Tanya Saracho, Gloria Calderón Kellett and Ilana Peña have all made uplifting fellow Latinx TV writers a major part of their work.
laid out, nearly 20% of the U.S. population identifies as Hispanic/Latino on the census, but just 3.5% of the top 100 grossing films at the U.S. box office from 2007 to 2019 featured Hispanic/Latino leads or co-leads. Only 5% of all speaking characters in those movies were Hispanic/Latino. And when Latinx people do appear on screen, it’s often as side characters and in stereotypical roles like the ones Saracho kept encountering, audition after audition.
She, Saracho and fellow Latinx writers and showrunners have tried to build a sense of community, like being able to share advice about getting their shows off the ground. “I never felt like any sort of token. My expertise in that room was musical theater, and I was the youngest person in the room, so I would make a lot of millennial jokes,” she said. “It was really special, being on a show that valued me and recognized me for everything I was, not just my background.”Ilana Peña, creator of"Diary of a Future President," says, “We’re all full people, you know? We have our enormously complicated lives.
“They can see how I take notes, how I do cuts, how I communicate with heads of departments. I allow them to see behind the curtain so that it demystifies it for them, so that when they are sitting in that chair, they know what they’re doing because they’ve seen it,” she said. “It’s important to me, so I am very happy to do it. But, gosh, I would love all the white showrunners to do that, to know the importance of that, know how impactful that can be.
“The unfortunate thing about being the first is you have no room for failure. The pressure for you is, if you fail, then they’ll say, ‘Eh, we tried it.’ I mean, you see that on network TV again and again.
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