Iberian Atlantic

The earliest known example of a European engaging with the Americas through the “Gypsy veil” comes from two 1501 letters written by the Venetian ambassador to Portugal, Pietro Pasqualigo. In October of that year, over fifty men, women and children, Natives of today’s Greenland or Newfoundland and some of the first Indigenous Americans to arrive in Europe, landed in Lisbon. These kidnapped families were then put on display. The week after their arrival Pasqualigo attempted a description: “They are of like colour, figure, stature, and aspect, and bear the greatest resemblance to the cingani.” This first documented instance of a European linking Romani people with Indigenous Americans soon spread via a Latin translation made the following year and a French one in 1522. Over the centuries, Pasqualigo’s letters were translated and reprinted many times ensuring broad exposure to his words. To him, physical appearance prompted the “resemblance,” and though other aspects would soon emerge, physiognomy remained a coherent thread. Likewise, this instance arose from a violent context: coercion and power accompanied transatlantic relational racialization from the start.Footnote ¹¹

About fifty years later, José Anchieta, the Canarian Jesuit missionary to the Portuguese colony of Brazil, attempted to familiarize his readers with the Native people there through relational considerations. After describing Indigenous Brazilians as lacking cities, laws or councils, he recognized them as a nation divided into many smaller nations, most of whom wandered. From these points, he continued:

Here, while skin color remains, he further explains each group vis-à-vis the other and himself via contrasting behavioral traits. Assumptions of his own civility and the savagery of the others can be implied by his recounting levels of honesty, violence, mobility, motivation and civic attachment.Footnote ¹² Today a Catholic saint, Anchieta is considered a founder of both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. His linguistic, ethnographic and literary writings circulated broadly in both manuscript and print form through Jesuit networks. It was common for later Jesuits to pull from former ones in ethnographic typologies, especially of the Americas. This has prompted one historian to note their important role in creating “a distinct ontological category of ‘Indian.’” But this ontological “Indian” came to exist, at least partially, through an ontological “Gypsy.”Footnote ¹³

This linkage appears again in a 1554 chronicle left by the German explorer, Ulrico Schmidl, who had traveled with the expedition that founded Buenos Aires two decades prior. Schmidl recalled his first encounters with the Indigenous Querandi people through the lens of his assumptions about Romani people in the German lands. Written to satisfy a public curious about the Americas, Schmidl undoubtedly strove to make legible a place few Europeans could imagine, much less experience. Though brief, his comparison suggests that both Romani and Querandi peoples’ mobility and perception as outsiders, even within their respective homelands, functioned similarly enough to illuminate his German-speaking audience about both others and self. As he explained it, the Querandi “have no place of their own in the country; they roam the earth just like the Zigeuner here in German countries.”Footnote ¹⁴ Schmidl tethered the two groups together in a familiarizing practice, while also tethering them both to himself in contrast – white Europeans did not “roam.” Both this practice and its ideological contents would endure.

The “Gypsy veil” Schmidl alerts us to, unfurled further to encompass other people and situations. The farming practices of settler colonists near São Paulo troubled royal authorities enough in the 1640s that they rhetorically explained these agricultural methods relationally under the influence of a Romani-infused perception. Utilizing slash and burn husbandry techniques, which had been learned from local Indigenous farmers, meant that colonial agriculturalists would “se azingarem,” or move about like Ciganos. This concerned bureaucrats desirous of settled populations and echoed complaints about Portuguese Romani people, whose mobility at this time, somewhat ironically, often resulted in their banishment to Indigenous American homelands. To be appropriately Portuguese in Brazil meant rejecting behaviors ascribed in common to Indigenous and Romani people, illustrating how the generation of racialized ideas about one group occurred alongside others and self.Footnote ¹⁵

In Spain, this veil expressed itself in more practical ways. Considerations of how to manage Romani people there often did so alongside Indigenous American subjects. The earliest writings on the matter aimed to keep the two groups apart, whereas later ones suggested combining the two together. No matter which outcome was pursued, considering each together intensified the linkages they were imagined sharing. From 1581, Gitanos were barred from immigrating to Spanish America on the grounds that they were harmful to attempts to convert the Native people whose “natural simplicity” made them gullible victims to Gitano “tricks.”Footnote ¹⁶ When reconsidering the potential to deport Gitanos to the Americas in the mid-eighteenth century, similar concerns were raised. A 1749 report submitted to Ferdinand VI included among the disadvantages of doing so, “that if they live badly in Spain, in the Indies they will live worse and will pervert the poor Indians.”Footnote ¹⁷

