Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There is no 'generic' Latina.
I am so homesick every day of the week.
Raul Castillo was my first high school boyfriend.
I am equally a writer and an actor and a director.
I'm not a good business person when it comes to my writing.
You can't visit Guanajuato without going to the mummy museum.
The fact that I have a show on Starz, it's crazy. It's insane.
I would like to do more millennial, Latina, complicated stories.
When I was in school, I didn't get exposed to Latino playwrights.
I didn't understand that TV writing wasn't writing; it was pitching.
When you change media, perception is changed and then policy is changed.
I'm sad about my theatre career, but I've also fallen a bit in love with TV!
I always have something big enough to say as a playwright. It's storytelling.
I'm always writing. There's no stopping. It's just that you can't see it sometimes.
I dress up cute sometimes to go to work, but TV writers don't! They just go however.
What I notice a lot about millennials is that they have agency over their sexuality.
I'm queer - and queer, to me, is not being stuck in a binary and being kind of fluid.
It's mountains. The air is crisp. It's peaceful. You don't get spring break in Guanajuato.
The big, radical thing that I'm trying to do is to portray Latinas as complex human beings.
You're on set more when you produce an episode, and it's long hours, but you learn so much.
The hierarchy plays out in the writers room, and you, as a staff writer, need to know your place.
I don't think that 'Vida' is just for Latinos. I don't think 'One Day at a Time''s just for Latinos.
When you get a bunch of Latinxs together, we get to handle our stories. A cultural shorthand happens.
The thing is about 'Vida,' we're telling a very simple family narrative. There's nothing fancy about it.
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.
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?
Putting on makeup before work is a meditative exercise. It incites me to think about how I'll tackle my day.
When you're a starving artist, you make do. It didn't matter that I didn't know where my rent was coming from.
Sometimes, when I was the only person of color in a room, you had to defend all the people of color everywhere.
So many times, shows say they're set somewhere - like in Chicago, 'The Good Wife' - but it doesn't feel like Chicago.
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.
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.
Glutton things, those are things that are dangerous for me. My grandma and my aunt died of diabetes; I'm borderline diabetic.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.'
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.''
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.'