Flamenco is thought to have been born in the southern part of Spain known as Andalusia, shown on the right-hand side here:

Flamenco can be described as an art form that deeply embodies the complex, multi-faceted, and often contradictory nature of Andalusia's cultural identity. Although many different overlapping cultures exist throughout Andalusia and helped create the musical genre of flamenco, it is thought the Spanish Gitano (Roma) community held the most influence for what flamenco is today. The Roma people (Gitanos) migrated into Spain—although the exact timeline is heavily debated—around 1447 through northern Spain, while there were already some Gitanos within the south of Spain. After the migration into Spain, the Gitano population faced persistent systemic marginalization, but they still maintained their culture. This resilience is what led to the roots of flamenco through performances that highlighted everyday social realities, communal traditions, and the lived experiences of the Gitano community as they navigated structural exclusion and expulsion within Spain.

Due to flamenco's rich multicultural interaction between Roma and non-Roma populations that came before them (Sephardic Jews and Moorish), it evolved into a rich oral tradition of lived history. Flamenco operates fundamentally as a vehicle for oral history (Cisneros-Kostic, 2010). With this in mind, we can begin to see how the physical behaviors, performance gestures, spoken poetry, dance, music, and emotional expressions within flamenco come together to document the historical past of this marginalized group of people. These elements allowed this community to utilize an artistic tradition to maneuver, survive, and adapt to the hostile socio-political environment they experienced within Spain.

This mechanism of cultural survival aligns directly with the foundational folklore dynamics within Living Folklore by Sims and Stephens (2011), in which rather than viewing folklore as a static relic trapped within a museum, it must instead be viewed as an active, ever-changing practice utilized by marginalized groups of people to negotiate power dynamics within their daily lives. This performative subversion has been noted though other cultures as well; as Judith Bettelheim (1991) notes in her study of Carnaval culture in Santiago de Cuba, public festive performances are rarely passive entertainment, but are instead highly coordinated "negotiations of power" where marginalized groups use expressive arts to safely mock dominant hierarchies and claim socio-political agency. Through the community, the Gitano population continued to pass down the tradition of flamenco, which has led to the utilization of the body, guitar, and voice for performances of public and private record.

Now that a better understanding of the origins of this group of people has been established a look at how flamenco would change forever due to displacement and isolation is a must to grasp and gain more context around the art form of flamenco: