â narrator: "truly california" is a kqed presented in association with... next on "truly california"... male announcer: lowriders, those hydraulically raised and lowered vehicles, come in a variety of sizes, models, years, and colors. narrator: for san diego's rich chicano community, lowrider culture has long meant more than driving a fancy car.
it's about creativity... martinez: one idea makes another idea. you know, it just comes to me. narrator: ...cultural identity.... juarez: it's that pride in us. our cars were washed, clean, polished. everything was perfect, and we knew that we were special. narrator: ...and social change.
soriano: lowriding means to me the beauty of my culture. it's art. and at the same time, it lets people know, "hey, i'm here to stay, "and i'm as part of the american melting pot as anybody else." narrator: next on "everything comes from the streets." aguilar: lowriding, to me, is a self-expression -- self-expression of the ideas and the style that you like.
it's an individual pride. ..."nice car, eh!" you go, "yeah, that's right. and it's me. yeah, and it's mine." reyes: for a lot of us that have been doing this for so many years, the whole essence of being a lowrider was cruising. it's something that was born from the grassroots, that was born in the barrio. and to me, lowriding -- it's become a way of life.
gomez: real lowriding started with the hydraulics. how low can you go, you know? i even seen cars where the tire would go up off the ground, and the car was laying on the ground. rodriguez: can't go around with just a stock car with no rims, and so on. you had to represent. and we always wanted to try to, you know, raise the bar to be the best.
somano: the value that i saw in lowriding was that you made a commitment. and being organized, stepping out of where you're supposed to be confined -- you know, we're not in the kitchen, we're in our cars, you know? and we're having fun and we're going to parties and we're doing events, and we're part of the community,
being role models for younger generations. reyes: if i hadn't done it, i probably would be dead by now. and i mean that very sincerely, in a sense that the type of lifestyle that we have in the barrios, the whole protectiveness of the barrio, it's a dangerous one. so for me, it was not losing totally the streets way of life, but an alternative. so, to catch the history of lowriding and to leave something behind for the next generations
to learn how we did it, how we organized, i think it's very important. constancio: lowrider is the chicano's way of resisting, and saying, "you know what? â¿sabes que? this is me. â¿y que?" male announcer: chevrolet presents "san diego and the ramona country." romantic? yes, indeed. especially to this honeymoon couple.
ornelas: the original anglo settlers that came to san diego county were mid-westerners. they tended to be conservative. they tended to be white, patriotic, and they built the city according to that particular image. male announcer: we enter the city along a smooth, wide stretch of engineering genius. ornelas: but the mexican presence in san diego
dates all the way to the first colonizers. in the 20th century, the community got concentrated in logan heights. and that has a lot to do with the availability of jobs, familiarity of people in the area, and also the fluidity of the border for most of the 20th century. so, the chicano community grew and strengthened itself right there.
torres: i grew up in logan heights during the 1940s. and this was my home, here. it was a two-story house, and the whole area here was our commercial area. there were doctors, lawyers. also drug stores, five-and-dime stores. and we even had a parade here. and then, with the '60s and '70s, that's when they came and they said,
"you have to move because we're gonna build a bridge here." and we moved. then they started building the pylons. the creative mind and the imagination and the initiative took over, and we started looking at this as a collective effort by artists. now this is a national historic site of aztlan. man: thank you so much.
give yourselves a round of applause. give it up for chicano park day celebration. woman: ise viva chicano park! man: ise viva! woman: iviva la raza! we're just getting warmed up. that's what it is. aguilar: today, we are celebrating the 42nd anniversary of the beginning of the park. and there's a lot of festivities today,
and mostly a lot of nice cars, you know? and friendly people, from young to adult. it's a big family-day event. today, i brought this '53 pontiac convertible. it needs work. it's not finished yet 'cause we got other projects, but i've been doing this since '68, '69. i used to cruise around here before the beginning of the park.
constancio: chicano park was a manifestation of the struggle by the people here in this community, that the raza of logan heights were getting together to stand up against the city. "you've been promising us a park. "you've divided the community. you built freeways through here, you built bridges." and what happened was, the people fought. in fact, what they were gonna do
is build a highway-patrol station here. rodriguez: you know, it was bad enough that they knocked down these houses and built the coronado bridge, and some of the houses our friends lived in. now they're gonna put a highway-patrol station there? we thought, "that ain't right." so, we all took off out of school and went down and protested, saying,
"hey, we're gonna make a park." constancio: people from all over heard about the land takeover here at chicano park. and, you know, we didn't have the internet and twitter and those kinds of things in those days. it was just word of mouth, but by the end of the day, people bonded arms and stopped the bulldozers from plowing the land. and chicano park, you know, was a symbol of the resistance.
