Creating a communal experience with All Wheels Pomona
All Wheels Pomona is skating and creating space for those that needed the most.
Rain covered the flat surface at Centennial Park on Sunday in downtown Pomona. The rare wet season of Southern California has begun and tried to interrupt the first meeting of the year for All Wheels Pomona, an immigrant-run, intergenerational, all wheels collective.
Martha*, the facilitator of the group, understood the necessity of having support from others in the current political climate. The group instead rolled through the raindrops, proving that the power of a communal gathering is unstoppable.
“Whether you are undocumented or not, or whether you're queer or trans, or whether you're belonging to any marginalized, systemically harmed identity,” Martha said. “You can just exist here in joy.”
The initial concept behind All Wheels Pomona was to garner enough community support to build a skatepark in Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park in District Two. Martha handpicked Pomona after earning a fellowship from the Skatepark Project.
Although Martha didn’t grow up in Pomona or currently live there, she developed a deep connection with the city through its people.
“You just kind of didn't know what was there until you really carefully looked, carefully paid attention and talked to shop owners, other nonprofits in the area,” Martha said. “Just got to know the people and the land and I was like, these are some real ass people, you know, these are some real down to earth people who want to make people's lives better, make the environment better.”
Unfortunately, after the city passed a resolution to build the skatepark in MLK Jr. Memorial Park, the project came to a sudden halt.
“Not only is bureaucracy weird, but bureaucracy paired with mishandling of power and patriarchy made things weird,” Martha said.
Faced with another obstacle, All Wheels Pomona’s resilience continued to shred through the bump in the road. They continued to meet and support marginalized groups in Pomona, ensuring they feel a sense of belonging.
“Usually at a skate park, the predominant, I think, populace are men, boys, typically white,” Martha said. “And so the aim of it was to build a group first that met collectively, focusing on beginners [regardless of identity].”
Sunday’s meeting was the first in roughly six months. Martha took some time off to re-evaluate her role as an organizer.
“It was like a, I would say a surgical operation on like my mind, where I needed to assess what I needed to change as a person,” Martha said. “But also as an organizer, as somebody who's responsible for, as an energetic being that, you know, affects other people.”
Martha’s return to All Wheels Pomona was intentional. With the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the city, many residents—part of California’s estimated 1.8 million undocumented individuals (Pew Research Center, 2022)—are forced to live in the shadows once again. She believes in the healing power that gathering can have on a person’s mental health.
“There's a healing component to not only moving your body but being with each other,” Martha said. “Being together with other people that share similar adjacent identities to you.”
With a fresh outlook on life after taking a break from All Wheels Pomona, Martha’s plan for the year is to meet once a month and avoid burning out. She also wants to emphasize the political activism aspect of the group.
All Wheels Pomona will next meet on Feb. 16 at Lopez Urban Farm, from 12 pm to 4 pm. For more information follow @allwheelspomona on Instagram.
*As an undocumented person, the last name was left off for their protection.