It’s usually close to the ground, often with hydraulics that can throw the front end to the air. The paint jobs are often lush and gorgeously deep, frequently with metal flake and pinstripes to plenty of chrome and custom upholstery.
But when it comes to lowriders, it doesn’t stop with the car. In fact, you’re just getting started.
Since the 1940s, a culture has grown around these machines low and slow, often rolling celebrations of Mexican American heritage and family with clubs, events and lots of mutual support and admiration.
It’s a phenomenon that spread into Texas and whose legacy became entwined with the Lone Star State.
Emiliano Tahui Gómez, who covers Latino communities for the Austin American-Statesman, went in search of some of the original lowriders of Austin. He said this subculture came to the city in the 1970s.
“(The culture arrived) through people coming from either originally California or through other parts of Texas and the southwest and making their way through Austin, often veterans or just young kids who were coming over,” he said. “And people were drawn to it because it was a way to be different, a way to show who one was and that one wasn’t necessarily like the majority culture that was an accepting one.
And just like elsewhere in Texas during this time, young Austinites were really becoming attracted to the beauty of what they could do and how they could express themselves.”
Often, lowrider cars are older models that have fallen out of fashion. People may have forgotten about some of these rides, and yet sometimes whole families will be working on one car for a long time, Gómez said.
“I think it’s a beautiful way to show the style and the aesthetics and the beauty of form and of design,” he said. “What’s also interesting is that I think you’ll hear a lot of these older lowriders who’ve been creating and customizing cars with family, with friends for decades, they complain about the fact that now these cars are much harder to get.
When they were young, you could be a young kid, you could save up your money from your high school jobs and you could buy an old car that was only a few years old and you could already start to do things to it… That generation had access to that and they kind of took hold of the technology that was in front of them.”
A lot of the folks involved in lowrider culture lived in East Austin, in Mexican American neighborhoods. Gómez said that while lowriding brought a sense of cultural identity, there were also some negatives associated with it.
“They often felt like they were (facing) prejudice because they had this interest, because they drove like this, because people weren’t used to seeing these cars. I mean, the amount of anecdotes you get of people remembering Austin police looking at them differently or stopping them is quite numerous,” he said.
“I believe in the early ’80s that resulted in a program where Austin police in the city hired an individual from the East side to be sort of a go-between between the lowriders and the police department. So the conversation could happen to change some of the infractions that the police were using to commonly ticket lowriders.”
Gómez said these days lowriding culture is much more mainstream and accepted, but that wasn’t always true.
“Now it might be something that has been drawn into the mainstream and that the Bullock Museum celebrates, and that nonprofits celebrate,” he said. “But for a long time that wasn’t the case. I think that’s an important thing to talk about.”