it was a symbol of the taking back of the land. it's always been a place that raza knew that we could come... that this was our home, you know, somewhere that we didn't have to ask permission. gonzalez: the lowrider community has always been a very important part of the chicano movement. it can be traced all the way back to the very beginning, to the takeover of chicano park. the chicano movement
was responsible for uniting our people and fighting for our rights and for others' rights. the car clubs -- they brought it to our youth, they brought it to our young people. they showed them the importance of uniting and organizing ourselves. in the year 1970, in the city of san diego under the coronado bridge, lies a little piece of land.
a little piece of land that the chicano community of logan heights wanted to make into a park. reyes: chicano park, to us lowriders, means a lot, not only because we were involved in the takeover, but what it means to the whole community. [ speaking spanish ] and for us that grew up during that era, the late '60s, early '70s, the peak of the chicano movement,
this lowrider culture went hand in hand with coming together, making a stand against the establishment. and this year, we were honored to be asked to raise the flag and commemorate the anniversary of the park on behalf of the whole lowrider community. constancio: if it wasn't for the lowriders, here in san diego, we wouldn't have a chicano park day. we understand very clearly the role
that lowriding has played in our movement historically, and the lowriders understand the importance of having chicano park as a place to call their own, somewhere not just to show their car but to show their pride. and i think that's where lowriding starts with -- showing that pride. [ bell dinging ] [ man singing in spanish ]
torres: my first time that i saw one of the lowrider cars, i could see how low it was and how beautiful it was. and right away, like that, just like that, it reminded me of our period, growing up in the 1950s. i could see that something that we did seemed to have been influencing them. the fellas that had cars began to modify them, and some cars had skirts, which made the car look lower. and many of the cars had whitewalls.
a lot of the seat covers were being designed in tijuana, mexico. and we really loved mexico, so we'd go as a group of us. but we were put down because a lot of us couldn't speak correct spanish. we were made fun of. so, we were not really accepted in mexico during the '50s, and we were also not accepted in the united states. so we had our own way of trying to survive.
we decided that we wanted to develop a club. and so, los gallos, we were a social club. we were always attending dances that we organized and beach parties and picnics, and we'd all meet at the drive-in on market street, lawton's. these are the jackets that we wore. it has the sombrero, the guitar with a broken string. and before this was a park, this was all dry land. there was no grass,
and we would drive our cars up the hill, here, and we'd park all around here. and we would bring our guitars, and we would sing, play lalitas. a lot of the times we came up here, all the guys by ourselves, and whenever we brought our dates, we would sit in the car and talk, and at that time, you know, we'd neck a little bit. [ laughs ]
enjoy ourselves, yeah, but nobody was here, so it was like our little place. and we were engaged in improving our community, improving ourselves, especially. our club gave us a lot of respect, self-respect, and we helped organize the southeast youth council. and that included quite a few clubs, and also, there were some women's clubs. and we did it to cease fights
that were going on in the dances, and we also curtailed some of the competition. like, if we were gonna have a dance in may, we'd go to the southeast youth council and find out, is there anybody having a dance in may? well, there was or there wasn't, so the southeast youth council was very important. but even after we were organized and went to sacramento on a juvenile conference,
the union tribune reported "jacket club reports on 'good' gang life." you know, we had a president, a vice president, a secretary, a treasurer, a sergeant of arms, and a historian. that's who we were. and so, they wouldn't even recognize that. they still lumped us in as a gang. lopez: i was probably in the 7th grade when i got involved with this group called los chicanos
that was influenced by an older group, los gallos. hollman: basically, they taught us the fundamentals of organizing. i mean, we were able to do different things -- we organized dances, and we were a popular club. lopez: now, the name is kind of interesting. because during that time, 1950s, early '50s, nobody called themselves "chicano." well, a friend of mine, albert usquiano,
they were at a meeting one time, and they were trying to decide what they were gonna call themselves, this group. and there were a lot of clubs -- jacket clubs, if you want to call them. they were naming themselves "lobos," "amigos," "pollos." and albert says, "we're not animals, we're chicanos." wow. that was a heavy statement. because nobody called themself "chicano."
