Hip-hop burst onto the scene in the Bronx 50 years ago this summer. WNYC and Gothamist are marking this milestone by highlighting the voices of women from our area who have made their own distinct mark on the culture. Maria Castillo, also known as "Toofly", is a street artist who grew up in Queens.

The transcript of Maria "Toofly" Castillo's story has been lightly edited for clarity. 

My name is Maria Castillo, also known as "Toofly." I was born in Ecuador, but I grew up in Queens, New York. I'm known as "Toofly" because I grew up with the graffiti culture. I started in 1992. When I would go to school, I'd see a lot of graffiti tags, and I wanted to be the female version of what I was seeing on the street. There wasn't that many women. I started to carry around my marker and draw in "blackbooks," which was a book that many artists kind of shared within the culture. And the more you got known as a graffiti writer, which was illegal at the time, obviously and still is, but when I did it, we were defacing property, but we were also trying to find our own expression, our own voice on the street to get recognized by other artists and kind of build a community, and then from there we would expand and evolve and become much better artists with time and hours to paint with.

I had a very great mom who actually took me graffiti writing at nighttime, so that doesn't happen often. I guess she just didn't want me to be in an unsafe grouping of guys, you know, anything could happen. It was hard and harsh for us to grow up around a male-dominated scene that felt very tough. And so that completely changed when we women started to paint because we were creating spaces that were more areas where women could come and also young people and transgenerational communities and multicultural communities. And so, we expanded the space to feel safer.

The message that I tried to put out on walls because now I've become a street artist versus an illegal person on the street defacing property -- now it's permission-based or community-based and also commercial-based -- my messages are usually like women empowerment.

I love hip-hop culture because that's what I grew up with. We love color, and we love the urban aesthetic, which was kind of viewed negatively when we were growing up, but now we've transformed it and now it's like the biggest phenomena.