A matter of detalles: On producing and consuming the skateboard industry at the U.S.-México border

skateboarding is an object and discipline that has become global in the last three decades. the mass production of skateboards, which coincided with a turning point in global neoliberalism, has contributed significantly to this phenomenon. The 1994 NAFTA opened the door for the relocation of global skateboard production from California to Tijuana, Mexico. In fourteen months of ethnography, I followed the social biographies of boards produced in Tijuana moving across the border. In this chapter, I focus on the experiences of young Mexican skaters who migrate north from the center of the nation to work in board maquiladoras. Their position as consumers and producers of their own popular culture creates a regime of desire that leads them to pursue exploitative work but also to force its limits. I analyze in particular the ethnographic case of one worker and his attempts to ''personalize'' the boards he mass-produces as a ritual technique to transcend, through the material culture he manipulates, the boundary that separates him from the ''homeland'' of skateboarding: California