Foretold · Los Angeles Times

A Certain Kind of Education

April 18, 2023·42 min·3 clips

A Harvard study found 70% of Romani Americans actively hide their identity due to bullying and discrimination.

Faith Pino opens the episode in Morro Bay, a small California coastal town where Paulina spent most of her childhood in a Romani family that ran the only psychic shop in town and often lived in it to save on costs. As a child, Paulina lived almost entirely within her family — attending constant extended family gatherings, moving between Morro Bay and cities like Las Vegas, San Francisco, and LA, and learning fortune telling from her mother almost by osmosis. By her preteen years, she was working the sidewalk on Main Street handing out flyers to attract customers for the family shop. On her first day of kindergarten, Paulina's grandfather stood outside the classroom window all day so she'd have a familiar presence nearby. Her parents' primary instruction was simple: don't tell anyone you're Romani. Dr. Margareta Matache of Harvard University explains that this is nearly universal — nearly 70% of Romani Americans in a 2020 Harvard study said they actively conceal their identity today, in part because of experiences like her own, where a Romanian chemistry teacher publicly humiliated her in class for her skin color. The Harvard study also found only 10% of Romani respondents held a high school degree. Faith Pino explains that the reasons Romani children are pulled from school are multiple and layered. One is racial bullying. Another is the expectation of early marriage, which becomes urgent at puberty. Paulina's cousin Nasta Lee was taken out of school at age nine when she got her period; her grandparents worried about boys and reputational risk to her father. The third and deepest reason is the concept of marimé — a Romani system of spiritual purity in which all outsiders (gajé) are considered permanently unclean, and their impurity is contagious. Professor Ian Hancock explains that public schools are inherently marimé environments: full of gajé children, mixed-sex seating, and cafeteria food. Conservative Romani families believe attending school risks children imitating outsiders' behavior and becoming spiritually contaminated. Hancock acknowledges irony in his own position, having attended university and married a non-Romani person, but says he gets a pass because he is not from the Vlach subgroup — Paulina's subgroup — which descended from enslaved Romani people and tends to be strictest about marimé. Paulina knew from early childhood she would not finish school. Del Mar Elementary records confirm she stopped attending in August 2007 at age 12, just before seventh grade. She had told her friends goodbye. Returning to her former elementary school for the episode, Paulina reunited with her first-grade teacher, Alicia Camelli, who remembered her as a gifted, outside-the-box thinker. Paulina stood in the classroom thinking about her own daughters — five and six years old — and the different childhood she wants to give them.

As heard by us

A coastal childhood memory opens into a careful look at schooling, difference, and what it costs to be singled out.

A Certain Kind of Education starts with a true-crime frame around the Black Dahlia and Zodiac cases, then settles into Paulina's childhood in Morro Bay and a kindergarten memory that she and her teacher do not quite share the same way.

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Why you'd press play

A childhood memory in Morro Bay opens into a hard question about schooling, discrimination, and who gets seen as different.

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