High Art, Low Ride  🔗 **Source:** [High Art, Low Ride](https://share.snipd.com/episode/560ba744-75e3-42a6-a56a-d516fe7e4551) ## Highlights - **Gypsy Rose Shocks Visitors With Pink Velvet Splendor** - Gypsy Rose stunned museum visitors with its pink roses, crushed red velvet interior, candelabras, and a bar in the back. - Steve Velasquez describes audible gasps when visitors encounter the 1964 Chevy Impala centerpiece in Corazon y Vida. Transcript: Lizzie Peabody I'm at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History with Steve Velasquez. We're touring an exhibition he's curating that's all about lowriders. And we're looking at the centerpiece of it, a lowrider called Gypsy Rose. So do you get to see or hear how people react when they come up and see the Gypsy Rose? Steve Velasquez The gasps, they're audible. You can hear them from any point in the gallery. Lizzie Peabody This car might be the pinkest thing I have ever seen. It's a 1964 Chevy Impala that's definitely riding low to the ground. A mouse would have trouble squeezing underneath it. And besides the pink, the paint job features hundreds of red roses and green vines. Steve Velasquez Inside, it is crushed red velvet. There used to be a TV in there. There are candelabras, little sconces, and there's even a bar in the back. Lizzie Peabody It's part car, part discotheque, part work of art. And it's not the only car in the exhibition. Steve shows me another lowrider. Steve Velasquez So this has almost 100 layers of paint on it. Lizzie Peabody This car is El Rey. Steve Velasquez It's red. It is what's called flake. So it kind of gives us this almost like glitter sheen to it. It sparkles in the sunlight and spotlights. Lizzie Peabody This is a 1963 Chevy Impala. The paint job shimmers, and the detail is unbelievable. I mean, every millimeter of the car is decked out, from the trunk to the axle to the engine. Steve Velasquez The engine has, it's all, it's chromed out. It is a work of art. It is truly kind of more of a sculpture than an engine. There's murals on here. There's engraving. The nuts and bolts are covered as well with engraving. It is truly, truly an amazing car. Lizzie Peabody The name of this exhibition, Corazon y Vida, is Spanish, and it translates to heart and life. Steve says that's because lowriders are a passion and a way of life. And even if you're not familiar with lowriders, you've likely seen them. They're in hip-hop videos. Countless films, like Cheech and Chong's next movie. Albert de Alba Sr. Hey, that's a nice car, man. Better get it back to the circus before they find out it's gone. Lizzie Peabody And you've almost certainly heard this song by War. Steve Velasquez All my friends are a lowrider. Lizzie Peabody It's hard to describe a lowrider. It's like trying to describe a famous painting. Albert de Alba Sr. It's art on wheels. Lizzie Peabody Albert de Alba Sr. Is the owner and builder of El Rey, one of the lowriders in the exhibition. Albert de Alba Sr. So many people tell me that when they see my cars, man, that's not even a car, it's art on wheels. And I agree with it because it is an art form. We go the extra mile. Lizzie Peabody Albert is a second- generation lowrider. Like many lowriders today, he got into it through his father. Albert de Alba Sr. By the time I came into the earth, he was already lowriding. Lizzie Peabody Lowriding was still fairly new when Albert was growing up. It had hit second or third year by this point. But if you want to shift into a reverse and back up to the start of lowriding, you've got to go back a few decades to the mid-1940s. This was a unique time when people in America had a special relationship with their cars. In the years after World War II, car culture exploded in America. It was part utility, you know, for driving to work from the suburbs, but it was also part symbol. A car was freedom, independence, the American dream. Steve Velasquez And it's an important, I think, marker for American identity, right? It's almost part of making ([Time 0:08:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9f23c762-493a-42de-903f-f33a8cf2ec91)) - **Postwar Car Boom Turned Cars Into Identity Canvases** - Postwar car culture made cars a canvas for identity as returning veterans, cheap used cars, and mechanical skills fueled customization. - Young Mexican-Americans adopted lowered aesthetics from hot rods and adapted them into cruising culture in 1950s Southern California. Transcript: Lizzie Peabody In the years after World War II, car culture exploded in America. It was part utility, you know, for driving to work from the suburbs, but it was also part symbol. A car was freedom, independence, the American dream. Steve Velasquez And it's an important, I think, marker for American identity, right? It's almost part of making it in America. You can afford a car for your family to get to work, to enjoy on the weekends. And so it's a marker of economic prosperity. Lizzie Peabody And more people could afford cars than ever before. See, during the war, carmakers shifted to building tanks and Jeeps. But after the war, they started making cars again. Denise Sandoval With the return to production after World War II, post-1945, there was like a turnover in used cars. Lizzie Peabody And that created a huge market in used cars. At the same time, you had this tidal wave of young men returning from war with extra money, just burning a hole in their pockets. Denise Sandoval I think that sort of opened up opportunity for, like, younger folks to, like, buy their first cars, like, beginning to sort of use these old