Custom Mambo

1992, 5 min. 13 sec.

"Manejar bajo (to drive low) is for the pride. And despacio (slow) is because we want to be seen”.

Crazy George from the "Viejitos" car club. 

Technology can have applications other than material, practical ones. For the Lowrider community, linguistics and aesthetics play a more important role than transportation. They fix their cars in the most incredible, excessive, baroque way ever imagined. Metal flake illustrated paint jobs, gold plated engines and brakes, velvet upholstery, disco lights, video systems and deafening stereos are some of the features that transform Chevies and other makes into shrines to be admired on the streets. Hydraulic systems are used to make the cars jump and dance and the beds of the trucks spin at more than 70 miles per hour. The car symbolizes the Californian way of life. Lowriders slow the freeways disrupting their efficient, pragmatic purpose, transforming them into a playground and meeting place. 

This early nineties video is the first I did about the subject. It doesn't pretend to coldly document this phenomenon but rather functions in a visually seductive way like the machines themselves using images, video technology and effects of dubious taste. The music composed by Xavier Alvarez is an electroacoustic piece that samples Perez Prado (the king of Mambo). Here again new technologies create rhythms and sounds that deal with the notion of "avant garde" and tradition at the same time. "You lower your car for the pride and if you drive too fast, people won't be able to check it out" says Crazy George from the Viejitos car club. These "rides" constitute an effort to be noticed in a society that doesn't want to see the people that ride them. I hope the video conveys the overwhelming experience of the Dyonisian "beauty" that escapes any notion of rationality and at the same time hints at some of the problems it raises.