and so, my point is, los chicanos helped us develop this sense of worth that we were somebody. a lot of us went to college. i'm proud to say that i worked with cesar chavez. reyes: some of the jacket clubs were an important influence on us as lowriders. arturo: i want to welcome everybody for coming. i know this is short notice and everything
for this special meeting. all right. open it up. let's see where we are, what clubs we're from. arturo, amigos. reyes: i strongly feel that, like, jacket clubs evolved into car clubs. gloria: gloria, bombas car club. reyes: the jacket clubs gave us structure... george: george, individuals.
reyes: ...and a sense of organizing -- organizing events in the community. arturo: you guys all know chicano park is on the 20th. man: germaine's got more information, right? germaine: we talked about it earlier this year, that you guys would have the first two weeks... reyes: and also, governing ourselves, we use a very similar structure that some of the jacket clubs used.
man #2: just a reminder to everybody, dues are due next month. reyes: another big influence is even the jackets themselves. the great majority of the lowriders today wear the same style of jackets of back in the '50s. so there's a strong correlation there. martinez: my business is changing cars around, re-styling them. we didn't call them lowriders, we just called them custom cars.
cars, to me, were like a piece of art, man. you know, you chiseled on it, cut on it, bang it around, change it. when i look at a car, i look at it and say, "this car "looks like a million cars sitting on the street, so i'm gonna do it different." torres: robert martinez and his auto shop that he had here on imperial -- he was very important figure in our period,
and he experimented a lot. martinez: customers -- they wouldn't want to know what my ideas were. i remember this guy came to me with a mercury. and he gave me 1,000 bucks down, and every time he come in, he gave me $1,000. so i'd change it as he paid me, you know? in the front, i put a desoto bumper, put in cadillac headlights that were frenched in --
like a shade over them. that hood had a chrome, like a little scoop across the front, and i made the scoop disappear to the point to the bottom of the grille. took all the bumper bolts off and made it plain, put mercury taillights on it, extended the bumper. and i put his initials in the back, you know, smacked it all out. and then i put buick chrome on the sides,
i put electric doors, so when you pushed the panel of the door, they would touch each other and it would open the door. and painted it twice -- once with blue and silver, and then he said, "i want this car to be" -- he said, "i want it noticeable, man." so i painted it orange and put the silver trim on it. and that's what i did to the mercury.
i did a lot of work into it, you know? my school was in my yard, learning from my dad. my dad used to be a mechanic. i was about 16, i was chopping cars with axes. they were wrecked or they were wore out, so my dad used to scrap them. then later on, i learned to weld and change motors. i started to paint cars now. that's when i met the bean bandits.
guys would get together, build cars and race them. joaquin, one of the main guys, man, he was good at that. durant: we were just about unbeatable, and it was all because of joaquin arnett. we all helped and worked on the cars and stuff, but it was all his ideas. when he built a car, he built the steering, the framework, he built the engines, the transmissions, the rear ends,
everything you can think of. i guess you could say he actually made the club. angelo: this man was unbelievable, you know? there was nothing he couldn't do. and let me tell you, i miss him a lot, you know? loux: he'd help anybody, and so he became my hero, kind of thing, you know. so, the bean bandits, to me, were always the club to be in or the guys to be around.
angelo: and a lot of the people in the barrio used to say, "yeah, the bean bandits are good guys, man. you got to go up to the races and watch them." 'cause we used to put on quite a show out there, you know. we wear mexican hats and white shirts that lou brasil used to wear. that alone -- they would pay us just to show up. martinez: part of the fame was they were fast, and lot of the speed came from drilling out the carburetors
and running alcohol and nitro later, but joaquin had the secret of running. plus the idea of building them, the length and the gear ratio, all that. durant: and before drag racing, joaquin was chopping tops on cars, and he was doing all that type of -- lowering cars. he was a body man. he could do anything to a car.
angelo: there's a gentleman here, bobby martinez, did a lot of that. i went to bobby and i said, "bobby, i got a '47 caddy convertible. it's beautiful, but i want to lower it down." he said, "well, we've got to section the frame." i said, "i don't want nobody cutting up my frame," but he said, "no, no, this is what i'll do," and it was perfect.
