There is no 'generic' Latina.
Tanya Saracho
Pleasures. I had to cut them back so I can write. And it's worked! It so has. But I am the most boring human on the planet.
It's mountains. The air is crisp. It's peaceful. You don't get spring break in Guanajuato.
I had never heard this term before - gente-fication - which is also happening in Portland, Houston; it's happening in a lot of cities. It's upwardly mobile Latinx who want to come back to their neighborhoods where they grew up - or it's Latinx moving to L.A. and looking for a Latinx neighborhood to live or open a business.
When you're a starving artist, you make do. It didn't matter that I didn't know where my rent was coming from.
Young men and women of color get told 'no' by so many people. But just listen to your inner voice. Amplify it. Make it strong!
I want to stay in Chicago.
I'm queer - and queer, to me, is not being stuck in a binary and being kind of fluid.
I dress up cute sometimes to go to work, but TV writers don't! They just go however.
Other people started taking me seriously before I took myself seriously.
The hierarchy plays out in the writers room, and you, as a staff writer, need to know your place.
Glutton things, those are things that are dangerous for me. My grandma and my aunt died of diabetes; I'm borderline diabetic.
What I notice a lot about millennials is that they have agency over their sexuality.
I'm very conscious of who I work with. Because I want to develop and nurture my writers so they can have their own shows, take on whatever is next for them.
When I got to Scotland, I signed up on a site called Meetup. It's like these group things you can do - a poetry reading, a hike, whatever.
For so long, the narrative - I'm speaking for Latinx - we've been invisible, the ones cleaning and taking care of your kids and doing your lawns.
People in L.A. think I'm insane to go back to Chicago during the winter. It's because I love my apartment and fleece leggings and my friends.
To me, 'Kita y Fernanda' is very much an American story, and I know some people are going to think it's a Latina story, but it's about shifting people's paradigms and views of what it is to be American.
I always have something big enough to say as a playwright. It's storytelling.
I have 16 plays, and we don't ever do subtitles. You can't do subtitles in the theater, so I was like, 'I'm not gonna do subtitles.' You'll never lose the story. There might be a little joke that you might miss, but you'll never miss the story, even in the Spanglish of it.
The big, radical thing that I'm trying to do is to portray Latinas as complex human beings.
Raul Castillo was my first high school boyfriend.
I remember 'Resurrection Boulevard.' It was on for such a brief moment, but they were trying to do a good, Latino, Mexican-American family with a patriarch.
In lots of ways, I've been trying to tell stories this way since I started writing plays: a female-centered story with queer, Latinx gaze.
A lot of the time, because we don't have many Latinx scenarios on the landscape, not just in television or film and other media, we haven't gotten the chance to tell our story from our point of view.
I feel like progress will be made in the landscape of Latino influence when we get to tell those murky, real, close-to-life narratives.
I always was missing that female brown queer perspective, and I think in 'Vida' we have that. A lot of things I wanted to touch on and deal with, I get to do here.
When you get a bunch of Latinxs together, we get to handle our stories. A cultural shorthand happens.
I would like to do more millennial, Latina, complicated stories.
I feel like a lot of us have a story to tell, it's just that we don't get the platform or the access or the opportunity. I don't know how the goddesses and gods and the stars aligned. I got the opportunity, and I do have to note that a Hispanic woman gave me that opportunity.
White, older showrunners told me, 'Why do you want to hire an all-Latinx writers room? Hire who's best for the show - don't get caught up in that.' And I was like, 'No.' For such an intimate show about the details of a culture? You can't fake that. The room needs to reflect the makeup of the show.
I was a playwright who was still learning the ropes when Starz took a chance on me to create and showrun 'Vida.' They nurtured and supported me during every step of the strenuous process, and that is a debt that cannot be repaid.
No one guided me through it, but here is how it happened: I was in New York doing a play, and an agent got in touch with me and said he wanted to take me out for lunch. In the theatre, they never want to take you out for lunch, so I thought, 'Yes!' I went, I ordered steak, and he told me he thought I should write for TV.
In TV, you're a 'writer for hire.' That means you're trying to guess what your boss wants and delivering that story. There's a lot of spitballing. The big thing is 'breaking story,' which means coming up with a story. You do it by episode and put it all up on a board.
You're on set more when you produce an episode, and it's long hours, but you learn so much.
I'm sad about my theatre career, but I've also fallen a bit in love with TV!
I am so homesick every day of the week.
I don't think that 'Vida' is just for Latinos. I don't think 'One Day at a Time''s just for Latinos.
I didn't understand that TV writing wasn't writing; it was pitching.
Sometimes people of color walk into these spaces that are dominated by the dominant culture, and we have to be better, not make as much trouble.
I adore 'Broad City,' but the one Latino is queer for jokes. You see queerness of Latinos in this emasculated with an accent or fez on a set '70s show. It's always like, 'Ha, ha, funny emasculated immigrants.'
The Latinas in this industry are really supportive and stick together. America Ferrera, Gina Rodriguez, Zoe Saldana, and Salma Hayek have all reached out and have helped promote 'Vida,' and it's because they get it. They really are about opening doors. The more there are of us, the more of a movement it will be, and it won't be just tokens.
I'm always in the car in L.A., so I see the people I work with - and, thank God, I adore the people I work with - but it's a little lonely.
So many times, shows say they're set somewhere - like in Chicago, 'The Good Wife' - but it doesn't feel like Chicago.
I'm always writing. There's no stopping. It's just that you can't see it sometimes.
I never wanted to be married. That was never a thing for me.
The fact that I have a show on Starz, it's crazy. It's insane.
When 'Vida' got the green light, Starz sent me this picnic basket of Jamie Fraser red wine and all these 'Outlander' things that I'll never open because it's like my sacred thing.
Any time you have to move in two days, it's crazy. It's like, 'Who am I going to get to take care of my cat?
Shouldn't you be able to tell your stories from your point of view? We're dealing with that with 'Looking' where some queers are like, 'These guys are so boring! They don't represent me!' But no show can represent everything, so is it OK for us, in 'Looking,' to write about these three men and their world?
