Skateboarding and Surfing!

When I was 11, my dad built a halfpipe in our backyard. We were living in San Salvador, El Salvador, and most of my time was spent outside—our school was outdoors, I would go to the beach every weekend, and biking around my neighborhood was one of my favorite pastimes. Our family had a collection of maybe fifteen skateboards, with my first one being a Barbie-themed hot pink skateboard gifted to me in my youth. Hot afternoons were spent trying out new tricks on the curved plywood sheets, gaining the confidence to learn how to drop in and kickturn with my dad’s guidance. The rhythm of skateboarding is my favorite part—drop in, glide, carve, repeat; there’s an almost meditative flow that comes with practice, and I’d push myself to do a million rounds of kickturns while competing with my twin sister to see who would fall first. Our halfpipe was tied to my identity greatly—I’d spend hours going up and down and would knock on my friends’ houses in our neighborhood to invite them to skate with me and teach them what I knew.

I’ve always had an interesting relationship with skateboarding—I’ve never considered myself to be a very fearless person, and there are times I’ve been reluctant to try tricks or push myself out of my own comfort zone when riding. My dad’s a different story—he grew up skateboarding with his cousins in Hawai’i,  and his own level of expertise (that comes with years of practice and his upbringing as a teenage boy invested in the subculture of the sport) rivals my own incredibly. My grandma would always tell me stories about him and my uncles dropping in from her roof and into the pool of her backyard. He’s a lot more fearless than I am, but teaching me and my sister to skateboard at the same level he did in his youth was never his goal. Instead, he taught us how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, how to fall, how to worry less about what others thought (especially when we’d go to skateparks and become intimidated by the lack of women), and how to trust ourselves. When I was 12, I learned how to drop in for the first time on the halfpipe he built for us, opening up a whole new world for me in the realm of skateboarding tricks. I still remember how my dad never questioned my hesitation; he helped me find my footing and shift my weight, stepping back to let me decide when I was ready on my own terms. 

Since I was a child, my dad has instilled in me a love of board sports—especially skateboarding and surfing. In El Salvador, I’d go to El Tunco, a beach 45 minutes from my house with the best break. Every Sunday my dad would load the top of our car with our surfboards, and we’d wake up early to beat traffic and get out on the water as soon as we could. I’d paddle out still half-asleep, riding waves alongside my dad and sister. It was always the three of us—my mom and younger sister preferred to watch from the shore, bringing snacks and cameras to film our best waves. There were some days we’d head to the beach at 4 am, still dark, finding the time to surf before school began.

I’d go through periodic phases (as a teenager does, of course) of hating surfing, despising the exhaustion of waking up early, the bruises on my ribs that would come from paddling, the constant beating I’d take when the waves got a little too big, and I’d be stuck getting pounded over and over again by whitewash. But my dad never forced us to love surfing, or any of the sports he tried to teach us—he just shared with us what he loved, and in doing so, let us fall in love with them too. 

I’ve always found skateboarding and surfing to mirror one another, and my love for each is tied deeply to the other. El Salvador—my early teenage years—is where my relationship with the two truly deepened. Each activity became tied to the places I lived—skateboarding in Vietnam, El Salvador, and Virginia; surfing in Hawai’i and El Salvador. 

Board sports in general are heavily male dominated. From a young age, I was taught that my gender was not a weakness, and there was no reason for me to feel inferior in the spaces I took up in skateboarding and surfing. That mindset didn’t always come easily to me; much of my own insecurities with skateboarding and surfing stemmed from my sense of exclusion. When you are a young girl in the water or at the skatepark, you are inherently breaking boundaries, and with that comes a certain level of pressure—to prove you belong, to go against the unspoken assumptions that you don’t deserve to be there. Carving out my own space in surfing and skateboarding instilled in me a deep confidence.

That same confidence has greatly influenced my journey at Wellesley. In so many ways, the halfpipe and surf breaks of my childhood have prepared me for finding my own place in college. Navigating male-dominated board sports in my youth has given me the ability to enter unfamiliar spaces and know that I deserve to be there just as much as anyone else. It’s part of the reason I chose Wellesley: I wanted to be in a place where those with historically marginalized identities were given the opportunity to lead, unapologetically take up space, and succeed! I’ve found my community here, and I do give a lot of credit to my love of skateboarding and surfing. Though I no longer have a halfpipe or a surfboard with me, I still carry the same lessons they taught me. 

Thanks for reading! See you next week!

Bri❤️