Spanglish is very natural. It's however it comes out. But there are a few patterns that all of us, especially Mexican-American writers, just noticed in how we utilized Spanglish. It comes out of necessity when you can't find the next word. You go to whatever language will serve you best.
— Tanya Saracho
I'm not a good business person when it comes to my writing.
I'm interested in people's darkness - and humor in the darkness.
It's mountains. The air is crisp. It's peaceful. You don't get spring break in Guanajuato.
Write about your experiences! When I moved to L.A., I didn't have any friends, and the office janitor was the person who I saw the most. He would always come in at around 10:00 P.M., and I would still be at my desk, so I wrote a play about a first-year TV writer and the friendship that she developed with the janitor. Our stories matter.
There is no 'generic' Latina.
What I notice a lot about millennials is that they have agency over their sexuality.
When you work in a writers room for a showrunner, you serve that story, and you serve that showrunner. I don't think it should be called writing; I think it should be called rendering content. Because you are there to render the content that is agreed upon in the room, and you're serving the voice of the main storyteller, which is the showrunner.
I'm obsessed with accents.
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 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.
When I was in school, I didn't get exposed to Latino playwrights.
Glutton things, those are things that are dangerous for me. My grandma and my aunt died of diabetes; I'm borderline diabetic.
At Shondaland, six out of nine writers were of color - not Latinx, but I was like, 'Wait, I can do that but for the whole room?' 'Atlanta' had done that, then I can do that.
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?
Raul Castillo was my first high school boyfriend.
I never wanted to be married. That was never a thing for me.
I get a lot of emails of scripts and pilots, and they want me to give feedback, and sometimes I can't because it's so many.
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.
Nothing against resorts or Cancun or Carlos 'n Charlie's, but Guanajuato is different. If you want history, culture, and peace, it's perfect.
I'm queer - and queer, to me, is not being stuck in a binary and being kind of fluid.
Putting on makeup before work is a meditative exercise. It incites me to think about how I'll tackle my day.
The thing is about 'Vida,' we're telling a very simple family narrative. There's nothing fancy about it.
I have been watching male programming all my life. And I'm completely interested in it. Like, I love 'Breaking Bad' and I like 'Game of Thrones.'
I dress up cute sometimes to go to work, but TV writers don't! They just go however.
I hope to see more Latino stories on television - not just on a personal level, but for us in the industry. We shouldn't just exist when a show is attempting to be diverse. We have good stories, and we are worth it.
I was obsessed with everything about 'Outlander' - the stories, the way it looked. I thought, 'You know what? I'm going to go to Scotland, and I'm going to find my own 'Outlander.''
I am not a quiet person.
Other people started taking me seriously before I took myself seriously.
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.
When you change media, perception is changed and then policy is changed.
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?
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.
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.
I know people seek me out to be their mentor, and I've chosen a few people I'm really invested in and nurturing their career and their aesthetic and just their person.
I'm not literary, and I'm not academic, and I don't think like a poet, so my stuff will never be like that.
You can't visit Guanajuato without going to the mummy museum.
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!
When you're a starving artist, you make do. It didn't matter that I didn't know where my rent was coming from.
Sometimes, when I was the only person of color in a room, you had to defend all the people of color everywhere.
When I got to 'Looking,' I didn't know that you could write stuff and they would put it on TV. That was that experience. My boss was Andrew Haigh and he came from film; he had never done TV. It was his first TV show, and he was running it. And I think he was like, 'Write it, and we'll put it on.' It was lovely.
The hierarchy plays out in the writers room, and you, as a staff writer, need to know your place.
I just wanted to put together the best Latinx writers. I didn't care about the level.They have a passion for 'Vida' in a different way, in a higher way.
My first time up to bat as a showrunner, what I did was hire an all-Latinx writers room. And it's a diverse Latinx writers room - we have an Afro-Dominican and Texicans and Chileans. It's diverse within its Latinidad.
I went in for a meeting with Marta Fernandez, and she said, 'We are looking for a female millennial show. Have you heard of the term 'chipster'?' And I was like, 'Of course - Chicana hipster.'
I am equally a writer and an actor and a director.
We don't have a lot of narrative on TV or film, mainstream film, of brown queers. Latina queers, I can't think of that many.
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.
The fact that I have a show on Starz, it's crazy. It's insane.
