La Reina de la Calle

It was hot out. It was DAMN hot out. But I had a looming deadline for a street photography challenge that I had been getting up the nerve to do. I didn't know if people would even be out given the swelter that persisted even into the late evening hours, the sun already deep into its descent. And then she was there. And she was amazing. She is standing in what social psychologists like to refer to as "a power pose". Standing like Wonder Woman - hands on hips; legs apart, firmly planted in the ground; chest puffed out -- not only conveys power, authority, and confidence to observers, but it also -- and this is incredible psychological science -- creates it in your own self, for your own mind. People who power pose for just three minutes create marked effects on hormone levels.

She was there, on that street, and she was power; confident against the oppressive heat of the evening; against any leery sort of character that passed by (and in this neighborhood, there were a few); and against the skinny white mannequins, too, that push an single image of beauty and femininity on repeat.  

She is, La Reina de Esta Calle.