Walking with Lina in Zamora

Reflections on Roma’s Home-Making Engagements from a Translocality Perspective

Abstract

This paper discusses how concreteness of place and locality matter for Roma in negotiating belonging and in engaging with home-making practices. The idea of ‘fluid identities’ or ‘flows’ permeated Roma/Gypsies related scholarly approaches and migration studies to a point that corporeality and materiality of movement and settlement became rather marginalised. Criticising this trend, the translocality perspective (Brickell and Datta, 2011) emerged as an agency-oriented approach that sheds more light on how local-to-local connections are made. To tackle these facets, in this article I analyse a walking tour in Zamora with Lina. With the ability to stimulate embodied, exploratory and relational experiences of space (O’Neill and Hubbard, 2010), this walking episode enabled Lina, a Romanian Roma woman, to reflect on the places that mattered to her life abroad. Based on her reflections, the article discusses how Lina dwells simultaneously ‘here’ and ‘there’, and imagines dwelling translocally.