Interview by Sean Bendon

Photos by Jon Mecca

You were born in Venezuela and moved to NYC when you were a kid?
Yeah, the capital Caracas. I moved here when I was five, but I was raised in New York. I moved to Queens and kind of stayed here the whole time. I got my citizenship and everything. I’m not illegal or something. We moved to Woodside because my grandmother was there and then I kept going East. I went to high school in Forest Hills, now I live in Kew Gardens. Maybe in fifty years I’ll end up in Montauk if I keep this trajectory going.

Is there anybody you grew up with in the New York skateboarding scene that you now see blossoming?
I remember Karim Callender, he’s from Jackson Heights. He’s like the face of Queens now. That dude’s super rad. I knew him when he was super young so it was cool to see him grow into the professional skateboarder that he is now. I looked up a lot to the FlipMode guys who then turned into the Bronze dudes – Derick Ziemkiewicz and Shawn Powers. I ended up becoming really close with a lot of those guys. I modeled some stuff for Bronze a couple months ago, it still kind of trips me out. Rob Gonyon took me under his wing for a while. I remember he would give me his old 5boro boards and Converse or Nike that he was getting. Those dudes kind of paved the way for a lot of us out here. There’s some really heavy names in Queens that I think people kind of forget like Luis Tolentino, Karim, and Marcello Campanello. Rob Gonyon and Rodney Torres too.

Do you have a brother that skates?
Yeah, I have a twin brother. Not a lot of people know that. We’re fraternal so we don’t look alike and that makes it a little easier to kind of hide it. His name’s Alfredo. I still live with him. We’re cool. We’re total opposites.

I heard earlier this year you did a 50 mile hike. What was the spark?
I started just hiking around the Hudson. Like small day hikes and then quickly got addicted to it, almost like being so bad that you want to get good. I bought a bunch of books about the Appalachian Trail and all these people’s story on it. It goes all the way down to Georgia, but I think New York has ninety miles of it. Fifty miles sounds like a lot, but you break it up into three days and it’s like fifteen to twenty miles roughly a day with a thirty pound bag. We did it in three days and two nights and it was raining pretty heavily. Three of my friends came with me, so that was cool, but we definitely did not know what we were getting ourselves into. It wasn’t challenging or anything, but by the end of it we were ready to rip each other’s head off. It is scenic though, and I have so much gear now.

Do you have the poles?
I do have trekking poles. My buddy Tim got me into them. We used to make fun of him but they actually help a lot.

You got a personal trainer?
Yeah, this is something new for me too. I got a gym membership and then a personal trainer to kind of keep me in tip top shape. It’s rough sometimes. It’s like a commitment that I can’t back out from. I’ve got a year contract with that guy and he’s been putting me through hell. I do feel like I can kind of pop a little higher over some stuff. But the idea is to be able to take the impact. As you get older it gets a little harder to jump down stairs and handrails. I find that stuff super fun. I feel like there’s a big health kick in skateboarding right now that people are jumping on. I didn’t think I’d ever in a million years be going to a gym and talking to this trainer and learning all these exercises, but my gym does have a sauna too, so…

You work at the Vans space in Brooklyn. How did that come to be?
I feel like I’m gonna be putting Jersey Dave on the spot here a little bit. It went from just going to events and showing face and then I would talk to Dave about health kick stuff that I was into. I think he asked around about me and I guess thought I was a pretty hardworking individual. He’s a good friend, so I want to make sure he’s good. Like, we’re friends before he’s my boss, you know what I mean? But it just kind of happened one day. I mean you get offered to do something like that, it’s like can you say no?

You’ve been doing some kind of medical assistance program too?
My mom is a psychiatrist, so she got in my ear about doing something in the health field. I’ve actually grown to be quite fond of it. We’ve done classes with blood drawing. It’s a little stressful sometimes. There were a couple days where I was doing it in the morning and then showing up to the park at night. But, you know, it’s so draining, like… I’m having my blood drawn. Maybe it’s not the best to go work an eight hour shift after. I think I have a month left and then I have to do a 200 hour clinical internship. It’ll be interesting the next couple months to see where that leads me. My mom wants me to go to NYU really bad.

How was being a counselor at Woodward?
It’s probably one of the reasons I know a lot of people that we run into in New York. Just meeting some of my favorite pros, kicking it with them, swimming in random rivers and lakes, a bunch of camping. Jake Johnson has a house not too far from there we would go skate a lot. Those guys were always super nice to all of us. My friends Matt Goodwine, Will Sickles and Chuck Cameron would always invite me into little gatherings or whatever. Maybe that’s what also inspired all the hiking, just being in Pennsylvania for so long and realizing I love nature. I was even there during covid one year and that was probably the most interesting year to be there. It was so bizarre. It was like half the capacity, but if you were going to be quarantined anywhere, that’s the fucking place to do it.

What’s up with your photography?
I picked it up a long time ago. Me and Jersey Dave both shoot with the Yashica T4, which is nice. It’s just such a cool camera, but now it’s so coveted. Someone was telling me Kim Kardashian did a campaign with it and that’s why the camera got so expensive. There’s some things you can capture on film that you can’t get in digital. And there’s a little more to it, you have to know the aperture and the shutter speed and you can’t see it right away. So you got to put a little bit more work into it. I shoot a lot with expired film. You get these really cool colors and grain that you just can’t mimic with digital cameras.

Tell me about the new video you’ve been filming for with Roti (Stephan Singh).
Stephan is doing another video and it’s coming along pretty nicely. There’s a lot of other characters in the video. It’s all Roti’s friends and a bunch of people from Queens. It’s going to be pretty good. It’s nice to be working towards something that feels like it’s gonna have a good response. I feel like everyone’s just been filming internet skating. It’s so strange. I don’t keep up with that stuff. It’s nice to have a goal for something that’s gonna come out in a more permanent or larger format that’s not just on Instagram. It’s like a fucking circus on Instagram right now. We gotta step back.

Shoutouts?
Smokey, Max, Adam, Gio, James, Jon, Calvin, Jersey Dave and the Vans family, Lick skateshop, Tenant skateshop, Bronze 56k, all my friends from Woodward, Jahrew my personal trainer, my mom and dad, and Dakota, the best dog that I looked after a few weeks back.