Other Spanish thinkers suggested an alternative possibility that presumably seemed logical considering the closeness of Romani people and Indigenous Americans in their minds. In conversations about what to do with those interred as part of the “Great Round-Up,” a coordinated attempt begun in 1749 to arrest and then eliminate every Gitano in Spain, the statesman and reformer Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes suggested repealing the 1581 decree to allow for the removal of Gitano children and single women to American colonies. The latter were to marry Indigenous men and thus facilitate the disappearance of Spanish Gitanos; presumably these “Indians” might vanish as such as well. Other proposals encouraged transporting young Romani boys and girls to sparsely inhabited islands and colonies and marrying them to locals. This proposal imaginatively assumed that all parties would recognize the benefit of this plan, since Gitanos would never “be able to pass for Spanish” and since none would want “to retain the odious name of Gitanos.” Though never enacted, later plans reiterated separating Romani women and men geographically and sexually. Women should be sent to the American continent to marry “Indians, Mestizos, or creoles,” and men to colonial islands to marry “island women.” The goal was the wholesale destruction of Romani people via population control measures – policing their reproductive choices in the context of imperial Atlantic possibilities – that required an Indigenous population into which they might disappear.Footnote ¹⁸ Though there was never any explicit mention of what this would mean for the Indigenous host communities, one can presume that the spread of “Spanishness,” even through a corrupted Romani version of it, might also be seen as good for the empire. The web of beliefs that bound non-Romani and Romani Spaniards and Indigenous Americans together simultaneously expressed and generated racialized content, policy and experiences. Though Atlantic in origin, such dynamics spread. The lessons from such racial governance in Spanish America were carried to Central Europe through the mechanisms of Habsburg rule.Footnote ¹⁹

That Gitanos and Indigenous Americans engaged with each other in both the Americas and Europe suggests their role in the creation of this ideological proximity that then impacted some of their choices. In just one example, from 1755, Manuel Ximénez appealed a prison sentence of forced labor that had been issued for breaking one of the numerous anti-Gitano decrees then active in Spain. He appealed on the grounds that his parents were not Gitanos, but Natives of Cuba. Ximénez believed that the confusion about his ancestry stemmed from his wife, María Francisca, being “de nación Gitana,” which had led others to assume his Gitano rather than “Indio” ancestry.Footnote ²⁰ One’s reputation was often relied upon by Iberian and colonial administrators, who with anti-Gitano restrictions in place were then confronted with identifying and sorting Romani people from everyone else. One Buenos Aires judge thus concluded “that it was impossible to determine with certainty who was a Gitano and who was not,” although in Spain many people believed in clear signs that gave individuals the appearance of Gitanos.Footnote ²¹

That Native Americans and Romani people socialized together led to confusion about the ancestry of individuals and where they should be placed within imperial Atlantic typographies. As a result, non-Romani people were often caught up by decrees intended to control Spanish Gitanos, evidencing the convolution of perceived racial content and categories. The blacksmith Bartolomé Fernández, for example, had been ordered to leave Iznájar in 1746 and move to Córdoba, a city authorized for Gitano residences. A decree of that year demanded that Romani people relocate to one of forty-one approved towns across mainland Spain. Fernández appealed this decision on the grounds that he was “de nación Indiana.” His blacksmithing trade, one traditional for Gitanos to practice and recently made illegal for them, could have made him suspect, especially if he looked a certain way or socialized among certain people. Whatever the cause, his claimed identity was verified by the authorities, and he was allowed to remain in his hometown. Yet his experience illustrates that the process of constructing race disrupted lives just as readily as any reified notion of race.Footnote ²²

Further evidence from the Spanish Atlantic illustrates the texture of this process. When the Polish Jesuit Florian Paucke noted of his time with the Moqoit people in today’s Paraguay during the mid-eighteenth century that “the color of the body and face of these Indians is the same as that seen in the Zigeuner” he wove and spread the “Gypsy veil.” Paucke descriptively continued, “one of these boys was of white appearance and color, not like the others with a Zigeuner complexion … [Others] have a white-yellow face and somewhat reddish cheeks, others are light-brown or dark-fleshed, others dark-brown, others like the Zigeuner in Hungary.”Footnote ²³ Here again the network of Jesuit priests played a role in the circulation of these physiognomic ideas.

