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In 2017, Kava Vasquez, a Dominican girl from the Bronx, received a grant to travel the world for a year and conduct research on a topic of her choice. As an avid skateboarder who felt out of place back home, she wanted to step into the world and see what other women skateboarders were up to.
She traveled to several countries including India, South Africa, and Mexico. In each of these places, she found small but powerful communities of women who found catharsis and empowerment through skating. "Seeing the passion of these women made me think, ‘Wow, I wish we had something like that in the Bronx,’” Vasquez tells Time Out New York. “I didn’t want to build it alone”. In 2020, she hit up a skateboarder friend, Mel Ramirez, and they created Bronx Girls Skate.
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Five years since it first began, Bronx Girls Skate has become a pillar of New York City's cultural landscape, and has made the sport more accessible for countless girls and women. Its mission is for the sport to be recognized and respected for its influence, considering it has shaped the very fabric of the city, from our fashion to our art, our streetscape, music and beyond.
Vasquez grew up in the Bronx, but she always found herself leaving the borough to skateboard. The Bronx is still one of the poorest congressional districts in the country, and despite having a population of 1.4 million, it has no indoor skateparks and few outdoor ones. In a way, this lack of resources is what pushed Kava to explore beyond the Bronx. “Skateboarding can be intimidating, and some people even judged me,” she tells us. “Thankfully I met amazing people that helped me believe in myself and my skating. Their support made me want to keep going.”
Mel Ramirez started skating seven years ago and always felt at home in the Bronx skating community. To her, skateboarding became a vessel to deal with personal challenges, such as losing her family’s taekwondo school. When she found skateboarding, it helped her gain confidence and she met many of her closest friends. Eventually, she got sponsored by brands. “No matter where we go, the Bronx always comes together as family. I built a strong community with love, and skateboarding helped me discover who I truly am,” says Ramirez. But she always noticed that whenever other girls would try and go to the skate park, they'd see that it was filled with men, get scared and turn around. “I hated seeing all the girls get intimidated all the time,” says Ramirez. “That's why I wanted to build Bronx Girls Skate.”
Bronx Girls Skate hosts three main events each year, and they tend to get a lot of love—its Women's History Month event last week was sponsored by Vans. Those meetups have allowed them to build a skate team of 10 women, some of whom started when they were 15 years old and are now entering their twenties. Vasquez and Ramirez feel like they've had a hand in raising them as empowered athletes and women. "Skateboarding helped us find ourselves," says Vasquez. They know it can do the same for others.
There has been some good news for skateboarding in recent years. In the ‘90s and 2000s, the sport was associated with crime and drugs, in part because so much of it was driven underground. Last year in Paris, it became an official and permanent Olympic sport. There's new hope for the skateboarding community, and new horizons to strive for.
But as skateboarding gets bigger, it’s essential not to leave behind the communities and people who have long shaped it. Skateboarding is not just for entertainment—it’s always been about community, about culture, about resilience. When I asked the girls behind the Bronx Girls Skate what they see for their future, their eyes lit up. To my surprise, it only has a little bit to do with skateboarding.
“If we’re dreaming big, I would say a skate park that's also a community center,” says Ramirez. “It would have a skate shop attached to it but also a media lab, kitchen, and garden,” Kava adds. “We deserve better in the Bronx!”
To find out about its upcoming events, follow Bronx Girls Skate on Instagram.