Tanya Saracho

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Emilie Cheyroux is an Associate Professor in American and Film Studies at the University of Toulouse (Champollion Institute in Albi, CAS Toulouse Jean Jaurès). Her primary research is in Film Festival Studies but she has also published several articles about the way Immigrant Rights Documentaries engage the audience. Her research focuses on the social impact of film festivals, especially Latino film festivals organized in the United States.

David Roche is Professor of Film Studies at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, a 2022-27 IUF Senior member and President of SERCIA. His recent publications include the monographs Arrival (2024) and Meta in Film and Television Series (2022), and the collected volumes Edgar Poe et ses motifs à l’écran (2023, with Vincent Souladié), Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film (2022, with Hervé Mayer) and Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Films and Series of the Post-Feminist Era (2020, with Cristelle Maury).

Emily Cheyroux: Could you please tell us about your life, your background, your education and any jobs you might have had?

Tanya Saracho: I went to Boston University to study theatre. I mainly studied acting. I did do a little bit of writing there for the festival, but I mostly wanted to act; I did direct some. It wasn’t until I moved to Chicago that I started my all Latina theatre company, the first one in the country, called Teatro Luna. It was comprised of Latinas from the diaspora. We were everything. This was in the early 2000s. We formed right before 9/11. J-Lo and Shakira and all these people had come out; the Latin explosion was a thing. We were young—twenty-two-twenty-three—and we didn’t have money to hire directors, to get royalties for a play, so we were writing our plays ourselves and we were just a bunch of kids not being told no. We didn’t have any money, but people would lend us theatres at first. That’s really how I became a writer. At first, I worked in the plays as an actor. Because I’m a classically trained Shakespearean actress, right? (laughs) I had done a semester in Oxford just studying [Harold] Pinter and Shakespeare and, when I got to Chicago, because I’m fat and brown, all the roles they were giving me were maids. For all the roles, the one line was like, “Yes, Meester Johnson.” Later, we actually wrote a play about it called the Maria Chronicles because all the characters’ names were Maria. The blond Cuban, the Afro-Peruvian, me, the indigenous, Mexican girl—all going for the same thing because what is Latinidad anyway? I co-ran Teatro Luna, then ran it for ten years just exploring and investigating the question, “What does it mean to be a Latina in the United States now, you know?” I watched us grow through our twenties. We got a grant to interview men for this play we called Machos. We interviewed a hundred men across the country. Basically, the grant aimed to take a cross-section of men, and then we worked with the Chicago drag kings and we performed verbatim these interviews similar to what you’re doing now. We had thirty-six questions and we always followed the list of questions.

Emilie Cheyroux: That’s a lot!

Tanya Saracho: Yes, it was, but it informed our everything. The penultimate question was, “Do you think your father is proud of you?” It’s so funny because of the eighteen interviews that I did myself, the men always cried when we asked it. Anyway, lots of good stuff. And we performed as men. So we did that type of performance and I watched us grow up. But then Steppenwolf and Goodman and all these big theatres saw that I was writing a lot. At that point, I was writing a lot of the plays and directing them. They gave me commissions, and this made me a real playwright, which was the best-worst thing because they kind of took me away and then all of a sudden I was like having readings at the Public and Atlantic theatres in New York. Running this little theatre company the way we were running, it was really hard.

Some Hollywood agent got a hold of one of the plays that had been published and they were like, “Do you want to write for TV?” I never even thought people wrote for TV. I didn’t really watch TV; I wasn’t a TV watcher. Some people have their shows and I think I only watched True Blood (HBO, 2008-2014). Now here I am. (laughs) It just sort of happened. So it wasn’t by design at all. I was going to be in Chicago doing theatre the rest of my life. I was very very happy. Very poor because the theatre doesn’t feed playwrights. But I didn’t notice I was poor. I didn’t notice that you shouldn’t have to worry every month whether you can pay your rent. That was just how we all did it in Chicago. Then I get here and it’s so much about commerce. And storytelling is commerce. And it’s still fucking with my mind—but I’m here—but it’s still fucking with my mind. Because it’s different to have a patron as an artist. But to be part of this—the big capitalist wheel and the product is the entertainment and not the story—you just have to shift here. If you were talking to other showrunners, maybe they accepted that earlier and understood everybody’s roles in the studio. But I’m just very resentful. (laughs) These roles. Why are you telling me what to do? What is your expertise? What’s your role here? With the studios, I’m sometimes wondering, “I’m sorry, how did you get here? Where did you learn to give notes and why are you an expert?” I understand that dramaturges in the theatre or artistic directors are experts, but in TV it’s like anyone just tells you how to do it when they don’t know how to do it.

