This Surfer Is Helping To Change the World
When I lived in Sydney, it wasn’t Bondi’s grassy knoll, but the rocks at Tama where I’d always while away my weekend, watching ‘blow ins’ get cursed out of sets via the local hierarchy.
But it was on those rocks, more than anywhere, that it’d hit home to me who in this pecking order of ‘first rights’ laid claim to Huey’s pulses.
Not too far from where I sat, around 2,000 years ago, a whale shark had been engraved onto its rocks by indigenous hands. This was a place where a dreamtime story related to the site, told the arrival of the Dharawal people, and where this area’s original inhabitants fished and foraged for seafood from. Nowadays, of course, it’s a different story.
It’s something Mario Ordoñez-Calderon, a surfer, Navy veteran, physical therapist, and director of the non-profit Un Mar De Colores (An Ocean of Colours) has noticed too in his local San Diego, where it was the Kumeyaay who first lived off and recreated on that sea, embedding the ocean into their histories. But Mario is actually doing something about the current state of socio-emotional and economic inequality in our oceans. His organisation allows local BIPOC kids the opportunity to not only get into the water for a surf but to also nurture and protect it. Recently, this has culminated in the Tijuana River project, which is helping to gain notoriety for a river whose pollution causes 30% of San Diego’s beaches to be closed, endangering the BIPOC and lower socioeconomic communities who live around them.
I know that you were a medic in the Navy for five years, and I can’t help but feel that what you’re doing now with Un Mar de Colores is making people better in a different way. Tell me about your path from the Navy to now.
Mario Ordoñez-Calderon : Oh boy! Okay, here are the Cliff Notes [laughs]. I really appreciate you making that connection because earlier this year, I started thinking about how [these roles] fed into each other, whether it be physical health or social-emotional health, especially considering the physical therapy background I had in the Navy.
I was stationed at Camp Pendleton but living in Oceanside, and my best friend, who had moved to San Diego, took me out surfing. That catalysed the connection to the water for me. Oceanside is a great wave, it’s pretty heavy, and learning there rocked me, but there’s something about it that kept calling me back. It’s what kept me in San Diego after I got out [of the Navy], and I was really connected to the community and surfing, so I decided to stay.
I had started to go to school at San Diego State, and that was around the time George Floyd was murdered, which led to reflections around the inequity that surrounded me in this coastal community. Living in Encinitas, in this little Latino pocket that is overshadowed in a white suburbia, there were still kids in that community that had never been to the beach, didn’t feel comfortable going to the beach, and weren’t connected to the beach.
I was kind of witnessing my upbringing before my eyes because I came from Thousand Oaks California, which is predominantly white and affluent. But even within that, my family was living in Thousand Oaks as the help. My dad is a cook, my mum is a house cleaner, and we were that forgotten low-income family in a lot of ways because there weren’t those programs that were helping students like myself. So, I didn’t want those kids in the Encinitas community to have to wait till they were adults or till they had that white best friend who invited them to surf to make that connection.
I decided to use the resources that I had within my immediate circle of being a surfer, having surf friends, and recognising the disparity in the surf. It’s not a direct approach to police brutality, but it was my step in trying to create a more equitable world. I think Un Mar de Colores is a huge reflection of all my values of physical and social-emotional well-being but also a cultural connection to nature and the environment.
Tell me about Un Mar de Colores.
It’s a surf program, but that’s essentially just the hook. We have ten activations centred around surfing throughout the year, but we have twenty that are all about environmental education. We front as a surf program; it’s our little ploy to get the kids and the families curious and involved and helps us stand out amongst other environmental and education non-profits. Once they’re there, we say, ‘You’re going to learn to love and protect the environment.’
I know that learning and the way we learn can be such a cultural thing too, and I think that learning through nature hasn’t always been inherent to our Western education systems.
For me, nature is integrated into my identity and integrated into my being. The more that I started aligning that connection with nature, whether it be with hiking in the mountains or surfing a wave on the coastline, I felt myself cement my identity and be a better person through that. Every time I was in nature—working to protect nature, or connecting people with nature—the world opened up for me.
I’m just continuing to follow that path and that calling, and a lot of it goes back to my upbringing. My family is an immigrant family from México, but they’re Mexican Indigenous, they’re Yucatec Maya. They are really connected to their family in México, so every summer I’d spend it with my grandparents, and I’d witness their relationship to the land: having farm animals in the backyard and having a ceremony every six months to give thanks to the four cardinal winds. Things that you would never see in Thousand Oaks. It really widened my understanding of what is out there and what it means to be connected to nature outside of a recreational sense.
