Nominal Assimilation: The Ethnic and National Identities of the Gitanos or Calé of Spain as Shown by their Surnames in the 1783–1785 Census

Abstract

In 1783, the King of Spain Carlos III enacted the last Royal Order for the control and assimilation of Gitanos or Calé. The law required that local authorities listed the Gitanos living in their counties. The resulting census is the most important document on the Spanish Romani written during the ancien régime. Unfortunately, its data has never been studied in depth. This paper analyzes the surnames of the 12,037 Gitano persons identified in the census and finds 567 different heritable family names. Interestingly, 10% of these surnames identified 75% of the Gitano population. The analysis shows that Gitanos already had the same names they have today, and that it is possible to trace personal genealogies linking Gitano people from this census with people alive now, some fourteen generations later. Gitano surnames were all Hispanic and many of them of aristocratic origin. Some were common to all Gitano groups, but most followed regional patterns and were differentiated by region and even by province. Baptism, mixed marriages, and imitation of neighbors were the most likely sources for the adoption of these surnames. Gitanos also used personal and family nicknames in their communities, but their official names were a crucial part of their personal and collective identity. Resistance, opposition, and contrasting cultural strategies should not ignore the hybridizing and creative adaptations of the Romani peoples.

Keywords:

• family names
• Roma/Gypsies
• Spain
• ethnicity
• enlightenment
• corpus linguistics

Acknowledgements

We thank Peter Bakker, Giuseppe Beluschi, Carmen Caballero Navas, Salud Domínguez, Fabian Jacobs, Elena Maruishikova, Veselin Popov, Teri Virostko, and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and corrections. The mistakes the paper may still contain are the exclusive responsibility of the authors. The final elaboration of this paper was helped by the Proyecto de Excelencia of the Junta de Andalucía, Spain, P11-SEJ-8286, and the MigRom12 Project, Seventh Framework Program of the European Union, Grant Agreement 319901.

Notes

1 “Prendimiento de Antoñito el Camborio en el camino de Sevilla,” Romancero Gitano, 2. Obras completas, 7th ed. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1964), p. 445.

2 “Gitano” is the term most Spanish Romani people use to refer to themselves both in private and public settings. In Spain it is also the term most frequently used by minority leaders when naming public institutions such as the Instituto de Cultura Gitana. It derives from the term “Egiptano,” and thus from a misunderstanding of their origin from Egypt. In this sense the term is synonymous with the English term “Gypsy.” Many representatives of groups who were previously referred to as “Gypsies” reject this term as derogatory, and prefer to be identified by their own denominations, such as Roma, Sinti, Kalé, etc. In Spain, Caló (plural Calé or Calós) is also a term that many Gitanos use to refer to themselves, although less frequently.

3 The authors of the educational ROMBASE web page provide a more complex view of this issue in their entry “Names of Roma.” They state that: “many Slovak Roma have family names which are ‘pure’ romani.” They provide different examples of what they consider “transparent” Romani surnames such as Lolo, Banga, Kaleja, T(h)uleja, and “unstransparent” or “Ancient Indian” surnames such as Badi, Mirga, or Karela (see <http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/>).

4 The Basque country, Navarre, and the court (the city of Madrid and the other royal sites) were not included, as Gitanos were forbidden to reside there. But there is evidence that there were Gitano families living in these three regions. This points to the inevitable gaps in the Census.

5 Those are preserved in the Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN Consejo, Legajos 524 y 525). We have also used the summary of all listings made in 1788. This summary is kept at the Archivo General de Simancas (AGS, Gracia y Justicia, Legajos 1004 and 1005). Finally we have reviewed the accounting of all the listings that is kept in the Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN, Consejo, Legajo 4036). Antonio Gómez Alfaro did most of the archival research and painstakingly produced a detailed review of all entries combining data from the different sources (see Gamella et al., 2012 for details of the methods followed).