David Roche: Could you tell us more about some of the differences between theatre and television as social environments, art forms or the different writing processes involved? At the conference you gave at the University of Texas at Austin in March 2024, you mentioned that it was a difficult transition to make.

Think of all the Sheila Callaghans and the amazing playwrights that were in Los Angeles. But in Chicago, it was very new; I was one of the first and I didn‘t know anyone who had done it. I just showed up and was an idiot; I had to hold on to the writer’s assistant and be like, “Can I have some outline samples from Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004-2012)?” That was the show they had done before. I was like, “Oh my god, outlines are horrible! You’re telling them what you’re going to show them?” (laughs) Now that’s what I’m working on right now, an outline for The Wild Wild, my gay cowgirl Annie Oakley project. But nobody explained to me that TV writing has very little to do with writing and a lot to do with talking—talking over each other and trying to out-talk, out-smart and out-wit each other. I don’t have that in me. You’d never want me to play a board game with you because I don’t care about winning; I just like to be there. It’s board games in a writers room, you know? It’s like volleyball.

So it was horrible. I had to stay late, till 10-11pm every day to learn and catch up because I hadn’t even read enough TV scripts to know how to write them. In fact, the first time I turned something in (it was about six pages), the number 2 in the room yelled at me. He was like, “You know how expensive this is? This is a one-page scene. Each page is $100,000. You think your writing is worth $100,000? That your scene is worth $600,000?” I mean I had one scene in one play that was fifty-six pages long, that just kept going. In the theatre, structure is important if you care about it, but you get supported whatever or however you want to tell the story; you have a lot more agency and control and power over your storytelling. You do have to hand it off to a director. By the way, I don’t understand why in the theatre they don’t let the playwright direct the play. In film, they let you; they direct the thing they write. In the theatre; they don’t. I don’t understand it.
I just directed a play called Fade for Audible, so it’s audio this time. I wrote it while I was working on Devious Maids. It’s a story based on the fact that the only people I would see after hours at Disney where our studio, writers room and offices were, were the janitors. So they would arrive around 6 am to buff the floors and they were all Latine. I became friends with two of them and I put a composite of one in this play.

Devious Maids was the first show about Latina women (with five characters in all), but when I started I was the only Latina writer. I was a diversity hire. Do you know what that is? Yeah. I didn’t know what that was. There is a hierarchy in the writers room so you are aware there are levels. As I was walking out of the office one day, a young queer writer turns to me and says, “You do know you’re the diversity hire, right?” I was like, “What’s that?” And he was like, “Oh, honey.” So I called my agent and asked, “What is the diversity hire? Am I like a scholarship kid?” He said, “Basically, you don’t cost the show anything.” “So I have no value?” I asked. “No, you’re free,” he says. “I have no value,” I concluded. Because I was already not feeling valued at that stage. I don’t think the showrunner ever saw me. But eventually they did bring in another upper-level Latina, who’s become a dear friend now and who was really good. The showrunner used to call us “Spic and Span.” This is 2013. That just happened. That’s eleven years ago. So of course I wasn’t seen, and the only stuff they wanted for me to solve was the Latina problem, but the rest of the stories, the white people in the room would handle them.

