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estebanana -> RE: what is a Gitano canastero? (Dec. 11 2009 9:24:04)
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That film is cool, but in the end it looks like staged show. It has sets made up to look old. If you can get passed the contrived look some of the footage of the artists involved is pretty good.
Another way of explaining the idea of canastero gypsies is to note a difference between the gitanos who were sedentary and the canaseros who traveled from place to place. The settled gitanos can be referred to as "caseros" because they were in casas. Basket making was a vocation that could go anywhere because the materials grew in the swamps and grasslands waiting to be processed and woven. Canasteros were not always just making baskets, they could have done seasonal farm work and then moved on to the next region for the next crop harvest.
At several points in Spanish history certain municipalities and regions restricted the movement of gitanos and forced them to settle, they became blacksmiths and farm laborers, clothes washers and on occasion farm managers or horse traders, etc. The histories of settled gitanos in certain towns goes back hundreds of years. Often in flamenco letras the gitanos are making reference to the state of being a canastero because it's a kind of romanticized freedom or free state of being. Or as an expression of pride of their origins. Or connected with the idea of pride, as a way of saying they made it through adverse living conditions and persecution. They could sing Soy canastero.., as if to say "I've been through it all and come out alive 'cause I have a strong canastero background from the past." It could mean many things depending on context, but usually having to do with orgullo.
There are areas where the canastero way of life lasted longer then others. Probably the last era or time when there were a significant amount of traveling gypsies left was in the 1960s. The traveling gypsies were not necessarily the flamenco making gypsies either. The casero clans who were settled developed flamenco to a higher degree. The relations between the traveling people and the settled for centuries folks were not always hunky dory either. But some flamenco families who came into a settled life later in history would often claim, and rightly so, canastero roots to make themselves more "authentic" to a flamenco seeking public than others.
It's kind of interesting or even impossible to draw a line between what is personal mythologizing about a family when they are talking about themselves and what is real history. People recreate themselves all the time, whether they are an academic from Los Angeles or a Gitano. For example a sophisticated businessman from Colorado could call himself a cowboy and wear a cowboy hat and sing cowboy songs with his guitar. Maybe a hundred and twenty years ago his ancestor was a ranch hand.
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