danceswithfaeriesunderthemoon:

littlegoldenapple replied to your post: Go into more detail?

Fiance didn’t know until he was in high school that he’s Rroma. He doesn’t know the language or anyone who speaks it, either. He knows some family members and has spent time with them, but overall he’s had a shit time learning about his heritage =(

It’s sucks so much.. finding out information about your Rroma background is one of the most difficult things ever. 

I mean, my great grandma was so scared of people finding out, that she kept it secret from her own kids. I just find that so sad.

My Grandma said that she (her mother) cried when she found out that they knew.

She didn’t even tell them herself, they found out because they heard her speaking Calo to her brother or something, and of course they asked her about it and she had to come clean.

It’s like some dirty secret.

Same here. I didn’t find out until I started a trial of ancestry.com. After confronting my grandmother about my findings, she told me that her mother was the child of a single Czech Romani mother. The reason that my grandmother is so hush-hush about our heritage, even though we still participate in Romani culture, is because both her grandmother and her mother were sex workers, and most Romani people have strict moral codes that they stick to despite the racial stereotype of “gypsy” women being wantonly prostitutes. My great grandmother, her mother, and her brothers and sister left Czechoslovakia in the early 1900s to evade the forced sterilization of romani women. Even though this happened a long time ago, the pain and fear of what happened to our ancestors has never left my grandmother, who heard the horror stories from her mother. Now, she speaks more openly about it, and I’m always intrigued to learn more about both the beautiful and horrible aspects of our culture.