Tanya Saracho Quotes

“I am so homesick every day of the week.”

― Tanya Saracho

“It’s mountains. The air is crisp. It’s peaceful. You don’t get spring break in Guanajuato.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“The big, radical thing that I’m trying to do is to portray Latinas as complex human beings.”

― Tanya Saracho

“When you get a bunch of Latinxs together, we get to handle our stories. A cultural shorthand happens.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“I’m queer – and queer, to me, is not being stuck in a binary and being kind of fluid.”

― Tanya Saracho

“There is no ‘generic’ Latina.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“I would like to do more millennial, Latina, complicated stories.”

― Tanya Saracho

“I always have something big enough to say as a playwright. It’s storytelling.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“You’re on set more when you produce an episode, and it’s long hours, but you learn so much.”

― Tanya Saracho

“I’m sad about my theatre career, but I’ve also fallen a bit in love with TV!”

― Tanya Saracho

“I don’t think that ‘Vida’ is just for Latinos. I don’t think ‘One Day at a Time”s just for Latinos.”

― Tanya Saracho

“I didn’t understand that TV writing wasn’t writing; it was pitching.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.’”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― 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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“I want to stay in Chicago.”

― Tanya Saracho

“So many times, shows say they’re set somewhere – like in Chicago, ‘The Good Wife’ – but it doesn’t feel like Chicago.”

― Tanya Saracho

“I’m always writing. There’s no stopping. It’s just that you can’t see it sometimes.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“I never wanted to be married. That was never a thing for me.”

― Tanya Saracho

“The fact that I have a show on Starz, it’s crazy. It’s insane.”

― Tanya Saracho

“Raul Castillo was my first high school boyfriend.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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?”

― Tanya Saracho

“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?”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“When you change media, perception is changed and then policy is changed.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― 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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“Glutton things, those are things that are dangerous for me. My grandma and my aunt died of diabetes; I’m borderline diabetic.”

― Tanya Saracho

“I am equally a writer and an actor and a director.”

― Tanya Saracho

“Other people started taking me seriously before I took myself seriously.”

― Tanya Saracho

“When I was in school, I didn’t get exposed to Latino playwrights.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.’”

― Tanya Saracho

“I am not a quiet person.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.””

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“I’m obsessed with accents.”

― Tanya Saracho

“The hierarchy plays out in the writers room, and you, as a staff writer, need to know your place.”

― Tanya Saracho

“I dress up cute sometimes to go to work, but TV writers don’t! They just go however.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.’”

― Tanya Saracho

“What I notice a lot about millennials is that they have agency over their sexuality.”

― Tanya Saracho

“Sometimes, when I was the only person of color in a room, you had to defend all the people of color everywhere.”

― Tanya Saracho

“The thing is about ‘Vida,’ we’re telling a very simple family narrative. There’s nothing fancy about it.”

― Tanya Saracho

“When you’re a starving artist, you make do. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know where my rent was coming from.”

― Tanya Saracho

“Putting on makeup before work is a meditative exercise. It incites me to think about how I’ll tackle my day.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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!”

― Tanya Saracho

“You can’t visit Guanajuato without going to the mummy museum.”

― Tanya Saracho

“Nothing against resorts or Cancun or Carlos ‘n Charlie’s, but Guanajuato is different. If you want history, culture, and peace, it’s perfect.”

― Tanya Saracho

“I’m interested in people’s darkness – and humor in the darkness.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“I’m not a good business person when it comes to my writing.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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.”

― Tanya Saracho

“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