Skate for Change: Norma Ibarra’s Photography and Indigenous Skateboarding as Decolonial Praxis: A Brown Bag with Miguel Fernandez

Norma Ibarra, born in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, photographs underrepresented and marginalized skateboarders such as female-identifying skaters across Mexico for her photobook Para Ti (2021), and self-fashioned Indigenous skaters for the Museum of Vancouver 2021-22 exhibition, Skate for Change. This presentation focuses on the latter, articulating how Ibarra’s collaboration with her participants circulate the decolonial potential of Indigenous skateboarding. Grinding down handrails, launching over benches, skateboarding is a cultural practice that actively challenges the settler-colonial regimes of property and ‘proper’ use of space, inspiring new ways of imagining the infrastructure that corrals us. Ibarra’s photography plays a crucial role in these possibilities, yet is complicated by photography’s settler-colonial legacy of subjugation, especially towards Indigenous communities across Turtle Island. This presentation explores these tensions and complications, revealing possibilities towards a decolonial praxis.

Miguel Fernandez is a Ph.D. Student in the History of Art/Visual Culture Department at UC-Santa Cruz and a Lionel Cantú Memorial Awardee (2025).