Latina surfer, Latina filmmaker, Monica Medellin

Most of how we tell stories as Latino artists centers around our experience, our history, and our imaginaries but what if we took our storytelling values and dedicated some of our work to uplift communities that are even more invisible too? 

Monica Medellin has done that for most of her career and is the creator and executive producer of Amazon Prime’s Surf Girls Hawai’i. 

The show follows the lives of native Hawaiian women surfers as they train and compete for a spot on the championship tour. As a surfer and fan of the sport’s competitors and tour, I was incredibly excited to see the founding community of the sport be prioritized and represented in a sport.

Surfing has over the decades been viewed as a white sport where there have been a few surfers of color. By measurement, it wasn’t only until the late 90s that surfers of color began to win world titles. For the women’s sector of the sport, the number is even lower. 

“I knew I wanted to start there,” Monica told CALÓ NEWS. She grew up in Venice California, before it changed, and had a mother and sister who were always daring and pushed her to do things out of her comfort zone. 

Monica’s mom loved to roller skate around the beach in the 70s and 80s and found ways to later get her daughters involved in volleyball, basketball, soccer and potentially surfing.

“I was always the only one who looked like me in the surf camp but it never swayed me,” she said. 

For Monica, it wasn’t until she met  an older Black woman surfer, that she was told about the rich indigenous history of the sport. She found the 2002 movie Blue Crush about a group of Hawaiian girls trying to make it on the tour and was hooked on documenting stories like that.

At a young age, she would borrow her family’s camera in order to document her friends skating and potentially surfing. In college, she studied journalism and learned she could make a career in documenting and archiving women in sports. 

It was working for the World Surf League where she learned there was a whole archive missing in the documenting the lives and careers of women surfers. The pitch to develop that was easy but she tells me it was up to her to truly develop the archive which is what was her to creating the show. 

The show is a hit. It defied all expectations from everyone. Monica knew however that it would work. “It is inspiring men, middle-aged men! Surfers and non-surfers,” she said. 

When asked about imposter syndrome, she  told CALÓ NEWS she “used every single stage of making this as a teaching moment.” Every step of the way was intentional for her.

She said this is also only the beginning and that there are more series in the works.