LOS ANGELES (Reuters Life!) - Low-slung cruising cars known as lowriders, banned from most Los Angeles streets, have become big business and an art form decades after being hailed as a symbol of urban life at its best and worst.
A retrospective at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles describes a subculture that arose in the 1940s as World War II servicemen returned home with cash in their pockets and eyeing the good life, said curator Denise Sandoval.
"If you were living in a poor community, your car was the symbol of middle-class status, an emblem of the American Dream," said Sandoval, a Latino studies professor at California State University.
Many veterans from the city's ethnic neighborhoods embraced California's car culture by applying mechanical skills they learned in the military to fix up their cars but they wanted to be different from the hot rod craze sweeping car clubs.
"The hot rodders were about raising their cars and driving them fast. The lowriders took to the ground and it was about going slow," said Sandoval.
"The thing that connects them is the desire to be seen. When people are looking at your car, they are looking at you."
They added hydraulics to give the cars an eye-catching bounce which Sandoval described as "an innovation that allowed drivers, with the flip of a switch, to raise their cars from breaking the law to street legal."
Wearing zoot suits, lowriders quickly became synonymous with crime and juvenile delinquency in the eyes of the city's white establishment.
The friction came to a head in the Zoot Suit riots of 1943, in which cops stood by as sailors on leave beat up zoot-suit wearing Mexican American youths known as "pachucos."
GOING UPTOWN
The riots put the subculture on the map but it took more civil unrest to give it a name. Police coined the term "lowrider" after the 1965 Watts riots, intending it as an insult.
Lowriders still wear their street origins with pride but the culture has moved uptown, into a half-billion-dollar industry reaching into Japan and other markets, Sandoval said.
Cruising, banned by most southern California cities, has been replaced by car shows that draw hundreds of entries -- some costing as much as $100,000 -- and corporate sponsors.
Pachucos have grown into family men who include their wives and children in their hobby by encouraging them to chrome and lower strollers and bicycles.
"It's going to get bigger .. because these cars become more scarce and the value goes up," Lowrider Magazine editor Joe Ray said. "It's taken a long time to get to where it's got today."
While becoming slicker, lowrider art has stayed true to original themes -- sexualized images of women such as the Virgen de Guadalupe and Aztec princesses, as well as gang and prison life, and native Mexican and religious symbols.
They choose "colors that will capture people's attention" like fuchsia, sunshine yellow and apple green, Sandoval said. "Some guys mention that they think it will attract women."
As hip hop culture went mainstream and international, so did some of the lowrider industry's biggest stars.
Graffiti artist Mark Machado, 38, who is better known as Mister Cartoon, started muraling lowriders about 10 years ago in his Los Angeles garage. He added tattoo art to his repertoire and counts celebrities such as rapper 50 Cent, Eminem, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Beyonce as clients.
A tangerine ice cream truck that Cartoon made especially for the Petersen exhibit is lavishly covered, inside and out, with a blonde bombshell lying in a vat of ice cream with cones on her breasts and clown-faced gangsters brandishing guns.
The ice cream truck is his farewell to car art -- he is designing a line of lowrider-themed shoes for Nike Inc and Vans, and his clothing line, Joker Brand, is selling overseas.
"It's all over the world but LA will always set the trends," Cartoon said.
A retrospective at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles describes a subculture that arose in the 1940s as World War II servicemen returned home with cash in their pockets and eyeing the good life, said curator Denise Sandoval.
"If you were living in a poor community, your car was the symbol of middle-class status, an emblem of the American Dream," said Sandoval, a Latino studies professor at California State University.
Many veterans from the city's ethnic neighborhoods embraced California's car culture by applying mechanical skills they learned in the military to fix up their cars but they wanted to be different from the hot rod craze sweeping car clubs.
"The hot rodders were about raising their cars and driving them fast. The lowriders took to the ground and it was about going slow," said Sandoval.
"The thing that connects them is the desire to be seen. When people are looking at your car, they are looking at you."
They added hydraulics to give the cars an eye-catching bounce which Sandoval described as "an innovation that allowed drivers, with the flip of a switch, to raise their cars from breaking the law to street legal."
Wearing zoot suits, lowriders quickly became synonymous with crime and juvenile delinquency in the eyes of the city's white establishment.
The friction came to a head in the Zoot Suit riots of 1943, in which cops stood by as sailors on leave beat up zoot-suit wearing Mexican American youths known as "pachucos."
GOING UPTOWN
The riots put the subculture on the map but it took more civil unrest to give it a name. Police coined the term "lowrider" after the 1965 Watts riots, intending it as an insult.
Lowriders still wear their street origins with pride but the culture has moved uptown, into a half-billion-dollar industry reaching into Japan and other markets, Sandoval said.
Cruising, banned by most southern California cities, has been replaced by car shows that draw hundreds of entries -- some costing as much as $100,000 -- and corporate sponsors.
Pachucos have grown into family men who include their wives and children in their hobby by encouraging them to chrome and lower strollers and bicycles.
"It's going to get bigger .. because these cars become more scarce and the value goes up," Lowrider Magazine editor Joe Ray said. "It's taken a long time to get to where it's got today."
While becoming slicker, lowrider art has stayed true to original themes -- sexualized images of women such as the Virgen de Guadalupe and Aztec princesses, as well as gang and prison life, and native Mexican and religious symbols.
They choose "colors that will capture people's attention" like fuchsia, sunshine yellow and apple green, Sandoval said. "Some guys mention that they think it will attract women."
As hip hop culture went mainstream and international, so did some of the lowrider industry's biggest stars.
Graffiti artist Mark Machado, 38, who is better known as Mister Cartoon, started muraling lowriders about 10 years ago in his Los Angeles garage. He added tattoo art to his repertoire and counts celebrities such as rapper 50 Cent, Eminem, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Beyonce as clients.
A tangerine ice cream truck that Cartoon made especially for the Petersen exhibit is lavishly covered, inside and out, with a blonde bombshell lying in a vat of ice cream with cones on her breasts and clown-faced gangsters brandishing guns.
The ice cream truck is his farewell to car art -- he is designing a line of lowrider-themed shoes for Nike Inc and Vans, and his clothing line, Joker Brand, is selling overseas.
"It's all over the world but LA will always set the trends," Cartoon said.
