Extensive territorial stigma and ways of coping with it: The stigmatisation of the Roma in Italy and France

This chapter emphasises the capacity of resistance of the most marginalised Roma migrants who, despite their highly precarious living conditions, are consolidating the emergence of a new political subjectivity. It examines the historically rooted anti-Roma attitudes and how these have been increasingly coupled with representations of Roma informal settlements as an expression of Roma otherness. In both Italy and France, repressive measures targeting Roma migrants living in informal settlements played a crucial role in the production of anti-Roma feelings, extending the effects of the territorial stigmatisation of informal settlements to the whole Roma community. The chapter analyses the different – and ambivalent – strategies developed by Roma people to cope with this extensive territorial stigma: submission to stigma yet attachment to the settlement community, solidarity between Roma living in informal settlements and the rest of the Roma population and, finally, resistance uniting Roma migrants and squatters.