D3 Arts Is the True Treasure of Westwood, Maintaining the Neighborhood’s Roots and Mexican Heritage

Santiago Jaramillo wasn’t even a teenager when his skateboard started echoing on the Westwood streets. Now a community elder and the executive director of nonprofit D3 Arts, at one time he was just a boy with a board.

“I got into skateboarding when I was about nine years old,” he remembers. “My neighbor, who was my best friend growing up, his brother Eduardo got into BMX and punk rock, and that’s how I got into that stuff, because everything he did, we did.” The young friends soon shifted from BMX to skateboarding, and a lifelong passion for rolling through the neighborhood was born. Decades later, Jaramillo’s enthusiasm for it remains undimmed.

“We just got into it. I don’t know, I just love it to death — I always have. It’s probably my favorite thing ever,” he says with a boyish…