Lowrider Space: Aesthetics and Politics of Mexican American Custom Cars

2. Inside Out: The Ambivalent Aesthetics of Lowrider Interiors

2 Inside Out The Ambivalent Aesthetics of Lowrider Interiors The car, it seems to me, acquires importance in the imagination precisely because it can move through public space generating images that might camouflage private space. The car, obviously, is a practical tool as well, but its practicality can never fully explain, as we will see, the use of a car as a site for self-display. The car, if the owner wishes, can be a mobile display of an artfully constructed self. This self can safely cruise public space because it knows that there is not enough knowledge out there to unveil the camouflage. The car, then, is a particularly useful site for the creation of hyperbole. Ralph Cintron, Angel’s Town Lowriding as a version of Mexican American identity became possible when Mexican Americans joined the U.S. car culture, a convergence of two developments : on one hand, the rise of Mexican Americans as a consumer market, and on the other, the expansion of the automobile class. The mid-twentieth century was a significant moment in this conjuncture, corresponding with the rise of a nascent Chicano/a identity among the grown children of those who had migrated to the United States from Mexico to escape the revolutionary upheaval of 1910–1920, as well as the visibility of mexicanos who had asserted their Americanness by serving in the U.S. military in World War II. This was the time that postwar surpluses in production and measures such as the G.I. Bill were building the U.S. middle class: the expanding availability of used cars spurred the inside out 65 development of customization and the hot rod and cruising scenes that are now iconically associated with the 1950s. Not coincidentally, the same midcentury historical context was formative for the politics of popular culture, since consumption became the focus of economic activity (Hebdige 1988), even, as one of the leading scholars of consumption puts it, “the vanguard of history” (Miller 1995, 1). Thus, lowriding emerged as part of a family of practices through which people exercise agency and appropriation in acts of consumption, and its version of Mexican American identity was in part a consumer identity. People continue to engage consumption as a field of everyday “second nature ” (Benjamin 2002b; Buck-Morss 1991) that offers opportunities to appropriate and recombine objects and elements of the semiosphere never intended for one another, such as decorating clothing with safety pins, or walls with spray paint. Such bricolage in the use and reinvention of everyday things became a master trope of popular culture with the ascendance of the “cut and mix” poetics of hip-hop, and continues to develop in the concept of a “mashup.” The ubiquity of this agentive consumption and the centrality of the consuming subject in contemporary capitalism render the category of “subcultures,” under which these practices appeared in the academic field of vision, a bit dated (Hebdige 1979). While the pathbreaking studies of subculture found a political charge in the “semioclasm” (Barthes 1972) that deviant modes of consumption effected, subsequent critiques have demonstrated that modern capitalism readily reincorporates such deviations as niche markets of taste. Indeed, sodalities of taste are widely viewed as one of the typical social forms of the present age (Bennett 1999). And agentive consumption is not only a matter of making certain choices from what the culture industries offer or mapping unscripted meanings onto purchased commodities—it can also blur any boundary separating it from production. Lowriding, for instance, emphasizes material modification and the physical reconstruction of an industrial object more than the collage aesthetic enabled by digital media. This material reconstruction, or customization, functions within and against habits of consumption and the contemporary cultural-political “system of objects” (Baudrillard 1996). Customization represents the excorporation of materials and time from the ordinary process of capitalist circulation for some purpose other than their prescribed function for the interests of capital (Certeau 1984; Limón 1983). It exists as a dynamic between mainstream commodity culture, which is one of the second-nature circumstances “not of their choosing ” within which people make history (Marx 1994), and acts undertaken to 66 lowrider space challenge, alter, or reappropriate that consumerism in some way. For lowriders, this second nature includes the social system of automobility and, in a larger sense, transport as a factor in the modern political economy. In a society in...