Fans of car culture share passion for custom rides with Hollywood
Visit Gilbert Flores at his home on the north side of Houston and you’ll see a lot of photographs of family members near cars.
“This was a way of life for us,” he said. “I was born in it, I guess you could say. My uncle had one of the first lowrider bikes in Houston.”
Part of that lifestyle includes meet ups, events where people can congregate with their prized rides to show them off or commune with likeminded enthusiasts.
As president of the Bayou City Car Club, Flores decided to continue a tradition of holding car meet ups around the release of new Hollywood movies that celebrate car culture — and feature a lowrider or two.
For most casual fans of car culture, that probably means getting revved up about the “Fate of the Furious,” the latest in the “Fast and Furious” franchise, which opens Friday. The films contemporized big-screen street racing in the early 2000s, showcasing a side of the culture that celebrated foreign cars tricked out for racing performance. It also has had a few lowriders rolling down the road.
But for Flores and a lot of lowriders the next car movie is the one they’re excited about. That’s
“Low Riders,” out next month, which marks the first time since the 1970s that a mainstream Hollywood film focused on Chicano culture and its iconic cars.
Of course “Low Riders,” which was filmed in Los Angeles, has received its share of bad publicity due to the common Hollywood theme of linking gang violence to lowrider culture. Co-starring Texan Eva Longoria and Mexican actor Demian Beshir, the movie treads on similar tones, ones that led to an outcry against the film for stereotyping Los Angeles Chicanos at a time when most of their Southern California neighborhoods are fighting against rapid gentrification.
“We’re in a day and time where you see things like that,” Flores said.
But get past the stereotypes and common characterizations of Chicanos and you see how lowrider culture is a community expression of Chicano-ness in the Southwest, said Jonathan Kuntz of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.
You could say the same about cars and cinema, in general.
Hollywood hot rods
An expert in cinema and film history, Kuntz said custom body design for cars started in the 1920s, with much of the foundation cemented in Tinseltown.
Names like Harvey Earl, a Hollywood-born designer who was hired by Cadillac and brought to Detroit, influence early automobile design, Kuntz said.
Some 20 years later, the New Jersey-born Howard A. “Dutch” Darrin moved to Hollywood via Paris, France, where he had built a car business. Darrin helped further develop car design, working on projects for celebrities and movie companies.
But it wasn’t until the ’40s and ’50s that teens started to add their own stamp to car culture, with hot rods, dragsters and, eventually, lowriders.
“Rebel Without a Cause,” featuring a custom Mercury, and teenage exploitation films led the way for custom cars and street racing in movies. Meanwhile, “Bullet” with Steve McQueen racing around San Francisco, became a landmark car film.
“Hollywood, by being in Southern California, has been at the heart and the origin of art-car culture, and we can particularly pick out here the lowriders,” Kuntz said. “This is an evolution of the 1940s and 1950s, a kind of workingclass Mexican-Americans in the Southern California area who took low-priced used cars, oftentimes, and styled them in a particular lowrider way so they could cruise around in style in their neighborhoods, usually on Friday and Saturday nights.”
Flores said the narrative of lowrider culture doesn’t start with the West Coast.
“I just know that that’s been a lifelong debate of whether Texas created it, or California,” Flores said, laughing. “We could go back and forth on that all day.”
Flores said he expects more than 100 people to come out to a lowrider showcase and private screening of “Low Riders,” which comes out May 12.
To set up the event Flores contacted a fellow Houston-area car enthusiast named Gilbert Rico.
Cars are family
Rico, who lives in Cypress, created the Wet Dreams VW car club, an offshoot of his obsession with Volkswagen cars. His club, a formal car guys meet up, focuses on fixing and driving modified VW cars.
The IT technician, who works from home, is currently working on a Volkswagen EOS for his wife, who also appreciates car culture.
With his children already out of high school and a wife who is OK with them spending the more than $20,000 it sometimes takes to modify a car, Rico said that being in a Volkswagen club is one of the best things in his life.
He’s won prizes with his 2013 Volkswagen Jetta GLI he calls the “Zombie Killer” because of the printed graphics of people battling zombies that wrap around the vehicle.
For Rico, getting together with his group of 20 or so fellow drivers is a common thing, either going to car shows, car meets locally or heading out to Austin or Dallas for a show.
“Our calendar is pretty booked this year so far,” Rico said about car shows and car meets he’s hosting or attending. “But, I’m going to be honest, I’m not a fan of the ‘Fast and the Furious.’ ” Really? “They went from street racers to Seal Team 6,” Rico said.
But there is an element of the franchise that still resonates and reflects Rico’s group of car enthusiasts.
“My home has become a unofficial clubhouse. and we often barbecue and just hang out, we have some great times,” Rico said. “It always reminds me of the time in the first movie when they sat down to break bread as a family.” Not about racing
For the opening of “The Fate of the Furious,” Rico’s club is hosting a car meet up along with Houston Underground Races, a club with thousands of members formed by Houston resident Christian Valdez.
Valdez who is 27, remembers the days not too long ago when cruising around Westheimer Boulevard would often lead to whispers of illegal races that would eventually lead to activity on a stretch of highway somewhere. He said his brand is more about the car lifestyle. But in the past, Valdez said he and his Mustang were no stranger to fellow street racers.
If you’re into cars in Houston, the acronym for his club, HUR, might be familiar. The group does weekly car meets in Spring and other locations. But HUR isn’t about racing, it’s more about automobile appreciation.
“The racing, other people do that. You need to have a fast car to know about those places,” he said. “If they don’t know you, they wouldn’t invite you to the real underground races.”
Giving the local car community a place to come and park and show off vehicle modifications that are often made at the expense of a lot sweat equity, is the aim for these car enthusiasts, and it’s also the exact kind of person these car-culture movies are aimed at.
Young males are a demographic of Hollywood, said Kuntz of UCLA. Car movies are going to attract that core audience.
In fact, for Flores, and his fellow Houston lowriders on the north side, seeing their favorite kind of cars on screen will have a deeper meaning. Something attached to their culture and to all the times they gassed up their vehicles to cruise Irvington Boulevard on a warm summer night, rides that continue to this day.
“Some people have photos of family members lying around,” Flores said. “We have pictures of cars.”
Camilo Smith is a freelance writer in Houston.