Currando las márgenes: Roma street culture

Abstract

This chapter considers street culture in the context of minority ethnic groups and alongside that what is apparent in the Roma culture – hence Roma street culture. Historically, Roma have experienced racism, discrimination and persecution and have always lived at the margins of society. Political attribution for their social exclusion is often presented as racial difference and a cultural refusal to conform to dominant social, structural and spatial capitalistic advances and seldom as an oppressive feature of neoliberal governance and globalisation. Street culture or “the values, dispositions, practices and styles associated with particular sections of disadvantaged social groups” must consider variables such as ethnicity and race because in the urban context swathes of such deprived groups come from minority ethnic backgrounds. The transition from modernity to postmodernity in which capitalism advanced and perpetuated unemployment and inequality produced what Bauman calls ‘surplus populations.’.