California lowriders become art, big business

By Gina Keating

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.