Sin Vergüenza by Somos

This week, Monica Veloz, aka Monica Style Muse joins us to share her experience with grief and having to show up online anyway. Veloz is a beloved Dominican American content creator and beauty influencer. She’s known for keeping it real! Whether it’s being honest about the challenges she faces as an Afro-Latina or her journey through motherhood, her audience feels seen.

Recently, though, she's been talking about something something taboo in Western culture: Grief. She's been grieving out loud after losing her mother to cancer. Both Monica and host, Raquel, have been grieving losses very publicly. Because Latines approach grief with openness and understanding. We collectively mourn, we build altars, we speak to our departed loved ones. Studies show that how we process grief and bereavement cannot be understood apart from our culture.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Growing up, I tried my very best to take up as little space as possible wherever I was. I didn’t want to be seen, so I minimized every part of myself. I'm not alone. As Latinas, we’ve been taught, in both subtle and explicit ways, that being too loud, too opinionated, too visible, too ambitious, and too much can come with consequences. We are taught there is safety in being agreeable and virtue in being selfless. And so we disappear, both literally and figuratively, both physically and emotionally. But what parts of ourselves do we lose when we’re constantly trying to be less and what could our communities gain if more of us felt free to take up space?

In today’s episode, we’re getting into all the messages and expectations that teach us to make ourselves smaller and learning how to resist them and, instead, take up more space, for ourselves and for each other. And right now, as our community is being targeted by immigration crackdowns, threats to our rights, and political rhetoric increasingly telling us that we don’t belong, that pressure to disappear can feel even more intense.

We’re speaking with someone who knows that fear intimately and has spent the last decade challenging it by making herself, and the communities she represents, impossible to ignore. Johanna Toruño is a queer Salvadoran-born, Virginia-raised, New York-made, and LA-based artist behind The Unapologetic Street Series, a project she started in 2016 that uses public spaces across the country as a canvas for affirmations celebrating Latinas, immigrants, queer and trans people, and other marginalized communities. Her work is a reminder that we belong and deserve to be here and we can make our presence known and felt everywhere we go.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As Latinas, we come from a long lineage of people, especially matriarchs, who lived as one with the land. But it’s a connection that colonialism disrupted in our homelands and that racism and xenophobia in the United States have continued to keep us from.

The disconnection runs so deep that even now, places where our ancestors once lived, cultivated, gathered, prayed, and healed, can feel like areas we don’t belong to when, in fact, they are where we remember and where we become. And there’s something about being separated from that — from a place of healing, from a place of blooming — that feels cruel and intentional. It feels like something we should shamelessly reclaim.

In this episode of Sin Vergüenza by Somos, host and deputy director of Somos Raquel Reichard speaks with

Evelynn Escobar, the founder and executive director of Hike Clerb, an intersectional, decolonial nonprofit, outdoor collective, and hiking club. Since 2017 the Guatemalan-Black American Escobar has created community spaces for queer, trans, and women of color to return, reclaim, and heal in nature.

Throughout the conversation, we explore the barriers that have historically made parks, trails, and other natural spaces feel inaccessible or unwelcoming to racially or ethnically marginalized people, the healing and community that can come from taking up space together, and the ancestral relationship Latinas have to the land. We also talk about what it means to move beyond the idea of “getting into nature” as a lifestyle trend and instead see it as a return, a remembering, and a way of reconnecting with ourselves and one another, even if you don't consider yourself a hiker.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

According to a 2026 study from the Latino Donor Collaborative and Kantar, 61% of Latinas have multiple streams of income. Whether it’s because of economic uncertainty or a changing work culture, more of us are juggling multiple jobs, side projects, and personal brands. And not all of us are pulling it off. At least, not without burning ourselves out. For some, it’s the pressure to end generational poverty for ourselves and our loved ones. For others, it’s about making room for all the professional and creative parts of ourselves that we refuse to fit into a single box.

Whatever the reason, the work — and the to-do list — keeps piling up. So how do we actually do it all without completely running ourselves into the ground? Enter Julissa Prado. As the founder of Rizos Curls, the self-funded, multimillion-dollar haircare brand rooted in culture and community, Prado knows what it means to build something meaningful while balancing all the other pieces of her life. In our first episode of Sin Vergüenza, she gets real about how she manages it all and why doing more doesn’t necessarily mean doing everything at once.

Prado shares the strategies, patience, boundaries, and yes, self-love that have helped her grow Rizos Curls while making space for herself along the way. From a grading system that helps her prioritize the items on her to-do list to only putting on her plate what she’d serve her own figurative daughter, she offers advice for anyone trying to build a career, pursue a dream, care for the people they love, and still have something left for themselves at the end of the day.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.