Maria said these words in an exasperated voice as we were walking down the street after she had been accused of stealing and told to leave a shop in the ‘Indian centre’ ( indiano centro ). She believed she had been accused of stealing because of her long skirt, headscarf and jewellery, which meant that the shop owner had identified her as Roma. Maria made sense of these experiences in different ways at different times. In this case, she was resigned and decided that the views of the shop keeper were ‘his problem’ and had not tried to argue with him. All Romanian Roma families I accompanied around Luton contended with these experiences every day. Interactions with frontline workers were no different.

At this juncture, it is important to reiterate that I am aware that by using the term Romanian Roma throughout this book I am also complicit in policing the boundaries of Roma ethnicity. The term Roma has a specific history, particularly within EU and national public policies. The origin of the term is widely argued to come from the word ‘rom’ which means married man for which the plural is ‘roma’ in the language spoken by those who are identified as Roma. The diverse histories and trajectories of those who are called Roma have led some to question its use as an ethnic identifier because of the potential for essentialisation and homogenisation of the term (Tremlett et al. 2014). However, such critiques could be levelled at using any ethnic definition, many of which are contested and have emerged through asymmetries of power relations (Banks 1996). Alternative labels such as ‘new migrants’ may also be homogenising and depoliticising, indicating the inherent problematic with any categorisation. Throughout the book I also use the term ‘families’ or ‘mothers’ as well as Romanian Roma to foreground the contextual variety of their identifications (just as I also at different times call frontline workers ‘mothers’). However, for the most part I have settled, somewhat uneasily, on using the term Romanian Roma.