“It’s building up to something and it won’t be nice when it erupts”: The making of Roma/Gypsy migrants in post-industrial Scotland Jan Grill Abstract: Drawing on research among Slovak Roma labor migrants to the UK, this article examines differentiated modalities of belonging and a crystallization of the category of Roma/Gypsy in one neighborhood in a post-industrial Scottish city. This originally working-class, predominantly white area has been trans- formed, through several waves of migration, into a multicultural neighborhood. Established residents of the neighborhood express a sense of growing crisis and blame for local decline is frequently placed on migrants and, in particular, Gypsy migrants from Eastern Europe. The article focuses on the shifting forms of ethno- cultural categorization that mark Roma difference in Glasgow. Keywords: categorization, class, multiculturalism, Scotland, Slovak Roma/Gypsy migrants Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 62 (2012): 42–54 doi:10.3167/fcl.2012.620104 In this article I discuss a recent wave of immi- gration from Central Eastern Europe to a post- industrial urban area of Glasgow. Following the accession of new European Union (EU) mem- ber states in May 2004, Polish, Czech, and mainly Slovak nationals—many of them Roma—moved into the area. 1 By taking one specific neighbor- hood that I refer to as Poundhill 2 as my spatial unit of observation, I examine the shifting forms of ethno-cultural classification in relation to Roma and other Eastern European newcom- ers at the level of discourse and everyday prac- tices of group formation. When I first entered my field research loca- tions alongside Slovak Roma migrants in 2006, hardly anyone from the surrounding British population and institutions knew of them as, or would classify them, as Roma/Gypsies. Ever since they started to migrate following Slovak accession to the European Union, Roma have always, when asked by officials or in daily inter- actions with other inhabitants of the area, iden- tified themselves in accordance with their citizenship, as Slovaks or Czechs. Although phys- ically present, they did not occupy any clearly delineated position within the symbolic order; they were strangers veiled in ambivalence, with some locals referring to them as “Slovaks” (or “Slovakians”), others using the generic “Eastern Europeans” and some seeing them as “refugees” or “asylum seekers”. Some people did not recog- nize Roma as being different from other racial-