Visibility as Resistance
For many Latinas, the instinct to shrink – to speak softly, laugh quietly, dress to disappear – starts young and compounds over decades. Johanna Toruño, the queer Salvadoran-born, Virginia-raised, Los Angeles-based artist behind The Unapologetic Street Series, has built her entire creative practice around dismantling that instinct, one public installation at a time.
The Architecture of Making Yourself Small
The pattern is familiar to an enormous number of Latina women: covering curves under oversized sweatshirts in the middle of summer, muffling laughter with a hand pressed over the mouth, swallowing coughs until they become that dry, persistent scratch at the back of the throat. These are not random habits. They are adaptations – trained responses to an environment that signals, both through whispered social pressure and outright declaration, that being too visible, too opinionated, too ambitious, or simply too much carries real consequences.
The cultural messaging runs deep. Virtue gets attached to selflessness. Safety gets attached to agreeableness. And the result, across generations and across communities, is a particular kind of disappearing act – physical and emotional at once, performed so consistently it stops feeling like performance and starts feeling like personality.
That pressure is not operating in a vacuum right now. Immigration anxiety – the documented psychological experience of fearing being stopped, detained, watched, or profiled – reshapes how people move through cities, which spaces they enter, and how comfortable they feel being seen at all. When the political climate is actively producing rhetoric that tells an entire community it does not belong, the instinct to take up less space intensifies. The body responds to threat by getting smaller.
What gets lost in that contraction is harder to quantify but not hard to identify. Ambition deferred. Laughter suppressed. Opinions that never make it out of the room. The question Toruño’s work keeps returning to is a pointed one: what could these communities actually gain if more women within them felt entitled to be fully present?
The Unapologetic Street Series and the Sin Vergüenza Conversation
Toruño appears in the latest episode of Sin Vergüenza, a podcast produced by Somos, to dig into exactly that question. The conversation centers on the specific messages and expectations that teach Latina women to make themselves smaller, and on what active resistance to those messages looks like in practice – not as abstract self-help concept, but as something lived and made visible.
The Unapologetic Street Series is Toruño’s answer in visual form. Street art is, by definition, a refusal to be contained – it occupies public space without asking permission, addresses audiences who did not opt in, and insists on being seen by everyone moving through a given block or neighborhood. Choosing that form as a vehicle for Latina visibility is not incidental. The medium mirrors the message.
Toruño’s identity threads through the work directly. As a queer woman born in El Salvador and raised in Virginia before relocating to Los Angeles, she operates across multiple communities simultaneously – and across multiple sets of expectations about what she should look like, sound like, and how much room she should occupy in any given space. That layered experience feeds directly into what The Unapologetic Street Series asks of the people who encounter it.
The Sin Vergüenza episode frames the conversation not as individual self-improvement but as something with a communal dimension. The title itself – which translates roughly to “without shame” – positions shamelessness not as a character flaw but as a political stance. For Latina women navigating immigration crackdowns, threats to rights, and a political environment that has made their belonging explicitly conditional, refusing shame becomes something more than personal growth.
Toruño’s work and the podcast episode both push back against the idea that visibility is a luxury available only once safety is guaranteed. The argument, implicitly and explicitly, runs the other direction: that visibility itself is part of how communities assert their right to exist, their permanence, their refusal to disappear on demand.
Sin Vergüenza, Somos, and the Ongoing Conversation
Sin Vergüenza by Somos has been building its audience as a space specifically designed to hold conversations that affect Latina communities – not as niche content but as the main event. The decision to bring Toruño in for this particular episode connects the artistic and the political without flattening either. Her work on the street and her presence in the conversation both operate from the same premise: that taking up space is not an act of aggression but an act of survival.
Toruño started The Unapologetic Street Series as a project, and what it has become is a body of work that insists on Latina visibility in literal public space – walls, sidewalks, the built environment that most people walk past without thinking about who it reflects and who it ignores. Whether the next installation lands in Los Angeles or somewhere else entirely, the tension it creates remains the same: who gets to be seen here, and who decided?
