I'm always writing. There's no stopping. It's just that you can't see it sometimes.
— Tanya Saracho
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.
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 didn't understand that TV writing wasn't writing; it was pitching.
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.
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.
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 always have something big enough to say as a playwright. It's storytelling.
When you get a bunch of Latinxs together, we get to handle our stories. A cultural shorthand happens.
So many times, shows say they're set somewhere - like in Chicago, 'The Good Wife' - but it doesn't feel like Chicago.
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.
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.'
I don't think that 'Vida' is just for Latinos. I don't think 'One Day at a Time''s just for Latinos.
I'm sad about my theatre career, but I've also fallen a bit in love with TV!
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.
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.
I would like to do more millennial, Latina, complicated stories.
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.
I want to stay in Chicago.
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.
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 am so homesick every day of the week.
You're on set more when you produce an episode, and it's long hours, but you learn so much.
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.
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.
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.