Two other Jesuits, writing from Spanish South America, one from Río de la Plata and another from northern Mexico, related the mobility of certain tribal groups to Gitanos in Spain, thus securing the assumption that Spaniards should not be mobile. “The Jobas are a nación muy Gitana, an untamed and wandering people. Although there are a number of pueblos where they can come and live, most of them migrate like Gitanos from canyon to canyon,” noted Joseph Roldán in 1762.Footnote ²⁴ Similarly, Manuel Moreno Alonso described a Puerto Rican stopover during his 1747 journey between Cadiz and Veracruz by noting how the Indigenous people, called “Jíbaros,” struck him with their “mulatto-like” skin and the women’s “Gitano-like” appearance.Footnote ²⁵ Physiognomy and mobility, in these examples, helped these Spanish men make sense of Indigenous Americans through conceptions they held about others and themselves. Comprehending through racial scripts generated and entrenched a racial matrix throughout the Iberian Atlantic world and beyond.

French Atlantic

The racial matrix woven within the Iberian Atlantic tangled with analogous assumptions and experiences from the French Atlantic world. French Romani people, called Bohémiens during the early modern era, served as a racial reference for non-Bohémien French colonizers within an ideological sphere that Romani people’s actions helped entwine. In 1727, the Jesuit Paul Poisson denigratingly compared the French voyageurs who worked as traders among the tribes, to both Indigenous and Romani people. He notes: “To see these men, clad with but one garment, more sunburnt and more swarthy than the Savages – stretched upon the sand or squatting like monkeys, devouring what they hold in their hand – one does not know whether they are in a company of Bohémiens, or of people holding a witches revel.”Footnote ²⁶ His comment reveals the fear of French men declining into “savagery” as well as the relational perspective at work. Poisson’s reference to dark skin color, lazy and animalistic postures, and clothing all imply an attempt to position Bohémiens, Native people and white voyageurs into his racializing worldview vis-à-vis each other. He reveals a perceived closeness between Bohémiens and non-white people, as well as his assumptions about what it meant to be French and white. Much later, another French traveler exemplified this proximity when he, with some uncertainty, described the musicians at an 1802 New Orleans carnival ball as being “Bohemes or people of color strumming heavily on their violins.”Footnote ²⁷

This closeness bears out within many eighteenth-century Louisiana sources. Some French colonial Bohémiens, many from families deported in 1720, did in fact choose to make connections with Black and Indigenous people. The Bohémienne woman Cécile Christophe Varangue, born soon after her mother’s transportation, and her daughters François and Babé socialized and formed intimate, familial and professional relationships with Indigenous men. At least one Anglo-Romani woman conducted herself similarly with an African man in Virginia at the end of the prior century.Footnote ²⁸ These connections caught the attention of authorities working to regulate race in both colonies. In 1772, a Louisiana commandant recommended the removal of a young Indigenous girl from Varangue’s care; he also supported her and her daughter Babé’s imprisonment for not marrying in ways suitable to the local religious authorities. A male relative of these women, one M. Bonnite, was recommended for deportation to France for putting “the Indians at risk of becoming unruly.” Administrative complaints against these Bohémiens involved their relationships with tribal people, evidencing both the social choices they made as well as the concerns these choices provoked.Footnote ²⁹ Colonial agents desirous of enhancing their own racialized power might try to manipulate the racial matrix by separating those who contemporary racial logics had placed close together. Though the results were mixed, such official action undoubtedly solidified and entrenched the hierarchy of racial scripts.

