Tanya Saracho

Saracho has said that a goal of her work is to provide representation for Latinx people and address stereotypes.[9] Her career started in 1998 when she moved to Chicago.[10][2][7][5] Saracho initially attempted to work as an actress, but found that her opportunities as a Latina were limited[1] to typecast roles as maids or sex workers.[7] She would form Teatro Luna with Coya Paz in June 2000.[1][5][11][12][13] The group had an original ensemble of 10 Latina women from diverse backgrounds.[1][7]

Saracho took part in the creation of numerous works through Teatro Luna, including Machos, Dejame Contarte (Let Me Tell You), The María Chronicles and S-E-X-Oh!.[1][11] Machos is a play examining "contemporary masculinities",[14] drawn from interviews with 50 men across the U.S.[14][15] and performed by the all-Latina cast in drag,[14][16] which earned 2 Non-Equity Jeff Awards.[16]

Saracho parted with the group in January 2010 to focus on playwriting.[5] The same year, she co-founded The Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists (ALTA) of Chicago,[17][18][19][20] which describes itself as "a service organization dedicated to furthering the Chicago Latinx Theater movement by promoting, educating, representing, and unifying Latinx-identified artists and their allies".[21]

Multiple plays that she worked on in this time received nominations for the Jeff Award.[2] She also worked as an outside actor on occasion during her time at Teatro Luna.[2][22]

One of her first works after leaving Teatro Luna was El Nogalar for the Goodman Theatre, co-produced with Teatro Vista, as a reconstruction of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard set in the pecan orchards of Northern Mexico amid the drug wars,[2][3][18][23] which ran at the Goodman Theatre from March 26 to April 24, 2011.[10][24] At that time, she was resident playwright emeritus at Chicago Dramatists, resident playwright at Teatro Vista, a Goodman Theatre Fellow at the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago and an artistic associate with Chicago's LGBTQ-oriented About Face Theatre.[2][3][23] She was also then working on two Andrew W. Mellon Foundation commissions for Steppenwolf Theatre, an adaptation of a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz play for Oregon Shakespeare Festival called The Tenth Muse,[23][25] and a historical fiction piece for About Face Theatre called The Good Private. The latter, about a transgender soldier in the American Civil War,[2][3] was inspired by the story of Albert Cashier, recognized as female on birth in Ireland but who lived out their life in Illinois as a man after fighting for the Union Army.[2][5] In late 2012, her play Song for the Disappeared about an estranged borderland family brought together by the disappearance of their younger brother, was performed at the Goodman Theatre.[23][26]

Her 2014 work also included Mala Hierba at the Second Stage Uptown[27][28] and Hushabye as part of Steppenwolf's First Look in 2014.[7][29][30] Saracho's additional involvements include being a member of The Kilroys' List[7] and founding the Ñ Project.[31] Saracho is also a member of SAG-AFTRA[31] and the Writers Guild of America West[31] and has worked as a voice-over actress.[2]

In 2012, Saracho began working in television, benefiting from the ABC Diversity program.[7] In her first TV job, as a staff writer at Lifetime's Devious Maids in 2013,[4][8] her office-mate told her she was "the diversity writer" and her agent confirmed that she was not costing the showrunner any budget.[32] In 2014, Saracho wrote a two-hander for the Goodman Theatre,[8] where one character was a first-year TV writer and the other a janitor.[8] The Denver Theatre Center commissioned Saracho to expand that work to create Fade, which premièred there in Winter 2016.[20][33]

After Devious Maids, Saracho wrote for HBO's Girls[4][34] and Looking (in 2013–14),[4][8][34] along with ABC's How to Get Away with Murder.[18][34] Saracho continued writing for theater while also writing for television, including two theater commissions, one set in Red Bank, New Jersey and the other in Costa Mesa, California.[20] Between seasons of Looking, Saracho worked on The Tenth Muse, an all-female play set in a convent in Colonial Mexico.[7]

Saracho, working with the production company Big Beach,[17][35][36] created, co-wrote, and co-produced the show Vida.[32][37] She assembled an all-Latinx, "heavily queer" writers' room[37][38][32] and directorial team who are all Latinx or women of color.[37][38] Like much of Saracho's theater work, the dialog in Vida is in Spanglish.[36]

Saracho has said that Starz initially approached her about the show, looking for "a female millennial show about gentefication, which is the gentrification of a Latinx space. The queerness came from me. I identify as queer, and it had to be there."[32]

In February 2018, Saracho signed a 3-year deal with Starz.[19][39][40] She has described season 1 of Vida as a three-hour pilot.

She is also developing another series with Big Beach called Brujas,[17][41] based on her 2007 play Enfrascada,[42][43] which will follow four Afro-Caribbean / Latinx Chicagoans within the brujería counter-culture.[41][17]

• Generic Latina (2001)[1][13][54]
• Dejame Contarte ("Let Me Tell You", 2001)[1][11][54]
• Kita y Fernanda (2002)[11][54]
• The María Chronicles (2003)[1][11][54]
• Electricidad ("Electricity", 2004, performing as Vecina)[22]
• S-E-X-Oh! (2005[11] and reworked in 2006)[1][11][54]
• Quita Mitos ("Removing Myths", 2006, 3 female characters)[11][55][54]
• Sólo Tú (2007, 4 female monologues, 1 by Saracho)[11]
• Lunáticas (2007)[11][54]
• Machos (2007)[11][14][54]
• Enfrascada (2008, 5 female)[31][56][42]
• Our Lady of the Underpass (2009, 2 male, 4 female)[5][57][31]
• The House on Mango Street (2009)[5][58][59]
• El Nogalar (2011, 1 male, 4 female)[10][24][31]
• Song for the Disappeared (2012)[26]
• The Tenth Muse (2013, 7 female)[25][31]
• The Good Private (2013)[60]
• Mala Hierba ("Weed", 2014, 4 female)[31][27][28]
• Hushabye (2014, 3 male, 2 female)[29][30]
• Fade (2016, 1 male, 1 female)[31][33]