Young women who skate make a difference

[downtoearth]

My title - but I loved this article about a couple young women who wanted to make skating more inclusive and accessible to other women.  I have a friend who has a daughter who started skating and she's always trying to get more women/girls involved.

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Meet NYC's Latina Skate Crew Brujas

In 2014, New York locals Arianna Maya Gil and Sheyla Grullón decided to do something about the mostly male skate scene. Together they formed Brujas, a collective of girls who love to skate. The skaters, who range in age from 15 to 27, gather from all over New York City: Soundview, King’s Bridge, Washington Heights, and the Lower East Side.

Brujas have taken over the Riverview Skate Park bordering the Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, directly influencing the politics of the space. “The skate park might no longer be a man cave of refuge anymore,” Gil explains. “Less and less spaces exist that are just places for men to get together and let their misogyny go unchecked.” Establishing a headquarters at the Bronx skate park has changed the gender dynamics of the park itself, says Gil. “It’s not rare to see a new girl at the park.” Many of the new skaters take videos, photograph their friends, or practice their first ollies.

In many ways, the Brujas skate crew encompasses a spiritual practice. “Practicing magic and practicing skateboarding are really similar because it’s all about your energy, intention, and personal perspective,” says Gil. “For a lot of people, it can serve as a vehicle of healing.” In many brujería practices in Latin America and the Caribbean, brujas are intuitive channels between the spirit world and issues in the real world.

Skating ties into many social and political issues and the Brujas are not afraid to point out inequalities. Gil, who has been skating since she was fifteen years old, has seen the increased policing of youth of color. “Back when I started skating, getting your board confiscated was completely unheard of,” Gil recalls. Today, many skaters are moving from the streets and into skate parks, something that has been driven by a rapid gentrification—in the sanctioned skate parks, skaters are less likely to be bothered by police or neighbors.

In the meantime, Brujas continue to build community in person—on 157th and River Avenue—and online. Through their Instagram, they share skate footage of badass mujeres and connect skaters. If you are a New York skater, feel free to drop them a direct message, they're always open to meeting fellow brujas. “There’s all these male gangs and that run around the Bronx and Uptown,” says Gil, “Brujas is not a counterpart to any male gang. It’s our own gang.”

bitchmedia.org/article/meet-nycs-all-latina-skate-crew-brujas

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Another linked article from the one above:

 

Check Out the Bronx Skateboard Crew That Wants to Empower Women of Color

When Arianna Maya Gil first began skateboarding, at the age of thirteen, she was the only girl in a scene dominated by boys, tagging along with her brother and his friends to the parks they would roll through in Lower Manhattan. This was in the mid-2000s, before her family was forced to leave the rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side for Washington Heights. Around this time, the mainstream media was just starting to realize that skate culture had begun its migration out of the suburbs and into the inner cities. Skateboarding had found a "new popularity among a black demographic" and was joining "the fraternity of minority street games" in the five boroughs, the New York Times wrote in 2007.

But even as the sport became less and less overrun by affluent white kids, Gil watched in frustration as her male peers built crews, clothing companies, and magazines around the burgeoning movement of urban skate culture. A space where young women of color could flourish in the sport remained persistently, painfully absent. Now 21 and a recent graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, Gil is setting to work on changing that with the creation of Brujas — a Latina skateboard crew composed primarily of young women from Washington Heights and the Bronx.

"We just found ourselves in very male-dominated spaces no matter what we wanted to do, whether it was skating, art, even school in some cases," Gil tells the Voice. "Brujas, even though I centered it around this lifestyle that I lead that's very skate-centric, it's about finding camaraderie and companionship and support amongst other women — particularly, of course, women of color."...

www.villagevoice.com/news/check-out-the-bronx-skateboard-crew-that-wants-to-empower-women-of-color-7212751