Tanya Saracho

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

“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.”

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

“Raul Castillo was my first high school boyfriend.”

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

“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.”

“I am not a quiet person.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“There is no 'generic' Latina.”

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