lowriders044-blog

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Finding a classical car like these is very unusual and satisfying when found on the street enjoying a sunny or dark night unbothered

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Finding a Chevrolet in perfect condition like this is the most satisfying thing in the world.

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Japanese lowriders what the japanese call a “cultural exchange”

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classic rola

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The Lowrider History

In Southern California in the 1950s and early '60s, young Chicanos created a car style called "lowrider" that expressed the pride and playfulness of Mexican American culture.

The peak of lowrider culture came in the 1970s on Whittier Boulevard in Los Angeles, a wide commercial street that cut through the barrio of the city. Gliding along Whittier on Saturday nights in the '70s were brightly-painted cars modified by young Mexican American men to ride low to the ground, fitted with special hydraulics to make them bounce up and down. These drivers had little interest in the rubber-burning speed of their hot-rodding peers. The guiding principle here was bajito y suavecito: low and slow.

The Whittier "cruise" was a social event of large importance, an exciting arena where la raza (the people) could come together to have fun, where young men and women could check each other out, and where a proud political and historical consciousness could be articulated. Lowriders, wrote journalist Ted West in 1976, "express the refusal of a young Chicano American to be Anglicized. There has never been a clearer case of the automobile being used as an ethnic statement."

MORE HISTORY...

Another chapter in the history of lowriders involves California demographics.

Starting in 1900, the state's Mexican population grew rapidly due to a massive influx of immigrants seeking jobs in agriculture and manufacturing. By the end of World War II Los Angeles had one of the world’s largest urban Mexican populations.

Mexicans in L.A., writes historian James D. Hart, got low wages, were crowded into barrios (ghetto neighborhoods), and were generally scorned by whites. Young people were stigmatized as pachucos (juvenile hoodlums). The "pachuco generation" was a term used by historian Carey McWilliams to describe these American-born kids who reached maturity in the early 1940s.

The parents of the pachuco generation, McWilliams writes, generally stayed close to home, seldom venturing from East L.A. into the downtown sector. By contrast, the new generation was "by no means so docile and tractable as their parents" and was lured to the "downtown shopping districts, to the beaches, and, above all, to the glamour of Hollywood." They made their journeys by car, and they liked to drive in style. Police harassed them but cruising continued - a bold assertion of freedom in the land of the free. They were "laying a claim," writes scholar Ben Chappell - "this is my city, my street, as much as anyone else’s."

The lowrider idea grew in the '60s and early '70s and linked itself to the emerging Chicano civil rights movement. As the '70s unfolded, lowriding edged ever-so-slightly into the American mainstream. The song "Low Rider" by the group War became a top-ten hit in 1975. A Chevrolet Impala lowrider christened "Gypsy Rose" appeared in the '70s in the opening credits of NBC’s "Chico and the Man" cruising down Whittier Boulevard. Articles in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Car and Driver documented the spread of lowriding to many communities outside L.A. (In fact, one or two of these cities claim the birth of lowriding for themselves.)

The 1979 film "Boulevard Nights," set on Whittier Boulevard, draws an explicit connection between lowriders and violent gang life - a controversial topic in the lowriding community. Although lowriders have indeed been used by gang members over the years, and gunshots have rung out at more than one lowrider gathering, the cars are largely a family affair, say some observers. According to James Sterngold, writing in the New York Times in 2000, mainstream lowrider clubs actively seek to wean Chicano youths from the lure of gangs.

Credit:By Bob Frost The History Channel Magazine, 2002

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Low Riders were used to showcase ones art representing ones heritage and cultural background. 

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Lowrider culture has grown beyond the chicano communities and inspired the Japanese community to dress up and fix up their cars. Japan holds its own Lowrider convention.

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Hip Hop artists have grown fascinated by lowriders that they adopted low riders into their own culture. Low riders have also been incorporated into music videos, TV shows, and movies. 

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Low Rider culture has grown so much that universal pictures released a movie on low riders in May 12, 2017

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Many women from different backgrounds and ethnicity come collectively together when it comes to the low rider community and try competing with the guys and other times they just do it for the fashion details of each individual low rider automotive 

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According to the San Diego automotive museum, the movement is an extension of the Mexican cultural custom called the paseo. In the paseo, young men and women would gather in town centers to check each other out, flirting from opposite ends of a courtyard. Often local caballeros would deck out themselves and their horses in a game of lavish one-upmanship. Decades later, custom cars would replace their steeds.

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The Legend of the Legends. Gypsy Rose was a car built before the times by her Lowrider Legend owner, Jesse Valadez. She is forever honored and  remembered by the Library of Congress. She’s one of a kind who helped catapult chicano culture since the 1970s into movies and to be more widely recognized and accepted. 

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San Francisco’s La Chingona. Who wants women to have equality within the Chicano Lowrider Community and plans to help the lowrider culture survive the times we are currently living in 

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Showing you a visual Timeline of the History of Lowriders. Beginning in the 1950s to early 2000s.