Roma Creek

There are about 20,000 Romani Americans (Roma) in Texas, out of a national population of about one million. Romani people, commonly known as Gypsies, have been in the Americas since 1498, when Columbus brought some on his third voyage to the West Indies. Their subsequent forced transportation brought most Gypsies across the Atlantic. To understand why Gypsies were shipped to the American colonies, it is necessary first of all to examine the circumstances of their presence in Europe. They arrived in the Balkans from India in the middle of the thirteenth century because of the spread of Islam into the Byzantine Empire; the ancestors of the Gypsies had in fact left India in the first place during the first quarter of the eleventh century as troops resisting Islamic incursions. Gypsies were at first associated with the Muslim threat. Being non-white, having no country, alien in language, dress and religion, they were quickly and easily targeted as scapegoats. Nevertheless their artisan skills, particularly in metalworking, made them indispensable to the Balkan economy; as they started to move away from southeastern Europe to escape the increasingly rigorous demands upon them, legislation began to be put into effect making them the property of their employers. By the early fourteenth century, they had become slaves in Moldavia and Wallachia (present-day Romania