It was . . . It was horrible. I hated it. I kept wanting to quit. I would cry in the bathroom at lunch all the time. I would call my agent and I’d be like, “Get me out of this,” and I couldn’t and then they (the showrunner, the producer or whoever) kept extending me. So I was no longer a diversity hire; it was like a real hire with the extension. And I really thought I was doing terribly. I’m not a good pitcher. I don’t contribute very well in that regard, especially if I don’t feel safe or if you’re being called “Spic and span,” you know. And when I wouldn’t contribute to the “Spic and Span” joking, he was like “Oh, get a sense of humor. You’re never going to make it in Hollywood if you don’t get a sense of humor.” It was horrible. I hated it and I wanted to run away. And I don’t know why I kept getting extended . . . But you know what? It was the best way to be dunked into this toxic pool of TV. This is how it gets made, you know? It’s like there couldn’t have been anything worse. Maybe, maybe there could. But I did meet Gloria Calderón Kellett who went on to showrun One Day at a Time (Netflix, 2017-2020) and With Love (Amazon Prime Video, 2021-2023), who is a dear sister now. She was taking all the blows like that. She had given birth six weeks before and she was still pumping, and the Number Two complained that she would get twenty minutes off twice a day of free time to go pump her milk. And so they made her pump in the room. This is 2013. She would pitch with the thing going vrm-vrm and then joke with them because they were joking, “Oh, you want a white Russian?” And I was watching her and I was like, “There is so much toxic energy. She has to normalize this for them?” The next show I was on [Looking (HBO, 2014)], the showrunner [Michael Lannan] was a queer man and it was a soothing balm. But some of the behavior in the Devious Maids writers room was disrespectful.

Emily Cheyroux: Maybe you have other examples to illustrate your experience in the television industry as a queer Latina artist, of instances of discrimination that you may have encountered or witnessed, or maybe at some point you felt that you lost some funding opportunities because you are a queer Latina artist. Or maybe you have never felt that.

And usually that partner/babysitter is in the shape of an older white man or a white man who’s done it. The executive at Starz that brought me Vida brought me in, and she was like, “Do you want to do a show about gentefication—not gentrification— gentefication and chipsters (Chicano hipsters) and women in East L.A. That’s it. Those were the parameters, and I was like, “I gotcha.” The queerness, all that stuff, I put in. There was an article that talked about the term gentefication, though the show is not an adaption of that article; they had bought that article. Her name was Marta Fernandez. That’s the equation that tells you everything. So for the four and a half years that I worked on Vida (the three seasons, including the pilot presentation), there were hardly any “No”s. No babysitter, which is huge. I’d been in Hollywood three years. Three. I’d only been in three or four series (when I was on Girls (HBO, 2012-2017), it was only like six weeks or something). It was like a special invitation, “Come,” and all three new writers they brought in were girls who were queer and brown. So I don’t know, maybe they’re trying to do something, and then they put us back on Looking. They let me make an all Latine writers room, and seasons 2 and 3, with all Latina directors, almost every single one first-timers including myself. Thanks to this woman, Marta Fernandez.

It’s bigger than that, obviously. Starz was a really small network and the head [Chris Albrecht] was the true President of it; he had creative vision and creative control of the thing. Wall Street runs things now so it’s not quite the same; money runs. In the ten years that I have been here, it’s more money runs things. But Marta Fernandez just let me do it. To me, the way you make a show is as important as the show you make. She and Starz let me make it my way. But what that means is to have a champion like that in there is that she’s fighting these battles that I actually don’t know of. I just get the “yes” and some Auntie vibes. “Don’t fuck up,” Marta Fernandez would say, “I got it for you. I got you the budget.” I was learning, just like when I came into the theatre and to Devious Maids and I didn’t know anything about outlines and Final Srafts. I hadn’t been in enough rooms to really understand making a script delivery schedule. But I learned it and we were under budget—even though in my own life I’m horrible at managing my own budget but I was like, “No, this people’s money I will take care of.” As a creator, it’s very important to be allowed that much control and power over the casting because usually it’s the studio and the network who have that power. That’s the standard.

