It is usually located close to the ground and often has a hydraulic device that allows the front end to be thrown into the air. Paint jobs are often sumptuous and gorgeously deep, with lots of chrome and custom upholstery often featuring metal flakes and pinstripes.
But when it comes to lowriders, it’s more than just cars. In fact, you’re just getting started.
Since the 1940s, a culture that slowly celebrates Mexican American heritage and family with clubs, events, and lots of mutual support and admiration has often been held around these machines.
It’s a phenomenon that has spread to Texas and whose legacy has become intertwined with the Lone Star State.
Emiliano Tahuy Gomez, who covers the Latino community for Austin’s American Statesman, went looking for Austin’s original lowriders. He said the subculture arrived in the city in the 1970s.
“(The culture) came through people who originally came from California or came through Austin through Texas and other parts of the Southwest, often veterans or young kids who came over. ” he said. “And people were drawn to it because it was a way to be different, a way to show who you are, a way to show that you’re different from the majority culture where you’re necessarily accepted. .
And like the rest of Texas at this time, young people in Austin were really becoming drawn to the beauty of what they could do and how they could express themselves. ”
Lowrider vehicles are often older models that have become obsolete. People may forget about these vehicles, but entire families sometimes work on one car for a long time, Gomez said.
“I think it’s a beautiful way to express style and aesthetics and the beauty of shape and design,” he said. “What’s also interesting is that older lowriders who have been building and customizing cars with family and friends for decades are now complaining about the fact that these cars are much harder to come by. I think it’s something I often hear people say.
When they were young, you might have been a young kid, you might have worked in high school and saved up money, you could have bought an old car that was only a few years old, and you were already paying for it. I was able to start using it…that generation. They had access to it, so it was like they had the technology that was right in front of them. ”
Many of the people involved in the lowrider culture lived in East Austin, a Mexican-American enclave. Gomez said that while lowriding provides a sense of cultural identity, there are some downsides that come with it.
“They felt they were exposed to prejudice because they had these interests, because they drove like this, and because people weren’t used to seeing these cars. I mean, there are so many anecdotes of people who remember Austin police looking at them differently or stopping them,” he said.
“In the early ’80s, I think, a program was born where the Austin Police Department would recruit people from the East Side to act as intermediaries between lowriders and police. So this conversation led to police giving tickets to lowriders. Some of the offenses used to get people fired may change.
Gomez said that while lowriding culture has become much more mainstream and accepted these days, that hasn’t always been true.
“Now it might be brought into the mainstream and become something that Block Museums and nonprofits celebrate,” he says. “But for a long time, that hasn’t been the case. I think that’s an important thing to talk about.”
