Las últimas

About the show

Once upon a time, there was a bar in the Philippines where Japanese and American soldiers drank during the Second World War. The bar was run by Pedro. His father was Spanish, his mother Filipino, and his brothers lived in a small village in the Basque Country, where his parents had lived before the Spanish Civil War broke out.
One summer, Pedro travelled to Ibarrangelu to meet his brothers. Mary Carmen sang copla. Her bicycle broke down, and someone told her: “Ask El Chino to fix it”. And, like in all good love stories, they didn’t need to speak the same language—because Pedro “El Chino”, never went back to the Philippines.
Pedro is the grandfather of actor Juan Paños.

This story marks the starting point of a journey to the Philippines in search of more stories, more families, and a shared past and present.

Note from the author and director

In 2015, the Spanish Development NGO Coordinator recognised Cross Border as agents of social change through the arts in Spain. Thanks to this, we travelled to the Philippines to learn from PETA (the Philippine Educational Theater Association). We were amazed by how much they knew about us, and how little we knew about them. Contemporary Eurocentric hegemony still dominated the conversation, and we felt their pain as they witnessed our ignorance. After 333 years of Spanish rule, we were still there.

The Philippines are Spain’s last colonies—not just chronologically, but in our collective imagination.

Las últimas is a documentary performance that seeks to reflect on the history we share, and how that history continues to shape our streets, our schools and the white norms of our stages. Las últimas is also a work of fiction, an attempt to build a new narrative between two different continents: one built together, in horizontality. Can we talk about colonialism today without being postcolonialist in doing so?

Lucía Miranda