How Drag Queen Salina EsTitties Is Now Proud to Embrace Latino Culture

For many years, drag queen Salina EsTitties had trouble being proud of her Latinidad. What she saw on TV wasn’t reflective of her experience, so she pushed her heritage away. But, through drag performance, she powerfully took back her cultural identity. Now, she celebrates her experience on stage, on camera, and on tour.

Salina EsTitties grew up in the Bay Area. Her parents had her young and worked a lot, so they often left her in the care of her gay uncles in The Castro District, a historic gay neighborhood in San Francisco.

“I grew up with the rainbow flags everywhere,” EsTitties says on LATV’s The Q Agenda. “This was in the 90s, when the Castro was a safe haven for people to run away to, so I was very exposed to … this colorful, beautiful way of living. So, it was no surprise when I came out.”

With the support of her gay uncles, a gay older brother, socially progressive parents, and a queer environment to express herself, coming out was not difficult. But dealing with internalized prejudice was.

 “I grew up having a lot of internalized racism with being Latino,” she says, “cuz that’s not what I saw on TV. That’s not what was represented in media. George Lopez was probably the closest thing to, like, a Latino American family I saw, and my family was not like that. So it was really hard to relate or see myself. So, I was like, I need to be like these white gossip girls, like Degrassi, these high schoolers I saw on TV that I related to—but didn’t.”

She abandoned sports in middle school for musical theatre in high school. Then, when she moved to Los Angeles for college, she left behind her “good boy” principles for the glamour and decadence of drugs and alcohol.

In these pivotal coming-of-age years, EsTitties felt othered as a gay Latino. In West Hollywood, where the white muscle boy aesthetic is championed at the clubs and revered on billboards, she was suddenly reaching for a drink just to get through the night.

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Lacking direction and the proper resources to get ahead, EsTitties found herself in a bad place.

“Within the queer community, drugs is such a part of culture, you know, and there’s so many kids who are struggling with it,” she says. “You see the celebrities drinking their Casamigos. Bitch, I’m like, ‘Yeah me too!’ But I take it a bit further and I end up in the gutter the next morning, you know what I mean?”

EsTitties took herself to an Alcoholics Anonymous and has been eleven years sober since.

She graduated college. She enrolled in a professional dance program. And she started landing commercial auditions for artists like Selena Gomez, Lady Gaga, and Ariana Grande.

Per protocol, the choreographers would ask the male dancers to take off their shirts.

“Bitch, I got chichis!” she says. “I always had man-boobs as a boy because I’m a little thicker, I’m a little chubby, so I would get chopped right away. I would never book nothing as a boy.”

Around the same time, EsTitties had a drag queen friend who convinced her to enroll in an amateur competition. So she borrowed a wig and threw together a dance—and she won. So she did it again.

She kept at it, kept winning, and was making money doing it. And just like that, her drag career was born.

“When I’m in drag, I totally transform. I become the diva I have inside of me,” she goes on to say.

For EsTitties, drag is a performance of her creative expression. The more she shows up on stage, the bolder her choices become. Through drag—through the outfits and the characters she embodies—she addresses and overcomes the internalized anti-Latino sentiments she harbored as a kid.

She realized she needed to become the representation she didn’t have. So when she got the call for RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15, she showed up con confianza y poder.

“I went in there and I wore the Dickies skirt with the plaid shirt with the hoop earrings,” she says. “I went in there and I ate hot Cheetos, bitch, because that’s how I know my Latinos grew up, right, in high school, the ones who had my back and took care of me in class. That’s what I was representing. I was representing my cousins, my little sister, who’s a bad bitch. I showcased that on the runway.”

Outside Drag Race, she continues to celebrate her cultural pride. On tour, especially in small towns that lack diverse Latin communities, she shows up proud and fabulous. On social media, she engages with her fans directly. She even created a show called Elotería—a unique twist on a lotería game night enjoyed with elote.

“Let me bring my culture that I used to be so ashamed of and now make it a part of my art and who I am and embrace it,” EsTitties says, “and bring it to communities that don’t have this exposure.”

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