‘Is your uncle Pablo Escobar?’: What not to say to a Latinx person

I know this because the word ‘cocaine’ in both Spanish and English has officially lost its meaning to me. I no longer process it as a class A drug, but as a slur and expired joke thrown my way.

Add in a little comment about being ‘spicy’ and ‘sexy’ and you’ve won the triple slur!

I’m 25 years old now and this has been happening since school, in the street, at parties and in the workplace. And it’s not always strangers; people forget themselves after a drink or two and think it’s OK. 

The typical, ‘What do you study?’, is regularly followed by shock and gasps when I reply ‘Politics and Law’, as if it’s impossible to do.

But I already know it’s the judgement about my intelligence that causes this reaction because once I mention I’m from South America, all they see is a drug expert. It frustrates me.

People in the UK think we can only be cleaners, or we have to be seductive – we are gold-diggers, in need of sugar daddies or simply the house help. But it’s time to retire these harmful and lazy stereotypes.

Films that play into these narratives – like Maid in Manhattan that shows J-Lo as a cleaner who ends up marrying a white man, or Fast and Furious, who have Latin American dealers and criminals – only add fuel to the fire. Women especially are usually second or third tier characters, rarely given names – just sex worker, stripper, cleaner etc.

When I was a teenager, I was invited to an event for a piece I was writing at school and an older white man came to speak to me.

He never for a second thought that perhaps these men might have been left for being bad husbands and had unhappy marriages. I questioned his attitude as much as I felt confident to, but he was an older male person and this was a white space – I feared my place within it was precarious enough.

I’ve experienced further judgement as a South London British-born Latinx woman. Many people are amazed I made it into higher education.

In sixth form, my own teacher said, ‘You might want to take Sheffield and Birmingham off your list of universities because they have high A-level requirements, and you are not going to get those grades’. I was so angry and disappointed because he was my favourite teacher and he had no faith in me.

Sadly, I believed them, and I took Sheffield off my list. But I was adamant about Birmingham and my potential to achieve good A-level results.

I sat in his office and said ‘I’m going to risk it, and I’m going to prove you wrong’. I got all As and A stars – including in his subject. I was accepted to Birmingham, and I was so proud.

As a child of first generation immigrants, there’s an ideology that we have to honour and be worthy of the sacrifice our parents made when coming to the UK for a better future.

My own teachers didn’t believe in a career as a writer, an artist or in drama so how was I supposed to achieve my dreams? When you’re faced with such disbelief, it’s contagious and you doubt yourself – until you find other people who encourage you to dream and work in what you love.

Which is what happened when – five years ago – I started work on a play, My Uncle Is Not Pablo Escobar (MUINPE). I began co-writing and co-creating a show that stemmed from mine and my friend – Valentina Andrade’s – lived experiences as South London British Latinx women.

Throughout the show, we see four powerful women find each other and fight against a big institution known as ‘The Bank’. They question their identities and eventually empower themselves to be who they are.

This show fights the invisibility and lack of representation our community has lived through while being one of the largest communities to exist within the UK.

We play on the stereotypes and force the audience to question how they see us. We also touch on the hard but very real situations of our community – like being scared of deportation.

But I don’t want us to have to walk on eggshells anymore.

Creating this show over the past five years has been like a mirror. I was forced to question who I was and how I saw myself.

Throughout these five years, my own identity changed. I started out afraid of showing who I am – because people make assumptions – then dealing with the fight when you prove people wrong, like my teacher.

Now I can officially say I will never shy away from saying I’m from Ecuador as well as being from London, and I’m not ashamed. 

I used to have to tick the box ‘Other’ in the ethnicity sections on forms, and am now witnessing wins – such as the Arts Council England adding a Latin American box under ‘ethnicity’ on ACE forms online – it’s all inspired and encouraged the work we’ve done in creating the play.

This show is a true story for so many of us and hopefully provides some relief and inspiration for those who have felt unseen for so long.

I hope it inspires the younger generation of South London Latinx girls to believe that they can be more than what the world believes them to be, because we are more than ‘other’.

We exist, we are here, and we will be heard.