Vida depicts young, beautiful Latina women. You feel protective over how they are being viewed. The thing is—an audition is literally an objectification; they’re putting themselves through that. We had to do naked screen tests (it’s Starz, so the nakedness is a big thing). We had to have a screen test for that. For the cast, the agreement in the breakdowns was full nudity for Vida. I sat down with each actress, the ones that required it—basically the two sisters [Melissa Barrera and Mishel Prada]. During the conversation, I explained, “This is the story I’m trying to tell. Unapologetically queer. Joy, eventually.” (laughs) It’s a process. So the queer sex is very important. Because queer sex to me could be in a heterosexual relationship, too—like with the pegging and all the stuff in Vida. I wanted to explore that very truthfully, but we all got to be willing. “I’ll keep you safe,” I said. That promise was important and I think that’s why we were able to make what we made. I keep getting told every week either by somebody on my team or an executive that you could never make Vida today: “If you tried to sell Vida now, you wouldn’t be able to make it.” In fact, right before I went to the University of Texas at Austin, two different people at two different meetings said to me, “You couldn’t make Vida right now.” And it’s painful because, if you take away my project, brown queer bodies are not being represented on screen. I mean, after Pose (FX, 2018-2021) and Vida, nothing happened for Brown queerness. What the fuck? Two—four—and then eight shows should have happened. But it’s weird; it’s like Brown queerness is all muted.

David Roche: At the conference at the University of Texas at Austin, you emphasized how exceptional the writers room you managed to put together for Vida was. 

Tanya Saracho: The writers room was mostly queer and Latina. What we were writing was being written by those who were that thing. You know what I mean? Not everyone was Mexican American—there was a Puerto Rican and a Central American—but we all had skin in the game. Literally.

Emilie Cheyroux: When I hear you say that it would be impossible today to direct Vida, as a viewer, I’m quite surprised because one of the reasons why I immediately clicked watching this show was because the characters were “real,” if you see what I mean. Even as a French woman, I could identify with them because they go through the death of their mother, for instance. And what I also really enjoyed as a scholar of Hispanic cinema was that the female characters do not correspond to the stereotypes of the Latinas—to the sexy Latina or the Bomba Latina, even though there are plenty of sex scenes in this show. Watching Devious Maids was very different in this respect. So what exactly do you think has changed since 2013, when it comes to the freedom that you have as a writer to write stories?

Tanya Saracho: This is such a different moment and so my answer is tinged by the moment. We started writing Vida in 2017. In 2018 #MeToo happened. Something popped up on the Internet. It was like a scene from Vida. Things were shifting. In Vida, every naked moment always had a purpose; the characters are taking a shower and started talking about Russian bots and why Trump won. Basically, Vida got created in the middle of the Trump administration. We might be having one probably soon. I was talking to Gloria [Calderón Kellett] yesterday. One Day at a Time and Vida happened in the middle of Trump. We were being allowed in television to react to contemporary culture. But the pandemic and the strike did something to this industry. “A carencia.” How do you say that? “Carencia.” Scarcity. There’s a scarcity mentality because it’s like everything’s contracted, so they’re making less and taking less chances. I don’t know if you’ve gotten a hold of the current mandates. Amazon is looking for this; Netflix is looking for that. The executives send these mandates to the agents, and what they’re looking for right now is “White men with guns.” “White men with guns” is a mandate.

I was starting a new project and it promises to be as queer as Vida. So not super queer, just half-queer. (laughs) A Latino gay man executive had to tell me, “Hey. You have to Trojan horse the queerness now because we’re not programming for the coasts.” And I was like, “You’re a brown queer man telling me this. This is terrible that you have to tell me this.” And he’s like, “If you want it to survive, Trojan horse the queerness.” He’s one of the people who said you wouldn’t be able to get Vida through today. Something has shifted. All that stuff culturally that happened in the Trump era, we are still living it politically and culturally: Roe v. Wade; the US television industry; how we’re viewed. It has all metastasized. MAGA and the right have so much power. We were able to talk about it before; they would let us tell those stories. You’re not seeing it right now. The mandates are: “Feed that man in Ohio”; “Feed that man in Arkansas.” That’s whose TV we’re trying to feed. And women, they can watch reality TV. That’s how they think about us. And yet, it’s crazy how much Latine audiences can consume, especially horror and genre stuff. We show up; we pay. But they don’t make anything for us. Young Latina adolescents watch movies like crazy, but you can’t name one Latina adolescent film or TV show that’s been made. It’s funny because we’re going to show up. They do not respect us as a fucking audience.