and it came out beautiful. one job that he did on a paint job, and he was a little loaded, you know. and somehow, he fell over the car, and all his shirt was on top of the hood. he said, "oh, my god, what am i gonna do with this?" you know what he did? he got everything straightened out, got himself clean, and then
he started making figures over the mess that he made. and he said, "man, that looks pretty good." and the guy that owned the car came to see it, and he said, "man, that is fantastic," you know. and that's how he picked up on that. so this guy's got a lot of ingenuity himself. martinez: i'm the first guy ever did colored chrome, they call it. i was painting this chevy, and this guy
that helped me forgot to mask off the words, you know? so i'm spraying away, and it was like a candy coat. it was a transparent paint, but you put enough on it, it'll cover it up and it'll be blue -- an iridescent blue. so i was painting this car, and i went over the emblem, and i hit it with the first coat and it kicked, you know? it went like colored chrome. i said, "man, look at this thing shine, man."
it looked like gold, you know what i mean? but it was blue. so i said, "remember that." one idea makes another idea, you know? it just comes to me. you pick up something that's in the corner and improvise. gomez: i was just a little boy back in the '50s, and that's where i first got into cars.
all the older guys in my neighborhood, in chow town, they were in social clubs. and they all had cars that were really nice, and i was always interested. i would watch them work on them, and i would just go to their house -- all around the neighborhood, they lived. and they would be lowering them and changing the tires and painting the bottoms.
and in the '60s, we had a club called los condes, and it was all the guys that we were going to school with. it was a social club. we all had jackets. and then all the guys had cars. i had a '55 nomad. it had air shocks on the back, so i had it really low with the lowering blocks, and i would go places and let the air out of the shocks, and the car would go down, you know, inches.
the bumper would be inches from the ground. when we got older, we wanted to start a car club, so then we started the latin lowriders. it was a handful of guys. we used to have our meetings, like, on friday nights. we had it pretty well-organized, and i had a lot of pride in being in the club. i'd really do anything for the club. once we started the latin lowriders, 1969,
everybody wanted to start their own club, and so the clubs started popping up left and right. rodriguez: brown image started back in '69, and it was basically a lot of friends. some of us younger guys were in a group called zapata from the barrio station. barrio station was helping the youth, trying to keep us out of trouble. casares: the zapatistas, what do i tell you?
i mean, they didn't have any discipline at first. i mean, they were just fighting and, you know... and we encouraged them to get along. and as they were developing a self-concept, orgullo, their chicano pride became a very important part of developing car clubs. rodriguez: brown image continued the brotherhood. back then, it was just about the lowrider. it was about the mexican heritage.
it was like, you put on a nice jacket or something, and you were showing yourself through your car. you came in with a nice lowrider and you showed style, you showed class. you're cruising. gomez: there was another club in national city. it was called chicano brothers, and somehow, national city gave them a building. you could paint your car, you work on it in there.
they had all the tools. and then on weekends, they would have parties and stuff there. aguilar: the first lowrider club that i joined was chicano brothers in national city. don't forget, you got to take the brackets, first, off the base for the battery. i was born in tijuana, mexico, basically grew up in tijuana. growing up, you know,
my brothers were always working on cars. used to do a lot of bodywork and changing paint, primer, and that kind of stuff, and changing the look. and the chicano brothers, the way we got our warehouse, basically -- i think it was chuco, arturo ruiz, or somebody in the club, knew mr. camacho. we helped him through one of the fundraisers that he had, and he said, "we got this empty building right here,"
that the city had moved to another location, "if you guys want to use it as a clubhouse." we started using that as a clubhouse and a place to work on the cars. on weekends, that was always the meeting place for parties, music. everybody knew chicano brothers' hangout. i think that was the connection that we had from some of the clubs from tijuana.
rodriguez: some of the guys took the cars that they wanted. oscar rivas had a stock '69 riviera. using his own concept, he took it down to tijuana, where they actually lowered his top and chopped it in half and did all the work -- the custom paint job. he had an upholstery guy down there actually customize the upholstery inside. cota: lot of work was done over there
because it was cheaper and faster. and the casinos, the brown image, the latin lowriders -- they used to go to... ...and we used to make the plaques for them, for all the car clubs. and i used to work for my suegro, so i used to do the mens' work. you know... and stuff like that, have them ready and chromed up.
my husband at the time, we used to go las playas at tijuana, y este -- we used to cruise around. pero, at certain points... [ engine turns over ] [ horn honks ] reyes: i grew up here in del sol. it's a small neighborhood on the south side of san diego. when i was 16, 17 years old,
that was the most important thing in my life, protecting my neighborhood, but once i started to realize that there was more to life than that, i decided to focus more on myself, on my family, and on the culture, and i got more involved with the chicano movement. and some of my older friends started getting into cars, and that really attracted me.
