BUCHAREST, Romania — Tudor Lakatos is combating discrimination towards the Roma individuals, one Elvis Presley music at a time.
Decked out in a rhinestone shirt and outsized sun shades, along with his black hair slicked again right into a Fifties-style quiff, Lakatos swivels his hips and belts out his personal idiosyncratic variations of hits like “Blue Suede Sneakers” at venues all through Romania.
However don’t name him an Elvis impersonator. Lakatos prefers to say that he “channels” the King of rock ‘n’ roll’s world enchantment to interrupt down stereotypes concerning the Roma and supply a optimistic function mannequin for Roma kids.
“I by no means wished to get on stage, I didn’t give it some thought,” Lakatos, 58, stated after a current gig at a restaurant within the capital, Bucharest. “I solely wished one factor — to make pals with Romanians, to cease being known as a Gypsy,″ he added, utilizing an typically derided time period for individuals belonging to the Roma ethnic group.
The Roma, an ethnic group that traces its roots to South Asia, have been persecuted throughout jap Europe for hundreds of years and are nonetheless related to excessive charges of poverty, unemployment and crime. They account for about 7% of the inhabitants of Romania, the place a fifth say they’ve confronted discrimination prior to now 12 months, in keeping with a current survey by the European Union.
Lakatos’ quest to alter that started within the early Eighties when he was an artwork scholar and Romania was dominated by the hard-line communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.
At a time when anti-Roma discrimination was mainstream, Lakatos discovered that singing Elvis songs was a solution to join with ethnic Romanian college students whereas rock music was an emblem of insurrection towards the oppressive authorities.
4 a long time later, he’s added a brand new viewers.
A college instructor for the previous 25 years, Lakatos makes use of his music to point out his college students that they will aspire to one thing greater than the dust roads and horse pushed carts of their village in northwestern Romania.
“The adjective Gypsy is used in all places as an alternative to insult,” Lakatos stated. “We older individuals have gotten used to it, we are able to swallow it, we grew up with it. I’ve stated many occasions, ‘Name us what you need, dinosaur and brontosaurus, however not less than be a part of arms with us to coach the following technology.’”
However Lakatos nonetheless crisscrosses the nation to carry out at venues giant and small.
On a sizzling summer time night, that journey took Lakatos to Terasa Florilor in Bucharest, a neighborhood joint whose proprietor takes satisfaction in providing reside music by native artists who carry out on a stage made from picket beams painted in vivid colours.
The viewers included those that got here for the present and others attracted by the sausages, pork roast and Moldavian meatballs on the menu. A couple of danced and others took selfies as they loved Lakatos’ trademark “Rock ’n’ Rom” present, a mixture of Elvis songs delivered within the Romani language, Romanian and English.
The eclectic mixture of languages can generally result in surprises as a result of there isn’t at all times a literal translation for Elvis’ Fifties American English.
For instance, “Don’t step on my blue suede sneakers” doesn’t make sense to most of the kids he teaches as a result of they’re so poor, Lakatos stated.
In his model, the lyric Elvis made well-known turns into merely “don’t step on my naked toes.”
It’s a message that Elvis — born in a two-room home in Tupelo, Mississippi, throughout the Nice Despair — in all probability would have understood.