Tanya Saracho Is Making Sure Latinos Have a Seat at the Writers’ Table

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Tanya Saracho is not going to pretend that this is an easy time to tell the kinds of stories that have made her one of TV’s most distinctive voices. A producer, screenwriter, and playwright best known for creating Vida, an acclaimed Starz drama that ran from 2018 to 2020 about two Mexican American sisters who return to their old L.A. neighborhood in the wake of their mother’s death, Saracho is passionately committed to the authentic representation of queer and Latino characters in particular. But, as female creators of color like Issa Rae and Saracho’s longtime friend Gloria Calderón Kellett have lamented, the entertainment industry’s poststrike era of austerity—one driven by Wall Street’s impatience to see a return on its investments in streaming and influenced by a reactionary backlash to DEI within the culture at large—has been hard on projects that center the experiences of anyone who isn’t straight or white.

“The moment is so tumultuous,” Saracho says. “Especially for brown stories, for queer stories, [creators] have this conversation a lot, that we’re not in vogue right now.” Before last year’s actors’ and writers’ strikes, in which Saracho was a vocal participant, she had a series in the works about two American Latinas in London who find themselves in a love triangle with a British musician. A writers’ room had been assembled. But then, she recalls, the series “I’d been working on for three years went away.” Funding for projects like the ignition lab Saracho founded under the umbrella of her production company, Ojalá, to nurture Latino writers, disappeared, while competition for a decreasing number of staff positions in the industry just kept intensifying.

Yet Saracho has never considered giving up. “Television is going through some growing pains,” she says. “To survive it, you put your head down and write the stories.” And so she has used her overall deal with Universal Studio Group—a privilege that she acknowledges not all TV writers enjoy—to keep crafting shows that spotlight the Latino and LGBTQ communities.

One project she has in the works, The Wild Wild, pairs the gunslinging folk hero Annie Oakley with her lesser-known co-star in Buffalo Bill Cody’s legendary turn-of-the-20th-century Wild West show: Señorita Rosalie, a trick rider who was one of dozens of Spanish Mexicans who toured with Cody. Saracho is interested in the way Buffalo Bill’s spectacle shaped American pop-cultural archetypes, and specifically in the birth of a stock “spicy Latina” character presaged by Rosalie’s low-cut costumes. Hollywood, she says, is “asking for white-guys-with-guns shows. Well, this is a girls-with-guns show. And corsets. And some of them are gay.”

More in the vein of Vida, which was beloved for its nuanced, politically charged but frequently pleasurable depiction of a contemporary Latino neighborhood navigating issues like gentrification and intersectional identities, is Brujas (Spanish for witches). Informed by her own practice of brujeria (witchcraft) and inspired by the recent movement of Latinos “reclaiming these old matriarchal belief systems” on platforms like TikTok, the show follows two Afro-Latina cousins in Chicago who get into brujeria during COVID-19 lockdown. “It’s sort of a metaphor for female empowerment,” Saracho says.

It will likely be more difficult to bring these projects to fruition than it was four years ago, when the pandemic had bored families piling on streaming subscriptions and the George Floyd protests manifested in the arts as a mandate to tell more Black and brown stories. But Saracho is used to creating space for herself. Born in Sinaloa, Mexico, the 48-year-old creator moved to McAllen, Texas, as a teen and signed up for her school’s speech and debate program, hoping for speech therapy that would rid her of her accent. Instead, she got an introduction to theater, which became her whole life. A graduate of Boston University’s theater program, she spent her early adulthood in Chicago, where she co-founded an all-Latina theater company and started the Alliance of Latino Theater Artists (ALTA). Hollywood eventually took notice; Saracho learned TV writing on the job, in the writers’ room for Devious Maids, followed by stints on Looking and How to Get Away With Murder. “I divorced my first wife, the theater, and I’m married to this one,” she says, “and I’m not quitting just yet.”

Saracho also remains steadfast about using her foothold in the industry to help other outsiders find a place for themselves. Along with Ojalá’s on-pause ignition lab, she gathered a handful of peers under the banner of the Untitled Latinx Project, whose mission is to advocate for “an entertainment industry where Latinx content by Latinx creatives is the standard.” Saracho also  partnered with the Writers Guild Foundation on the Writers’ Access Support Staff Training Program, which trains writers from underrepresented backgrounds for writers’-assistant and script-coordinator positions. Each initiative is a way of claiming a seat at a table where space is harder to find than it has been in years.

Of course, Saracho notes, “the correct revolution includes us building our own table.” She wonders whether independent TV production, which remains much rarer than indie film, might one day become the tool to achieving such creative autonomy. “But as it stands right now,” she says, “it’s like: Let us sit here. And value us. And put a damn place setting out for us.”