Skating the borderlands: a comparative study of popular leisure cultures in Mexico and Jamaica

Recent scholarship has explored sports and popular cultures as productive areas for extending border studies, offering compelling frameworks for social depths of borderland cultures beyond just geopolitics. So-called “informal sports” hold particular relevance, emerging outward from globalized modernity. This article advances an understudied domain in which modern popular leisure cultures are often border cultures through the novel case of skateboarding, comparatively explored within two ethnographic studies in Mexico and Jamaica. We review these two cases through chromatic grey space paradigms foregrounding the materiality of borderlands in Tijuana and a symbolic borderland in Jamaica. In Tijuana, skateboarding’s late-twentieth-century popularization was significantly shaped by the relocation of its industry from California, fostering a vibrant local scene oscillating between political exclusion and the reappropriation of Northern material culture. In Jamaica, skateboarding exists at a symbolic borderland of a U.S.A.-centric industry whereby BIPOC skateboarders adopt tactics to simultaneously uptake and reshape American cultural hegemony, offering a dynamic relationship between leisure and creolization. Together, we argue for a productive relationship between grey leisure and a borderland lens to review the globalization of informal sports that illuminates how peripheral cultures affect change back on the hegemon as an area of study for future research.