How the Lowrider Evolved From Chicano Revolt to Art Form

By JAMES STERNGOLD
 

OS ANGELES, Feb. 18 -- Half a century ago, when postwar youths sought a means of expressing their rebelliousness, automobiles provided a distinctly American medium. Rear ends were jacked up, muscle was added and hot rods, their radios blaring rock 'n' roll, were created to fly past the dreary old symbols of their elders.

`They just wanted to be different and to be proud.'

But Chicanos -- for the most part immigrants struggling with poverty and discrimination in the barrios -- took a look at these middle-class American icons and conceived them in a very different light.

In the capable hands of these young Mexican-Americans, castoff older cars -- the only ones they could usually afford -- were lovingly transformed into potent statements of a different sort. Moving in the opposite direction from their white counterparts, they created lowriders -- customized cars that, by crafty design, rode low and slow, cruising gaudily in candy-colored glory just a few inches from the pavement of Los Angeles' wide boulevards.

 

Let the white kids race frenetically; Chicano youths defined cool by affecting a flamboyant, relaxed look, first with 1930's- and 1940's-era Chevys, today known as "bombs," and later with the boat-size Chevrolet Impalas and similar cars. Rather than use their cars as symbols of rejection of their elders, the lowriders were conspicuously reverent of their parents' generation. They embraced the zoot suits and drooping mustaches of the so-called pachucos, hipsters of a previous generation, as well as Roman Catholic imagery in their search for an identity with roots in the past.

 

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

In postwar Los Angeles, Chicanos resisting intimidation appropriated a symbol of white middle-class culture and turned it into a symbol of their own. Thus was born the jaunty, colorful, individualized, road-hugging counterpart of the zoot suit and the drooping mustache: the lowrider.

These in-your-face cars made a proud but almost invisible minority highly visible, in part because they were reviled by the white mainstream, especially the police here. They became irritating symbols of ethnic defiance, in effect, giving young Chicanos a voice.

 

"They had nothing else," said Judy Baca, an artist and a professor of Chicano studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. "What they had was a style. They co-opted an American icon."

Lowriders have evolved a great deal from the early postwar years; in fact, they have grown into a worldwide fad, with a magazine dedicated to the art form, a busy show circuit and clubs as far away as Japan. They are now, in many instances, almost freakishly contrived, with murals sprayed on their skins, doors that fold into casino tables and hydraulic systems that make them leap in palsied dances. Indeed, lowriders have been pushed almost entirely off the streets, at least in part because of police intolerance.

But they have remained a uniquely expressive medium for Chicanos, statements about their continuing efforts to carve out a new kind of American identity while resisting assimilation.

"The cars became a mode of social record and a social protest," said Patrick Polk, a folklore expert at the University of California at Los Angeles. He said that the closest that white society had come to such an art form were the hippie vans of the 1960's and 1970's, with their painted peace symbols and dreamy murals of sunsets.

This Chicano tradition of artful struggle is on display at a new exhibition here at the Petersen Automobile Museum, a well-respected car museum.

"Arte y Estilo: The Lowriding Tradition," which runs through May 28, surveys the history of these highly complex, low-slung machines and even includes some of the art's offshoots, like lowrider bicycles, model cars and pedal cars. For instance, "Mother of God," an elaborately chromed, customized and painted Schwinn bicycle, has murals of the Virgin Mary, a pedaling shrine.

The exhibition is regarded as a milestone, for the museum and the Chicano community. "Lowriders are part of the historical memory of this city, but they really haven't been recognized in places like this before," said Denise Sandoval, the show's guest curator and a graduate student at the Claremont Graduate University who is writing her Ph.D. dissertation on lowriders. "It was really an important form of expression for Chicanos. I see more pride among the guys who do this than I do even among students I teach."

How the Lowrider Evolved From Chicano Revolt to Art Form - Continued By JAMES STERNGOLD The show represents the first time the museum has broken free of the tradition of focusing on mainstream American and European cars and recognized a different ethnic tradition. "I've lived through the Porsches, the Ferraris, the gorgeous cars," said Nancy Fister, the museum's assistant director and an expert in folklore, not cars, "but where are the important stories, where's the real culture?"

She said that there had been some resistance to the show from traditionalists but that over all the response had been positive. "Most people feel it's about time we did something like this," Ms. Fister said, adding that the show had been drawing about 2,000 people each day on the weekends, compared with an average of about 500 previously.

The show is also confronting some negative stereotypes. While some of the more renowned lowrider artists have had brushes with the law, lowrider clubs and shops are frequently family-oriented and consciously seek to wean Chicano youths from the world of gangs.

"I'm a bald-headed dude in a lowrider, so I get stopped by the cops," said Albert DeAlba, a second-generation customizer and club member. "But if you come to one of our picnics you'll see we're the opposite of the gangbangers. We bring our kids and we can mix with each other. It's like a code of honor. We show respect. When our fathers started doing this, they just wanted to be different and to be proud."

And now that the lowriders have for the most part left the streets, they have taken on a new form. "We use them to tell a story," said Robert Luna, whose elaborate 1939 Chevy, called "Maldito," is featured in the show. "They are very personal to us. This, you know, is what we are."

"Maldito" is a sort of Sistine of automobiles, with extensive air-brushed murals and iconography that touch on personal and cultural history. There are jail bars, representing brushes with the law, lots of women, mostly unclothed, and an image of Mr. Luna with his brother, George. Other lowriders frequently incorporate Catholic imagery as well as icons from Aztec mythology in dramatic tableaux.

One common theme is known as "Smile Now Cry Later," presented in the show notably on a converted lowrider bicycle, a fatalistic symbol of how good times have inevitability been followed by violence or other troubles for many Chicanos in Los Angeles.

The lowrider grew out of a sense of struggle at a troubled time. There is some dispute about whether they surfaced first in Los Angeles or New Mexico, which has a thriving lowrider culture, but there is no doubt that the cars were developed by people defiantly confronting racial oppression. (Blacks also developed a parallel lowrider culture in Los Angeles and other cities.)

Ms. Fister said that many Chicanos returned to Los Angeles from World War II, some highly decorated, but were not permitted to use most public swimming pools. In addition, many remembered what had been referred to here as the Zoot Suit riots of the 1940's, in which sailors would go into Chicano neighborhoods and provoke fights, with the police perceived either as useless bystanders or as lending a hand with their own forms of intimidation.

So the Chicanos took junked cars and made them their own, not with money but craftsmanship. "They took junk and created art," said Ms. Baca. "The boulevards were not nice places to be, but once the lowriders started cruising them they became something else."

Ms. Sandoval said that "on a broader level, I'm not sure Mexican-American culture has really been accepted even now in Los Angeles." Latinos outnumber all other ethnic groups here, including whites. "We're still seen in a negative light," she added. "This show is just a step in changing that."

But Ms. Baca said she was skeptical.

"I feel this is more co-optation than recognition," she said. "You lose some of the cultural milieu just by bringing lowriders into a place like a museum. Los Angeles is a city where it's been impossible to get it to identify with its roots. It's a body that hates its feet. That's what the show is saying to me."

Article from New York Times

MAKING THE JALOPY AN ETHNIC BANNER