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 (). 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

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

Saracho took part in the creation of numerous works through , 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.

Saracho parted with the group in January 2010 to focus on playwriting. The same year, she 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".

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

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 from March 26 to April 24, 2011. 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.

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. In 2014, Saracho 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''. 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. Between seasons of ''Looking'', Saracho worked on ''The Tenth Muse'', an all-female play set in a convent in Colonial Mexico.

Television: As showrunner

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

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

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

She is also developing another series with Big Beach called , based on her 2007 play , which will follow four Afro-Caribbean / Latinx Chicagoans within the counter-culture.

Awards and recognition

Saracho was named the Best New Playwright by ''Chicago'' magazine, one of the nine national by ''Café'' magazine and given the first award in theater by the National Museum of Mexican Art. She has also won the Goodman's Ofner Prize, a 3Arts Artists Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished New Play Development Project Grant with About Face Theater. In January 2019, she was presented with the 2019 Final Draft New Voice Award for Television and won the 2019 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comedy Series for .

In June 2020, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first LGBTQ Pride parade, ''Queerty'' named her among the fifty heroes “leading the nation toward equality, acceptance, and dignity for all people”.

Personal life

Saracho identifies as queer and has a mainly LGBTQ+ social circle. She was diagnosed with diabetes in 2010, of which there is a family history. She has also spoken about suffering from anxiety and impostor syndrome.

By 2008, as a green card-holder, she was the only member of her family who had not naturalized to American citizenship, being unready to renounce her Mexican citizenship. She has said that in 2008, she chose to become a U.S. citizen in order to vote for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

Saracho grew up in the trans-border area between and Texas – a frequent setting for her plays – however she considers herself a Chicagoan. She has also spoken out about racism that she has experienced in Chicago.

She grew up, went to school and to college with fellow Mexican-American actor Raúl Castillo, who she was in a relationship with as a teenager. Castillo is featured in a key episode for his character in ''Looking''. After being disowned by her father in 2014, Saracho took a 2-week trip to Scotland, inspired by her love of ''Outlander''.

Saracho has cited a number of individuals as influences, including the 17th-century nun , African-American playwrights and professors Lynn Nottage and Lydia R. Diamond, Cuban-American avant-garde playwright , British director Caroline Eves, and LGBT writer and director Luis Alfaro

List of works

Theatre

* ''Generic Latina'' (2001)
* ' ("Let Me Tell You", 2001)
* (2002)
* ''The María Chronicles'' (2003)
* ("Electricity", 2004, performing as Vecina)
* (2005 and reworked in 2006)
* ("Removing Myths", 2006, 3 female characters)
* (2007, 4 female monologues, 1 by Saracho)
* (2007)
* (2007)
* (2008, 5 female)
* ''Our Lady of the Underpass'' (2009, 2 male, 4 female)
* ''The House on Mango Street'' (2009)
* (2011, 1 male, 4 female)
* ''Song for the Disappeared'' (2012)
* ''The Tenth Muse'' (2013, 7 female)
* ''The Good Private'' (2013)
* ("Weed", 2014, 4 female)
* ''Hushabye'' (2014, 3 male, 2 female)
* Fade (2016, 1 male, 1 female)

Television

Notes

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Saracho, Tanya
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
American actresses of Mexican descent
American dramatists and playwrights
American television writers
American writers of Mexican descent
21st-century Mexican actresses
21st-century Mexican women writers
Mexican feminist writers
Mexican stage actresses
Mexican television writers
Mexican women dramatists and playwrights
Mexican women screenwriters
Chicana feminists
Hispanic and Latino American dramatists and playwrights
Screenwriters from Texas
American showrunners
American women television writers
Writers from Chicago
Writers from Sinaloa
American queer actresses
Queer dramatists and playwrights
Queer screenwriters
Mexican LGBTQ actors
Mexican LGBTQ dramatists and playwrights
American LGBTQ dramatists and playwrights
Mexican LGBTQ screenwriters
American LGBTQ screenwriters
LGBTQ television producers
American women television producers
LGBTQ Hispanic and Latino American people
21st-century American screenwriters
21st-century American women writers
LGBTQ women writers