Interview: Lyn Gardener Talks to Co-Writer Valentina Andrade as My Uncle is not Pablo Escobar comes to Brixton House
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**President Trump** may not have been appreciative of the halftime Super Bowl performance by Latin artist **Bad Bunny**, but the show by the Puerto Rican star has become the most watched halftime set ever. It’s that kind of visibility that South American creative and activist **Valentina Andrade** says the UK’s Latinx community still dreams of achieving. But that’s not going to stop her from doing her bit to change that, campaigning to get one of the UK’s fast-growing communities, Latin Americans, recognized on the 3031 census. By whatever means she can, including art.
Andrade is a second-generation Latin-American migrant and along with **Elizabeth Alvarado**, **Tommy Ross-Williams** and **Lucy Wray** she is also one of the co-creators of [*My Uncle is Not Pablo Escobar*](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/play/my-uncle-is-not-pablo-escobar-tickets) which returns to [Brixton House](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/venue/brixton-house-theatre-london) in early April after a sell-out run in 2023. As the title suggests, this zippy thriller uses wit and humour to lean into and then subvert and crush the Western stereotypes perpetuated in movies and other media about being South American, particularly for women.
“If you are from South America, even if you are not from Colombia, people often ask whether you are related to **Pablo Escobar**, wanting to know if you are his niece," says Andrade wearily. “What we wanted to do with *My Uncle Is Not Pablo Escobar* is to create a story that was properly rooted in the lives of South American women living in South London. “When we were making the show,” says Andrade, “we were always thinking of who we were making it for, and in our heads we had a young woman called ‘our Maria,' someone who lives in South London, who is second generation and about to go to university but who is confused about where she fits in her community and in the UK.”
This heist comedy drama, inspired by the 2012 HSBC money laundering scandal when the bank was fined over a billion for profiting from money laundering profits from Mexican drug gangs, does just that with the story of teenager Ale, who is studying for her A levels while also working as a cleaner at a bank. Something that Andrade herself did.
When Ale’s sister, an investigative journalist, persuades her to get a cleaning job at the bank for another young woman, Lucia, it soon becomes apparent that Lucia has a motive for being there that is very different than that of Ale and her other co-worker. But when the women join forces, they are unbeatable.
With a nod to popular South American telenovelas, *My Uncle Is Not Pablo Escobar* not only skewers the greed of banks wanting to profit from the misery drug cartels bring to local people living in South America (which fuels migration) but also raises complex moral questions about how you go about exposing that. It is done with a lightness of touch and offbeat humor.
But while the production had some early support from Theatre Deli, Paines Plough, and the Royal Court, one of its co-creators, rising TV writer Tommy Ross-Williams, says that there was initial resistance from many venues to programming the show. “They said there was no audience for it.”
How wrong they were proved, but it is a ridiculously common issue for anyone trying to present more diverse work grounded in different communities that are not yet widely represented on our stages. When Dance Consortium toured Nigeria’s groundbreaking QDance Company across the UK back in 2024, there were many doubting Thomases at venues who declared that there was no audience for such work outside of London. It turns out that there definitely was an audience that was very interested in QDance; they had just not been very interested in what those venues had been programming previously.
It’s a reminder that the brave are sometimes justly rewarded in theatre, and so it was for Brixton House in 2023, which saw the show’s potential and garnered considerable interest from Latinx communities but also the venue’s regular theatre-goers when Pablo was programmed.
“It was such a privilege to meet young women who came up to us afterwards and who said, 'This is the first time that I have ever gone to the theatre and seen myself there and felt heard,'" says Andrade. But she reckons there is still a lot of work to be done because while, as a result of campaigning, the Arts Council has now started monitoring data about Latinx artists and projects, wider visibility remains poor, which is why Andrade believes a change to the census is so crucial. “You can’t cater to communities that you don’t know exist or which you don’t want to recognise are here in the UK and growing all the time.”
“The dream,” says Ross-Williams, “is to do with Pablo what *For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy* managed: moving to bigger stages and touring, taking it to venues where there is very little knowledge or interaction with the local Latin American communities who are there but often invisible.”
Andrade says that co-creating the show has made her think differently about the role of the arts in activism.
“Initially I was negative, a bit of a Debbie Downer about what this show could do to raise awareness. I thought, what can theatre do that I can’t do out on the ground campaigning? But then I saw the real effect it had when people saw the Latin American community represented on stage. It was so powerful to see, so, yes, the arts and theatre have definitely been transformative for my community, and they can be for other communities too.”