Dinuba, California, is a city of just six and a half square miles and a population of 24,000, located in the richly fertile Central Valley at an elevation of 345 feet. Eight of the top ten employers in the town grow, pack, process, or sell food. Yosemite National Park is 80 miles due north, and Mount Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48, is about 50 miles due east, but Dinuba is pretty much dead flat, the air is often hazy, and if you didn’t lift your eyes you might think there was nothing around but farms and dust and wind.
Matthew Rangel’s grandparents came from Texas and Mexico to Dinuba in the 1950s to work in the fields. His parents grew up in Dinuba and then he did, too, finding identity in skateboarding, in its physicality and self-expression. For a kid, the Central Valley seemed like a whole lot of not much, a good place for leaving—or at least it did until high school, when Rangel took
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