Tanya Saracho

Tanya Selene Saracho is a Mexican-American actress, playwright, dramaturge and screenwriter. With a background in theater before writing for television, she co-founded in 2000 and was its co-artistic director for ten years. She also co-founded the Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists (ALTA) of Chicago. She is particularly known for centering the "Latina gaze". She developed and was showrunner of the Starz series , which ran for three seasons (2018-2020). Saracho signed a three-year development deal with Starz in February 2018.

Early life

Tanya Selene Saracho was born in , Mexico, to Ramiro A. Saracho, head customs officer with the and a powerful figure in the conservative Institutional Revolutionary Party, and Rosalina Armenta. After her parents' divorce, her childhood was split between , where her father lived, and just across the border in McAllen, Texas, where she and her mother chose to reside together with her two younger sisters Tatiana Saracho and Fresy Saracho. Both cities are part of the bi-national Reynosa–McAllen metropolitan area straddling the Rio Grande ( es, Río Bravo del Norte). She and her family-members went back and forth between Mexico and the United States often — with her father commuting over the border in 2008. She attended middle and high school in McAllen and enrolled in Boston University College of Fine Arts to study theater, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

Career

Theater

Reluctant to move to New York or Los Angeles, her career started when she moved to Chicago in 1998 with her college roommate. They chose Chicago partly because the Steppenwolf Theatre Company had shown the city to be somewhere where artists could start a theater group and see it grow to success. Saracho first tried working mostly as an actress, but found her opportunities as a Latina were limited, with the only roles available for Latina actors being maids and sex workers. As a result, after having met Coya Paz (who was initially reluctant) at an audition, the two founded in June 2000. This self-proclaimed all-Latina theater group had an original ensemble of 10 women from diverse backgrounds; its establishment was partly funded through the sale of a house Saracho's father had bought her in Mexico.

At , Saracho took part in the creation of numerous works, including , '' (Let Me Tell You)'', ''The María Chronicles'' and . is a play examining "contemporary masculinities", drawn from interviews with 50 men across the U.S. and performed by the all-Latina cast in drag, which earned 2 Non-Equity Jeff Awards. A year after Coya Paz, her at , had been asked to step down as co-artistic director during Paz's maternity leave, Saracho parted with group in January 2010 after 10 years so that she could focus on playwriting, which had suffered from her responsibilities toward the administration of the group. The same year, Saracho co-founded The Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists (ALTA) of Chicago, 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".

The transition into more independent work was easy for Saracho as she had already been involved in some independent theater, such as her adaptation of ''The House on Mango Street'' at the Steppenwolf Theatre. Other independent work include her pieces  at the 16th Street Theater and ''Our Lady of the Underpass'' at . was inspired by her relatively privileged upbringing as a Mexican in Texas with "a complicated relationship with the daughter of the family maid", whereas ''Our Lady of the Underpass'' is an interview-based character study of people who believe they saw the Virgin Mary in a salt stain in Chicago's Fullerton Avenue. Both plays received nominations for the Joseph Jefferson Award Citation for New Work of a Play, all in 2009. She also had the chance to do some outside acting during her time at , in by at the Goodman Theatre in June and July 2004. Henry Godinez, curator of the Goodman Theatre's Latino Theatre Festival, cast her in the role for , before seeing her writing work for , which he considered "crazily well-developed" and suggested Saracho for the Goodman's 2005 Ofner Prize supporting new work. Winning the Ofner led her to work with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company — including her first commission in 2006 — where she debuted with her young-adult adaptation of ''The House on Mango Street'' by in late 2009, which she described as a Latinx cultural-equivalent to ''The Catcher in the Rye''. Another 2006 work with was (translated as "Myth Remover"), with 3 "multidimensional Mexican-American women" speaking in monologue. The work played at Chicago's Viaduct Studio Theater and, on weekend performances, Saracho played all 3 roles herself.

One of her first works after leaving was for the Goodman Theatre, co-produced with , as a reconstruction of Anton Chekhov's ''The Cherry Orchard'' set in the pecan orchards of Northern Mexico amid the drug wars, which ran at the Goodman Theatre March 26 – April 24, 2011. was initially inspired by Cecilie Keenan's observation that "''The Cherry Orchard'' is a very Latino play". also marked a break from the use of monologues, previously very prominent in Saracho's writing. Despite moving from storefront theaters to larger scaled stages such as the Goodman and Steppenwolf, Saracho still kept true to her storefront start: "And the cover of ''Time Out Chicago'' — the scrappy, storefront aesthetic got me on that cover. The fact that we respect and honor the storefront — I feel like that is why I am here right now. I need to always be of both worlds." At that time, she was resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists, resident playwright at , 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. She was also then working on two Andrew W. Mellon Foundation commissions for Steppenwolf Theatre, an adaptation of a play for Oregon Shakespeare Festival called ''The Tenth Muse'', and a historical fiction piece for About Face Theatre called ''The Good Private''. The latter, about a transgender soldier in the American Civil War, 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. 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.

Throughout her work, she has sought to provide representation for Latinx people, to redress stereotypes: "You know how Jill Soloway is talking about the female gaze? I'm interested in the Latina gaze for the foreseeable future."

Overall her theater career has led her plays to be performed at many different venues, including the Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, , , Fountain Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Next Theater Company, The Oregon Shakespeare Festival and 16th Street Theater. She has also had commissions at some of these theaters, and others, including the Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, Two Rivers Theater, Denver Theater Center, and South Coast Rep.

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

Television: In the writers' room

In 2012, Saracho began working in television, benefiting from the ABC Diversity program. In her first TV job, as a staff writer at Lifetime's ''Devious Maids'' in 2013, her office-mate told her she was "the diversity writer" and her agent confirmed that she was not costing the showrunner any budget. She has described feeling unprepared at the time, experiencing impostor syndrome and she was new to Final Draft. She was relieved when Gloria Calderón Kellett joined the show, and has talked about the culture shock of seeing very few other Latinx faces there and becoming close to the Spanish-speaking janitorial staff as a result. In 2014, she was intending to write a musical about , "within the safety of" a writers' workshop at the Center Theatre Group. With the mixed cultural experience of her work at Lifetime on her mind, she instead wrote a two-hander for the Goodman Theatre, where one character was a first-year TV writer and the other a janitor. The Denver Theatre Center commissioned Saracho to expand that work to create ''Fade'', which premièred there in Winter 2016.

After ''Devious Maids'', Saracho wrote for HBO's ''Girls'' and ''Looking'' (in 2013–14), along with ABC's ''How to Get Away with Murder''. For ''Looking'', she wrote the episode where Patrick (Jonathan Groff) introduced his Latino boyfriend Richie (played by Saracho's longtime friend Raúl Castillo) to his friends. She also pitched her play ''Mala Hierba'' to HBO as a television show; her agent sending the script of ''Mala Hierba'' as a sample of her work is part of how Saracho came to be interviewed for the ''Looking'' writers' room. Initially she was reluctant to write gay male characters, as she felt she "wouldn't know what to say". She was convinced after speaking with showrunner Michael Lannan

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