The most stunning thing about Vida is that, for a moment, it felt foreign to me. The new Starz series (currently in the middle of its first, brief six-episode season, is about Emma and Lyn) two Mexican-American sisters who return to their East Los Angeles hometown after the death of their mother. In American pop culture, that Latin experience is often homogenized, recognizable to much of us but never terribly specific. But Vida isn't like that. Characters in Vida used words I'd never heard, dipped into folklore that I never saw firsthand, played music that was uniquely Mexican. And it doesn't bother to translate or explain itself. The show is unapologetically Mexican-American, taking on issues of concern to the community in East Los Angeles. There's the gentefication—the phenomenon where Latinx people are coerced or convinced to help sell out their neighborhoods to the gentrifiers. There's also the dynamics between the working class Mexican-Americans, and the privileged whites, and what it's like to be a queer woman in Latin spaces.

At a time in which much of the country feels hostile to anyone of Latinx descent, it feels like a miracle that Vida exists. It's a beautifully poignant and specific portrait of an experience familiar to me but also different in a way that didn't seem possible mere years ago. To shed a little more light on it, I spoke with creator Tanya Saracho about speaking Spanglish, trying to fit in with white people, and what she calls "The Brown Gaze."

GQ: I really appreciate the unapologetic specificity of Vida—your Spanglish is not my Spanglish, there are words that characters use in Vida that I've never heard before.

Tanya Saracho: What's your ancestry?

I'm Puerto Rican on one side and Guatemalan on the other, so it's a bit weird.

Oh yeah. I get it. It's just, different worlds! Dominicans have different Spanglish than Puerto Ricans or Cubans, you know?

Yeah! And it's cool that in Vida there's no suggestion that you're presenting a universal Latinx experience, like there even is such a thing, right?

Exactly. 27 countries make up the Latin diaspora. How is there gonna be, like, one united experience? Even in the country, the Mexican and the Mexican-American experiences are vastly different.

Do you worry that people might treat Vida like a universal take on the Latinx experience?

Five years ago, when I first got to Hollywood I started working on the show Devious Maids, and at these meetings they would ask me, "So why do you think there hasn't been at this point, five years ago, a successful Latinx show?" And we weren't using the term Latinx either. And I ventured to guess that it was because, when it had been attempted, it had been like, "Let's see if we can get the whole experience!" Even if it was about a Mexican American family, they were trying to also please this whole umbrella, you know? And I think the way we're gonna get this is by [being] really specific with Latinidad. I think a Dominican can watch this, or a Chilean, and find commonalities [as well as] stuff we don't share—espescially because this is about Mexican Americans from the East Side of Los Angeles.

That's really specific. If we were shooting this where I grew up, in South Texas, the lingo would be a bit different too, you know? So I've always thought that the more specific you are, the more universal you can be. [People ask] "are you gonna deal with immigration?" Or, you know, DACA, or ICE. And I was like, let's see if we can do it in a way that feels true to life. A lot of us walk in this world but we don't wear the worry all the time—some of us do, but we're not, like, issues all day, being didactic about it. We're just having our lived experiences. 'Cause the Latinx television movement is gonna happen [laughs]. We're gonna have our black-ish, our Empire, our Power.

Alex Welsh/Redux

It's kind of a relief to watch Vida and find that specificity, even if it isn't quite mine—a lot of the job of covering entertainment requires me to just like, forget about myself—

Oh that's so fucking tragic. You're right, whenever we consume, we have to forget about ourselves. I'm sorry, keep going.