For the Love of Cars and Community: On Lowriding
Bajitas y Suavecitas exhibition. Photo by Sonia Gurrola.
Denise M. Sandoval likes to let her work speak for itself.
“It’s never really about me,” says the professor of Chicano and Chicana Studies at California State University, Northridge. “When you’re doing work in the community, I just feel like that’s what we’re supposed to be doing, highlighting our community.”
And for decades—through her writing, research, exhibitions, including Bajitas y Suavecitas at CSUN—her work on lowriding has pushed back on stereotypes and shown the people at the center of this fervent community.
When she does step into the spotlight, you can see exactly how her warmth, curiosity, and expertise have allowed her to earn the trust and respect of lowriders. Intervenxions recently spoke to Sandoval to learn more about the new exhibition she curated, her work on the all-women issue of Lowrider magazine, and what she hopes to see in the field in the future.
Bajitas y Suavecitas is on view at CSUN Art Galleries until March 15, 2025. Check out more 2025 exhibitions here. Intervenxions staff edited the following interview for clarity and concision.
You've written and uplifted lowrider communities for several years. What first sparked your interest?
What first sparked my interest was having grown up in the San Gabriel Valley. I grew up in La Puente around a lot of Chicanos. Obviously, I saw lowriders there as well as Lowrider magazine and Teen Angel, which was the cholo magazine of the time. But I think it really clicked for me when I was at UC Berkeley and found old issues of Lowrider magazine.
At that point, I already had my first Chicano Studies class. That's when I saw the magazines differently. I had the language now to understand what I was viewing as a cultural artifact and saw how the magazine was really a community history. They would have stories on the Chicano Movement, on organizing in different lowrider communities. It was much more community-focused. They even had short stories, poetry, and photos, which let us see the beauty of what was happening in Tucson lowriding, San Francisco, LA, and beyond. In the Lowrider Pasados section, people would send in photos of their tíos or tías posing by their cars in the ‘40s and ‘50s. It was that era when owning a car was the American Dream, and people would take their whole family portraits. It was very Americana. It was also a time when we didn't have the Civil Rights Movement yet. There was racist segregation.
And then taking feminist classes at Berkeley also gave me another language to view the Lowrider magazines in the early ‘90s. It was all like bikini models.
Bajitas y Suavecitas exhibition. Photo by Sonia Gurrola.
Bajitas y Suavecitas exhibition. Photo by Sonia Gurrola.
And that’s something the letters to the editor addressed, particularly other women.
To me, those letters to the editor were more about people sharing their story, sharing their cultura and their love for low riding. Sometimes you would find in the old issues, guys who were locked up writing about how this magazine brought them joy and connected them to their community.
And then somehow—in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s—the letter to the editor was called Escucha la Tía, and it was kind of like Dear Abby. People were sharing their personal problems and that Tía would respond. I became fascinated when I saw how girls were writing about how their brothers don't let them lowride, or they were controlling their bodies and their sexuality. Some women were saying, “We want men. We want pictures of sexy men.”
The interesting thing was that Escucha la Tía her responses were so traditional and Mexican patriarchal. I told myself, “There is a man writing this response.”
I had no way to prove it. It was conjecture. But when I was doing a public presentation in San Diego in 2006, somebody raised their hand and he said, “Hey, when I was in grad school, me and five people were writing the responses. There were four men and one woman.”
You called it!
Bajitas y Suavecitas exhibition. Photo by Denise M. Sandoval.
Yeah, I kind of read all the letters to the editor from the first issue in ‘77 to the early 2000s. And there were some shifts. The magazine folded in ‘85 and the original Chicano founders were very political. They were doing fundraisers for the UFW back in the mid-’70s. The new guy who bought it had more of a business model, and he really erased a lot of the letters from prison because they were more about promoting this positive image of lowriding. The politics shifted in some of the letters to the editor, but you would still find women talking about how they love the magazine. They're lowriders. They wanted sexy men in the magazine. That was a constant theme that a lot of them pointed out like, “You're giving us sexy women. We want sexy men.”
The editor writing responses in that period of the ‘90s said women were about 50% of the letters he read. It showed me that women have always been there, even though they're kind of getting their flowers now. And in the media, they, you know, you even look at the old issues, women were always a part of lowriding.
“It showed me that women have always been there, even though they’re kind of getting their flowers now. ”
We're seeing contemporary artists draw on lowrider culture, such as Willie Chavarria during Paris Fashion Week. How has the appreciation and understanding of lowrider culture changed as a result of growing criticism, scholarship, and curatorship?
When it comes to the art world, we have to go back to the ‘60s and ‘70s because Chicano artists have always used the lowrider as kind of an icon that symbolizes Chicanismo, symbolizes our community. Take Gilbert “Magu” Luján and Los Four who were very instrumental in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There's a history of looking at the car as this symbol of pride and strength of our communities and love of our communities.
There were even times when you didn't see so much of that in the Chicano art world, but in the streets, you did. So there’s that urban art that the community's drawing and then the art world. That tension's always been there, and I think the shift has happened.
And then there’s the crossover stylistically of that Chicano style, like the cholo style and fashion and makeup, like Gwen Stefani and Christina Aguilera in the early 2000s. What we're seeing now is that lowrider style is mainstream. It's like that hot thing right now, right? The same thing happened with hip-hop. For me, it's important to note the way it becomes fetishized or when white kids are wearing that cholo style for fashion, right? There are people who are wearing that style in our communities that are still going to be criminalized. So to me, it's that contrast of you having that freedom. It's fashion; it's cool. And our community is wearing it as cool, right? But their bodies are still criminalized.
