Inline skating, you may recall, had quite a moment in the 1990s. At the time it seemed like everyone was heel-toeing and soul grinding their way to cardio health and green transportation. Never mind looking goofy as hell.

The homegrown Latino youth of Brooklyn’s Southside Williamsburg—a place on the cusp of gentrification but still holding tight to its old New York neighborhood values—were no exception. When photographer Vincent Cianni moved to the area in 1993, he found himself gravitating toward the vibrant local street life and a small band of teenage “bladers” perfecting their moves in neighborhood playgrounds and the ad-hoc skateparks they’d erected in vacant lots and abandoned warehouses along the East River. The young men were in a cat-and-mouse game with ornery neighbors and the city’s sanitation workers demolishing their ramps and rails, and their sense of frustration is palpable in the photographs and short documentary film Cianni produced. As is the rambunctious posturing typical to early manhood anywhere.

It’s not called “aggressive inline skating” for nothing.

© Vincent Cianni (2004)

Like their contemporaries in the skateboarding scene, it’s a commonality that many street ‘bladers come from troubled pasts. In the case of these young men, the hardships of growing up in an entrenched urban neighborhood are literally written on the walls—in murals memorializing peers lost to street violence, AIDS, and drugs.

Cianni, however, was utilizing these tableaus not as tropes of ghetto suffering, but as clues for empowerment and culture in the Latino community. Inline skating was one such manifestation.

“As I got to know them, I continued photographing both within the context of their skating and their relationships: friends, families, and girlfriends, at house parties, dances, birthdays, weddings, etc. […] They had their dreams and schemes; they were aware of how popular culture affected their lives and knowledgeable of social issues and the internal and external obstacles that existed in attaining their dreams,” Cianni writes.

In Memory of Macho, South 9th St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1998. © Vincent Cianni

In other words Cianni, like his subjects, saw the existing neighborhood culture not as a place from which to escape, but as something worth celebrating.

In America, late century social documentary photography often hewed to paternalistic renderings of downtrodden minorities surviving post industrial urban blight. In inviting his subjects to speak about their own experience in contemporary terms Vincent Cianni took another route. Rollerblading was of the moment—a fresh canvas for young athletes to project their creative energies and desires. Cianni embraced the fad as a means for eschewing the photographic cliché of timelessness, imbuing his work instead with a forward-facing momentum and canny presence to the here and now of history in the making.

All photographs © Vincent Cianni from his book, We Skate Hardcore (NYU Press, 2004).