Field Report
I spent my first 18 years in a small neighbourhood at the outskirts of an industrial city in Romania. I did my primary and secondary school in the neighbourhood school, spending my childhood almost exclusively within the borders of the neighbourhood. My parents, as most of the population there, worked in factories, with little financial ability to offer us holidays or eating out. Now, in my adulthood life, after having spent more than 20 years in Bucharest (the capital of Romania), I still use the term home whenever I go to Bereasca, to visit my parents.
For a long time, despite being officially within the borders of the city, it was considered a rural area. Without pavement or sewage until 2013, with people informally selling milk from their own cows or using horse-drawn carts as a mean of transportation, the neighbourhood was often bypassed by the people who did not live there. Despite the fact that most of these things have changed (currently, there is public infrastructure as in the rest of the town and most of the cows and horses are gone), there is still lingering resistance to considering this area as part of town. What hasn’t changed in this neighborhood is that is among the areas with the highest rate of Roma population in the city.
Official documents indicate this neighborhood is a “marginalized zone” of the county, with a high rate of poverty among the inhabitants. That is no surprise, bearing in mind that the Roma population is disproportionately affected by poverty, in comparison with the non-Roma population. (According to National Strategy for Inclusion of Roma Population 2022-2027, p.13, 80% of Roma population in Romania is living in poverty)
But the marginalization of the neighborhood goes beyond statistics or social phenomenon; it is also geographical. The neighborhood is separated from the city by a railway. Other parts of the neighborhood are in the vicinity of a field (often used as a place for dumping garbage). Despite having public transportation available, the perception is that of remoteness from the city. What is more, in itself, the neighborhood feels cut off by a national road, on which cars transit speedily. Therefore, people residing in this neighborhood have a distinct feeling of two distinct neighborhoods. Actually, now, as an adult, whenever I bump into someone from Ploiești (the city in which the neighborhood is), that would know the neighborhood, I would automatically say that I am from the right side of the neighborhood.
Going as a researcher in the neighborhood in which one lived in their childhood has its own perks and downsides. Visiting Bereasca as a researcher in a pre-fieldwork capacity was quite liberating. As a child I wasn’t allowed to stroll in the neighborhood. My parents would keep me near our home, on the streets in the direct vicinity of our home and I would only walk towards the general store or school. Going in the other side of the neighborhood was something that I have never before considered doing.
My mother still had some advice for me though before letting me go on the streets now, as an adult – to avoid streets in the direct vicinity of the empty filed, as there are a lot of stray hungry dogs. No other advice given. Despite this, she was quite anxious to know my whereabouts from time to time.
The streets were quite emptied, as the weather was cold and a lot of the people that otherwise would sit and talk in front of their gates were either indoors or preparing their gardens for the spring. February is quite a busy month as people in Bereasca clean their gardens and groom their trees. The neighborhood smelt strongly of smoke as people would burn whatever remained from their former crop in their yards. This smell is kind of specific to the neighborhood in spring and autumn, it is quite familiar for everybody who lives there.
As I knew prior, the neighborhood was (once again) going through a garbage crisis. From time to time (often enough to be considered a constant problem within the community), the garbage company did not collect the garbage at the frequency they should have. Therefore, all over the place there were piles of garbage. Despite a considerable number of cars being displayed on the sidewalks (parking the car on the sidewalk is quite a usual practice all over Romania), the streets were fairly emptied. From time to time, a car or a horse-drawn cart would pass.
Bereasca has two churches – one on each side of the neighborhood. As expected, each of the sides goes to their church, deepening the feeling of two separate communities. I entered the courtyard of one of them, as there is also a cemetery and my grandparents are buried there. The church was locked, but two people (one of them quite young, the other an adult) offered to help me. I needed some candles for my grandparents. They sold me three candles half burnt at a steep price. They tried to convince me that I should buy some incense too:
We help the priest here. And we collect some money. I need money for my family. And this little guy [the person who was with him] he is poor too [amarât]. But please, buy some incense for the graveyard. It is only 30 lei! And these money for the candles are not ours, are for the church.
While I was trying to politely refuse this purchase, a man approached and accused the two of stealing candles from the graves and re-selling them. As I would later understand from other people, they would take flowers too and sell them to people that are obviously not from the neighborhood, coming to the cemetery for their families. I felt I was judged for being naive.
Moving ahead on the streets, I discovered a third church, an Adventist one. I was taken aback by this, so I asked a person in the vicinity of the church about it. They mentioned that there are a lot of “gypsies” in the church, as they receive clothes and food for free. Most of the population here uses the term “gypsies”. And they don’t do it [necessarily] with a pejorative intention. It is kind of a this is how we have always called them situation. Nobody actually told me this, but I realized that I cannot even ask the question regarding Roma/gypsy terms because it would be odd for people in Bereasca to use Roma. Not because of racism. It just how things have always been there.
