“It’s a saying, it’s a way of living, it’s a form of resistance and sinning, low-riders are religion, they’re candy-red disciples with rims like a sunrise.” An excerpt from “Low and Slow” by Jorge Q.
It’s six p.m. and Juan Ramirez is walking to his car in the dark after a long day of driving for FedEx. He works eight hours a day delivering packages across the congested Southern California streets, a tiring, thankless job – and that’s “as far as I’m gonna go,” he said.
The thing is, Ramirez drives a delivery truck for work, but his real passion isn’t that vehicle at all. He’s the founder of Los Angeles Lowrider Community, a group that works for the preservation of lowrider culture in L.A. and head of the car club Just Memories. Ramirez is proud of his Angeleno heritage and isn’t afraid to let people know it:
"It’s more felt in the heart down here.”
— Juan Ramirez
On January 1, 2024, the ban on cruising – defined as the slow driving of a car around an area with no specific place to be or end goal in mind – was lifted in the state of California. Cruising has been banned since 1988 in an effort to specifically target lowriders, who are largely Latine and are associated with gangs. Since the beginning of this year, the cars are free to roll down L.A.’s streets.
Or at least, that’s what lowriders thought.
“The reaction was when we first heard [about lifting the cruising ban], it was like, man, it’s crazy,” Ramirez recalled. “They’re gonna allow us to do what we wanted to do, what we’ve always wanted to do.”
Merriam Webster defines the term lowrider as “a customized car with a chassis that has been lowered so that it narrowly clears the ground.” But for the Mexican community, especially in Los Angeles, the term represents a celebration of culture and resistance.
However, the police and city of Los Angeles have not been as welcoming as lowriders had hoped, according to Ramirez. He says that the hydraulics – the part of the car that makes it “jump” up and down – are the real sticking point. “That’s what defines us as a lowrider,” he said. “That separates us from the hot rods. That separates us from, you know, from the classic vintage [cars], the purists.”
“In LA, pre-war, the car was a big thing.” said Charles M. Tatum, author of Lowriders in Chicano Culture: From Low to Slow to Show, which details the history and influence that lowriding has had on the Chicano community and emphasizes its social, artistic, and political impact. “Lowriders had not been around… but hot rods were.”
To understand the origins of lowriding, one must first look at the origins of the hot rod.
During the Great Depression in the late 1920s and 1930s, men who couldn’t afford brand-new speed designed cars resorted to cheaper and older models – Model T’s and Chevrolets – altering both the exterior and interior of the cars they purchased.
Using junkyard parts and paint jobs that decorated their cars with racing stripes and unique designs, these individuals made their cars their own. A strong culture was built as car clubs began forming – a huge step in dismantling the notion that hot rodders were youth gang members who partook in crime. Southern California soon became the unofficial capital of hot rod culture, as its flat terrain allowed hotrodders to race their cars freely.
But juxtaposing the hot rod craze was another movement that sought to do the exact opposite: custom cars. Car owners took part in lowering their cars, and with deep and dark paint jobs, elaborate designs, and plush interiors, their vehicles completely transformed into works of art. Custom cars would become the basis for what would later become known as lowrider cars. Unlike hot rods, custom cars were not meant to impress people by how fast they drove, but by the artistic work put into making them. Riders of these custom cars rode slowly through city streets to show off what they had made.
Lowriding itself began in the 1950s after Mexican-American veterans returned from World War II. During the war, the boom of the automobile industry had come to a halt, as many hot rodders and lowriders were drafted. However, as veterans returned home with impressive mechanical skills from their military experience, the culture of lowriding began to pick up speed. The ability to purchase reliable vehicles also became more possible as veterans received a $20 weekly stipend for their service.
The popularity of cars that had been lost during the war had now returned with full force, as the rising industrial sector attracted Mexican veterans all across the Southwest. The value of their mechanical skills were not lost on the well-established automotive industry in L.A., allowing them to acquire well-paying jobs after returning home.
But by the late 1950s, lowriders began to face harassment. While law enforcement had deemed their interference with lowriders as a way to prevent the low cars from scraping the street pavements, the hostility toward lowriders can be traced back to the decades-long tension between Mexican communities and those in power. Media coverage heavily portrayed lowriders as criminals and gang members hovering over white communities. As lines of lowriders gathered and cruised down Whittier Boulevard, their presence was characterized as a threat.
A law passed in 1958 – California Vehicle Code 24008 – would essentially make low riding a crime, prohibiting any part of a car from being below the base of its rims.
It was a father and son’s disdain for the harassment and love for lowriding that would revolutionize the culture forever. Tired of getting stopped by traffic officers for having their car lowered, Ron and Louis Aguirre would not let that stop them. The pair would install a used system of hydraulics on their 1957 Corvette, allowing them to raise and lower their car as they please and more importantly, avoid any trouble with law enforcement.
Thousands would watch in amazement as the newly-transformed Corvette debuted at the 1958 Long Beach Memorial Day car show. And while hydraulic systems had been used in cars before, cruisers would take notice of their impact and hydraulics would quickly become linked to lowriding culture.
Tatum has long been familiar with the culture surrounding lowriding. While he was raised in Mexico, his Mexican-American mother would frequently take him to his birthplace of El Paso, Texas, where he witnessed the rise of the artform first hand, eying with curiosity at the lowriders that would cruise through the streets. Decades later, Tatum continued to see its influence and how the culture had spread, as lowrider clubs dominated Las Cruces, New Mexico, a small city of 40,000 from which Tatum taught at New Mexico State University. After attending lowrider shows years later, he gained a more informed perspective and newfound appreciation for lowrider culture.
“For some of these cars, people have invested ten to $50,000 in them. So they’re not going to take the chance of having them damaged or scratched or whatever,” Tatum said.