David Roche: It sounds like executives think women and minorities can just keep on negotiating material like they did back in the classical Hollywood era, as if they believed minority audiences have those interpretive strategies and should just put them to use. One of the questions we ask everyone is: What is your current view of the industry? The evolution for women and minority screenwriters, directors and producers? You just said you feel that #MeToo impacted the industry at some point. The sense I’m getting from what you’ve just said and what you said at the conference at the University of Texas at Austin, is that there was an impact at the time, notably when Vida was made, that was kind of a reaction against Trump, but that now you’re observing a backlash.

Tanya Saracho: Yeah, it’s a pendulum that I’ve watched swing in just the decade that I’ve been here. Some people may have watched it longer. It’s dangerous. I went through that summer of reckoning in 2020 when we took to the streets during the pandemic, and it did something in Hollywood, and the conversation was “Inclusion, inclusion.” I think that’s when I got my big overall deal. “We need Latine stories, right? And we need Asian stories.” There was like a frenzy of course correction involving staffing but also stories. All this stuff started to get developed. For instance, my two Latinas in London project got support. Because most of the time, they limit what they want from us. They want cartels; they want immigrant trauma porn. There are lanes they’re used to seeing us in, and that’s comfortable. But “Two Latinas living in London fall in love with a British folk musician from East London”—this has nothing to do with class, except that they can afford to be there and live there, but it’s not the “right” identity (being immigrants and stuff). It’s so uncomfortable for Americans to watch Latinas like that because it’s like, “Wait! We get to be in London, which is a world stage. But Mexicans? We have a [stereotypical] idea of who they are supposed to be.”

So all that happened and then . . . four years later. We know what happened: the pandemic. Wall Street really took the hit, I guess. Netflix came and ruined television with how much content they were producing and they fucked everything up; now they’re going back to that advertiser model. And then—the strikes happen. I do think we are being punished. I do. Even assistants. They’ve taken so much stuff away from us now that we’ve come back: the pay; the way they negotiate. I feel really worried for lower- and mid-level writers really worried. The people who said I would never be able to make Vida the way I made it are right: it would never happen today—to make a show at this level. I’m so grateful that they’re still considering me because I did have a show—well, a show and a half, and then one didn’t make it. To be a first-time showrunner right now would be really difficult. Because there are all these showrunners looking for work and the studios are more risk-averse; they don’t want to take a risk on someone who hasn’t run a show because that’s money. Before, when there were six hundred shows, it was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. She’s a playwright. She just got here today. Yeah, give her a show.” It probably wasn’t exactly like that (laughs) but it felt like that with me. “You know I’ve only run a theatre company with $150,000 operating budget, right? That’s like the wig budget on a TV show, okay? You’re going to hand me millions of dollars?” Anyway, the sky is falling, and it’s dark times now just because—they don’t care.

I started this incubator for Latine fellows who wrote a pilot. It was beautiful; it was a twenty-six-week thing, and they took away all that money because they can’t even hide the fact that we don’t matter. Inclusion? That’s not what they’re worried about. The bottom line is what they’re worried about; inclusion is okay on your own dime. Try to get something through, make it really “undeniable.” That’s the word right now. I keep bringing stuff to my studio. But it’s like, “It’s not undeniable. It’s not undeniable,” they keep saying to me. “Undeniable” is not a real word because “undeniable” means that you’re fucking psychic and that you know that at the end you’re guaranteed something that’s undeniable. You should say the words “with more potential” but not “undeniable”; it is not a real thing. It’s something they came up with in a conference room meeting, and they started saying it, and now we’re up to our necks in, “Is this undeniable? Is this undeniable?” Shut up! This is what I mean about the way this industry runs, the way mandates and notes come; they come from a bad place, you know, not from the place of “Let’s get this to be the best work possible.” I have a lot of faith in audiences. You give them good work; they’re going to watch it. You give them Baby Reindeer (Netflix, 2024) or The Bear (FX , 2022-), they’re going to watch it. But if you listen to all the industry podcasts right now, no one would buy The Bear right now. Reacher (Amazon Prime Video, 2022-) and The Boys (Amazon Prime Video, 2019-), that’s what they want.