It's happening on Whittier Boulevard, where the cars can cruise, but the cops are still writing tickets for lowered cars or other things. The reality is great that we're getting that attention, but it doesn't take away from what's still happening in our communities. We're continuing to be surveilled, continuing to be targeted and criminalized for our style.
You’re very familiar with the lowrider scene in LA, but you’ve also delved into other communities. How have you managed that?
For a lot of years, I just stuck to my lane in Los Angeles because I think it's really great when you do community history when you're from here. But I've been working with the Smithsonian in the last five years on this traveling photography exhibit on lowriding, focused on Chicano lowriding. That allowed me to do oral histories in different lowrider communities. I went to Sacramento, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Phoenix.
I hadn’t ever touched San Diego in my work because San Diego is very unique. They have Chicano Park, which has a very specific community history and a lot of people already doing that work. So I didn't want to step on it in the past, but at least the lowrider oral history project allowed me to interview these different communities. I just documented their stories, documenting lowriding.
Even though region adds some diversity to lowriding, it’s pretty much the same reason why they lowride. It’s the same love of the cars, the family, the brotherhood, sisterhood, the honor, respect, all of that.
In the lowrider culture, they always talk about it as a movement, like there's one lowrider family. That also is really interesting language as a cultural studies person, to understand that there's this set of knowledge, like historical knowledge and language and place, that the community shares from the past to even today.
Bajitas y Suavecitas exhibition. Photo by Sonia Gurrola.
And then, of course, I want to talk more about the Lowrider magazine issue you edited and the focus on women. What was that process like?
When I saw the project, I was like, “I don't think I can do this.” But then when I realized in talking to the staff that I actually had an idea, they said, “Well, you could be the editor-in-chief.” And they asked if I knew somebody who we could bring on as an editor to do more of the groundwork. I knew Jessica Lopez, who wrote for Lowrider magazine in the late ‘90s, early 2000s. I called her, and this was just after the writers' strike; she writes for Hollywood. And it just happened to be somebody who I knew who had been out of the magazine for a while, but she had that expertise. She knew the magazine; she knew what we needed. I wrote some of the pieces as well. I even reached out to Gustavo Arellano at LA Times to see if he knew some writers that we could bring on.
That was great bringing all those writers together and then to highlight not just the women lowriders, but the art and also the women who are now on the building side doing painting and hydraulics. It was really great to capture that spirit of the old magazine with the glam and the glossiness of the ‘90s magazine. I was very particular in my message of not using the word feminism, but using the ideas of feminism. It's definitely a feminist magazine. Overall, it was a really amazing working experience. And I'm very proud of the end result.
“It was really great to capture that spirit of the old magazine with the glam and the glossiness of the ‘90s magazine. ”
I love how women went from kind of being on the periphery with their letters to now steering the direction of this issue. That's really powerful.
They're telling their story on their own terms and defining their body politics, how they want to be portrayed, and their relationship to the cars. Initially in our meetings, and it wasn't MotorTrend, it was Modelo. They had certain ideas of what they wanted in the magazine that was more fluff and glam, like chola nails and hair and all of this. And they were, you know, culling Instagram for top influencers. But MotorTrend was great because they also have to protect the integrity of Lowrider magazine. That's why I felt confident coming on board doing that.
And the title of the new exhibit, Bajitas y Suavecitas, we actually pitched that title for the special issue, but it ended up not working out. But that magazine was great because it got me in the mindset to prep for this exhibit; it already gave me new lenses to kind of see something that I've always been analyzing and integrating in my work. When it came to doing this art exhibit, like, I could see what right away what I wanted to do.
Veronica De Jesus, Onni Arte, Denise M. Sandoval, Irene Shiori, and Jacqueline Valenzuela. Photo courtesy of Denise M. Sandoval.
What stood out to you from working on this exhibition?
There were some artists I knew I wanted to work with, but I feel there are probably, in this show, more artists that this is my first time working with them. I think the great part of that show was bringing together many types of visual artists—some of them went to grad school; some of them don't; some of them are just learning on the job. Or even Onni. She's pretty much self-taught, comes from an artistic family. And then the women who are now entering into the field of painting lowrider cars.
It's very feminist-inspired. When we wrote the press release and the grant, I was interested in developing this idea of lowrider feminism that had been around since the beginning but that has strengthened in the last few years. It's all about uplifting and unity. And sisterhood is powerful.
Where do you hope the research, scholarship, curatorship surrounding lowrider culture goes in the future?
I think we're seeing it. When I was doing this work in the early 2000s, even ‘07, ‘08, there weren't a lot of museums including lowriding in their exhibits. Our community has always done it, right? So community spaces, especially in California, you'd see it like in the Mission Cultural Center or out around Chicano Park down there. I've seen a lot more exhibits in these last eight years across the United States, particularly in pockets where there's Chicano communities, and more grad students are interested in the area of not just lowriding but also pachuco culture.
That's exciting to me because when I was in grad school, there weren't a lot of us. I pretty much knew everybody, like the Chicanos that were, doing this work, like one of my colleagues. She's a chingona out on the East Coast at Yale, Deborah Vargas, who does stuff on Chicano music. So now it's great to see the increase of PhD students, and they're doing their work. To me, there's still so much of our history that needs to be documented. I welcome it, and it's even more important to me that it's scholars who are coming from specific communities, engaging in that community history. And I love it.
It’s so important that we continue to cultivate and mentor new scholars in our field. And I'm excited about this new generation and what they're doing.
