‘Am I doing it well enough?’

This chapter examines the political implications of Romani masked mumming in nowadays Bulgaria as a form of subversive heritage practice. It analyses the changing representational strategies of Romani mummers and highlights how they reflect the interplay between dominant racialising discourses and subaltern understandings of Romani culture and agency. The text shows how grassroots heritage performances constitute the political domain, even though they often lack an explicit activist agenda. It argues that traditional mumming allows for the crystallisation of political engagement within an apolitical community organisation and its expression in the public sphere, thus challenging the exclusive concept of the nation and its supposedly monoethnic heritage. Through selective and subversive reinterpretations of heritage, Roma contest the imposed racialised stereotypes and enact an alternative self‐image to renegotiate their belonging to the national body, envisioning also translocal and transnational Romani solidarity.