Epigenetics of Racial Trauma and Disability: Exploring the Transgenerational Effects of Racism on the Spanish Roma People

Vollständiger Abstract

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Abstract: In 2025, the Spanish government marked the 600th anniversary of the Roma people's arrival in the Iberian Peninsula by declaring it the "Year of the Roma People." Despite this symbolic recognition, the Spanish Roma continue to be marginalized and excluded from dominant national narratives, a condition that is exacerbated for Roma individuals with disabilities. This article argues that racial trauma itself operates as a disabling force, shaped by centuries of structural antigitanismo (anti-Roma racism) and sustained forms of historical erasure. Drawing on selected strands of critical disability studies that conceptualize disability as methodology, alongside critical trauma studies and a crip-of-color critique, the article examines how race, trauma, and disability are mutually constitutive in the lived realities of Spanish Roma communities. Epigenetics is approached here as a heuristic framework for thinking about the embodied and transgenerational transmission of racial trauma, rather than as a biological or deterministic claim. Through an analysis of selected artworks by Roma lawyer, author, and artist Séfora Vargas, the study foregrounds questions of access, visibility, silence, and cultural restitution, reading her work as a situated counter-archive that challenges hegemonic constructions of Spanishness. Ultimately, the article advocates for the re-centering of Roma epistemologies and for trauma-informed, antiracist approaches that move beyond purely symbolic recognition toward structural and epistemic forms of reparation.