They've Been Trying to Stop Us for a Thousand Years

For a thousand years, settled governments have used the same tool against people who live differently: control over where you can exist, sleep, work, and belong. This episode traces that history from the Romani migration out of northwestern India through Tudor England's death penalties for association, the Habsburg removal of horses and wagon-ownership rights, five centuries of slavery in Wallachia and Moldavia, Spain's 1749 mass arrest of settled and traveling Roma alike, the American hobo and harvest worker era, the 1936 Los Angeles Bum Blockade when 136 LAPD officers set up checkpoints inside other states to turn away poor American citizens - the Supreme Court's 1972 Papachristou ruling striking down vagrancy law, and the 2024 Grants Pass decision that legal historians say makes sense only if you forget that history. Filmed partly at a nomad gathering of 50 rigs in an Oregon forest. Eight years on the road. This is the history of the life. The system wasn't built for you. Build your own.