The ground Zero of a generation. Borders, neoliberalism and sports through the material culture of the skateboard scene in Tijuana
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article considers the conceptual ambiguity of skateboarding, a phenomenon that has undergone a process of globalization over the past twenty years, redefining itself in peripheral regions worldwide. I address this trend by focussing on material culture in my anthropological research on skateboarding at the México-U.S. border. The liberalization of this border over the past three decades has led to the relocation of the global skateboard production to Mexico’s industria maquiladora. Through an ethnographic case, I show how this externalization in the so-called Global South of Tijuana has triggered an informal local culture representative of a transborder scene. By approaching the border as a ‘contact zone’, and skateboards’ biographies as one of its material manifestations, I reflect on both the asymmetries underlaying the contemporary neoliberal sports and the grassroots creative domestications of their scripts, artifacts, and imaginaries by local actors; eventually rethinking where the West of global skateboarding is located.
Source: Sport in Society
Author: Andrea Buchetti
Institution: Sapienza University of Rome
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4408027504