We first met Sindy in El Salvador in 2018. What followed would become a road chock full of pitfalls to get her to the Mexi Log Fest.
A few years ago, something amazing happened. It was the summer of 2018, and The Inertia was in El Salvador to make a film called Alternativa. It featured Leah Dawson, Kassia Meador, and Lola Mignot, three of the most stylish surfers on the planet and three of the best all-around human beings we’ve ever met. The film was a great success, but a chance meeting in the lineup would eventually turn into something even greater.
Kassia, Leah, and Lola were surfing at Las Flores when they noticed someone. A young woman paddled into a set wave that wrapped around Las Flores’ point, gracefully stepped to the nose of her longboard, and, with an arched back, her hands behind her, and a cheek-splitting grin, she flew down the line. “She had the biggest smile on her face,” said Leah Dawson. “You couldn’t not see her.”
Her name was Sindy Portillo, and there was just something magnetic about her. Her surfing was great, sure, but Sindy had something extra. And as it turned out, she was the only female surfer from her town — hard to believe when the waves in her town are so good.
“For many, it’s difficult to be a woman in El Salvador,” Sindy told us then. “Women work and struggle to make a living. It’s not easy most of the time. My dream is to be a longboard champion and represent El Salvador and Las Flores all of the time.”
As the trip continued, Portillo’s presence dramatically shifted the goalposts that we’d initially set.
“We were communicating back and forth really finding out about women and life in El Salvador,” Dawson continued, “and by day three or four of our trip, we realized that Sindy was the purpose of our trip.”
When the adventure wound down and the women were back in the U.S., they couldn’t get Sindy out of their minds. So they hatched a plan: get the 17-year-old to the Mexi Log Fest in 2019 and help her realize her dreams of representing her country at her first international surf contest. And it almost worked.
We set up a crowdfunding campaign to raise the funds to get her there. Nearly every detail was nailed down, every loose string almost tied. But then her visa was denied. El Salvador isn’t exactly looked upon forgivingly by the current government, and immigration straight-armed her attempt to enter the United States to head to a Mexican surf contest. “[Sindy] actually went to San Salvador two different times to get her visa to travel to Mexico,” said Becky Mendoza, the executive director of the Changing Tides Foundation and an attorney who specializes in U.S. immigration law. “And they flat out denied her on the basis that she was underage and also because of the crisis that was happening with the migrant caravans that were going from El Salvador to Mexico.”
It was disappointing, to say the least. The funds raised were diverted to the Changing Tides Foundation to support the women’s surfing community in El Salvador, but a glimmer of hope remained in getting Sindy to the Mexi Log Fest for the 2020 event.
In 2019, Sindy turned 18, which means that she’s an adult in the eyes of the law. Mendoza, who never gave up hope, was determined to get Sindy into the Mexi Log Fest, so at the beginning of March, she headed back down to El Salvador.
“We had a successful trip to El Salvador,” Mendoza said. “We delivered a new board to Sindy, distributed more water filters and checked on the filters she had previously distributed after filming Alternativa. It was awesome. We even ran a surf clinic with her for the girls in the community.”
Mendoza was there when Sindy had her visa interview, so they all went together. “It all went well,” Mendoza reported, “and she got her visa granted for five months.”
Sindy cried tears of joy when the Mexican consulate finally granted her a tourist visa so that she could compete.
Now, though, another enormous roadblock has emerged: the Coronavirus. “Unfortunately because of COVID, Mexi-Log has been postponed until October, so Sindy will have to likely go in for an extension,” Mendoza said.
So while it’s still not a sure thing that Sindy will compete in the Mexi Log Fest in October, what can be said with certainty is that she, along with the people involved in getting her there, are not giving up. “This story has been so crazy,” Mendoza finished. “It’s been one roadblock after another; the timing has been insane, but we fully believe she will compete.”
