Skateboarders as Diverse as They Are Daring

They roam city streets like packs of nomads, scruffy misfits seeking out the places where they don’t belong. They are considered a menace to society, or at best a nuisance. They are confronted, cursed and chased away.

Some people detest everything about them. Their seeming lack of ambition. Their defiance of clearly posted prohibitions against their presence. Their baggy pants worn so ridiculously low they defy both gravity and community standards, revealing enough underwear to be offensive without actually falling off.

They are skateboarders, the thrill-seekers of our sidewalks. The graceful and daring acrobats of concrete. Mobile members of a subculture on wheels.

Outside their circle, few people pause to appreciate their talent. Fewer still realize that this modern cult of outcasts has a valuable lesson to teach the very society that shuns them.

While the rest of us bicker about multiculturalism and wring our hands about how to live in harmony, skateboarders have been silently showing us the way. We’ve just been too busy persecuting them to pay attention.

Skateboarders are among the most integrated groups in the country today. You’ll find all races doing kick-flips and all nationalities doing nose grinds. In those off-beat skate videos and magazines, you’ll unfailingly see a mix of Latinos, Asians, African Americans and European Americans.

“There’s no color lines,” shouts Mark Cestr, 17, a slender teen with hazel eyes I met last week at the skate park near Huntington Beach High School. “No one’s gonna dis you for your own style. Everyone’s different and everyone accepts everyone for that.”

He’s right. Just look around this famous skate spot. You’ll see youngsters of every skill level, skin hue and social standing.

A nerdy guy with glasses and an unsteady stance. A tough guy with a shiny bald head resembling a Mean Mr. Clean. A sun-bleached beach boy with golden hair and skin. A heavyset, dark-skinned youth with a bushy goatee and a huge Chinese dragon tattooed on his shirtless back.

Some looked like gangsters; some like cousins of Snap, Crackle and Pop.

“I’m in a gang,” says a Vietnamese skater. “A skateboarding gang. We do drive-by skateboarding.”

The wisecracker calls himself “Chinoe.” Here, he met Tony Mosley, 16, a cool black kid from the burbs near Pomona. And Tony met Matt Costa, a clean-cut white kid from Huntington High.

“Everybody comes here from everywhere and you just meet ‘em,” says Matt.

Many other sports are diverse, to a degree. But no race rules in skateboarding, which grew up in the 1960s. It’s not utopia; skaters do discriminate. They look down on in-line skaters and they detest “posers,” or pretend skaters. Among themselves, though, differences don’t make much of a difference.

“There’s no exclusivity in the sport,” says Joel Patterson, editor of TransWorld Skateboarding Magazine in Escondido. “You’re just kind of thrown out there.”

Out there on the streets! Not in some fenced playing field within some fenced neighborhood. But in the wild, meandering, endless expanses of concrete that cities provide. Especially city centers, with their wealth of ledges, rails and steps.

Skaters have reclaimed with joy the very ground their suburban parents abandoned in fear.

They frolic in the shadows of skyscrapers and tumble past tenements, delighting in the cement-and-marble topography of an urban landscape others find cold and austere. They skate across social classes and geographic boundaries that keep the rest of us segregated in our comfortable communities.

Patterson, an architect’s son, grew up with white kids in Newport Beach but met minority kids during his skating forays into Santa Ana.

“Because it’s a city thing and cities are diverse, you end up with different-colored friends,” he says.

My own son, Miguel, regularly sets out with his South Bay beach friends in search of skate spots throughout the L.A. Basin. His path must certainly cross with Latino kids from the low-income Pico-Union area who skate to Koreatown, the Fairfax district and even as far as Santa Monica.

People In Progress, a drug prevention group, is pushing for a skate park in the Westlake district for those inner-city kids--against neighborhood resistance, of course. But parks can’t contain skateboarders. Their passion is the street.

And wherever they wind up, they bond with fellow skaters of all races. They all know how it feels to be treated like aliens in their own land.

So smile next time you see some skaters gliding through your neighborhood. They’re just trying to show us how to get along.

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or online at agustin.gurza@latimes.com.