ABSTRACT
In the mid 1980s the local authorities in Madrid kick-started a massive campaign to solve once and for all ‘the Gypsy issue’ (la cuestión Gitana). There were at least 15,000 Gitanos (Spanish Gypsies) in the city, the majority concentrated in huge Gitano-only shanty-towns or in very deprived council accommodation built during the Francoist period. There, large families lived in poverty, crammed into chabolas or ‘cardboard houses’ without running water or electricity, precariously earning their subsistence in the informal sector of the economy or, in some much publicised cases, through drug-dealing or theft. The Gitanos had become intimately associated in the non-Gypsy popular imagination with these areas, and people and places together were being increasingly criminalised in media and governmental discourses: shanty-towns like La Celsa or El Pozo del Tío Raimundo were portrayed as urban black holes where liceridden children ran around naked and drug addicts went shopping for their daily doses. They were also described as massive eyesores in the modernising capital, perched on the edges of Madrid, the first view of the city that tourists arriving by road or railway confronted. These shanty-towns had to be eradicated and their population had to be dealt with, brought into line with the rest of European Spain.
