Historia y costumbres de los gitanos

Curatorial Note

Published in Barcelona in 1915, Historia y costumbres de los Gitanos by F. M. Pabanó is an illustrated early twentieth-century Spanish compendium combining historical and ethnographic descriptions of Roma, accounts of customs and social life, collections of stories, sayings, proverbs, curses, and humorous anecdotes, and an extensive Spanish–Gitano–Germanesco dictionary. The volume is significant as a historical source for the study of how Roma were described, classified, and linguistically documented in Spain during the period. Its mixture of folklore, lexicography, anecdotal material, and social observation preserves valuable evidence concerning contemporary interest in Caló and Roma cultural practices, while also reproducing stereotypes, exoticizing assumptions, and categories characteristic of non-Roma scholarship and popular representations of the early twentieth century. The work should therefore be approached both as a documentary source on Spanish Roma history and language and as evidence of the historical construction of Roma representation by non-Roma authors.