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If you surf in Southern California, there’s a good chance you’ve already seen a board made by Jose Barahona. As a production shaper for Becker Surfboards, he crafted hundreds of thousands that bore the famed shaper’s name. After he struck out on his own, his factory became a mecca for discerning South Bay riders and a hub for the Hermosa Beach surfing community.
Like any mythical figure, Jose’s journey began a long time ago and far, far away. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1981, at the age of 16, after leaving his home country of El Salvador to escape civil war. “It was shocking,” he tells me. “I had never left the country and coming here – big city, new language, you know, culture and everything – it was hard to adapt, but it wasn’t too bad.”
Though El Salvador has its fair share of iconic breaks, Barahona grew up inland and had never seen the ocean until arriving in California. Once he did, though, it wasn’t long before he took to the waves.
He was introduced to Becker Surfboards through his older brother, Oscar. Though Oscar never surfed himself, he’d begun working at a windsurf factory near the airport in El Segundo. There, he met Bob Jensen, who was also a sander at Becker Surfboards. “He was getting older and he didn’t want to sand anymore, so he started bringing Oscar to teach him how to do it,” explains Jose. “Oscar learned and [Bob] just didn’t want to do it anymore, so Oscar took over. That’s how I started helping Oscar hand sand and that’s how I started.”
He began working on the weekends during the summer. In order to do that, though, Jose had to perform the herculean task of riding his bicycle 20 miles from his home in MacArthur Park to Hermosa. He shrugs it off like it was no big deal, though. “When you’re a kid, you’re full of energy,” he tells me. “I was coming to the beach every time I came over here, so, you know, it’s just a combo of working and having fun.”
The opportunity to take the next step came from Becker co-founder Dave Hollander. “Dave Hollander was airbrushing, of course, and he was getting busier and busier with the shops, so he asked me if I wanted to learn how to airbrush,” remembers Jose. “He started teaching me and I picked up airbrushing pretty quick. That was kind of like my first real job making surfboards, except for hand sanding and cleaning the floors. I kept learning all the jobs. The only thing I never really did was laminating.”
As much as working at Becker was building the foundation for the long career that would follow, it also provided a community for Jose. Despite the surfing world’s notoriously insular nature, Barahona found himself instantly welcome in the Hermosa lineups. “I was hanging out with all the kids that work at the Becker Store and Dave Hollander and everybody knew them, so, you know, I felt like home, surfing with them,” he says.
Which brings us to the first surfboard he ever made. It all started when a customer brought in a snapped board for repair. However, when Jose told them how much it would cost to make the stick whole again, the customer quickly abandoned the repair and the board with it. Looking at the discarded pieces, Jose realized that one of them was just big enough to refashion into a shortboard.
Though he now had experience sanding and and airbrushing, this was Jose’s first time ever actually planing a board. Like seemingly every other aspect in the world of surfboard manufacturing, he took to it quickly. Afterwards, Barahona airbrushed on some color and added fabric inlays before handing it off to a laminator.
Jose still has the board, somewhere in his factory, but he’s never ridden it. Being made from half a board, the four- or five-foot shape was far too small for him. It was more of a proof of concept to see how he could shape. “I made it, liked doing it, and then I bought a blank from Becker and made the second one,” he recounts. He showed that second board to Phil Becker, the eponymous co-founder of Becker Surfboards, and the shaper was impressed.
“You want to do this?” he said. “I can help you.”
Jose agreed and Becker said to meet him the next morning to make another board. He’d show Barahona how the machines worked and give him some tips. Just like that, he was a shaper.
“So we met the next day at 9:00 a.m. and shaped the board together,” recalls Barahona. “That first board went to the shop and then he started giving me three boards a week, and then five boards a week, 10 boards a week, 20 a week. At the end, I was doing 35 boards a week, just for Becker, on top of my own. I was also airbrushing and doing ding repair at the time. It was busy, so I didn’t have a life. That’s how my first board started.”
Editor’s Note: The Inertia’s Cooper Gegan works with well-known shapers to tell the stories of the first boards they created. Read about Doc Lausch here, Stretch Riedel here, and Darren Handley here.