i end up joining the casinos in 1975. i was going to high school at that time, and prior to that, the casinos had a reputation of being from tijuana. and my trip was being over there was on this side of the border, so for that reason, when i joined the casinos, i made it a point to try to change that image. but yet, many of the clubs of that era still saw us as a tijuana car club.
so in 1977, we decided to quit the casinos, and we started the amigos. and we've been here ever since. this is a 1929 willys knight. i've had it for over 20 years. i decided to fix this car because it's pretty unique. you don't see too many of these cars as lowriders. i have quite a big investment on it, as far as hydraulics, and most of the car was designed by victor correro.
it reflects my experience over the years, and i said that i consider myself chicano. but when we're trying to find out that identity, grasping the reality of who we are, we can't deny the fact that we are mexican, also. this car is dedicated to all the revolucionarias -- all the women that fought in the mexican revolution and continue to fight today. and to me, what's very, very important
that brought everything together, i feel, is here, a dedication to my mom because she brought up four kids on her own, as a single mother. so the whole dedication of this vehicle is basically for that. [ singing in spanish ] when i started lowriding when we were kids, it was something innovative, it was something new. we called it mexican or chicano ingenuity. martinez: i saw my first lowrider, i wanted one.
you know, it just goes to the floor. this is probably the ugliest setup that's here, you know, but it works. on the setups and the hydraulics, all my friends got together, we put it in. you got your cylinders tied up to a tailgate. you got two dumps so you can lower each side individually. you got the batteries hooked up on parallel, hooking up to some solenoids,
where the switch is going to the front, where you can hit the back or the car can lean to either side. and it's an old-school car. you know, other cars, they love that style of a hot rod, bigger tires, burning rubber, speed. with me, it was to the ground. it's just us. and everything came from the streets.
rodriguez: a lot of our hydraulic parts -- they were airplane landing gears, and we used to go to the army-surplus stores. galindo: up in los angeles, there was a place called palley's supply, and they had a lot of cylinders and stuff. you know, from the flying fortresses -- those bombers. male announcer: the flying fortresses, the pioneer four-motored bomber, in the air since 1935.
reyes: what makes the tires come down or up? those particular cylinders are the ones we were using. of course, they were big, so we had to adapt it to our cars, but it was all recycled materials. rodriguez: there was no manual that a guy could go to. it was just the people talking to each other in the club, and that's what's one thing that was good about the club 'cause you always could find out more things
and, well, "oh, where'd you get that at? we want that." or the different clubs would talk to each other. galindo: it became a challenge, lowriding. you know, as people, like, came up with something, somebody would come up with something else. the curbs surrounding chicano park on a sunday afternoon offer an informal place to get an idea of the variations. sure, all would like you to look at theirs,
but of course, some spend more time and money on assuring that what you see will impress you. rodriguez: there was a lot of competition. my brother was labeled the top hopper in san diego for a long time, where he was always challenged. so wherever we went, there was always a hopping contest, and we'd go head to head right in the middle of the street. one morning, we had a group that came to the house, calling me and my brother out early on a sunday morning.
but back then, hopping wasn't, like, a staged thing. it was like, you're either ready for it or don't take your car out on the street because if they know you're one of the best, they're gonna go up and people are gonna challenge you. you know, today, nowadays, you know, hey, it's for trophies. "okay, let's see who gets the highest." so somebody puts this big, old --
the back end way up there and jumps through it, you know. but that's show. back then, it was the street. somano: the culture of lowriding, you know, it was a part of the mexican-american culture, the chicano scene, and i actually got involved through the committee for chicano rights. we used to go down to the border and march. a lot of the events we went to, there was a lot of lowriders.
and we would always say, "man, i want my own car. i want to have my own car." we dreamed of it. we would talk about it. cano: back then at that time, you got to remember, a lot of females weren't allowed in certain things. and it seemed like lowriding was one of them, because in the workplace, i had that problem. they didn't want women where i was working at, so i got tired of it.
i said, "something has to be done." ladies pride was the first girls' car club in san diego. the main problem we had was coming up with the name. and i said, "we have to come up with a name that when somebody looks at the plaque, they know it's a women's car club, not just some girl driving their boyfriend's car. and then, also, the girls took a lot of pride in their cars, so we just put the two and two together
and we came up with ladies pride. castillo: and it was the perfect name because, obviously, we were all ladies and we had our cars. and that became our pride and joy, which actually was the logo that i had on the back of my monte carlo. it started out black car, and then, eventually, it was, like, a black-pearl color.