David Roche: It really sounds like very little has changed since the classical era when producers believed they knew from instinct what movie was going to sell. 

Tanya Saracho: Yes, but those producers used to be creative producers. Now they’re money producers. They’re looking at it through money without wondering whether it’s a good piece or story. They want to know what will sell? Look at The Fall Guy (David Leitch, Universal Pictures, 2024). The old studio heads were visionaries, even if they were problematic in other respects. So I think that’s different and it’s the lack of interest in story and art that’s breaking us. 

Emilie Cheyroux: I’m here in L.A. for LALIFF, the Latino Film Festival. You’ve probably heard that they’re launching a market. Do you think that they are doing this to counter the situation you just described?

Tanya Saracho: Everything helps right now. I went out to sell a film and everything helps. I love that we’re trying to do as much as we can. I think anything helps. The question is: will the industry bear it to the finish line? Because we do need the system to get to the finish line, and that’s the annoying part. But to get it made, anything helps. I’m very supportive of that. I don’t go to the premieres. I just go to the screenings because I’ve been getting social anxiety since the pandemic, but I love that it’s happening now.

Emilie Cheyroux: You should come on Saturday: the Netflix Fellowship Inclusion Program is really good. It features emerging filmmakers and it is really good.

Tanya Saracho: I encourage people to go because it’s all of us Latine. But I haven’t had another show since the pandemic, so when I show up to these spaces, I feel empty-handed. It’s like, “Oh, fuck, I haven’t delivered for us again.” These are just my feelings; I can’t get rid of them. I talked to Rafa [Rafael Agustín, Executive Director of the Latino Film Institute] about it. I was like, “I’m so sorry. When I’m in these spaces where Latines are going to gather, I now feel so like, ‘Fuck, I let you all down.’” But people just want to drink and say “Hi.” So are my anxieties. That’s where I’m at right now. I have to go to Tribeca to be in a jury for a thing, and it’s already stressing me out. 

Emilie Cheyroux: Some Instagram haters called you a “whitina” and apparently that found it’s way into the series [in episode S2E10]. What’s your take on that insult? Do you feel that for some people of the Latinx community, your success has to fit a certain box? Do you feel this could hinder your creativity? 

Tanya Saracho: I did in fact change a line in the episode after being insulted on social media. It often happened that lines emerging from hard discussions in the writers room would end up in an episode. And I did identify to the two sisters. I was hurt. Growing up, the term “mestiza” was more akin to “browny” but it has shifted with younger generations. I also realized that we were gentrifying the neighborhood by shooting our series there, so it was understandable that they were calling out the irony that we were gentrifying the neighborhood while making a series on gentefication there. It was really a case of life imitating art.

Emilie Cheyroux: Vida received some criticism that the Spanglish was not California enough. Would you care to comment on that?

Tanya Saracho: It’s true that the series received some critique that it was not California enough and there’s certainly a lot of my Texas background in it. But we were aware that Splanglish was a big responsibility and we did our best to make the dialogue and accents sound like authentic California Spanglish.

David Roche: Do you have any sense of the reception of Vida outside the U.S., in Latin America or Mexico in particular?

Tanya Saracho: It’s on Hulu in the United States right now. It took years to get Vida in Mexico. Now it’s on Netflix Mexico. It’s such a painful subject to me; I don’t understand. I go to London four times a year. I just came back last week or the week before and the queers there, they know Vida. I have no idea how they find it. It doesn’t have a very international profile because it was on Starz.