Other evidence proves these women’s choices were not unique. Two Louisiana Romani women married free men of color – one under French rule in 1725 and the other under Spanish rule in 1779. This 1725 marriage between Marie Jacqueline Gaspart “Bohemian” and Jean Baptiste Raphael “nègre libre” was the first officially sanctioned interracial marriage in the colony. The special permission needed to approve this marriage was likely only granted because Gaspart was Bohémien. There are no known examples of any non-Bohémien French white women (either officially or by custom) marrying an Indigenous or African-descended man throughout the early French Atlantic. Regulating sex, especially women’s intimate matters, was crucial to structuring race throughout European empires. Both granting and limiting intimate options were ways of racializing power. That Bohémiens might be granted and make intimate choices other French women did not reveals the entanglements between the ideology and experience of racialization influencing their lives.Footnote ³⁰ Romani men also married Indigenous women and free women of color in the Louisiana colony. One 1802 account described some of these men, who worked as shipbuilders for the coastal trade, as “lazy” and “with little ambition,” but “happy, and liv[ing] perfectly tranquil” lives. The difficulty of this work, so crucial to the colonial enterprise, suggests that the assessment of their character drew from their proximity to Native people or antigypsy stereotypes, rather than from the reality of their labors.Footnote ³¹

Complaints about how people fraternized might also consider Bohémiens in ambiguous racial positions, evidence of the uncertain overlap between racial content and categories that a generative matrix might provoke. When in the winter of 1744 the Governor of Louisiana Pierre Vaudreuil forced the resignation of a white French ensign “for having led a villainous life with Negroes and Bohémiens” he revealed his own conceptions about what it meant to be French and white.Footnote ³² This example also reveals the social choices made by certain white, Bohémian and Black colonists: they kept each other’s company even when doing so made them suspect. Grouping separate categories together within a white supremacist hierarchy thickened and ensured the continued conceptual and experiential relevance of the “Gypsy veil.”

Despite these examples showing Bohémiens associating with Native and Black Louisianans, such choices seem to have been the exception. Most Louisiana Bohémiens who can be identified seem to have chosen to consort with other Bohémiens or non-Bohémien white French colonists. The increasing limitations placed on Indigenous people and free people of color motivated Bohémiens to distance themselves from an undesirable status into which they might conceivably be folded, and to position themselves as white, if they could. One final example from the French Atlantic illustrates this impetus.

The 1743 words dictated by Jean Baptiste “La Chaume” Chevalier, the only known Bohémien colonist to have his thoughts regarding race recorded, reveal his nuanced comprehension of the colonial racialized social order and his insecure feelings about his place within it. In 1741, the recently arrived soldier was convicted of deserting and punished with bound labour. After a fight within his abusive household, an enslaved African man was called to tie up La Chaume in preparation for corporal punishment. Realizing his fate, La Chaume stabbed himself because, in his words, “he did not deserve to be mistreated by some blacks.” The inverted racial power of this punishment sent a message La Chaume acutely felt. “To be ordered by a negro” rather than his white superior, as he put it, was an outrageous affront to his sense of how he should be treated. Through his actions and words La Chaume expressed his internalization of the colonial racial order and the assumptions he held about his own place within it. He expected access to privileges of whiteness, which to him meant avoiding punishment by Blacks. In staking this claim La Chaume stabilized race and bound discreet notions of difference more tightly together.Footnote ³³

Anglo Atlantic

English colonizers also used Romani people – called Egyptians or Gipsies/Gypsies – as references from the beginning of their imperial project. Two Puritan founders of the Plymouth colony, Edward Winslow and William Bradford, published in 1622 in London an account of the colony’s founding to attract future investment and emigration. Within this, the authors made sense of those they termed “the savages” by describing them as “of the same complexion like our English Gipsies.”Footnote ³⁴ Years later, William Penn, the founder of the Pennsylvania colony, similarly noted in a 1686 promotional tract distributed throughout England, “The Natives are generally tall, straight, well-built; Of Complexion, Black, but by design, as the Gypsies in England. They grease themselves with Bear’s fat clarified, and using no defense against Sun or Weather, their skins must needs be swarthy.”Footnote ³⁵ In this interesting commentary Penn suggests that both groups carry the potential for redemption from their supposed savagery – that is, their complexion was self-imposed and thus might be modified. European civilizing forces – well-dressed and white – could be put to good work on both people. Already a century prior, Tudor laws had criminalized “counterfeit” Egyptians in England, who were accused of darkening their skin as part of their deception. That people falsely presented themselves as members of the early modern Anglo-Romani community was a well-accepted presupposition, and one reinforced through literature and drama.Footnote ³⁶ When Penn noted seeing Native “women comely, as some Gipsies in England,”Footnote ³⁷ it was within the context of a complex of well-established antigypsy laws, attitudes and assumptions. That Penn hoped the Lenape might voluntarily convert to English-style living to allow his colony to develop in alignment with his Quaker pacifism might also have motivated his interpretation of the mutability of external markers of difference and the potential to spread European civilization.Footnote ³⁸