then i had a t-top put on, which was something that was real popular in the late '70s. cano: what was really different and unique about it was that when you seen all of us roll up somewhere, everybody was anxious to see who's gonna come out of that door. and the expression on their faces when they seen it was a woman... castillo: in fact, i remember several times,
a lot of us, when we were parked or we stopped to eat or we were at an event and they would see our cars, some of the males that did not know us would come up to us and they would say, "hey, is that your boyfriend's car?" or "is that your husband's car?" and we would get a laugh out of it because, you know, we were so proud of our cars. and we'd say, "no, that's our car." you know, "we own it.
we take care of it." cano: and when we were called to do interviews, it's just an awesome feeling to know that, hey, i'm a part of this lowriding. and it gives me goosebumps at times to know that, hey, you know what? we did this and other people noticed it and we're a part of the society that we grew up in, that we seen our fathers, our brothers, and whoever do this.
and it's just an awesome feeling to know that, hey, you know what? castillo: what we did by putting together this club and being members of this club would open the doors for lots of other women to do the same thing. juarez: i got involved in the specials car club in 1979. you know, all women, and we were more like sisters. williams: it took us a little while to understand the dynamics of what a car club was,
you know, coming to recognize officers. but i think it really became family, it was an extension of a family. somano: and we were from different sides of town. there was no barriers of i'm from this, you know, hood and you're from that hood and i can't associate with you. when we came together, we were as sisters. we were united as one. you took one on, you took all of us on.
juarez: nonie's mom was our second mom. all the girls would go over to nonie's house, and nonie's mom would be there. somano: my mom -- she was a traditional mexican mom, but she accepted me being a lowrider and she was always supportive of it, you know? so that was a blessing to me. williams: because most of the time, there was a misunderstanding of why we wanted to do it.
they were thinking we were looking for the attention, but we really had a genuine respect and a love for the cars. somano: being women, they were a little bit harder on us. we had to maintain those cars and they had to look good. you know, like, step it up a little bit more. we couldn't be sloppy. we had to be organized, you know. even our appearance. when we were wearing our shirts and flying our colors and flying our plaque,
we had a standard we had to live up to. juarez: i always liked to be different, so i got a 1979 cutlass supreme. mine was avocado green on the bottom, white vinyl on the top. so, when i got it, it was stock. the car was stock. and my dad said, "you know what? you got a great car. this is a beautiful car." two weeks later, i took it, we lowered it, pinstriped it.
it was beautiful. and my dad said, "you ruined the car." [ chuckles ] but it was my very, very first car, and i was proud of it. welcome, everybody! tonight is lowrider night, as all of you knew. even though i don't have a car, i still love to be around the cars.
it's that pride in us. we were the specials car club. how you guys doing? we got a trophy for the best car and the best motorcycle. so tell all your friends, tell everybody to vote. all right. okay. thank you. rosales: to compete with the fellas and gain respect, i actually feel like i have to work a little bit harder and step up my game.
my car -- her name is christine, and it's taken me about 20 years to get her to this point. and i think i built a pretty nice car, you know? i even hear comments saying, "wow, look at that," you know? "yeah, she's got the best car out here," whatever, you know? to me, i just love my car 'cause it's a part of me. i feel like it's an extension of me. castillo: as a club, one thing that we always looked forward to was cruising, and that was on the weekends.
one of the places was on highland. gomez: we were always trying to establish a cruising area. and everybody picked highland, you know. 'cause we had people from chula vista, and they come down highland to get to san diego, and you go that way to get to chula vista. and you always see people just on their everyday drive. cano: i was working at the cannery. i would have to work weekends, so what i would do --
i knew i had to be at work at 4:00. get up early, go down highland, leaving here about 2:00. and, you know, everybody knows it doesn't take no two hours to get from here to logan heights, but it did for me because i would go on down broadway, get onto highland, cruise highland, go through shelltown, come down, and then to work. juarez: we would caravan down to chicano park.