Emilie Cheyroux: We’d like to know what feminism means to you and more about your relationship to feminism as a person and an artist. Could you also tell us more about the Latina gaze you mentioned at the conference with Mary Beltrán at the University of Texas at Austin? I’m really interested in that concept because I have never heard of it.

Tanya Saracho: I’m not very articulate or academic about it. My feminism is just something I wear, so I never had to defend it. I want us to have equal say, equal access, equal opportunity in all spaces, and have agency. Those two characters on Vida are showing you my type. They have sexual agency. They’re fucked up. I call them “ugly girls.” It was such a luxury to portray Latinas that are complex and complicated! Because they usually want us to be the model minority, but during the first season, you’re wondering about these two women, “Do I even like them?” You’re compelled by them; something resonates. That’s lived feminism. For instance, when we did the abortion storyline in which Emma, who’s super smart and has a college degree, takes the morning-after pill wrong and is told how to take it right. She chooses. It’s lived feminism when you have access and opportunity. You can make your own stupid choices about how you deal with stuff, and that is a luxury for Latines who have been living in Hollywood and Los Angeles for a hundred and twenty years and haven’t had enough screen moments.

Side note. I’m doing a show about Buffalo Bill’s Wild Wild West Show. Buffalo Bill basically created the notion of celebrity; he was the first to create marketing and a fictional story to go with it. What a performer! He employed two hundred Native Americans and two hundred Spanish Mexicans. I’m calling them Spanish Mexicans; it’s more complicated than that, but that’s what I’m calling them, Spanish Mexicans. There was a performer named Señorita Rosalia or Señorita Rosalie. Bill didn’t lower Señorita Rosalie’s cleavage—this was Victorian America—but he raised her skirt, which was scandalous. For the Latina—they didn’t have the term Latina back then—for the Spanish Mexican, they lowered the thing, and then the promotional material for her was: “She will dance for you because these (not ‘spicy’ but whatever) ladies will dance and she can ride because all Mexican girls can ride.” So since 1883, we have been suffering from that notion of Latinidad, of the vixen, Lupe Velez, the Spitfire. You mentioned Devious Maids. It’s been one hundred years or more of the history of Hollywood and we’re still finding that image. So with the protagonists ofVida, as well as Eddie who is a Butch-presenting lesbian, all this provided an opportunity to complicate the images of who we are. In my stories, I try to deal with that, and in my everyday life as well.

Regarding the Latina gaze. For Vida, I hired an Afro-Latina cinematographer [Carmen Cabana]. In terms of lighting, our colonized skin tones have either been washed out or saturated or whatever, and I just wanted us to look like us. So technically, by having one of us that understands us handle the look of the show and not turning the camera away from us—this was a way of providing a version of us that was different from what dominant culture offered. Moreover, I didn’t give you subtitles. Fuck that. If you’re walking through Boyle Heights, you will understand whatever you understand, you know. So that’s our gaze, right? Finally, with these characters, we’re not performing model minority for anyone; it’s unapologetically us. I also felt it was important to elevate us cinematically because we just haven‘t been in film and television history. And we deserve it. That doesn’t mean you have to make us look better, more glamorous. But we deserve to be elevated to cinematic value! Make us look as good as other cultures! And as good as the dominant culture has been able to look. So it’s mostly portraying us with reverence, making us look good, without looking away from the barnacles either; that doesn’t necessarily mean glamorous. I think that’s very important, even in marketing. With One Day At A Time, my dear friend Gloria [Calderón Kellett] used the same poster all three years to market. That’s the sell of the show, how they market you, where they put you, how they portray you and present you. It matters because it’s telling the buyer: “It’s worth watching.” I told them this during the premiere of Vida. I was crying. I was like “Thank you for marketing us like a white show” because that just means marketing us with reverence, but really like a white show. That made a difference with Vida. I do think that I got amazing critical acclaim, and I do think it’s because Starz and Martha Fernandez stood behind it. But anyway, the gaze is to me when you’re in control of the presentation. And it’s not catering to the dominant.

