Mustafa Mehmet: One of Those Tobacco Workers, in (eds.) Elena Marushiakova, Vesselin Popov, Roma Portraits in History, Brill, 2022.

In this collection’s foreword, Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov indicate the two dimensions of Roma existence as ‘community’, explicitly different ethnic groups from the surrounding population and ‘society’, the integral ethnic elements of the nation-states of which they are citizens (Marushiakova & Popov, 2016e, p. 15; Marushiakova & Popov, 2021b, p. XXIII), relying on an updated non-evolutionary version of the old conceptual duality of Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft (Tönnies, 1887). For the authors, Roma civic eman- cipation refers to the attempts to achieve a congruous balance between both. That is a constant fight, for equal status to Roma ethnic identity and Roma’s obtaining all the relevant citizenship rights. Therefore, emancipation is not assimilation (Marushiakova & Popov, 2021b, p. XXIV). In this respect, one may see Roma’s active participation, as individuals or groups to national politics or struggles for improving economic condi- tions as a clear manifestation of their progress in the emancipation process. The tobacco workers’ story is a perfect example of participation in a nation-wide, or even interna- tional, competition between rival political camps, beyond the immediate necessities of ethnic communities. The contemporary left-wing movements promising equal status for each ethnicity was attractive for them and, as a part of that struggle, the tobacco workers demanded all the available rights for Turkish citizens and better life opportunities.

This portrait is a humble attempt to exhibit Mustafa Mehmet personality, or Mustafa, Mehmet’s son. His life was the primary source of inspiration for Tütüncülerin Tarihi (The History of Tobacco Workers) (Özçelik, 2003), a ground-breaking study, including his memoir, some of his transcribed speeches and a bundle of precious archival documents. The tobacco workers constituted a circle of diverse individuals and families who shared a broadly similar history of migration from Greece, mainly the former Salonica (today Thessaloniki in Greece) province of the Ottoman Empire and served for the early for- mation of unions and leftist politics in early Republican Turkey. Roma were noticeable in the circle, and thus, many outsiders identified the whole community as the Gypsy Tobacco Workers and, more recently, the Roma Tobacco Workers.