cars and modify them and chop them. These young veterans also had mechanical training from the war, so they knew how to modify or chop the cars they were buying. Lizzie Peabody Pretty soon, they were altering these used cars to make them faster or put a unique spin on them. Denise Sandoval Changing interiors, paint jobs, modifications could even be like chopping like the front of one car and putting it on another car. Hot rods were big at the time. Lizzie Peabody These are cars with powerful engines built for speed. Many were also lowered for better aerodynamics and handling. And some young Mexican-Americans took this lowering aesthetic and ran with it. Denise Sandoval How you would achieve a lowered look of a car, you would have to cut the suspension coils in the rear and put lowering blocks on your car to keep it low, or put sandbags in your car. So it's like literally your car is all the way low all the time, right? Lizzie Peabody With chopped suspension or weights in your trunk, you wouldn't win any races. But these lowriders could cruise around town in style, which is what all the cool kids were doing in the 1950s. People would trick out their car or truck and drive up and down the main boulevard in town. But not everyone liked young people cruising Main Street or turning the Dairy Queen parking lot into a hangout. So in Southern California, where cruising was huge, cities started passing laws to stop these cruising youngsters, particularly lowriders. Steve Velasquez They come up with a law that says, you know, your car can't be lower than a certain amount of inches. You can't modify the suspension. And so they start to take it and take it and just try to end this cruising. Lizzie Peabody This was the first anti-lowrider law. It went into effect on January 1st, 1958. And it prohibited modifications that made a car's body lower than the bottom of its wheel rims. But this didn't stop lowriders. It actually made them what they are today. ([Time 0:12:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2956cf50-0e8a-434f-be7b-37c0ca1a2a69)) - **Laws Sparked The Hydraulic Innovation** - Anti-lowrider laws beginning in 1958 targeted lowered bodies and suspension to halt cruising culture. - Rather than ending the practice, the law pushed innovators to develop hydraulics and other workarounds that defined the lowrider aesthetic. Transcript: Steve Velasquez They come up with a law that says, you know, your car can't be lower than a certain amount of inches. You can't modify the suspension. And so they start to take it and take it and just try to end this cruising. Lizzie Peabody This was the first anti-lowrider law. It went into effect on January 1st, 1958. And it prohibited modifications that made a car's body lower than the bottom of its wheel rims. But this didn't stop lowriders. ([Time 0:14:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/52286421-ca4c-4c65-b0ed-9b642b990956)) - **Hydraulics Came From An Army Surplus Corvette Hack** - Ron Aguirre installed airplane wing hydraulics on his Corvette so he could flip a switch to go from super low to street legal. - That trick inspired L.A. lowriders to adopt hydraulics as a practical way to evade anti-lowrider enforcement. Transcript: Lizzie Peabody In 1959, a man named Ron Aguirre had a problem. He had built a space-age custom Corvette called X-Sonic. It wasn't a lowrider. It was a show car. But it was so low to the ground, it was considered, quote, the lowest car in Rialto, California. And one police officer made it his personal mission to write Ron a ticket anytime he saw the X-Sonic. Ron's life was customizing cars and coming up with strange new modifications. So one day, he got an idea. He went to an army surplus store and bought some parts. Airplane parts. Denise Sandoval The portion of the airplane that raises and lowers the wing flaps. Lizzie Peabody Hydraulics. These compressors pump liquid through tubes to move parts of an airplane with the flip of a switch. Ron thought, why can't I put these hydraulics on my car's suspension? So he welded hydraulics onto his Corvette. This way, he could raise it from super low to street legal at the flip of a switch, and waved merrily at that policeman as he drove on by. And when a few Mexican-American lowriders in L.A. Heard about this, they were inspired. Steve Velasquez These guys took hold of that and figured out that, hey, if we can install hydraulics in the car, we could, at the flip of a switch, become road legal. You know, we could cruise as low to the ground as we want, and as the authorities come, flip a switch, we can rise up those few inches and become legal, and they won't harass us. Lowriders ([Time 0:15:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/17539440-66cd-497e-8aa4-daa644a72a8e)) - **Lowriders Became Rolling Canvases Of Chicano Pride** - The Chicano movement redefined Mexican-American identity and lowriders became rolling murals featuring Aztec imagery and community motifs. - Cars mixed Aztec warriors, lovers, flowers, and volcanoes to assert heritage alongside modern life. Transcript: Lizzie Peabody History. Denise says during the Civil Rights Movement, Mexican-Americans adopted the term Chicano as a way to empower themselves. Denise Sandoval It's a shortened version of the word Mexicano. Those were, became the Aztecs in the history book, but they were the Mexicas. So Mexicanos, those are Mexicans, Mexicanos, right? Chicano. Lizzie Peabody The Chicano movement was a fight for equal rights, better working conditions, and more for Mexican-Americans. It also pushed Mexican-Americans to be