From Negative Visibility to Positive Invisibility – Who Needs to Use Gypsies [Roma] as the Anti-citizens of Civilized Europe?

Since the 15th century, Gypsies in Occidental Europe have been subjected to special legislation and social action determined to cause one of two types of cultural identity extinction –extermination or complete assimilation. Five centuries later, the result has been an exceptional cultural persistence associated to social marginalisation and, in Portugal, a mixture of positive invisibility (unlike the Spanish situation, Portuguese Gypsies are not recognised as having made any positive form of cultural contribution) and of excessive exposure, in terms of a negative visibility constructed by public opinion and the media. This negative visibility of Portuguese Gypsies is worsened by the systematic silence and a certain connivance on the part of the authorities (Parliament, Government, Catholic Church, Courts, municipal authorities, etc.), with rare and personal, non-institutional exceptions, occurring in moments of excessive persecution. In this paper, we will explore the identity economy of social persecution against ethnic minorities that are not recognised as such in the Law, and are used in daily life as the negative image of the hegemonic ‘imagined society’.