“So they’re like pieces of art, canvases that go from museum to museum.”
— Charles M. Tatum
One way lowriders show off their pieces of art is through rolling around the streets of their town on a cruise. However, the lifting of the California cruising ban doesn’t mean that lowriders can use their hydraulics, go up on two wheels or generally do any of the tricks that lowriders are built for. Lowriders, who had celebrated the end of the cruising ban, found themselves ticketed in the first few days after the new legislation went into effect.
“We should have known better,” Ramirez said. In the city of L.A. proper, police are very harsh on lowriding. He recalled that on January 1, 2024, the morning of the cruising ban being lifted, lowriders were faced with “so many cops” ready to ticket them on Van Nuys Boulevard. “It’s New Year’s Day – you guys couldn’t be somewhere else?” he asked in disbelief. Ramirez claimed that while this isn’t an isolated incident, the policing is less restrictive on the fringes of L.A. County, where lowriding is also popular.
Lowriding has long been a staple of political resistance and community organizing.
After the turbulent Watts Riots of 1965, the tensions between law enforcement and minority groups in East and South Central Los Angeles heightened. Because of the increased law enforcement presence, more confrontations between cruisers and police officers occurred on Crenshaw Avenue. Law enforcement was not only targeting Mexican youth but were now targeting Black youth as well, using lowrider as a derogatory term correlated with crime and gang activity. But despite this, young Mexican Americans still formed lowrider clubs as a way to separate themselves from the growing gang population that had impeded on their cities.
And when a group of UCLA students discovered from an economist’s report that a majority of the businesses on Whittier Boulevard were owned by non-Chicanos who had pressured law enforcement to increase their presence on the street – a decision that ultimately led to the harassment of lowriders for minor traffic violations – lowriders stood right beside community members and student activists during a mass protest demonstration on July 3, 1968.
Their presence at the protest was a fight for their freedom, as the constant harassment they faced for minor traffic violations was a direct result of the pressure for more police presence. A three- night riot would ensue, as demonstrators smashed car windshields and glass storefronts. The media and police would use this incident as a way to further perpetuate the idea that lowriders were thugs, solely blaming the violence and destruction on the lowriding community.
The misconception that lowriding is directly correlated with gang activity has plagued the culture for decades. And while Tatum admits that there may be some gang members in lowrider car clubs, more often than not, lowriders are just average everyday people who cherish the art and community lowriding has to offer.
“You have professional people, doctors, lawyers, who do lowriding… and they’re committed to the artistic and mechanical dimension of it,” Tatum said.
But despite the decades-long struggle to freely do what they love, many Angelenos persist. “A lot of places too, especially in East L.A., some people only have one car. Some families only have one vehicle, and that vehicle just happens to be a lowrider because that’s how much they love it,” Ramirez explained.
Even cruising, which has long carried implications of gang activity in the minds of the police and city, is something different for Ramirez as well. He described a typical morning outing after breakfast with his family. “I’m talking about a real family, the kids and the wife and everything, and we’re going cruising, we’re going on Sundays,” Ramirez said. “That’s why, you know, there’s a lot of prayer, a lot of people consider it a Sunday car.”
But the culture isn’t just the cars, and it certainly isn’t just the perception of criminality. Ramirez described how during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, car clubs would provide aid to neighborhoods and families in need. For years, lowrider car clubs have organized food donations, packed school supplies and run toy drives. The community fends for itself but it also supports itself.
“I want to leave something to my kids that they could enjoy,” he said. “That this culture wasn’t gonna fly by.” Lowriding has been part of Ramirez’s family for decades. His parents are lowriders; he’s passed down the tradition to his children, too.
With Just Memories, Ramirez wanted to recognize that this was a culture that spanned generations. The car club was founded, in its own words, to maintain lowrider culture and work on “removing all negative stereotypes of it.”
Ramirez named his club after the memories and values he associates with lowriding. “It always brought me back to being in the backseat, when they’re hitting the switch and [the lowrider] went up and down. And then you know, it just felt surreal,” said Ramirez. “It was something different, it’s an experience you can ever understand, unless you’ve been in one.”
Stig De Block, a photographer and artist living in Antwerp, Belgium, could not be any more different than Ramirez on paper. But they both share a love for lowriders.
De Block learned about funk and soul music from his father as a young child and began to see that same music sampled in rap videos by artists he followed in his teens.
“They used to feature those lowrider hydraulic cars very, very clearly in their music videos. And I was always very attracted to the visual aesthetic of it and amazed by how the car would move on the four different axes,” De Block said. The aesthetic of the cars – and of Los Angeles – fascinated him.
It wasn’t just the visual that he became interested in. The community of lowriders drew De Block in as well. “For me, it’s about people from different backgrounds, different communities that come together on mutual ground that provide a safe zone for the youth,” he said. “We know very positive things for the community, like raising funds for breast cancer awareness, for example.”
Lowrider events also tend to be “color neutral zones,” or areas where no one is allowed to wear explicit gang colors, said De Block. This means that lowriders who are involved in different gangs get a chance to meet each other and learn about one another.
In his art, De Block has photographed lowriders and the families that own and drive them. To him, the beauty goes beyond the chrome and paint job.
“The interesting part is that the car is a one-to-one representation of the owner’s imagination. He or she spends a lot of time, money and effort trying to build a car like that,” said De Block. “That’s super cool, of course. But for me it goes – I like to get deeper on the cultural part of it.”
Ramirez agrees. As cool as the lowrider is, nothing in his mind compares to owning one – having a form of personal expression that many people don’t even think about.
“To be like, oh, man, those things are the coolest things. Not just cool just to see them, it’s cool to have one or be in one,” Ramirez said. “And then having your own cars, it’s your rolling canvas.”
This story is in Capsule’s Spring 2024 collection.