“WE ARE THE FIRST TO BE ACCUSED”: A STUDY ON “ANTIGYPSYSIM” AND COLONIAL PERMANENCES IN BRAZILIAN LAW

Abstract

In recent years, the narratives about living conditions of the Brazilians Gypsies People, associated with social exclusion, prejudices and racial discrimination, have been provoking and attracting a series of actors, individual and collective, as well as organs of the state bureaucracy, to think and intervene in this. reality. This article seeks to understand how the laws and policies of the colonial period were mobilized and how they can have an impact on the construction of the legal and political condition of “gypsies” in Brazil. A genealogical study was carried out, from primary and secondary sources, on how the presence of  “gypsies” people were managed in Brazilian territory, during the period of Portuguese colonization. The analysis and data survey of “anti-Gypsy” policies and laws, carried out in this study, are not necessarily chronological, nor do they contemplate the totality of existing measures aimed at the management of “Gypsy people” in Brazil. In addition to the documentary and bibliographic investigation, this study integrated field research with the direct and participant observation of the authors, in activities in which the “Gypsy people” act within the scope of the state bureaucracy, especially the processing of the Bill 248/2015, which intends to create the “Gypsy Statute”. There is a network of practices and meanings about the “gypsy” condition that have been woven since the past, connected to the present, from new bases, which we chose to analyze in this study.