Four years ago, Jacqueline Priego began working on a script that would tackle many of the injustices she saw facing Latinas: a daunting pay gap that means Latinas make about 54 cents for every dollar a white man makes and a lack of access to social networks. She wanted to bring awareness to those experiences but also to make it entertaining.
“I saw the retention rates when it came to Latino students at the university, and it was abysmal,” Priego says. As an aeronautical engineering student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she started to notice the difference between her and her peers. She says she saw the downward trend of Latinas in attendance as she and her classmates moved into the professional sector. “We weren’t as well prepared as our colleagues. We didn’t understand the roles and the politics of work life, and that held us back.”
Priego found that in spite (or because) of these career setbacks, Latina women were becoming entrepreneurs in large numbers. She incorporated that into the basis of her new web series, “PinkSlipped," which follows a group of Latinas through their unfulfilling jobs, layoffs and hopes of starting something new.
In the web series, which is being released in the fall, Jacqueline (Priego) is struggling at her nonprofit job between workplace drama, her boss’s unrealistic demands and her overwhelming schedule. The irony is that Jacqueline works at a nonprofit aimed at helping women of color internationally. However, the environment is toxic for just about every woman there, including three pregnant co-workers Jacqueline’s boss is trying to replace. Jacqueline’s demanding job causes friction between her and her friends, Elena (Samantha Ramirez-Herrera) and Rosie (Ana Ayora). It gets in the way of their plans of starting their own side project, a web-based outlet. Both Elena and Rosie are counting on their business idea as the only way out of their situations: Elena works at an exploitative magazine aimed at Latinas and a layoff is costing Rosie her apartment and soon, everything else she knows.
“The show is mainly about power,” says Priego. “Who has that power, who doesn’t have that power. You would think in the nonprofit space with a strong female CEO that she would have your back, right? I really wanted to show that that’s not always the case. And it’s not specific to Jacqueline because she’s a Latina.”
“I really wanted to show how when we go into those spaces that we think are Latino-owned, Latino-friendly, it doesn’t always mean it is,” she says.
Elena’s boss, Diego, pointedly reminds her that even though she graduated from an Ivy League school, he still sees her as a risk he took on, as opposed to the several other white men in the office. When Elena speaks out about her treatment, it backfires.
Rosie’s story isn’t fully explained until later episodes. Painfully, she hides her troubles from her two friends, and her actions feel personally motivated against them. In the end, we see that Rosie’s issues were tied to her immigration status.
Priego’s brother-in-law, Michael Estrella, became a co-director on the series while helping Priego visualize her story.
Shot within the span of the week, Priego was grateful for her family’s help. “I originally thought I was going to film the web series on my iPhone,” she says.
While the plot does feature a series of bad ex-boyfriends, Priego didn’t want to let the romantic subplot outshine the relationship Jacqueline has with her friends.
“When I was writing it, I thought this needs to be true to me,” she says. “I was just so over it with the same stereotypes and the storylines that were so negative to Latinos. Even looking at how the characters dressed, where they lived, where they having lunch at — those are all very deliberate decisions.“
“We have to move past the bias. We have to show how multidimensional Latina experiences are in the United States and really own our narrative,” Priego says. “Our time is now to tell our own stories.”
