Health, life conditions and services access: Roma Youth in Gendered Street-work

The present work aims to explore the topic of daily life and gendered streetwork of young Roma, from the point of view of the health issues associated to the migration of Romanian Roma towards Italy. In an action research framework, we conducted a three year ethnographic study focused on a transnational community from the South West of Romania. The nomad camps in Italy reproduce dynamics of segregation that some of the poorest Roma communities lived in Romania and often lack basic hygienic facilities. In spite of NGO efforts, frequent forced evictions and discrimination in the access to state health services leads to a precarious health situation, and a diffused feeling of emergency and lack of perspective. For some Roma minors and youth living in Italy, involvement in illegal and informal streetwork is a further area of opportunities - as it develops particular networks with the territory, contrasting residential segregation - and risks – for the constant exposure to sometimes unstable and unsafe environments; these spaces present themselves in different manners for boys and girls. Some migrants build new, transnational and culturally mixed strategies for self-realization and wellbeing, in spite of public debate, imposing virtual, stigmatized identities to Roma.