These widely distributed publications ensured broad exposure to such interconnected ways of thinking. Practices of racialization clearly transcended North America, reaching throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world and even beyond.Footnote ³⁹ And, like the confusion caused in Spain when Indigenous Americans appeared out of context, English observers might similarly be affected. This is expressed in The Jamaica Lady, an anonymous novel published in 1720 in London. In this, Holmesia, the protagonist, “herself a Creole, and consequently of a pale yellow Complexion … [spoke] … a sort of jargon, being a dialect peculiar to the Natives of that Island, it being partly English and partly Negroish.” In one scene, she questioned a Londoner who “looking on her, thought by her appearance, and her cant, that she was a Gypsy.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Using skin color and dialect to make and mark group boundaries, while connecting them together, recomposed the matrix that linked and replicated English, Black and Romani people.

Two eighteenth-century German pietist immigrants to British North America again tied the transatlantic racial matrix to Central European antigypsy thought. The first, Johann Bolzius, who led the first group of Salzburger immigrants to Georgia, saw his 1751 description of the region published as a promotional travelogue in Germany. Within this he described how the Natives “who roam through our areas at times are no better than the Zigeuner in several parts of Germany, [they] are much devoted to drinking and other vices, steal horses from the pasture, and sometimes shoot oxen and crows for the sale of a piece of meat or the bells hanging around their neck.”Footnote ⁴¹ Henry Melchior Mühlenberg, a missionary to Pennsylvania, conjoined African Americans and Romani people in a 1774 report from Bolzius’ community. Even Blacks who had become Christian, he warned “retain their savage spite and cunning trickiness like the Gypsies in Europe.”Footnote ⁴² The content of these behaviorally defined scripts fostered both proximity and distance along a hierarchy of race. By degrading Romani people alongside Indigenous and African Americans commentators constructed and laid claim to their elevated sense of European whiteness.

Actual Romani people who crossed the British Atlantic navigated this cloak of assumptions the best they could. Three members of an Anglo-Romani family, Joseph, William and John Smith had been “transported for their natural lives” to Maryland in 1767 after being found guilty of stealing and killing three lambs. Just weeks after their arrival, they ran away together from the ironworks where they had been sold as seven-year bound laborers. The newspaper advertisement placed to identify and retrieve them began with a racial juxtaposition: “Ran away on Sunday evening … Joseph Smith, an old man, a Gypsie, very much resembling a swarthy mulatto in colour.” William, Joseph’s brother was “nearly of the same color” and John, William’s son, “nearly of the same complexion as his father and uncle.” Though using color words to signify has its own Anglophone history, connecting Romani people with those of a particular genealogical descent positioned them rhetorically, conceptually and practically alongside other not quite white people in the colonies. In so doing this author scripted race relationally.Footnote ⁴³

A generation after the Smiths’ ordeal, white legislators in the neighboring state of Virginia considered Romani people alongside “negroes and mulattoes.” The 1792 repeal of a 1736 statute that had banished Romani people from Virginia, carefully distinguished between Romani and Black people, noting that though “Egyptians or Gypsies” were no longer forbidden in the state, “the migration of free negroes and mulattoes” remained illegal.Footnote ⁴⁴ Emphasizing Romani peoples’ distinctiveness under the law from free persons of color by the white Virginian legislators shows the shared consideration of the three groups even through the separation of their privileges.

Racializing Romani people relationally occurred in less instrumental ways as British cultural forms moved around the Atlantic. The nature of the matrix accounts for both well-established hegemonic configurations as well as weaker or even dormant possibilities. As such, expressions of the scripts facilitated slippages between forms. This can be illustrated in a reimagining of Guy Mannering within a North American context. Walter Scott’s works were hugely popular among a US audience eager to participate in the Anglo “world republic of letters”Footnote ⁴⁵ and to connect “beyond the boundaries of nations.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The central character, Meg Merrilies, a powerful Romani woman, allowed Scott to comment on a plethora of themes. She was a member of a “tribe” who as “the pariahs of Scotland, living like wild Indians among European settlers,” saw their “own customs, habits, and opinions” separate them from “members of the civilised [sic] part of the community.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In the wake of Scott’s popularity, the English writer Barbara Hofland published The Stolen Boy, an Indian Tale in New York in 1830. This children’s book presents an American version of Guy Mannering by recontextualizing the Romani characters as Native Americans. In the first lines of Hofland’s story, a “Spanish” boy living on the Texas frontier asks his father about the “strangest people that ever were seen who are sitting opposite to the garden. They are not Gipsies, such as we used to see in Spain, but yet they seem to be wanderers like them, and to live out of doors.” The book presents a mash-up of stereotypes that includes references to cannibalism, kidnapping and thievery. Securing and confirming the power of whiteness – and even Europeanness – on the US borderlands worked by grouping and debasing Native and Romani people as part of one whole.Footnote ⁴⁸

