About us
Chanipen means knowledge
And that word holds much of the reason why we exist.
For centuries, others have written about the Roma people. We have been researched, classified, represented, legislated, persecuted and explained from the outside.
Others decided which parts of our history deserved to be preserved. Others built the categories used to study us. Others filled archives, books, reports and universities with knowledge about us.
Too often, without us.
CHANIPEN was born of a simple and demanding conviction: the Roma people have been stripped of the right to know who they are.
And reclaiming that right also means reclaiming our capacity to research, name, preserve, interpret and pass on our own history.
What is CHANIPEN?
CHANIPEN: Research, Memory and Justice is a Romani association for research, memory and justice, based in Cartagena and international in scope.
We were founded in 2025 to recover, produce and share rigorous, situated knowledge about the Roma people, from our own voices.
We are a Romani organisation. That matters. Because CHANIPEN was not born to speak about the Roma people from the outside. It was born from within.
We bring together academic research and community knowledge. We believe a university can preserve knowledge, but so can a grandmother; that an archive can hold memory, but so can a story passed down for generations.
Why we exist
Because knowledge is never neutral when some voices have held the power to write for centuries and others have been turned into what is written about.
Because much of our history has been told through documents produced by those who tried to control, expel or assimilate us.
Because too many generations have been through school without learning almost anything about their own history.
Because libraries and universities hold a great deal of knowledge about Roma people and very little produced by them.
Because our languages, memories and knowledge need spaces from which to be preserved and passed on.
Because we are not only sources or research subjects: we are producers of knowledge.
Because knowing our history is not only about recovering the past; it is about having tools to transform the future.
That is why CHANIPEN exists.