When you're a starving artist, you make do. It didn't matter that I didn't know where my rent was coming from.

In TV, you're a 'writer for hire.' That means you're trying to guess what your boss wants and delivering that story. There's a lot of spitballing. The big thing is 'breaking story,' which means coming up with a story. You do it by episode and put it all up on a board.

I always was missing that female brown queer perspective, and I think in 'Vida' we have that. A lot of things I wanted to touch on and deal with, I get to do here.

I went in for a meeting with Marta Fernandez, and she said, 'We are looking for a female millennial show. Have you heard of the term 'chipster'?' And I was like, 'Of course - Chicana hipster.'

I'm a child of the sixties. I grew up with a president who was a crook, who put us into the most unpopular war in history, who had no communication with people under thirty. I had seen the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Panthers and the Diggers; I understood what they were about.

We live in a time when fictitious election results elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons.

And I've come to the place where I believe that there's no way to solve these problems, these issues - there's nothing that we can do that will solve the problems that we have and keep the peace, unless we solve it through God, unless we solve it in being our highest self. And that's a pretty tall order.

There is no alternative to peace. There is no sense to go to war.