Stereotypes, “integration” policies and multiple identities: From a mapping attempt to the experience of some Romanian Roma families in Milan.

“Dichiarazione dello stato di emergenza in relazione agli insediamenti di comunità nomadi nel territorio delle regioni Campania, Lazio e Lombardia”, “Strategia Nazionale di inclusione dei Rom, dei Sinti e dei Caminanti 2012-2020”, “Progetto Rom, Sinti e Caminanti” (Municipality of Milan), are examples of Italian national or local policies or practices that create and reproduce specific categories in which a multitude of persons, stories, origins, situations are subsumed, according to a supposed ethno-cultural similarity. Based on a categorical approach and on a deep-rooted anti-gypsyism, these policies could risk homogenizing, essentializing and making “gypsy” the identity of different people, separating them from the rest of the population. The paper deals with men and women, Romanian citizens, in majority Roma, migrated to Italy during the last ten-twelve years and mainly settled in makeshift camps on the northern outskirts of Milan. Immediately categorized as Roma or as Nomads, they are identified as a “social problem”, “marginal subjects”, needing the implementation of particular “integration” policies. It seems that to categorize these people as Roma or as Nomads could allow to avoid to wonder about political, economical and social causes of the existence of unauthorized settlements, and could allow not to consider these families’ mobility within the broader migratory movements from Romania. Considering the experiences of the last four years of ethnographic research and the first results of the European Research Project MigRom - The immigration of Romanian Roma to Western Europe: causes, effects and future engagement strategies, especially the attempt to map the presences of Romanian Roma in Italy, the paper aims to show flexible subjectivities, multiple and variable belongings, and people able to resist, through everyday life practices, to strict categorizations and to the violence produced by them. On one hand there are policies of “inclusion” that risk to create and exacerbate conflicts and discrimination, but on the other hand there are people able to resist moving inside these networks of power and among their different identities, in Italy and in Romania, in relation with gagé or with other Roma, bringing into question the so-called “Roma question” which has acquired new strength and an even greater weight at a political and media level, particularly since the arrival of Romanian migrants.