Ms. Anabel Carballo-Mesa

Professional Background

Anabel Carballo-Mesa is a PhD candidate in the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Barcelona. She received a master’s degree in contemporary history from the University of Barcelona (Spain) and a bachelor’s degree in European studies from the London South Bank University (United Kingdom).

Ms. Carballo-Mesa has been the director of European and International Projects at the Federation of the Roma Associations in Catalonia (FAGiC) since 2011. She works on projects related to the memory of the Roma people and the fight against “anti-gypsyism.” She has collaborated with the international initiative Dikh He Na Bister (Look and Don't Forget!) since 2013, working towards their goal of establishing August 2nd as the International Day of the Roma Genocide. The group annually convenes hundreds of young Roma and non-Roma from all over Europe in Krakow, Poland to promote remembrance, recognition, and education about the Roma genocide. Carballo-Mesa became one of the initiative’s trainers/facilitators in 2015. She is a member of the Board of Directors of Phiren Amenca, European Roma Youth Organisations Network and the ERGO (European Roma Grassroots Organisations) Network.

Currently, Carballo-Mesa collaborates with Pedro Casermeiro Cortés on the European project CHACHIPEN (“Truth”) to investigate the history of discrimination and persecution of Roma in Spain, with a special emphasis on the era of the Franco regime. Carballo-Mesa is also part of the NECROPOL project, “Beyond the Underground: From the Forensic Turn to Necropolitics in the Exhumation of Mass Graves,” where she will make a transnational comparison of monuments related to the Romani Holocaust in Europe. She is also a part of the research team for the ETNIXX project, “Discourses and Representations of Ethnicity: Politics, Identity and Conflict in the 20th Century,” within which she will focus on the study of the political and social construction of the Romani people from a historical perspective.

Carballo-Mesa has conducted research in several archives in Europe and the United States and has interviewed Roma and Sinti Holocaust survivors from France, Hungary, The Netherlands, and Germany, utilising sources in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian.

Fellowship Research

Anabel Carballo-Mesa was awarded a Leon and Edith Milman Fellowship for her research project, “Na Bister! Oral History of the Roma and Sinti Genocide.” Her project investigates the Nazi genocide of the Roma people and focuses on the oral testimonies of Roma and Sinti survivors and the emotions expressed in them to try to determine whether or not there is a common narrative among Roma and Sinti across countries and communities. Overarching theoretical concepts of the history of emotions, oral history, and memory frame her project.

A Mandel Center fellowship permits Carballo-Mesa’s use of the Museum’s archival collections, and the oral history collections in particular. She plans to examine the complete collection of the Czech Roma Documentation project’s holdings of interviews with Roma and Sinti from former Czechoslovakia; the Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive; the special collection from the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive; and the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.

Residency Period: January 1–April 30, 2023