Though this literary linkage suggests the ideological existence of the transatlantic “Gypsy veil,” such concepts never stood alone outside practical application. The lived experiences of both Romani and non-Romani people cycled together with such concepts. As a result, those who engaged with this racial matrix came to expect certain things of Romani Americans. In an article from the Philadelphia National Gazette from 1834 (and reprinted elsewhere) the unnamed author explains his knowledge about Romani Americans based on the literary “Gypsy.” He had “seen numbers of a Gang of Gypsies occupying a spot of waste land” near Kinderhook, New York, who “have the features, complexion, and habits characteristic of the Gypsies of writers.”Footnote ⁴⁹ When another author compared a group of white men bathing with “half tamed Indians” he linked this to “a vivid idea of the Gypsies as represented in the toy books of children.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The linkages and leakages between fact and fiction condensed the tightly woven transatlantic racial matrix bolstered by the connections Romani people generated in non-Romani people’s minds.

The “Gypsy veil” spun by the transatlantic racial matrix spread across the early US just as subtly as elsewhere. In 1810, New York City mayor De Witt Clinton described in the center of that state “an encampment of Indians manufacturing brooms and baskets … . These Indians are now the Gipsies of our country.”Footnote ⁵¹ Newspaper accounts used Romani and Indigenous people to explain the other to readers. Regular recourse to descriptions of housing, mobile livelihood, small-scale trade, clothing and physical features painted two people with one brush.Footnote ⁵² One author even supposed that due to having so much in common, both being “untamable – one the wild man of civilized countries, and the other of the forest” – they would begin to mingle in the Americas, with Romani people literally replacing Indigenous Americans and settling into their abandoned wigwams.Footnote ⁵³

Some Native Americans themselves thought about and with Romani people, but in a very different context. In 1828 the Cherokee Phoenix, a bilingual English and Tsalagi newspaper, reprinted a short summary of a work of unknown provenance its editors titled “Gypsies in England.” The selection the editors chose tellingly begins by describing an increase in the Anglo-Romani population, a fact that may have been of interest to tribal people aware of predictions of their own decline. The racial perspective expressed must also have resonated. Though described as earning a living “by means of fraud, theft, robbery, or some species of crime” they do so only because “they have actually no alternative … . For such is the prejudice against them, they cannot procure any respectable occupation.” The sympathetic stance continued, “they are betrayed by their very faces: the countenance of a Gipsy is recognized in England almost as readily as that of a negro. Perhaps the English Gipsies are the only people in the world who are born under cruel doom of perdition – Enviable indeed is the condition of the naked savage, compared with that of our Gipsies.”Footnote ⁵⁴ One wonders if the Cherokee editors and readers might not have felt in the Anglo-Romani circumstance a sense of shared trials and troubles in the face of white attitudes and actions, no matter the racialized assumptions embedded in the narrative.

In considering the position of Romani people, the Cherokee editors added an additional layer to the thickening racial matrix. Playing with the specter of the vanishing Indian connected Native American and Romani experiences in ways that others would also note. This is particularly evident in the popular nineteenth-century travel narrative, a genre that straddled literary and ethnographical writing, and “produced ‘the rest of the world’ for European readerships.”Footnote ⁵⁵ It also racialized Native, Black and Romani people as part of the “Gypsy veil’s” non-white weft to contrast with the white sensibilities of the writers. By the time these English travelers made their way to North America, they had already encountered Native people through the armchair literature of others. Whether they had personal encounters with actual Romani people, they had certainly encountered them in British literature. These literary encounters primed the touristic expectations of seeing “Gypsy-like” Indians. The “battery of assumptions and predispositions” travel writers brought to this genre replicated expectations in authors and audiences alike.Footnote ⁵⁶ Of the dozens of examples, a few will suffice.

