Road stories come in many colors. Films most often portray whites on the road because high production costs mean that films reflect majority culture so that investors (usually white) can recoup their expenses. Still, it’s clear that people of color enjoy vibrant road culture and document their automobility--their autonomy and mobility. We simply need to look outside mainstream media, for it's on the backroads of pop culture that minorities, subcultures and rebels share their road stories. BlueGalaxie will be a place to explore these alternatives as well as Hollywood’s depictions of the road.
Today I want to shout out to the lowriders posting short videos of their hopping and candied cars on YouTube.com.
Toblerone7’s “Give it UP!”
Some of these videos are 16 seconds long and others are five minutes or longer, but you’ll find over 500 videos on YouTube tagged “lowrider” (the number grows daily—no kidding).
Rentapacheco’s Lowrider Video on YouTube
fce’s Lowrider Video on YouTube
Many of the videos have been posted by people in car clubs, like the Dukes or the Individual Car Club, and are tagged as such,
tank1975’s Lowrider video with the Individuals Car Club
but even “amateurs” are getting into the picture—literally. Additional sites like autoclips.net contain some of the same videos, and some car clubs, like Majestics Compton, have their own online films. (More about the Majestic’s mighty lowriding documentary Sunday Driver in the next week or two, and other videos for sale lickntricks.com.) MySpace has a long ways to catch up on lowriding videos—there’s not much there...yet.
Race and ethnicity don’t dictate car club membership, but ever since the the first lowrider clubs began in South Los Angeles in the 1940s, the clubs tend to grow from one central racial group—be that Chicanos/Latinos, blacks, Asians, or some hybrid community. There’s even “Punjabi Lowriders” in Toronto by jazzsaini, whose video is set to appropriate music.
As such, these videos portray the passion and pride of people whose stories are rarely told on the nation’s movie screens or even televisions. Lowrider videos constitute an important grassroots movement in minority self-representation, autonomy and mobility; social software like YouTube, LayItLow.com, autoclips.net, and flickr create an audience and—even more important—a community.
The YouTube videos feature the cars rather than stories of mobility, but when I worked at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles during its “Arte y Estilo: The Lowriding Tradition” exhibit in 2000, I learned that behind every beautiful lowrider car are lots of road stories—of their owners driving to competitions, cruising inside and outside their home turf, negotiating with police, working at steady jobs to support their hobby, developing relationships with key mechanics and master craftsmen, and much more. More than mere cars, lowriders have elaborate murals or specific touches added lovingly to demonstrate the significance of automobility—autonomy and mobility—in forming the identity of this car subculture. Entire families of multiple generations are usually involved the lowriding, as Lynell George demonstrates in her recent LA Times article on the Ruelas brothers. I met the Ruelas families and many other lowriders of all races at the Petersen, and learned from this huge community that not all the road stories created in LA come from Hollywood, but also Whittier Boulevard and Slausen Avenue as well.
While the lowriding community is diverse, the videos on YouTube are pretty similar—some even use the same clips. These videos can hardly be called “stories,” for they usually focus on the spectacle of the hopping car or offer a montage of still shots of car exteriors and interiors without any voiceover whatsoever. Clearly, lowrider youtubing is still at an early stage—I predict we’ll see storytellers emerge from the current trend of snippets and scrapbooked documents. I didn’t look at all the videos, but only a couple offer commentary and interviews. Of course, every single video posted is accompanied by a soundtrack—a rap or norteno soundtrack or War's legendary "Lowrider." iMovie and other digital movie-making programs have expanded the opportunities for self-representation in lowriding from inner-city boulevards to the info superhighway.
Lowride24’s “No Life Like the Low Life” documentary mixed with the narrator’s own history
Also, 99% of the videos seem to be made by men, but there are plenty of women involved in lowriding and the representation of lowriding (and I don't mean the many women in bikinis, although they know something about self-reprentation--some of them are real businesswomen). For instance, Monica Delgado narrates her history of growing up in lowrider Los Angeles in Low and Slow (1997—27 minutes) http://members.aol.com/ritualfilm/page3.htm, a documentary film she made with her husband, Michael van Wagenen—this is a great film for teachers of all grades. An anthropologist who studies lowriders is Brenda Jo Bright, and Denise Sandoval, guest curator of the Petersen’s lowriding show, also put together an exhibit on the Virtual Gallery of the Smithsonian Latino Center in 2003.
And there’s me, a white woman dedicated to the road story in all its colors and formats. What about you? Share with us your insights on lowriding or point us towards road stories on alternative media.
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