A lowrider or low rider is a customized car with a lowered body that emerged among Mexican American youth in the 1940s. Lowrider also refers to the driver of the car and their participation in lowrider car clubs, which remain a part of Chicano culture and have since expanded internationally. These customized vehicles are also artworks, generally being painted with intricate, colorful designs, unique aesthetic features, and rolling on wire-spoke wheels with whitewall tires.
1964 Chevrolet Impala named "Gypsy Rose," owned by Jesse Valadez, on display in the Petersen Automotive Museum. It is considered to be one of the most iconic lowriders ever built.
Lowrider culture and society public conference in San Jose, California (2019). The city was among the first to repeal its ban on lowriding in 2022.
Two men lowriding in the Fiestas Patrias Parade, South Park, Seattle (2015)
Two women lowriding in the Fiestas Patrias Parade, South Park, Seattle (2015)
Chicano or Chicana is an ethnic identity for Mexican Americans who have a non-Anglo self-image, embracing their Mexican Native ancestry. Chicano was originally a classist and racist slur used toward low-income Mexicans that was reclaimed in the 1940s among youth who belonged to the Pachuco and Pachuca subculture. In the 1960s, Chicano was widely reclaimed in the building of a movement toward political empowerment, ethnic solidarity, and pride in being of indigenous descent. Chicano developed its own meaning separate from Mexican American identity. Youth in barrios rejected cultural assimilation into the mainstream American culture and embraced their own identity and worldview as a form of empowerment and resistance. The community forged an independent political and cultural movement, sometimes working alongside the Black power movement.
A "Chicano Power!" by M.E.Ch.A. CSULA is held up in a crowd (2006).
El Paso's Second Ward, a Chicano neighborhood (1972)
"Chicana by luck, proud by choice" at 2019 Women's March, Los Angeles
Chicano may derive from the Mexica people, originally pronounced Meh-Shee-Ka.