David Roche: Now that you have been in the television industry for a while, how do you differentiate your roles as a writer and as a producer? How has this evolved? I watched a couple of the episodes of How To Get Away With Murder (ABC, 2014-2020), for instance, where you have writing credits on two episodes, but you also have production credits. How does that work?

Tanya Saracho: For that show, we wrote every episode by group. There’s a horrible term I learned on Devious Maids called “gangbang.” That’s a horrible term but they still use it. It’s horrible! (On Vida, we didn’t use the term.) In Devious Maids, everyone would take ten scenes. So those episodes are where my name ended up, but we all wrote everything together. And then Pete, the showrunner, would do a very thorough rewrite. This is a habit I picked up from Pete and that I did for Vida. I did pick up some bad habits from the showrunners I worked for. Right now, I don’t differentiate between showrunner and writer. For Wild Wild, Jamie Babbit would direct the pilot, but I would direct some episodes. So all my deals are to write episodes, direct some, and obviously, produce and showrun, right? Now I think of myself as a showrunner. Showrunners are directors because we sit there in the editing room with the editor. The role of the showrunner is so interesting. I talk about it with showrunners on Instagram threads every day. The role didn’t get codified until recently. The word “showrunner” doesn’t appear in your contract. It’s producer and writer. It’s like a slang term, in a way. But now it’s getting codified. I think of myself as everything right now. Like this Lovesong with the two Latinas, I had a writers room but I wrote the first three episodes and would have directed all of them. So I think of myself as a showrunner.

David Roche: But when you say it’s codified, do you mean as a practice or are they using the word in the contracts?

Tanya Saracho: They’re not using the word in contracts, but for negotiations, during the strike, the term started appearing in writing. Showrunning is actually two jobs, and during the strike, we realized, “Oh, it’s a fucking big ass double job.” In England, two people usually do the job of showrunner: there’s a head writer and a creative producer. When I sat down to interview a creative producer, the creative producer was like, “No, I hire the people. You’re half a showrunner.” My British writers for Lovesong, they got handed an outline and they wrote their script. There’s no twenty weeks in a writers room. It’s so funny because they don’t know how to pitch either. That writers room was really interesting because it was all British (the support staff and the writers). They had never been in a writers room where they get lunch and snacks every day and have to pitch all day long. Which is exactly what I had to learn when I started out in Hollywood. Also, they’re used to the creative producer being a producer, not the head writer, too. So me being the head—I hate that term—the head writer and the producer in the room, as you’re pitching to them, it was a mind fuck for them. In film, it’s different, the director has the final say, but for now TV is still a writer’s medium.

David Roche: Thanks for talking about your experience in Great Britain. Our research project also focuses on British television, so we’re interested in hearing about how the practices may differ in both countries.

Tanya Saracho: There’s a role there called script editor that we don’t have in Hollywood. It’s the person that writes the outlines. When I found out, I didn’t even want to see this person. I didn’t even understand this role! (laughs) I got together with Jessica Rhoades, the producer of Black Mirror (Channel Four, 2011-2014; Netflix, 2014-); I had a training program that I started with Mike Royce to train support staff. They don’t have script coordinators over there, so, for Lovesong, we trained some British staff. That producer and I paid for those instructors because the U.K. is learning to produce US-American shows more. So these roles are starting to be available.

David Roche: I can’t wait to hear more about The Wild Wild. What about The Wild Wild?

Tanya Saracho: They don’t want to take it out yet, because in the mandates they say it’s not the period right now. Jamie [Babbit] and I are contracted with the studio to do it right now. The thing I’m working on with Netflix is Brujas. It’s about brujería and witches but the way I practice magic so no sparks and fire. I myself do spells. So that one is at Netflix, and it’s going well but I’m not going to get excited because for Lovesong, I had ten fully written episodes with a writers room and it was like a stillbirth for me. The pain was real because it was ready to shoot, and then they were like “Oh, no. Nobody wants to hear about love.” 

David Roche and Emilie Cheyroux: Thank you so much for your time.