About 8,000 gypsies live in the Canary Islands, including the Romanian population. José Carmona, president of the Canary Islands Federation and member of the State Council of the Gypsy People, laments the anti-Gypsyism and the abandonment that has traditionally existed on the part of the Canarian institutions towards this population. He even remembers a sad episode in Tenerife in 84, when the mayor of Arona requested the expulsion of the gypsy people from the municipality.
However, Carmona perceives these acts of rejection of the gypsy community as isolated. He was born in La Laguna, lived in five different Latin American countries, and in the 90s he returned to Tenerife. He ended up living in the Añaza neighborhood, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and describes it as an exemplary neighborhood, where tolerance and coexistence shine. The entire island of Tenerife is the cradle of diverse cultures, and most of them coexist in peace.
Carmona is a firm defender of education as the only way to end the problems of coexistence that may arise in the neighborhoods, and asks that the specific problems that may arise with some individuals not be attributed to all the gypsy people. “For a bad apple we cannot throw the whole basket in the trash,” he says. That is why he considers it essential that the institutions take a step forward to facilitate this coexistence. In this sense, Carmona is hopeful because yesterday a commitment was made by the Government of the Canary Islands, the Island Council of Tenerife and the municipalities where the Roma population lives to design an inclusion strategy.
–
–
