Bike Advocacy’s Blind Spot

Adonia Lugo grew up in a Latino barrio of Orange County, California, as a biracial child of a Mexican father and a white American mother. Growing up, she felt a constant sense of being at a border—code switching between two identities. She felt privileged in some ways, and marginalized in others, and developed a keen sense of where she fit within America’s racial hierarchy.

That experience informs her work as a bike advocate. “Being on a bicycle, that experience of marginality you get of, one, not being treated so great by your fellow road users, and two, seeing those cracks in the city—these opportunities that other people aren’t necessarily seeing—that just really mirrored the marginality I’ve had in terms of my racial background,” she says. “For me, the bicycle became a part of this overall injustice I carry around.”