{"id":17398,"date":"2022-01-25T15:26:17","date_gmt":"2022-01-25T15:26:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-news\/?p=17398"},"modified":"2026-02-27T22:21:26","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T22:21:26","slug":"skating-onward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/2022\/01\/skating-onward\/","title":{"rendered":"Skating Onward"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Tinbete Ermyas ’08 \/ Photo by Jordana Berm\u00fadez<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To call Kava Garcia Vasquez\u2019s love of skateboarding expansive would be limiting. It\u2019s more like a vast web that begins with a kernel of excitement. During our conversation, it came as she started describing her first board: \u201cIt was a Sector 9 cruiser with a fishtail, clear grip tape, and big blue wheels,\u201d she reminisces longingly. \u201cI learned how to ollie and pop shove-it on that. It was fire!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vasquez\u2019s passion for skateboarding (and the airborne tricks she\u2019s describing) is infectious, but there\u2019s also urgency. And for good reason: She\u2019s been able to use it to traverse many worlds and think about big problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She found skateboarding during a major life transition, when she returned to her Bronx, New York, home after three years away at a Connecticut boarding school and wanted to meet new people. \u201cI made friends who would let me borrow their boards until I got my own,\u201d she says. \u201cOnce I got that cruiser, skateboarding started to take up more space in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When she got to Macalester, her passion grew, but not necessarily from being on a board. Vasquez says college taught her how to think differently about connecting with others: \u201cIf there\u2019s anything I learned from my time at Macalester, it\u2019s that community is a verb. Both the grand gestures and in-between moments count. Bringing this principle into spaces like skateboarding opens up a lot of doors.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the doors Macalester opened was to a better understanding of her place in the world\u2014as a Black person, a daughter of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, and someone who didn\u2019t always see herself as part of the American social fabric.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Macalester, she not only grappled with her own identity, but was also better able to understand her upbringing and think about it critically. \u201cA lot of Latin American countries consider themselves a melting pot, and they use that narrative as a way to obscure their prejudices. This cognitive dissonance is baked into politics and culture,\u201d she says. \u201cBefore Mac, I didn\u2019t have the language to engage with or challenge the myths and stories we tell about ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a better sense of identity and community, Vasquez explored both after college through a prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, a one-year grant to pursue independent research abroad. For her project, Vasquez explored \u201chow women are personally, politically, and economically empowered through skateboarding.\u201d Her project took her all over the world, including India, South Africa, Sweden, and Mexico.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While abroad, Vasquez noticed two phenomena. The first: how important skateboarders are to their communities. She met skateboarders who were architects, filmmakers, activists, and artists, \u201cmaking meaningful contributions to these different cities and spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Kava<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The second thing she noticed was more troubling: Women and girls assumed skateboarding wasn\u2019t for them. \u201cGirls all over the world would say, \u2018Oh, I didn\u2019t know girls could do this,\u2019 or, \u2018I didn\u2019t know this was possible for us.\u2019\u201d In South Africa, Vasquez says, race added another layer to what she witnessed: a racialized understanding of skateboarding as a white import that Black people just don\u2019t do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Witnessing both of these things got her thinking about the big ideas\u2014and the big challenges\u2014around skateboarding. There are the personal aspects of learning to skate: a willingness to fall and make mistakes, move on wheels surefootedly, and take up space. And then, of course, there\u2019s the physical aspect of the sport: you need a place to do it. \u201cSkateboarding requires a certain level of infrastructure\u2014it\u2019s all about the concrete and being able to engage with the urban environment,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd so questions around public space came up a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although I\u2019m only a skateboarding observer, much of this resonated. Where I live in Washington, D.C., there aren\u2019t many public skating parks, and so young skateboarders use public monuments to practice their craft or just to hang out. The skaters\u2014almost always young and largely of color\u2014often have run-ins with law enforcement for occupying those spaces. They\u2019re treated like problems to be solved rather than citizens to be served.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In almost every way, Vasquez is working to confront that reality. Last year, she cofounded Bronx Girls Skate. The group\u2019s mission: to cultivate and celebrate women\u2019s skateboarding in the borough. She envisions creating a skate park and community center where women and girls can learn the basics of skateboarding, make art, and have access to a computer lab.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She wants to provide a space for girls to just be\u2014and possibly soar. \u201cI\u2019m even thinking we could sponsor girls\u2014not just with products, but also workshops and professional development,\u201d she says. \u201cIf they want to learn how to be a photographer, if they want to be a software engineer, how can we connect them with those resources so they can be fulfilled not just with skateboards, but in a more holistic way?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the end of our conversation, I began to see the skateboard as something that could possibly transport us to a better place\u2014a space to fix problems, especially ones facing communities of color in urban areas. Vasquez then chimed in, chuckling: \u201cA friend recently said to me, \u2018Boy, that skateboarding is taking you places.\u2019\u201d Her excitement went up a notch, as if her journey\u2019s just getting started: \u201cAnd I\u2019m like, \u2018Yeah, where do we want to go? And what are we going to do to get there?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tinbete Ermyas \u201908 is an editor at National Public Radio in Washington, D.C.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Skateboarding brings big lessons\u2014and big possibilities\u2014for Kava Garcia Vasquez \u201917.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1077,"featured_media":17477,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","mediatype-articles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":[8],"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false,"main_feature_story":"","custom_image":false,"custom_feature_title":"","custom_feature_caption":"","custom_markup":"","custom_markup_link":"","custom_markup_title":"","custom_markup_caption":"","byline":"","post_thumbnail_style":"default","press_downloads":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1077"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17398"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30669,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17398\/revisions\/30669"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}