Stereotypes Against The Spanish Gypsy Community

STEREOTYPES AGAINST THE SPANISH GYPSY COMMUNITY
1. Introduction.
Nowadays, there are lots of ethnic minorities that are suffering
discrimination and social exclusion just because of the fact that they are
“different”. An ethnic minority is a community of people that don’t have the
established customs as their lifestyles, maybe because they have another
language, dialect, race or religion.One of them is the gypsy community. They are excluded in society and
people have a negative point of
view of them. There are so many
stereotypes about gypsies that
make people be rude with them.
Most of these prejudices are
created because of the ignorance of
people who talk about gypsies with
no knowledge.
We are going to talk about
these stereotypes, explain and try to create the realimage that gypsy people
have without prejudices. We will focus on the Spanish gypsy community.

2. Main characteristics of the Spanish gypsy community.
 They are around 650.000 people.
 The idea of a common character.
 Cultural differentiation.
 A singular social structure. They are organized in clans.
 Family is the most important institution.

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 Own language: caló

3.History.
Firstly, we should talk about a little bit about
history to understand why gypsies are suffering social
exclusion.
Gypsies arrived to Spain around 1415. At first
they were welcome. People liked them. They were
merchants, craftsmen and craftswomen... But,
during the reign of The Catholic Kings they started to be persecuted by the
Church because they wanted homogeneity. So, gypsieswere forced to leave
their gypsy clothes and customs. They reacted against these facts so they
started to be seen by people as dangerous people.
After that, because of their bad quality of life, there were a big amount of
gypsy people who emigrated to America and Central Europe during the
nineteenth century.
Nowadays, they are more accepted but there is still a lot of racism
against them.4. Social stereotypes against the Spanish gypsy community.
As we said before, we are going to show the different stereotypes an d
prejudices that exist against gypsies, by making a list and explaining one by one
each of them. So, these are some of the stereotypes that make people exclude
gypsies:

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 They don’t want to integrate into society. This is completely false. There
are lotsof gypsies (especially women and young people) who are trying
to integrate themselves into society but it is too hard for them because
they don’t find referents to feel identified. Furthermore, it is said that
gypsies like to live in exclusive places for them and not mixed with other
people but, what really happens is that gypsies have been persecuted
and excluded for centuries so they havebuilt their houses all together for
this reason.
 They don’t want to work. Nowadays, 70% of gypsies that are old enough
to work are doing it. There are gypsy people working in every economic
sector, (education, public health, security...). On the other hand, we have
to say that sometimes, getting a job is very difficult for them because
there are lot of people who don’t want to hire themjust because of the
fact that they are gypsies. So, we can definitely say that gypsies want to
work as much as other people want to.
 They are illiterate: It is true that in the past gypsies didn’t consider
education important in live but, in our days, they change their mind. We
can prove it because almost 100% of gypsy children are registered in
school. There are also a huge amount of gypsiesin university. We can
say that young people and women are changing their past traditions a nd
are helping the community to evolve.
 They have a sexist culture: On the one hand we have to admit that in
gypsy culture men has bigger influence than women. Their social
structure is always leaded by a man. They call him “the patriarch”. On
the other hand we can say that this fact is changing....