[3] His parents were both involved in the Chicano Movement from the late 1960s into the 1970s while living in San Diego, and Rivas' honorary godfather at his baptism was civil rights leader Rodolfo Gonzales.
In 1993, after having interned with El Teatro Campesino for nearly two seasons, Rivas along with three other classmates (Manuel Montez, Leonard Maestas and Renee Sola) founded Chicano TheatreWorks,[6] a company created in response to the passage of California Proposition 187.
As a student in the Professional Directors Training Program, he studied under M. Burke Walker (founder of the acclaimed Empty Space Theatre in Seattle, Washington) and Valerie Curtis-Newton.
[7][9] During his final year of graduate studies, he completed a Directing Fellowship with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, serving as assistant director on their productions of Othello, The Good Person of Szechwan, and Rosmersholm.
[11] Tlaloc Rivas started writing and directing plays in California and has since then done the same in other states including New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Mexico, Washington, and Iowa.
[7] In the early 2000s, Rivas was selected for the Career Development Program for Directors,[13] administered by Theatre Communications Group and the National Endowment of the Arts.
Through this program, he assisted and observed many esteemed stage directors, including Oskar Eustis on Homebody/Kabul, Emily Mann on Anna in the Tropics, Joseph Chaikin on Shut-Eye, and Lisa Peterson on Chavez Ravine by Culture Clash.
In 2009, Rivas directed an acclaimed production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht at Queens College and the following year he took the position of assistant professor of theatre at The University of Missouri- St. Louis.
[16] In addition to this recognition, Rivas has also been a recipient of the Sir John Gielgud Fellowship in Classical Directing and honored by a Most Ambitious Production award from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for The New World.