Browsing by Author "Roman, Raluca Bianca"

The presence of Eastern European Roma beggars in the city of Helsinki has attracted public, media and political attention, both on a national and international scale. My thesis focuses on how members of the national Roma community- the Finnish Roma- see the migrant group(s) in the country. I do this by exploring the opinions of and actions taken by one segment of the Finnish Roma community: Finnish Roma members holding public or publicly visible positions (such as artists, social workers, activists, academics and members of Finnish Roma NGOs) or those who I refer to as Finnish Roma 'representatives'. I look, on the one hand, at concrete actions taken by these individuals, in relation to the migrant Roma group(s). On the other hand, I explore their views on the ways in which the Roma migrants influence the position of Finnish Roma community in Finnish society. My study thus questions and analyses the grassroots applicability of Roma transnational mobilization in the context of Romanian Roma migration to Finland. My data consists of twelve in-depth interviews conducted with Finnish Roma representatives and two additional expert interviews conducted with members of state institutions that specialize in the issues of the Finnish Roma community. From the former group of respondents, I have interviewed both Finnish Roma members who have been publicly helping/supporting the Roma migrants and those who have not spoken out publicly on their position on the matter. I looked into their reasons for helping/not helping the migrant Roma, the means they chose to do so and have identified five categories of Finnish Roma engagement with the Roma migrants: extensive engagement, initial engagement, passive engagement and disengagement. An often expressed fear of associating with the Roma migrant group(s) was argued as based on the activities the latter are primarily associated with (i.e. begging and street performing), which were thought as contravening not only Finnish majority norms but also some of the core Finnish Roma customs. The possibility of having the status of the national Finnish Roma community - as an officially recognized traditional minority- threatened by associating with other national Roma groups was brought up. Linked to this, in what concerns aspects of Roma identity and ethnic solidarity, a strong attachment of the Finnish Roma to the Finnish nation state was argued in contrast with a weaker attachment of the Finnish Roma to a Roma transnational community or a Roma 'nation'. Three of the often applied markers of Roma identity- such as culture, language and history- featured in a much contextualized understanding, as the history, culture and language of the Finnish Roma community rather than that of a cross-national Roma community. These findings seem to contradict the political projects of international Roma elite and transnational organizations in attempting to foster a trans-national mobilization of Roma communities across countries.