I ended up having a conversation with one of the women living in Bereasca for 20 years. She told me that her relation with her Roma neighbors started as quite hostile. She used to call the police frequently, as they would make a lot of noise during the night:
[Woman]: I used to scream at all the kids all the time! “I have to wake up early in the morning to go to job, so that you mother would receive social benefit and sleep late in the day”, this is how I used to scream at them in the night. But after I had the kids, they started to play together. We are not friends, but we know each other now. They are my neighbours, what am I to do?
Her older son is now in high school, downtown. She told me that whenever he wears clothes that are not to her liking, kind of ragged, she would tell him that he could be easily mistaken for a gypsy, as everybody knows that he is from Bereasca. This took me down memory lane, when I used to be called Zamfireasca from Bereasca in high school and I felt pressure to demonstrate that I am not representative for what they heard about the neighborhood.
I heard frequently the good gypsy/bad gypsy claims across the years in the neighborhood. For some, the good gypsy works hard and is available for no matter what kind of job emerges within the community (there are numerous occasions in which there is the need for some help in the household in exchange for money). For these Roma people, some of the people hiring them keep things of no use in the household and they offer them as a presents whenever they would help them with minor chores that requires some physical support.
For the young woman that I spoke to, the good Roma is the person who works abroad and tries to improve their housing conditions. This seems rather paradoxical, as in Romania, Roma are generally considered guilty of generating bad reputations abroad through their behaviour there.
As a child, I was traumatized by shopping. The place from where we used to buy clothes was the flea market (the only one in the city) and I used to be forced into trying on clothes on the cold ground and behind a piece of coarse material. For the last 20 years I haven’t been to the flea market. And actually, things haven’t changed that much.
The surroundings though are very different, as a mall, a hypermarket and a construction store were built nearby. What is more, in the immediate vicinity of the flea market houses have emerged. I remembered the place as being in the middle of a deserted area. Now I found as area dense with buildings. There is even a hotel, something quite peculiar, as I used to think this area as having zero potential for that.
Despite the change of the surroundings, the flea market largely stayed the same. It has a clear structure, as goods are sold by categories, in distinctive parts of the flea market.
There is a part in which new clothes are sold, mainly bought from whole sale stores. I actually noticed the same pieces of material as a means of blocking the view of the general public for trying on the clothes (but now the dirt was replaced by concrete). But there were some stalls with sort of a dressing room. There is a section in which people sell living animals (all sorts – starting with chickens and up to rabbits and other pets). There is a section that seems a bit more organized and formalized than the rest of the flea market – people selling tools and chemicals for the gardening. From place to place, within these sections, there are people cooking grilled minced meat (mititei) and other street food. The flea market is bathed in the smell of these grills. Next to the grills there are people selling milk, dairy products and cold meats, promoting them as being healthy, and from the country side.
The most animated part of the flea market is where people are selling all sort of used things – clothes, cables, broken electrics, religious pictures, old broken watches and so on. This was the most animated part of the flea market. A lot of people would stroll between the blankets lying on the ground, but seldom one would buy anything.
There seemed to have been some ties between the venders and the costumers, as I heard a vendor saying:
Do you still need the axe? I brought one, look, come and see.
Some kind of relationship was among vendors too, as I saw people bringing several paper cups with a hot liquid and distributed them among several vendors.
I was accompanied by my father who is a regular visitor of the flea market. He would go even though he doesn’t need anything. While going through the flea market, he met several neighbors who, just like him, said that they were just wandering through the flea market.
I stopped to buy some old watches. After paying 40 lei [8 euros] for two broken watches (it’s always a lottery, as one does not know if they could be repaired or not), my father scolded me:
You just gave her the money? This is not how you buy stuff here! You have to bargain. This is not how you do things here.
I found the neighborhood extremely familiar to my childhood memories in terms of my interactions with the people on the streets. People still say hello, despite that they do not know you and they still welcome a small conversation at the gate. But the rural aesthetics of the community seems to have diminished. There are newcomers within the community, refurbishing the old homes. And part of the people that were born there have invested the money earned abroad through intense physical labor. But most of the Roma families have the same old precarious homes.
The borders of the neighborhood though could indicate a future potential gentrification process. A commercial area developed right in the vicinity of the neighborhood gives the sensation of closeness to the city center. A significant part of the deserted field is now covered in solar panels. To add to this, the children of the older population who have lived here since died are moving back and refurbishing the old homes.
Despite these changes, the general discourse in local media regarding the neighborhood remains centered on criminality and defines the area as the dangerous uncivilized periphery of the city.