Article and photos by Aaron Cayer
@dogtown_oaxaca
In Oaxaca, on my last day, I raced across the city on my last bit of daylight to find a DIY I’d spotted on Google Maps. It had been torn out. So I went to what looked like another new small DIY, Dogtown Skate School instead and as always I was met with the same warmth I’ve found at every DIY I’ve ever visited, thousands of miles from home. Same conversations. Same shared sense of why we’re here.
The funny thing about DIY, is that we spend so much time trying to explain them, community, repurposed space, a reaction to poor goverment, and they’re not wrong, but they’re missing something. In an era of Street League sponsorships and skateboarding selling cars, DIY spots are a symbol. They are proof that some people still care about the thing itself.
Disobedience is not a side effect of skating. It might be its oldest virtue. It’s through disobedience that progress has always come, in culture, in cities, in how we claim space that was never meant for us. The unsanctioned nature of a DIY is not incidental to its appeal.The feeling of doing something right by doing something you’re not supposed to.
Which is also why I’ve never felt much grief when a DIY gets torn out, and why, strangely, I feel something is lost when one gets officially sanctioned. There’s a tension there. Fight hard enough for a skatepark and you win, but you also lose. The disobedience was the point.
Sitting in Oaxaca with people I’d never met, talking about why the local parks are bad and why we all still care – the DIY is a symbol of a love of skating. Thank you to the folks at Dogtown Oaxaca Escuela de Skate – Oaxaca City, Mexico.
