Latinx Files: Why this TV writer is striking

Hi folks, it’s Fidel. I am out this week, but I’ve asked Alex Zaragoza to fill in for me this week. Zaragoza is a TV writer newly based in L.A. She was raised in San Diego and Tijuana and spent over a decade in media, most recently as the senior culture writer at Vice. She’s written for “Lopez vs. Lopez” and “Primo.”

In December 2007, I went to New York City for the first time, and the only touristy activity I asked to do was the NBC tour. That’s mad dorky, I’m aware, but with two immigrant parents who worked full time, TV raised me, arguably to an alarming extent.

I knew I wanted to be part of it somehow, someday, but as a border-raised Mexican, I didn’t know how you did it. Hollywood felt as close as the moon, even though I was just a couple hundred miles away in San Diego and Tijuana. In the meantime, I consumed TV until my eyes burned.

But that year, the corridors of 30 Rock were empty of exhausted, bustling writers as they were in the middle of a strike to secure a fair contract. The studios and networks that make up the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers dug in their heels, leading to a 100-day strike, over a billion dollars lost to Los Angeles’ local economy, and Landry killing a dude on “Friday Night Lights.” It was bad!

But what was hard-fought then still reverberates today as writers once-again picket in L.A. and New York to demand a fair contract, building upon what was at stake in 2007 and 2008. For a breakdown of all the major issues, check out the Los Angeles Times vast reporting on the strike.

It’s probably not a surprise that Latinx writers and other underrepresented writers in the industry are being hit the hardest by the issues on the table. I’m starting to learn this firsthand.

After about 15 years in media, I began writing for TV in 2021, making good on my fantastical dreams of being in a writers’ room pitching jokes about dog erections. (Shout out to Shea Serrano and Mike Schur for giving me my big break and for not firing me from “Primo” for pitching dog erection jokes.) It felt like a miracle, considering Latinx people are severely underrepresented in Hollywood. Ready for a bunch of increasingly depressing links to support this? Here goes: No mames. Ugh. Quiere llorar? Damn. This hella sucks big time.

I’m learning the ins and outs of this industry and navigating how to build and sustain a successful career in Hollywood as a Latinx woman. As I hit the picket line alongside my fellow TV and film writers, I keep high in mind what the future could look like based on the present, and it’s terrifying.

Christina Piña and Jorge Rivera are chair and vice chair, respectively, of the Writers Guild of America’s Latinx Writers Committee, an affinity group that studies and advocates for diversity, equity and inclusion for Latinx writers in the WGA. The group is one of 12 committees focusing on issues facing underrepresented writers in the industry. (Writers can be part of multiple groups.) Piña, who worked on the Starz series “Power” and the CW reboot of “Charmed,” and Rivera, who wrote on the Fox procedural “APB” and has several Latinx series in development, broke down the ways Latinx writers are affected by the current state of writing in Hollywood.

Although there are countless concerns, Piña and Rivera say the biggest hurdles Latinx writers face are around entry into the industry, career advancement and a lack of investment in Latinx stories and, therefore, Latinx talent.

“It’s the same for all BIPOC and underrepresented groups,” says Rivera, “but for some reason we’re suffering some of the worst numbers in terms of employment in front of and behind the camera.”

To borrow a question once posed by Cardi B: WHAT IS THE REASON?!

The WGA currently has about 800 self-identified Latinx members out of approximately 10,000. In 2021, The Times took a deep dive into Latinx representation in Hollywood. It was reported that since 2008, Latinx people have “never constituted more than 5% of employed WGA film writers,” based on available data.

In 2019, Latino TV writers made up “8.7% of employed television writers as measured by the WGA, up from 2.5% in 2008,” The Times reported. When you factor in that Latinx people are the second-largest demographic in the U.S., per the U.S. census, that disparity becomes even more staggering. When we are so prevalent everywhere, it’s glaring when we are nowhere to be found in certain spaces. Anyone without a powerful parent can tell you that entry and advancement in those rooms is not easy, but why’s it gotta be so hard for us?

In a writer’s room, there are three levels of writers: lower level; midlevel writers with a few years under their belt; and the most experienced, the upper levels. Showrunners are the big bosses on a show — sometimes they are wonderful, generous people, and sometimes they are demons forged in the deep, fiery waters of the devil’s jacuzzi.

Rivera and Piña say there’s a big bottleneck in the lower and upper levels. Writers start as entry-level staff writers, Rivera explains. Sometimes they come out of a diversity program run by a studio, where the studio pays for their salary for one season, meaning the writer’s salary comes at no cost to the show’s overall budget. What’s been happening is that if a show gets a second season, that writer is often replaced with another free writer to save on budget, or is asked to repeat the staff writer position (sometimes multiple times) instead of advancing to a story editor position, which would mean doubling the salary and ensuring a script fee as mandated by the minimum basic agreement.

There are showrunners who will work the budget to ensure lower-level writers can advance, but there are many factors involved in that decision, mostly budgetary and, if we’re being honest, moral. They have to care. Ultimately, it’s at their discretion how much they care to help writers advance, but they also have to fight studio pressures to remain on budget when making the choice.