Augustus John Foster, secretary to the British minister in the United States, commented of one 1806 Chickasaw delegation that they “had very much the appearance of Gypsies, exactly their colour and their lank black hair – a boy in particular had very black eyes.”Footnote ⁵⁷ One year later, the English writer and painter, John Lambert, while traveling through Canada and the United States promised to “exhibit to the European world” “with fidelity and truth” North America’s “distinguishing features … in their natural colours.” To do so, he made Indigenous Americans legible through drawing “a great resemblance to the outcast race of wandering Gipsies.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Another English visitor, writing for the Niles Weekly Register, compared the lives of English Romani people to “that of the savages, whom I have seen on the borders of the River St. John in New Brunswick, except that the later gain their food by hunting and fishing and the former by theft.”Footnote ⁵⁹

This practice continued for decades. Richard Longeville Vowell described the South American Chinganéros in 1831, as “a peculiar race of wandering Criole Minstrels, whose habits, and even whose appellation, strikingly resemble the Zingances, or Eastern Gypsies.” They were good dancers and musicians, he described, as well as fortune tellers and sorcerers.Footnote ⁶⁰ Similarly, in an account from the shores of Lake Michigan, the Englishman Godfrey Vigne described how his “half Indian and half Canadian” guide took him to “the very darkest part of the forest” to see “an Indian doctress and fortune-teller.” He began curious yet became disappointed that “her manner, her language, and the substance of what she said, differed in no respect from that of a common English Gipsy woman. She shuffled a dirty pack of cards, and told me of the fair lady and the dark lady, the false friend and the true friend, the treasure to be found and the journey to be taken with the same chapter of accidents and unavoidable.”Footnote ⁶¹ Assuming this encounter did in fact occur, and was not merely a literary embellishment drawn from behind the “Gypsy veil,” one wonders about the genealogy of the fortunes this woman foretold. By midcentury such pieces had proliferated enough to provoke critique: “The traveller who, with poetic fancies respecting the American Indians, first sees one wrapped up in his blanket in a log-hut tavern, can scarcely be more disappointed and mortified than the writer when he first saw a Gypsy encampment.”Footnote ⁶²

Conclusions

Though ideas about difference changed over the course of the early modern era in both subtle and dramatic ways, when non-Romani Europeans thought about people new to them a Romani patina tinged their perception. This “Gypsy veil” helped Jesuit missionaries comprehend, create and control, through analogous comparisons, the Indigenous people they anticipated converting and settling in mission villages. It helped French and Spanish bureaucrats order and regulate their domains. British travelers to the United States saw through the veil to make sense of a new nation at once familiar and strange. At the same time, such practices cohered a sense of Europeaness in response to their Romani neighbors, who had been made familiar outsiders living in their midst. The consistencies shared among the ideas generated during these distinctive histories expose the “Gypsy veil’s” imprint on Atlantic thinking and understanding. Across four centuries and as many continents and empires, non-Romani Europeans contrasted and linked Romani, Indigenous and African-descended people with and to themselves to create their own sense of whiteness, a crucial feature of this veil.

This veil thickened or was perhaps rewoven even more tightly whenever non-Romani Europeans made connections involving Romani people. Such consistent reproduction gave a certain sense of timelessness to the tropes. Each reference to “Gypsies” made in contrast to others and self, reproduced anew, again and again, their unchanging character, which then could be juxtaposed with the progressiveness of European modernity. It also renewed the expectation of, and sometimes even the direct call for, their disappearance, even while their assimilability might be doubted. Alongside this, indeed, as another aspect of it, the “vanishing Indian” and the “civilized European” emerged, grew and stabilized. The restabilized content of these racialized tropes spread throughout the Atlantic world and beyond. That today we emphasize the anti-Blackness, white supremacy and eliminatory logic inherent in imperial Atlantic projects does not mean these concepts and practices ever stood alone. The diverse and changing meanings attached to Europeanness, whiteness, Blackness and Indianness can only be fully understood by uncovering the traces and untangling the connection made by and about Romani people. The transatlantic “Gypsy veil” still covers contemporary thinking; the fabric’s thickness and the weave’s tightness hamper the rending of these binds.