Danny Fuenzalida

June 15, 2009 @ 12:21 PM

Danny Fuenzalida is an exception to a whole bunch of rules. For instance, his blood is different nationality from his passport. He gets up early in a city notorious for its late starts. When a lot of skaters take years to film one part, Danny’s sitting on three complete ones, successfully resisting the call of the beach and the sun in favour of a concrete car park under a bridge. And, when the rest of us have trouble spelling our names and figuring out how many fivers make up a twenty, Fuenzalida’s counting odds for quantum leaps. 

interview by Deeli & photos by Zaslavsky

Backside Lipslide, FS 270 out

Where are you from originally?
I was born in perth, and then I lived on a small mining island called Groote Island right by darwin in the north of Australia. then when I was 7 I moved to vancouver in canada.

Did you start skating in canada?
Actually when I was ten, we moved to chile, because that mine in canada was depleted of copper as well. my dad was a mining engineer, so we moved to chile, which had a huge copper mine. so we ended up living in santiago de chile. my whole life was basically following his job around. but my parents are originally from chile, so it was an easy decision for them to move back there.

So do you think of yourself as chilean or australian or american..?
I usually say that I’m chilean by blood and Australian on paper.

and then at some point you decided to head for the Us?
that was when I graduated high school. I was like ‘you know what, I’m gonna go to the states and see if this skateboarding thing happens’. so I got myself a student visa to enter the country, but I guess I kind of knew I just wanted to skate.

Did you finish college?
no, I did a year and dropped out. I didn’t want to ask my mum to keep paying for it. being an international student is really expensive, like ten thousand dollars for two semesters, so I thought I could just go to Australia and study for free, if I wanted to study.

..so you went back to australia at that point?
no- I just told think that I was going to move to Australia to study, and they were like, ‘We want you to keep skating’ and I told them they’d have to do something about the visa and they did, so I have a work visa to skate now.

Gap to Front Board

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