ABSTRACT
Integration is one of the main concerns when it comes to extending the scope of legal frameworks that address the historical minorities to the ‘new minorities’. While integration-related discourses tend to frame targeted people as essentially occupying peripherical positions in society, this chapter stresses that people with migrant and/or ethnic minority background do not act ‘disintegrated’, but they engage in practices of belonging and foster relations to people and places. Based on an ethnographic enquiry with Roma from a north-eastern Romanian town who migrated to Guernica (Spain) and inspired by relational approaches in Romani Studies and by debates on conviviality, the chapter reveals that people represent themselves as having successfully integrated and as deserving to be acknowledged as integrated. Their integratedness is self-affirmed as a result of their agency, individual engagements in the local community life and of their commitment to meeting the expectations that the society has of them. ‘Integratedness’ is proposed as a notion that denotes the state achieved after having completed the integration process, enabling a conceptualization of integration as attainable, thus as more than a processual state that keeps those targeted by integration discourses in a perpetual limbo position.