proud of their mixed identity, American, Mexican, and indigenous, or Aztec to be precise. Steve Velasquez says that's why Chicano symbolism is filled with Aztec imagery. Steve Velasquez The imagery of the warrior, of the Aztec princess, the imagery of myth and mythology from Mexico and beyond. Lizzie Peabody For example, the United Farm Workers Labor Union, which formed during the Chicano movement, uses an Aztec eagle as its symbol. And lowriders were gaining popularity in the Mexican-American communities of California during this time, the 1960s. So you started to see the same art that was decorating the community start decorating the cars in that community. Denise Sandoval When you talk to the lowriders in LA, like they started putting like murals on the car, being inspired with the artists that were putting murals in our communities here in LA, right? The Chicano communities and the Black communities as well. And so the idea then is your car can even be another layer, right, of pride, right? Because it's this time period where we're like taking back, like this is how we see ourselves. Lizzie Peabody Lowriders became rolling murals of Mexican-American pride. They incorporated Aztec imagery, like flowers, volcanoes, and mythic figures, with a twist of the modern. ([Time 0:21:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/43ef4486-1767-40e5-b750-7f8e7761d632)) - **Lowrider Magazine Linked Culture And Activism** - Lowrider Magazine (founded 1977) connected Chicano communities nationwide, showcasing cars alongside journalism and organizing shows for activism. - The magazine raised funds for unions, hosted health initiatives, and presented Chicano imagery to broader audiences. Transcript: Steve Velasquez Most important part of the story is the creation of Lowrider magazine. Lizzie Peabody Sonny Madrid, David Nunez, and Larry Gonzalez founded Lowrider Magazine in San Jose, California in 1977. And Steve says it was about more than cars. Steve Velasquez It was a way of this kind of showcasing Chicano culture, not just, again, not just in California, but across the country. Denise Sandoval Here's this car magazine having cars, but it's actually like journalism and news stories about what's happening in Albuquerque, what's happening in LA, what's happening in Sacramento. And they would stress education, you know, and they would have all these beautiful images of our community that often, you know, people didn't see in Hollywood movies or on TVs at that Time. Steve Velasquez And so it was, it was a kind of like a Chicano newsletter. Lizzie Peabody The magazine organized lowrider car shows to raise money for Latino labor unions, like the United Farm Workers. It hosted health initiatives. Lowriders became tools for rallying the community. A bunch of lowriders would show up at a park and start drawing attention. And once you had a crowd, you could start talking to people about issues affecting the community. Denise Sandoval And I think that's one of the things that goes overlooked in lowrider history. There has always been this activist, philanthropic motto of lowriding, like food drives, you know, toys for tots or the trunk and treats that are becoming really big about Halloween. Lizzie Peabody Steve says Lowrider magazine connected Chicano communities around the country and raised the profile of lowriders, figuratively speaking, of course. And it did it with a slow, cool nod to its early inspiration. ([Time 0:23:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b515d739-fe9e-4153-80ef-88e55169a8c2)) - **Stigma And Laws Nearly Put Lowriding In The Garage** - In the 1980s and 90s, media portrayals and anti-cruising laws stigmatized lowriders as gang-affiliated, shrinking public acceptance and access to major car shows. - Lowrider clubs countered by banning gang members and emphasizing culture, family, and philanthropy. Transcript: Lizzie Peabody The 1970s was a high point for lowriders. Lowrider Magazine was published, the song Lowrider came out. But in the 1980s, the tide began to turn. And one of the major hits to lowriding culture came in 1985, when Lowrider Magazine shut down. Albert de Alba Sr. When the magazine stopped, lowriding kind of took a pause. Lizzie Peabody Albert de Alba Sr. Again. He says the other thing that happened in the 1980s lowriders started to get a bad reputation. Albert de Alba Sr. The movie industry didn't help us any because a lot of movies came out showing lowriders doing drive-bys, robberies, this and that and the other, which was not the case. Turn off the lights. Lizzie Peabody Movies in the 80s and 90s like Boys in the Hood, Blood In, Blood Out, and Me Familia showed gang members in L.A. Driving almost exclusively lowriders. Denise Sandoval All these movies that came out that were a gangster committing a drive-by like in a lowrider, right? So I think it also kind of puts in people's mind in a very subconscious way of like, oh, a lowrider is a gang member. A lowrider is a bad person. A lowrider has guns, right? Albert de Alba Sr. What they portray in the movies is false because who would go, you know, do a drive-by in a lowrider that's distinguishable, you know, like it's going to stand out like a sore thumb. But the movie world ran with it, you know what I mean, and put a title on us. And growing up, I got harassed quite a bit you know quite a bit I got harassed and pulled over just because I'm driving down the street in my low low As the reputation of lowriders declined, Lizzie Peabody Cities in California started writing anti-cruising laws. This gave police the power to write