“The sky is the limit”

I left Catalonia in 2009, right at the beginning of the crisis, because it was very hard to find a job in the field I studied, which was Media and Communications. So I took a leap of faith and applied to UCLA to do a Master’s in Entertainment studies and got in. My hope was always to come back, because I love Barcelona and I’m very attached to my family and friends. I never thought I’d be away for more than a year but life takes you to unexpected places sometimes and I’m still here. I’ve always wanted to be in the entertainment industry, and Hollywood is the place to be.

Absolutely. I’ve been here for 13 years and it was very hard at first because I had no connections at all before moving to LA and I had to build them from zero. On top of that, my English wasn’t that great at that time and getting a work permit was extremely hard. But once I got my foot in the door I’ve been blessed by working non-stop and in many different areas of the entertainment industry. I was an assistant at a top Talent Agency [WME, that reps Keanu Reeves, Jared Leto, Bardem, Tarantino] for one year, I worked at a film distribution company for almost two and finally I landed at LATV.

It’s the first bicultural national TV network in the US to target millennial Latinos across the country through bilingual content. I started there as the Talent Booker and within a year I became a reporter and then after three years a writer and executive producer of our all-female talk show Get it Girl. That would’ve taken me years to achieve in Catalonia. Here people are more likely to give you the chance if you’ve proven that you can and want to do it.

After Life Vacation was a short I wrote a year after my dad passed away, which was the hardest time of my life. My therapist suggested I should use writing as catharsis and transform the pain into something else. So the short started with the premise of what if dying is just the beginning of a new adventure, and it soon became a sci fi, rom-com about who you would like to spend eternity with if you could choose. I shot it with my husband, who is a director, and it did very well on the festival circuit. There are four amazing Catalan actors in it: Jano Sanvicente, Anna Vinyas, Sergi Cervera and Valeria Gonzalez. As for L.A.tinas, it’s a pilot I wrote based on my group of LA girlfriends who are all Latinas. I was very upset that Latinas always get the same type of stories: the maids, the narcas, the cholas... but that was not at all my experience, so I wrote a dramedy inspired by my amazing group of friends who have been my rock all these years. It’s a love letter to our friendship because without them I would probably have come back to Barcelona many years ago. LA is a very tough city and if you don’t have a support group it’s very hard to succeed. We submitted it to Warner Media, who were selecting just four projects for a new partnership with HBO and we got in! Now we’re in pre-development and so we’ll see what happens, but I’m very excited. I always say I lost my father but I gained an angel because he’s always looking out for me.

The weather is pretty amazing if you like sunny days 360 days a year. And everything is possible. If you work hard and are determined you can achieve whatever you set your mind to; the sky’s the limit, really, and I never felt that anywhere else.

There are things about the system that clearly don’t work; for instance, health care is extremely expensive and flawed. Also, there are a lot of homeless people camping around the city, something you would never see in Catalonia. I wish the government had better programmes and shelters for them.

My loved ones, the food, and something just as simple as a good baguette. In the 13 years I’ve been here I haven’t found a bakery with good bread and in Barcelona there’s one on almost every corner! I took them for granted but now I miss them!

Motivation. Giving 100% in everything I do and always lifting others along the way. In Catalonia, the general attitude in life is just to get by whereas here it’s “do your best”.