The purpose of this article is to show the process by which Roma elite members actually construct political and cultural boundaries and at the same time propose a deterritorialised version of a Nation across state borders. As a result, the nation-building project and the process of ethnicisation promoted by Roma activists and members of the elite can be understood as a process of challenging borders and setting up boundaries. On the one hand, state borders may represent the barrier to surmount in order to accomplish an alliance based on a supposed ethnic category. On the other hand, the analysis of Roma identity and political strategies reveals the different forms of boundaries that may exist and how they may in fact be created and manipulated.
The concept of ethnogenesis offers a theoretical approach to hybridity and syncretism that finesses the tensions between “New Amazonian Ethnography” and “New Amazonian History” by simultaneously encompassing the study of indigenous ontologies and alternative constructions of history (i.e., “mytho-historical narratives”) as well as the reconstruction of history from all available sources. Ethnogenesis can be defined as a process of authentically re-making new social identities through creatively rediscovering and refashioning components of ‘tradition,’ such as oral narratives, written texts, and material artefacts. Understood in these terms, ethnogenesis allows us to explore the cultural creativity of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples alike in the making of new interpretive and political spaces that allow people to construct enduring social identities while moving forward in the globalizing nation-states of Latin America.