“But they also started to create these community events.
“Yes liked talking about cars and working on cars,” says Velasquez of the clubs. Car clubs, which were forming at this time, began offering community services, like fundraising for the United Farm Workers labor union and hosting health initiatives. Steve Velasquez, a curator of cultural and community life at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, explains that, “lowriding is a reflection of that Mexican American post-war experience.” (The museum has a 1969 Ford LTD that David Jaramillo of Chimayo, New Mexico, converted into a lowrider he called “Dave’s Dream” in the late ‘70s.) Unlike the hot rods that were taking the country by storm, the lowriders were “about something different.”Īs Mexican Americans began to collectively reimagine their identity from an empowered perspective during the Chicano Movement in the 1970s, lowriders took on a more formalized political function. Whittier Boulevard, Heatwave Car Club, East Los Angeles, CA, September 3, 2016 Tinkering with the engines, painting the exteriors and even adding weights in the back to lower the bodies, Mexican Americans were purposefully altering their cars-Chevys, which were in surplus at the time and designed with an X on the bottom that made them easy to modify were especially popular-so that, unlike the “hot and fast” hot rods, their cars would be “low and slow.” As the “hot rod” trend swept the country, which comprised mainly of vintage models like Ford Model-Ts being modernized with enlarged engines for speed, Mexican American vets, deftly employing the mechanical training they had received in the army, began to tweak their cars in their own garages as a means of distinguishing themselves both on and off the road. Like their white counterparts, Mexican American veterans were also purchasing cars with the money they were earning from their service in World War II. This was especially true in southern California where families began purchasing cars in order to adapt to the expanded cities of the new, post-war urban landscape. trace all the way back to the 1940s, when car culture was beginning to take hold across America. Gypsy Rose, Imperials Car Club, Hawaiian Gardens, CA, July 12, 2015 When she eventually moved to L.A., one of the first things she set out to find was the Silver Dollar Café, the site in East L.A. Despite the fact that these figures were culturally and geographically far away, they were always in “the back of my head,” says Bedford. Growing up in Washington, D.C., Bedford’s father, political filmmaker and activist Chris Bedford, raised her with an awareness of, and appreciation for, iconic Chicano activists like Cesar Chavez and Ruben Salazar, a journalist with the Los Angeles Times from 1959 to 1970 and the first Mexican American to write about Chicanos.
Low rider song show series#
The result is a series of photos that, like the cars themselves, tell a visual story of how lowriders-the term refers to both the cars and their owners-have used customization as a means of resisting a homogenizing American society that too often suppresses the creativity and pride of its minorities.īedford’s interest in the nexus between art and activism originated at an early age. For the project, she spent five years immersing herself in Mexican American lowriding clubs in East Los Angeles, attending all of the events she was invited to-weddings, funerals and quinceañeras-where the members would display their cars. These are words that could only describe the famous lowriders belonging to L.A.’s Chicano community, which are the subject of photographer Kristin Bedford’s new book, Cruise Night. The names “Purple Rain” and “Erotic City” gleaming from the lacquered frames. Bouncing hydraulics cruising low and slow. Candy paint jobs with glimmering specks of metallics.
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