we would caravan all the way down to highland avenue. it was just like going up and down. didn't matter. we'd make sure we had gas, we had our snacks in our cars. my son always went with me in the backseat, and he loved being a part of that. reyes: for us, that was it. it was the roots of -- i mean, that was the whole essence of being a lowrider was cruising
and showing off whatever new things you had done to your car. allen: highland avenue, when i started here in 1980, would be bumper-to-bumper traffic on both north and south lanes from 4th street all the way to 24th and sometimes 30th street. completely packed in front of all the businesses, and the cars would have loud music. traffic would be stopped, so people would get out of their cars,
talk to people behind them. aguilar: then the businesses start complaining, and it's, like, people ruin a good thing. there was a lot of fights going on, but it wasn't really with the people that were in the car scene. castillo: spent a lot of time and money on our cars, so the last thing that people involved in lowriding wanted to do
was to get involved in any kind of trouble. newscaster: now let's take a look at an entirely different kind of car. leonard villarreal concludes his special report on lowriders and looks into some of the problems the car clubs have with the law. leonard? villarreal: tonight, harold, it is the lowriders and the law. so far in our series, we've looked at the fun and the spirit of the lowrider,
but there's also a very serious side to the attention these cars and drivers receive. it seems for many lowriders, trouble of various degrees seems to follow. cruising has created a lot of problems for the lowrider, especially in national city. officials say crime, among other things, forced them to take action. allen: businesses would call and say, "hey, we have trespassers."
and the residents of national city -- they couldn't get to the stores on highland avenue, so once the police department would receive a complaint, then we had to act on it. man: you're gonna give me a ticket for all that? officer: yeah. so, we told you. man: all three of them citations? officer: all three of them plus what i already saw.
you're bouncing on the street. allen: so, one of the sergeants and lieutenants did some research and came up with a bunch of different vehicle-code sections that nobody really knew about, and we would write tickets for the batteries, the hydraulics, the modified frames, the tires, and things like that. reyes: and to us, that was a definite sign of harassment. allen: i would probably write between 10 and 12 tickets
to lowriders and maybe impound one or two cars. that would be a typical night. back then, the police department had a reputation of being very hard-nosed. galindo: yeah, they were like the wolf pack, you know? ready to do the pac-man on you, you know? and those tickets cost, you know? if you were saving to do something custom on your car, you know, there you go.
you got to go to court. here come the judge. and boom! stick it to you. adolfo gonzalez: the police were always enforcing the cruising on highland. when i was young, i got pulled over i don't know how many times, and i wasn't doing anything wrong. i was just lowriding. aguilar: i got ticketed for being too loud and too low all the time.
somano: i got told to get off highland and don't come back by national city pd. galindo: and the officers -- san diego, it's a military town, so a lot of the officers were not used to seeing mexicans, and...they were not understanding the culture. rodriguez: and there was a lot of misconceptions of what the car club was. allen: there was a couple movies out in the '70s that portrayed car-club people as gang members,
and that set the public perception. [ dog barking in distance ] rodriguez: "boulevard nights" came out. i remember seeing it at the harvard drive-in. we had our lowriders and the wives, girlfriends at the time, and stuff, and we watched the movie there. even brought the kids. [ indistinct conversation ]
man: hey, pato. pato, what's the matter? pato: who did it? 11th street. rodriguez: and we were really amazed at how over-dramatic they made it... man: come on, let's go. rodriguez: ...to make the lowriders look violent. there were gangs, all this other stuff,
which was a bunch of bull, you know? but it changed a lot of the way people thought, and people were scared of the car clubs. and we talked about it and thought, "what do we want to do to make this change?" a good handful of us thought, "let's have a gathering of all the car clubs, "and show the community "that we're not at war with each other,
and for the clubs to know each other." i said, "each club is gonna come with two kegs of beer. "and you're gonna serve that beer to every club member, free. "but you're not gonna serve it with your club member. "you're gonna serve it with another club member. you're gonna talk and know each other." turned out really good, and now when they went cruising highland, they stopped and talked to each other.
