Ligiah Villalobos Rojas was an executive at The Walt Disney Company, where part of her job was to review scripts written by fellows in the Writing Fellowship Program, giving each script the detailed feedback known as “executive notes.” Villalobos Rojas already had decades of experience as a Current and Development executive on various primetime television shows. But one day, after she shared her notes, one of the fellows asked her if she was a writer. She brought insights and thoughtfulness that marked her as not just an executive but an artist.
This question surprised Villalobos Rojas, who today is an alum of both Antioch University’s BA in Liberal Studies and its MFA in Creative Writing. Despite having read thousands of scripts and having a deep understanding of Hollywood’s inner workings, she had never considered herself a writer. And she had never seriously considered writing screenplays. Up to that point, her writing had been confined to keeping a journal and having the practice of writing three “morning pages” each day—one of the creative exercises in the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. But the question lingered. “Are you a writer?” she asked herself again and again over the coming years.
Eventually, she decided to explore this question in earnest. She enrolled in writing courses at Santa Monica College and began a journey that would eventually lead to her writing and producing a hit indy feature film, getting her MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch, and becoming an established Hollywood screenwriter of movies, television shows, and scripted podcasts.
From Mexico City to Hollywood
Villalobos Rojas has navigated a demanding and rewarding career as a producer, writer, cultural consultant, and tenured professor. Across these different roles, Villalobos Rojas’ identity as a Mexican woman who immigrated to the United States as a child is formative to how she approaches her professional life. As she explains, “One of the things that has really guided my creative career is to make sure that I am putting images out into the world that show a different perspective of what it is to be a Mexican or what it is to be a person of color or what it is to be a Latino.”
Villalobos Rojas moved to the United States when she was eleven to live with her mother, who had accepted a job as a professional translator in Salt Lake City, Utah. This move meant leaving her father in Mexico City, with whom she had lived since she was five. Unlike the more widely told stories of immigration that involve being smuggled across borders and living for years without documents, Villalobos Rojas arrived in the U.S. with legal residency, which meant she didn’t live under the constant threat of deportation. “When you don’t have to hide, when you’re not in danger of getting deported, and when you didn’t come to this country for a better life, but because your mother was offered a job as a translator, you arrive with a very different perspective,” says Villalobos Rojas. She says that these circumstances meant she never felt pressure to assimilate her identity. Instead, she learned to take pride in her rich cultural heritage.
However, settling into her new life and environment, Villalobos Rojas grappled with profound and complex emotions of abandonment. Being separated from her father and the country she had grown up in was painful. Decades later, these feelings inspired her to write and executive produce the feature-length film Under the Same Moon (in Spanish, La misma luna), which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, was an official selection there, and soon sold to two studios, Fox Searchlight and The Weinstein Company for $5 million, becoming the highest-selling Spanish-language film in the history of Sundance.
Villalobos Rojas thinks that the success of this film came from the universality of the feeling of having been abandoned. “Whether you came to this country documented or undocumented, or whether you are an immigrant in this country, the thing that we all have in common is that we have all experienced abandonment,” she says. “Whether it’s by our best friend, whether it’s a boyfriend, whether it’s by the death of our grandmother—whatever it may be, we have all experienced abandonment.”
Villalobos Rojas’ identity and lived experiences have not only inspired personal projects but have also been a source of valuable knowledge as a consultant for multiple projects in Hollywood, including the Academy Award-winning animated movie Coco.
Today, however, as she reflects on this and other experiences, she notes that the notion of a cultural consultant has undergone tidal changes over the last decade. “White people have been telling our stories for centuries,” explains Villalobos Rojas. This pattern can’t be disrupted simply by inviting a Latinx person to give advice to the director and screenwriters. As she says, “Writers have really pushed back on this idea of just consulting on a show. There’s a phrase… ‘No story about us, without us.’ If you’re going to tell this story, you better hire us and not just as consultants. We should be the storytellers, the directors, the producers.”
Numerous directors and producers—some quite acclaimed—have invited Villalobos Rojas to consider consulting on their projects over the years. Often, instead of simply accepting the job, she has found herself explaining why her Mexican heritage alone does not qualify her as a cultural consultant. Some projects require in-depth knowledge of pre-colonial history, preferably (and this is where she offers her advice) from an anti-colonial perspective. “Being a Mexican, or being a Latina does not make me an expert on all things Mexican or Latin American.”
