Lowrider’s last cruise in print
Founded by San Jose State students, the magazine has covered car culture and the Chicano community for 42 years.
By Montse Reyes | Jan. 5, 2020 | San Francisco Chronicle
Photo by Beto Mendoza
Los Angeles has Whittier Boulevard. Immortalized in songs and films, the road is legendary for Chicanos, especially those who obliged the weekend tradition of piling into glistening, candy-painted Chevys and Cadillacs to cruise.
It might not be featured in Snoop Dogg music videos, but Bay Area residents know the other heartbeat of the lowrider community: Mission Street.
“Every Friday and Saturday night, it was like a parade,” recalls Roberto Hernandez, founder of the San Francisco Lowrider Council, of nights spent on the neighborhood’s biggest thoroughfare in the 1970s and ’80s. “We had cars coming from Sacramento, Tracy, Stockton and San Jose. It was bumper to bumper from 16th Street all the way up to Cortland Avenue.”
As the godfather of ground-hugging cars in San Francisco, Hernandez has been protecting the rights of those who cruise since the early ’80s. And now, he’s among those mourning the loss of Lowrider magazine, which recently announced it will be shuttering its monthly print edition.
The publication has been a pillar in car and Chicano culture since a trio of San Jose State University students — Sonny Madrid, Larry Gonzalez and David Nunez — debuted the publication in 1977. (Nunez passed away in 2011, and Madrid in 2015.) The three came up with a few thousand dollars to fund the first issue, which they put together huddled over tables at a restaurant near the university. Their first issue, essentially a zine with black and white photos of cars and write-ups documenting the scenes in San Jose, Fresno and Gilroy, sold for $1.
On Dec. 6, 2019, the magazine’s parent company, TEN Publishing, announced it would cease to print Lowrider (alongside 18 more of its 22 titles) by the end of 2019, citing a rise in digital readership. The magazine will continue to publish content online.
“I almost died,” Hernandez says of his reaction to the news that the physical magazine would be shuttering after 42 years. “I couldn’t believe it.
Covers of Lowrider magazing. | Lowrider
“The magazine played an important role because it gave a validated identity for the youngster who was 14, who was a cholo and was coming out to check out the lowriders,” adds Hernandez. “Or tu mamá or tu papá, or tu tía or tu abuelita.”
“It’s a whole lifestyle, a whole community,” says Beto Mendoza, who freelanced for Lowrider for years before joining full-time in 2011. He is one of two current full-time staffers, both of whom will continue covering the souped-up cars through the magazine’s website and social media accounts. “Everyone that’s a real lowrider, we all know each other, we’re all friends. There’s a real good connection between all of us.”
Mendoza fell in love with lowriders at age 6, when he saw a car jumping on hydraulics in the 1987 Cheech Marin comedy “Born in East L.A.” Soon after, Mendoza got his hands on a copy of Lowrider magazine. He was hooked.
The tradition of riding low and slow has deep roots for Latinos in the United States, stretching back to the 1940s, when Mexican American youth in oversize zoot suits — known as pachucos — would throw in bags of cement or sand to lower their Chevrolets. The lowriders were roving political statements, a declaration of both pride in Mexican heritage in the face of discrimination, and defiance of the fast-and-slick hot rods popular among young, white Americans.
Technology evolved, with sandbags soon giving way to hydraulic pumps that could raise or lower the customized cars with the flip of a switch at the owner’s behest, creating the modern lowrider style most have come to recognize today.
“Lowriding is an art form,” says Hernandez. “You will never see a lowrider that’s the same as another. The upholstery is different. The color, the paint job is different. Every lowrider puts his touch on his lowrider. It comes from your heart, your soul, your spirit, your mind.”
A 1986 Buick Regal in Corcoran (Kings County). | Beto Mendoza
Law enforcement hasn’t always agreed. A 1958 law in California outlawed cars that had any part lower than the bottom of the wheel’s rim. From then on, lowriders became associated with gangs and violence, arguably spurred by racist stereotypes of the young, often working-class brown and black men who drove the cars.
“The police didn’t understand it,” Hernandez says, recalling the resistance lowriders faced in the ’70s and ’80s. “They saw it as threatening.”
Drivers out to cruise knew to expect harassment. Police would issue tickets for reckless driving or shut down Mission Street altogether to stop lowriders. Hernandez says he was cited 113 times, and recalls some of his peers being arrested for cruising.
If they headed across the bridge to the East Bay, it was the same: “If we went to a town like Walnut Creek, we ended up getting chased out by the (locals) or by police,” says David Gonzales, a Richmond-born lowrider and cartoonist who ran the comic strip The Adventures of Hollywood in the magazine from 1978 to 1983.
The police involvement always seemed to have an element of racial profiling, according to Hernandez.
“While we were doing that on Mission Street, across the city, in the Sunset, on the Great Highway, the hot rodders — which were all the white boys — were racing for pink slips,” he says, meaning the winner takes the loser’s car. “And the police and the city never messed with them.”
Covers of Lowrider magazine, including the inaugural 1977 issue of Lowrider magazine (center). | Lowrider
Lowrider magazine provided an antidote. Spurred by the energy around the Chicano civil rights movement, Madrid, Gonzalez and Nunez set out to feature lowrider culture with appreciation and affection, while also covering social and political issues important to the Chicano community.
Alongside customized cars, Lowrider’s pages featured sections like La Raza Report, short stories, poetry and comics made by Chicanos. At one point, they even started a now-defunct music label, Thump Records, and had a scholarship program for young Chicanos.
“It did a lot of reporting on social issues that were affecting Latinos,” Hernandez says. “But more importantly, it also became a conversation piece. You could talk with your family, your friends, your homies so it became a way to not only communicate but to inform, educate and begin a conversation.”
The early success of the magazine spoke to the need for such an outlet, as it grew from a homespun DIY-style project to a publication with considerable reach.
“I’ll never forget when Sonny (Madrid) called me and said ‘I got the first issue,’” Hernandez recalls. Hernandez leaned on the connections he had built in San Francisco and throughout the Bay Area through his organizing with the United Farm Workers to help get the magazine stocked in record stores, panaderias and other local businesses.