Answer:riter, director, and performer Diane Rodriguez has long been a part of the Latino artistic community, making her professional theater debut with El Teatro Campesino in the mid-1970s. In subsequent roles as co-director of the Latino Theater Initiative, board president of the Theatre Communications Group (TCG), associate artistic director of the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, and a member of the National Council on the Arts, she has consistently used her position to uplift traditionally unheard voices, most passionately those of Latinas.
In recent years, she has found her own voice as a playwright, sculpting title characters who are all strong women: Living Large centers on a Latina widow who remakes her life on her own; Itch revolves around a Latina social justice worker seeking to at least crack, if not break, the glass ceiling; and A Sweetheart Deal follows a young Latina’s trajectory into becoming a leader within the United Farm Workers Union. She has also reached an entirely new generation of young girls through her work writing and consulting on scripts for Mattel’s live Barbie productions and the Disney television show Elena of Avalor, which focuses on the adventures of a Latina princess. In the following edited interview, Rodriguez discusses the challenges and joys she has faced throughout her career as a Chicana theater artist.
PLANTING ROOTS
Being a Latina, Chicana, has affected my career greatly. I was going to go to graduate school. I applied to California Institute of the Arts, and I got turned down. The alternative was to join El Teatro Campesino—that was the best thing that ever happened to me. It opened my eyes to possibility, but it also rooted me in home, and in where I came from. It rooted me in the fields that my parents worked in, in the canneries that my mother toiled in as we were growing up. I never forgot the roots that I came from as I was launched into the world. Even now, even when I'm not necessarily doing Latino-specific work, those roots keep me anchored.
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