NEA Arts Magazine Spotlight: Diane Rodriguez: Sharing the Latina Experience
by Rebecca Sutton (excerpt)
Mar 28, 2018

(1) Writer, 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.

(2) 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
(3) 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.

Select the correct text in the passage.
Which statement best builds on Diane Rodriguez's point that minorities are still crowded out of leadership roles?

(5) I think leadership in the theater is the number one challenge still. There are still very few women of color in managerial positions and executive positions. There has never been a Latina who has run a LORT [League of Resident Theatres] theater, and certainly not a Mexican-American woman. I have tried to get in those doors.

(6) We still need more writers of color. We've made advances, certainly, and there are a lot of talented writers. But I do think that it's very, very hard for a woman of color to be a playwright full-time. I think that will change with the generations—I'm very hopeful for that. There are organizations like Theatre Communications Group that really help us, giving us the platforms, setting us up. We need more organizations that can help in that way. It's happening, but it's slow.