We try to expose our students to diverse relationships with our ancestors and diverse relationships with the elements. Essentially, you’re fomenting that cultural identity for the students or trying to foster that in them. What did it look like for the people that were here before you—that could be in your direct lineage—or for anyone for that matter? What is your relationship with the water, and what do you choose to identify with? I think that for us as native communities, you can be viewed as relics of the past really quickly—like you should have a conch shell in your hand—whereas a present-day relationship with water, it’s this hybridisation of ‘Here I am, I don’t have the cenotes or the Caribbean coast near me, but I do have the Californian coastline which has shaped me, so I’m balancing both.’
The way we view water is so cultural too, and it feels so ironic that there are Indigenous ways that have such spiritual traditions and reverence for the water, yet they don’t necessarily have as much access to the water anymore compared to some higher socioeconomic groups, and that feels like such a mind fuck.
Absolutely. Here in California, there’s such a geographical displacement of black and brown bodies from the coastline, from red-lining, restrictive housing loans, and from Spanish colonial missions to the American westward expansion, all of which pushed people who are native to the coastline inland onto reservations. So there’s a complete severance of coastal connection. It’s really sad to see, because specifically where we operate out of Kumeyaay territory, they have ‘people of the bluff’ in their name. That’s what Kumeyaay translates to. Yet because of all these issues, they have to overcome so many obstacles to connect to their cultural heritage sites. Just in general here in the United States, we don’t have rituals in our everyday life, so it translates over to how people move a little quicker, and then those on the coast tend to be of higher socioeconomic status, which tends to lean towards a certain demographic, and that bleeds into the coastal culture. You see it’s more of a take, take, take [mentality].
‘You see it in surfing too, where people get in, and have this aggressive ‘My wave, my wave, my wave’ localism approach.’
You see it in surfing too, where people get in, and have this aggressive ‘My wave, my wave, my wave’ localism approach. I don’t think it necessarily has to be that way because the ocean is an indefinite resource. In the grand scheme of things they waves are going to be here long after us and they’ve been here long before us. Maybe that’s a cosmic perspective to take on when you’re just scrambling to get a session in before work or something, but I tend to enter most spaces like that, and I invite people to think bigger than an ‘our’ mindset.
So, I understand that your most recent project through Un Mar De Colores, the Tijuana River project, came about because of the way the river was polluted, which meant some of the surrounding San Diego beaches were closed. Is that right?
Essentially, we were working out of North County San Diego: Encintas, Oceanside, Vista, and Escondido. Then we wanted to reach kids from southern San Diego, and in doing so we faced the issue of 30% of San Diego’s beaches being closed down due to water pollution issues, with oceans that are public health risks. There is bacteria and heavy metals leading to people getting sick from getting into the water. So it felt so wrong to take students from the affected beaches like Imperial Beach, which predominantly serves Latinx communities, all the way to La Jolla Shores, which is predominantly white communities, for them to be able to get to the water.
As an organisation, we couldn’t stand by transporting kids outside of their community for them to get to the water, because of pollution. We slowly started to get involved by plugging ourselves in with everyone who has ongoing efforts in cleaning up the river. This is an issue that has been going on for decades, and people have been advocating for clean water in a myriad of different ways. We were trying to figure out where we were going to land in all of that, and what we did was educate our youth and their families about the issues that were happening, because not everyone in San Diego knew. We’re also educating the greater public about what is happening, because this is a great environmental injustice that’s affecting BIPOC communities and it’s being ignored.
With the Tijuana River crisis closing 30% of San Diego’s beaches for over 900 consecutive days and counting, that would not be acceptable anywhere else in California. If it was La Jolla to Del Mar, which are affluent communities, a sewage spill wouldn’t last a day yet this has been going on for over ten years.
What we’ve done is that we’ve recently partnered up with Surfrider and nominated the Tijuana River to be designated endangered. That was really monumental because American Rivers is a Washington DC-based not-for-profit, and every year they release national media campaigns centred around America’s most endangered rivers. Because of the work that Un Mar de Colores and Surfrider did, we were able to get the Tijuana River on that list, which got it on the radar of nationwide environmentalists and nationwide river people. That’s been our efforts thus far, and we’re going to continue to educate our supporters, and to continue to advocate for it at the state capital and beyond.
I can imagine being the director of a non-for profit can get pretty hectic, but is there a story or advice that you go back to that helps pull you through?
I want to talk about one story specifically, where I went to the start of the summer season and I thought that I’d just be there for the intro not for the following sessions. And there was this one little girl, called Iko, who took a long time to get into the water. All of the students went in and she didn’t want to, so I stayed on land with her. We started picking rocks. She said, ‘Go find a purple rock,’ and I’d find one, and then she’d say, ‘Now go find an orange one,’ and I’d lay it down. All of a sudden she looks up at me, with the rocks in her hand and she says, ‘Okay, I’m ready to go in now.’ I couldn’t put my wetsuit on fast enough. We get in the water, she has a great time, and [after that] I’ve gone into the water with her every single time since.
