Helios Gómez: The invisibility of the Romani revolution

Abstract

This article studies the political discourse of Helios Gómez, a Romani artist, who committed first to anarchism and then to communism in the interwar period. The analysis sets his account of the new Soviet society as a model to follow in the context of the large body of literature on the genre and at the same time interprets it in the light of the political cultures on which it draws. Moreover, it sets out to understand the Romani identity of this graphic artist as the key to his capacity for transforming a common discourse into a utopian discourse full of projective boldness, one that called for ethnic equality as part of social justice. The article addresses the different intersecting identitarian contexts—political, class, ethnic—that constitute the framework from which to claim recognition of rights for the Roma minority, marginalized in the processes of political modernization.