The large Pentecostal movement among Spain’s Roma or Gitano population has created a marriage market where Christian Gitano men are considered a “good catch,” writes Antonio Montañés Jiménez in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (online in December). As in other European countries, Roma have converted in significant numbers to Pentecostalism in Spain, as reflected in the prominent Spanish Gitano Pentecostal movement, the Iglesia Evangélica Filadelfia. Jiménez researched Filadelfia churches in Madrid and found that, like in other Pentecostal churches, male converts tended to reject the machismo attitudes toward women and partying lifestyles of their secular counterparts, taking up more domestic and wife- and family-friendly roles.
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In some contexts, such as Latin America, this domestication of Pentecostal men has often been interpreted as effeminate, resulting in the men’s loss of status among non-Pentecostal men. But in the case of the Gitano Pentecostals, the converts are looked up to as potential marriage partners and leaders in the community, with their churches supporting these roles and popularizing courting practices like roneos (“flirtations”). This is a recent urban phenomenon where young people fill the large squares and malls in the south of Madrid, discretely introducing themselves (face-to-face interactions being considered indecent), often with the help of social media. Jiménez concludes that the older pattern of Gitano Pentecostal leaders encouraging endogamous marriages through parental arranged marriages and cousin marriage is giving way to courtship and marriage to unrelated spouses without parental control.
(Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.14234?af=R)