someone a ticket for driving down the same road two or more times in a six-hour period. The laws were different from the first anti-lowrider law in 1958, but the result was the same. Steve Velasquez It really kind of kills the lowriding culture for a bit. And it really kind of impacts how people are perceiving lowrider and Mexican-American culture and identity. Lizzie Peabody And this negative perception of lowriders spread beyond the streets. Steve Velasquez The bigger car shows were not letting lowriders in either. Albert de Alba Sr. We would go to, you know, your typical hot rod shows and they would put on the flyer straight up, no lowriders. Lizzie Peabody Albert says some gangsters did drive old Chevys with small wheels that looked lowrider-ish, but those weren't actual lowriders. In fact, Denise says lowrider car clubs explicitly banned anyone with a gang affiliation from joining. One founder of a lowrider club told her, there's lowriders, wannabes, and true lowriders. Denise Sandoval And he would say a true lowrider lowrides from the heart. And he sort of represents the best of his pride, culture, you know, family, brotherhood. Lizzie Peabody A stained reputation and anti-cruising laws put the brakes on the lowrider community in California for decades. ([Time 0:25:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/090d9f85-9fae-4006-91a7-1812a1bb74a7)) - **Relegalize Cruising To Restore Community Practice** - Repealing anti-cruising laws restores lowriders to the street and to community use, so reclaim public space for cultural expression. - California's 2023 repeal lets owners legally cruise, reconnecting cars with their social purpose. Transcript: Lizzie Peabody Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill repealing cruising vans statewide. Denise Sandoval The new state law will prohibit any city or county throughout the state from making lowrider cruising illegal. For the first time in more than 35 years, lowriding is legal again. Lizzie Peabody In 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law that gave lowriders the green light to hit the streets low and slow once again. Denise says this is a result of lowrider clubs pushing back on these laws for years. Albert says people in power now own their own lowriders or know someone who does, so they understand what they're really about. Albert de Alba Sr. I've had cops roll up on me and be like, giving the motion to hit the switch. And we're like, whoa. But it's because a lot of the people that are now grew up around it. Lizzie Peabody Denise says the end of anti-cruising laws is huge. Because anyone who owns a lowrider knows having a beautiful car is fun and all. But the best part of lowriding is hitting the street. Denise Sandoval You want people to see your car. They talk about the feeling of being in your car, of driving and cruising with your music on, with your family. Albert de Alba Sr. That's the main thing, to be able to use them and have fun with them. You're just rolling up and down the street and parking and saying hi to everybody. It's like a big street party, you know what I mean? But showing off the cars. ([Time 0:28:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e9231d67-214c-41e9-aaa1-389072559cee)) - **Global Lowrider Communities Still Honor Chicano Roots** - Lowriding has gone global with strong scenes from Japan to Brazil, where builders fiercely compete while still honoring Chicano roots. - Albert de Alba Sr. returns from Japan noting international respect and competitive craftsmanship. Transcript: Lizzie Peabody And this popularity isn't just in the U.S. Lowriding has become popular around the world, from England to Brazil, Thailand to Germany and beyond. Albert just returned from a lowrider gathering in Japan, where the competition for building the best car is fierce. When he got back to L.A., his friends asked if the Japanese could beat them in a lowrider competition. Albert de Alba Sr. And my answer to everybody was, I'm just glad there's a lot of water between us and them. Lizzie Peabody Music Albert says it's amazing to see that even lowriders in Japan still honor the Chicano roots of lowriding. The popularity of lowriders may have grown around the world, but lowrider culture is still deeply rooted and intertwined with Mexican-American culture. ([Time 0:30:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/52020f63-b39c-4e51-a39b-1fd4921251b6)) - **Lowriders As Mobile Community Memory** - Lowriders function as community builders that combine art, history, and family memory into mobile public displays. - Details like murals of a founder's father or a zoot suit silhouette embed personal and cultural narratives in each car. Transcript: Lizzie Peabody Lowriders are a way to build community through a shared art form, and then give it your own unique twist. To let Chicano culture shine. It could be with a mural of your father who introduced you to lowriding, or a fluffy pink interior. Maybe the silhouette of a man in a zoot suit. Denise says lowriders are a proud piece of Chicano heritage, but they're a part of our shared American culture, something all Americans should be proud of. Lowriders represent one of the coolest art forms our country has to offer the world. Denise Sandoval To me, lowriding is like rock and roll. It's like hip-hop. These are cultural forms that have gone around the world. And people around the world have added to its meaning, have used our American forms to express themselves. ([Time 0:31:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/304886db-e2b8-4888-9457-612bc7d7132e))