February 19, 2000

MAKING THE JALOPY AN ETHNIC BANNER

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."

 

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