ABSTRACT
First, this chapter shows that there were pressures within the Rom community itself pushing people out of it. Second, it suggests that as a result there were always people to whom an assimilationist policy might appeal. The chapter presents the story of two families whose circumstances made them potential candidates for absorption into the non-Gypsy world. To understand Morga’s commentary on her predicament, we have to know something about Gypsy uses of money. It was not enough to be born to a Gypsy family—one had to continually reaffirm this identity by participating in activity together, by doing things in a similar manner, by actively displaying one’s continuing attachment to the Gypsy way of doing things. The radical restriction of differentiation led inevitably to a situation in which the Gypsies were either “in” or “out” of the ghetto. The rejection of all forms of mediation did not occur just at this level of denigrating another group of Gypsies.