More and more, the film industry is beginning to realize that stories can’t be made authentic as a later step in the process of creating a film. As Villalobos Rojas puts it, “The authenticity of a story can’t depend only on consultants. The authentic story has to come from the people at the top, and that shift is currently happening.”
Finishing Her BA at Antioch
Building a career in Hollywood and becoming a writer were not the goals Villalobos Rojas imagined for herself as a young person setting out into the world. Instead, as a recent high school grad, she pursued her passion for ballroom dancing at Brigham Young University, which had one of the nation’s top amateur ballroom dancing programs. She took dancing extremely seriously and thought that this would form the basis of her career. But between her junior and senior years of college, only semesters away from finishing a double degree in Dance and Cultural Geography, she suffered a series of injuries. Abruptly, her dreams seemed unattainable.
That summer, with only two semesters standing between her and a degree, Villalobos Rojas moved to Los Angeles to live with family and find a summer job. Her summer job led to a permanent job in advertising and radio, and she stayed in LA rather than going back to finish her senior year that fall. The opportunities kept unfolding, leading her deeper into the world of Hollywood and further away from completing the final credits for her degree.
Fast forward to 2011, when Villalobos Rojas was volunteering for Obama’s second presidential campaign, she began speaking with another volunteer who shared their positive experience studying at Antioch University. Antioch? Villalobos Rojas had never heard of this university. The other volunteer told her that Antioch would accept previously earned credits from other schools and that it wouldn’t require her to choose between being a student and continuing her career. This last detail was of great importance to someone like Villalobos Rojas, who already had a well-established professional life. By the end of the call, Villalobos Rojas promised herself that she would look into this university.
Villalobos Rojas had never stopped wanting to finish a bachelor’s degree. So after getting this tip from that volunteer, she enrolled in the BA in Liberal Studies at Antioch’s Los Angeles campus. By 2013, she completed her undergraduate degree with a concentration in creative writing.
From Screenwriting to Prose and Back to Storytelling
The next year, Villalobos Rojas came back to Antioch, this time for the two-year, low-residency MFA in Creative Writing. For this degree, she had decided that she wanted to study a genre of writing completely different from screenwriting. She boldly struck out as a writer of prose fiction.
During her MFA, Villalobos Rojas quickly learned that fiction prose writers have a penchant for intricate, long descriptions. This writing style challenged the economy of language she had developed over two decades of screenwriting. “The notes I would receive were like, ‘Your dialogue is fantastic, but more description, more description, more description!’” she says. This pushed her out of her comfort zone. As she explains, “I just found that super hard because I’ve been a screenwriter for twenty years.”
At first, Villalobos Rojas wondered why she would say something in ten sentences when she could say it in one. However, as she moved through the program, these skills enriched her screenwriting. Villalobos Rojas became more conscious of her stage directions, deepening into specific descriptions of what scenes should look like. As a result, when her scripts were developed she now found that directors’ choices aligned more closely with how she had imagined the scenes.
Coming from the highly collaborative world of TV and film production, where many people participate in shaping the outcome, Villalobos Rojas was captivated by how prose allowed her to control many—even all—of the steps leading to a final piece. “In prose, you are the director,” she says. “You are the writer. You are the choreographer. You are the location manager. You are the set designer. Prose forced me to be more detailed.”
Villalobos Rojas returned from this sojourn in the world of prose with a new set of tools and approaches to her work as a screenwriter. Recently she was a writer and executive producer at DreamWorks Animation. She also recently branched out into podcasting, writing the scripted podcast, Adelita: Changing the Key, which tells the story of a talented singer who finally has the courage to find her own voice. Villalobos Rojas describes the podcast as her “love letter to Latin music.”
A project that Villalobos Rojas is currently developing is an adaptation of Don Quijote into a modern-day musical television series set against the backdrop of contemporary New York City. “What if Lin Manuel wrote the score?” asks Villalobos Rojas. “And somebody like Anthony Ramos was Don Quijote? You know, Don Quijote was a dreamer, and I want to talk about the dream of an immigrant. Immigrants come because they have a greater dream for themselves. They have a greater dream for their family.” In many ways, this adaptation, if it ever gets made, will capture some of the story of Villalobos Rojas herself. As she puts it, “In my version of Don Quijote, these dreamers are also artists, dancers, producers, singers, and composers.”
