, nor the measures of repression against them or the condemnation against this group.

-Because in Zuberoa there are no more gypsies, no one knows who we are talking about, so it is not so serious.

Lie: The youngest have not met any Buhame family, but they have met those over 60. Those mentioned in the masks are the gypsies who have lived in Zuberoa. To make you smile in your sight, you use your nicknames, to seem indecent, insolent, drunk and mujahee, and for everyone who you are to take for opposites. If many of the highlands have left the valley, some still live here. But it is true that the figures are rarely seen in the actors or in the public of the masks. And when it exists, they don't even know anything about their family's history, it's basically better!

"Anyway, the Gypsies were not angels."

The truth is that… Those who have known them are sympathetic to them citing their miserable life, saying they always gave them something when they asked, but always adding ridiculous stories with their care. Then they laugh at them because some Bohemians had the gift of being naughty, of transgressing the laws, of mocking the authority of gendarmes or recruits, of provoking them later with their cherries. This memory is the most present in the memory of society.

But what cannot be said is that the Roma have often paid for that money. Many of them, men, women or children, have been in jail sometimes for stealing, like the country’s poor, but most of the time for vagrants and pilgrims. In more than one time in the Basque Country, terrible repressive measures have been taken against them (human hunting, expulsion from the department, dispatch to the lost). Many children have been torn apart, because they've never seen them since. Living conditions have changed a great deal with the expansion of industry, when the spartan has been taken in factories, or in external works, as well as when children have started to walk in school and social aid has appeared. Since then, those who have been in the country have needed to forget about bad fame.

- Then the masks can't do more!

Lying: Every people who are masked has to reflect on that spectacular part. And avoid the problem, as they have done in other European masks. Other times, unfortunately, like Moldova in Romania, there is the same tone as ours.

Is it possible, in the twenty-first century, on a pretext of respect for tradition, to broaden this view of a human group that has actually been marginalized, sometimes with great resentment? All we know is that this group was part of the town of Tzigano, which is also today a victim of marginalisation in many villages, Manux, Gitano, Rom… and the Roma of the Basque Country, most of whom live in the Garazi area, and some of whom have escaped from society.

The article was published by Dantzan and we brought it with the Creative Commons license.