This issue gets exacerbated by the relatively new practice of “mini-rooms,” the practice of hiring small groups of writers, and short orders of series (fewer episodes per season). Writers struggle to find jobs, can’t advance when they do and because seasons are shorter, they’re having to scavenge for as much work as they can find to survive.

The second biggest bottleneck is at the upper level. According to Rivera, capable, experienced Latinx writers at the executive producer level rarely get the opportunity to become showrunners, or are offered low pay to do the job. Classic America. “We’re talking about not just Latino shows, but any show,” he says. “They’re qualified and they’re not being hired. It’s a systemic problem that has to do with bias and studios undervaluing Latinos and people of color.”

Those who are most likely to hire us, essentially, aren’t given the opportunity to be in a position to do so. Many executives lean on algorithmic data to determine a show’s possible success, and therefore who and what to invest in. On one occasion, Piña was asked whether a show she pitched revolving around Cubans could be switched to Mexicans simply because Mexico is bigger, and a bigger country means more people and therefore more people willing to watch a show about Mexicans. Our stories and identities are interchangeable so long as there’s a profit to be made. Machine must have a hit! Cuban is Mexican, Mexican is Cuban, who cares! Machine demands a hit!

“The thing about entertainment is you don’t really know what’s gonna be a hit until you try it,” says Piña. “You have to hope that buyers are willing to take a chance on you. A good show travels no matter what audience it’s intended for, but there’s this misconception from executives at the top that a show that is predominantly Latino will only be for Latino audiences, whereas Latino audiences watch a variety of things.”

Meaning we’re a risk. It’s not hard to see the xenophobic undertones of that very notion, and how it reflects our place in our society overall.

The wave of streaming networks created what has been dubbed “peak TV” led to higher demand for original series and films to fill their libraries and, as a result, greater opportunities for people of color to make content. But now in its struggle era, Latinx creators and other underrepresented creators are the first to feel the negative impacts. Even at peak TV’s high, those same groups suffered, effectively set up for failure.

“As Latino creatives especially, we have witnessed people really struggle to sell their shows, struggle to get into those rooms with buyers, really struggle to have their agency take out their material because they said it would never sell,” Piña says. “Those are things that happen in Hollywood all the time. But as soon as these mergers happen, as soon as they have to tighten their belts, the first shows to get canceled are people-of-color shows.”

What does this all mean for Latinx writers and their future in Hollywood? To be honest, everything mentioned above barely scratches the surface of the mess we’re in, and again, we share many of these issues with our colleagues across the board. The WGA is actively working to address these issues, but it’s hard not to feel as though you’re staring upon the bleakest dystopia, where we’re all replaced by artificial intelligence that will take our jobs and erase our very humanity with every beep beep boop boop. Writing will become an even greater gig economy in which we have to mine for jobs that will afford us basic survival, at best.

That is, unless we fight. And that’s what we’re doing on the picket line every day until this contract is secured. This is a matter of not just our very existence, but a critical moment in the labor movement all together. The outcome of this strike will affect creative industries across the board and negatively impact the economy of L.A. and that of the country as a whole. And those who will suffer the most are the workers. Accepting that without a fight is the biggest risk of all.

— Alex Zaragoza

Things we read this week that we think you should read

— The Times’ Raul Roa spoke with asylum seekers in Somerton, Ariz., as they arrived in the U.S. Many are gathered at the border in anticipation of the planned lifting of Title 42 on May 11. The decades-old measure, invoked by former President Trump in 2020, blocked asylum seekers and other migrants from entering the U.S. and allowed border officials to immediately expel them to Mexico under the guise of COVID-19 spread prevention.

— Construction worker Antelmo Ramirez died while on the job at the site of the Tesla Gigafactory near Austin, Texas, in 2021. Gus Bova of the Texas Observer spent five months investigating the circumstances surrounding the 57-year-old’s death. What Bova found revealed Texas’ insufficient governmental protections for manual laborers and Tesla’s failure to thoroughly report accidents in compliance filings. Read Bova’s investigation here.

— For Axios, Russell Contreras and Astrid Galván wrote back in March 2022 about the visible rise of white nationalist Latinxs in the U.S., which, along with centuries-long anti-Black and antisemitic views among Latinxs, has been bolstered by the spread of online misinformation. Their reporting seems especially pertinent in light of the recent mall shooting in Allen, Texas — in which the suspected gunman, Mauricio Garcia, had Nazi tattoos and had posted neo-Nazi content online — and the death of eight people in Brownsville, Texas, after a man, whom authorities identified as George Alvarez, drove his SUV into a crowd of people waiting for a bus outside a migrant shelter on Sunday.

— Times columnist LZ Granderson grilled Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in his latest piece, noting that with each mass shooting that occurs in Texas, Abbott’s ineptitude shines through. “It’s not just that he’s a gun owner and a Republican, because let’s face it, elected officials from both parties cash gun-lobby checks,” Granderson wrote. “It’s his very public mishandling of the gun-violence epidemic that sets him apart.”

— Championship-winning NFL quarterback Joe Kapp died Monday at the age of 85. The Times’ Gustavo Arellano paid tribute to the impact of Kapp’s famous 1970 Sports Illustrated cover that boldly proclaimed the Mexican American player “The Toughest Chicano.”

— Carlos De Loera