Vida creator and showrunner Tanya Saracho has been trying to create the roles she didnt have at the beginning of her career and make it possible for others to do the same.

She had trained in acting in Boston Universitys theater program and studied Shakespeare at Oxford. But after college, when she moved to Chicago to start her theater career, the only roles available to her were what she calls Maria roles: often maids or prostitutes, with just one line.

It was like, Wait, Im classically trained for this?! she says now. It was like, Yes, Mr. Johnson. Like, that was the line. That was it. And so I would see these same Latinas at the auditions. I would see an Afro-Dominican, and I would see a blond Cuban, and I would see myself. All of us were so different, and yet we were going for the same Maria role. I was writing plays already, so I was like, We have to do something!

So Saracho found ways to create work and spaces for herself and other Latinx theater artists, like co-founding an all-Latina theater company, Teatro Luna, where she wrote and directed original plays, and the Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists (ALTA) of Chicago, an organization for building solidarity among Latinx theater artists in Chicago.

In 2012, when she started writing for TV, she found there was the same urgency to create opportunities for herself and other Latinx writers and creators. Its an all-too-common experience for people who are among the first or only in their fields: working to build spaces to elevate each others work often out of necessity.

For years, Latinx audiences have been a major source of revenue for Hollywood. Yet their stories make up a disproportionately low portion of what gets told on screen. As a recent study from the University of Southern Californias Annenberg Inclusion Initiative 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, its often as side characters and in stereotypical roles like the ones Saracho kept encountering, audition after audition. Its still exceedingly rare for Latinx artists to get substantive and long-lasting opportunities to tell their stories and see their full selves reflected on screen.

In every space that Im in, its sort of necessary, which is kind of sad that we have to create it ourselves, she said. Not that there arent those spaces, but sometimes its like theyre created by the dominant culture to check boxes like, OK, well, we have that for inclusion and diversity. Great. But sometimes theyre not effective, or they actually are not giving access. Its more cosmetic.