they helped each other, and that was the beginning of the car-club council. male announcer: recently, the committee on chicano rights helped the many car clubs organize an area-wide car-club council, and it was at a recent meeting of the council i spoke with members about the reasons for their interest in lowriders. man: it's part of our culture,
it's part of our tradition, something that people out there don't know that, you know, has been here now for awhile, for a long while, and is probably going to continue for a long while more. reyes: highland to us was the central point, the central point of uniting not only as car clubs but as a community. [ indistinct shouting ] male announcer: hundreds of chicanos
from 11 lowrider car clubs and supporters from the committee on chicano rights gathered in front of the national city police department and city hall. lowriders claim police are abusing and harassing them every time they try to cruise highland avenue. reyes: i think it's very important that we were able to get other organizations to support us. the ccr -- the committee on chicano rights --
was one of the organizations that we approached, and one of the reasons that we approached them because i was involved with the ccr. baca: our position was that you couldn't break the law to enforce the law and that the national city council and the police were breaking the law because of the violation of constitutional rights -- the right to assembly,
the right to travel, equal protection of the law. reyes: we went as far as organizing the community. we got up to 300, 400 people to come into a community meeting to expose our points against the national city pd. man: what i'd like to know is, how come you guys are blocking the streets? how come you're telling us to go out of town? it is you, city council, who are ordering the police, but what gives the police
the right to start breaking the law? every time they see a lowrider, they go after him, and they tell you, "get out of here, out of town." woman: the harassment should be stopped now -- not later on, now before an innocent chicano gets killed down highland for no reason at all. thank you. [ applause ] reyes: people started realizing
that they didn't have to take it and they needed to participate, otherwise, their rights would continue to be stomped on. unfortunately, the national city pd continued with its efforts, to the point where many lowriders stopped being lowriders. and it's ironic -- 32, 33 years later, it's still the same situation. the sign right behind me kind of tells that story,
as far as how it got so political, and it got so hot that they just wanted to cut it once and for all, and they just eliminated cruising here on highland. we're still looking for that place to cruise. and we have lost that culture of the streets, of cruising the streets, and that's what we started from. and i feel to a great extent that that's what we need to go back to.
we need to go back to the streets. [ horns honk ] soriano: it's the x-man's 10th annual cruise for the cause bone-marrow blood drive. get on the registry so we can help save lives. come on down here. see x-man all the way live with magic 92.5, san diego's old-school chula vista. juarez: there are a lot of leaders in our community
that have lowriders. soriano: what about you? what kind of car do you want? you can pick one. juarez: they do a lot for the community. soriano: man! how old are you? young man: 17. soriano: 17 years old. and he says, "i don't want a new car. i want a car from the '50s." soriano: i haven't been in the game for a very long time,
but i'm a lowrider at heart. and lowriding means to me the beauty of my culture, the beauty of what i know, where i'm from, putting it on a car and expressing how i feel about my life. and it's my identity, so, you know, it's art. at the same time, it lets people know, "hey, i'm here. "i'm here to stay, "and i'm as part of the american melting pot as anybody else,
but this is my style." and that's what this show is about, and of course we're helping families for those bone-marrow matches, at the same time getting people to donate blood in our community. reyes: i think lowriders have a lot of potential to influence today's world. today, lowrider has become international sensation.
that's why it's so important, as older lowriders such as myself, to educate the younger ones that are coming up about the ways of being -- our traditions, our history, our culture. somano: being chicana, being able to represent who i am, being part of lowriding -- i mean, that's still in my heart. it's not something that you're done with
if you have a love for it. my daughter -- she's in a lowrider bike club. she has her lowrider bike, so it's gone to another generation. and i hope that my daughter can see that, yeah, this is what your mom did, and be proud of who you are, you know? she's the only girl in her bike club right now, so being in the car club helped me to help her.
aguilar: the car scene has been a big influence for me. there's been a lot of good from the different clubs that i belong to. oh, yeah. i have my jacket. the wife -- she has always supported me, and i got to work with my son, working on a lot of the cars. we built two cars together. we're still doing it. and when i get a chance, my grandson is there,
messing the wrenches with me in the garage, too. he's doing pretty good. castillo: i think one of the things with lowriding is it brings people together. and even though years have passed, these are friends that you continue to have 'cause we all had a common goal. it's something that years from now we'll still be talking about.
galindo: it's part of life. it keeps me going. it's good for your spirit and it's good for your soul. man: all the clubs in the lowrider council decided to get together the last sunday of the month. and we're cruising again. chicano park is back. [ engine revs ] man: more and more clubs are coming down like we did 30, 40 years ago. so, we're gonna continue with the old tradition
of cruising here in chicano park. ♫ two, three, four ♫ ♫ when it's time to shine the light ♫ ♫ on the young souls of the earth ♫ ♫ let it shine, illuminate the beauty of their world ♫ ♫ i said it's time to shine the light ♫ ♫ we got to educate ♫ ♫ not incarcerate ♫ ♫ so the humanity will shine ♫
♫ educate ♫ ♫ vamos, mis amigos ♫ ♫ let's try some brotherhood ♫ ♫ no need to kill another over a neighborhood ♫ narrator: want more "truly california"? visit us online to keep up with the local film scene, stream full documentaries, and submit your film to "truly california." support for "truly california" is provided by...
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