New Film Reveals Revolutionary History of Lowriders Gabriel A. Solis - VICE
go to original May 11, 2017

'Lowriders' highlights the aesthetic of Chicanx car culture (Emmanuel Ramirez)

Director Ricardo de Montreuil's new film Lowriders is Hollywood's latest attempt at depicting the culture that's formed around customized classic cars in the Chicanx community.

"Every lowrider movie is the same - whether it takes place in the 50s, 60s, 70s, or the 2000s," he tells me. "The lowriders are poor, there's some neighborhood issues, some gangs, a brother goes to prison, mom and dad love him and try to help him out... And then they play handball in prison..."

While Lowriders does manage to break a few persistent stereotypes about Mexican-American youth (a quality that hits home for Chicanos like me who know more about At The Drive In than how to make cars bounce), it still sticks pretty closely to Hector's script - minus the prison handball.

The movie follows Danny (Gabriel Chavarria), a young Mexican-American who is far more interested in becoming a renown street artist than working in the garage owned by his dad, Miguel (Demián Bichir), a lowrider aficionado. Danny's mom Gloria (Eva Longoria) tries to hold the family together, before Danny's estranged brother Francisco 'Ghost' Alvarez (Theo Rossi) returns home from prison, old wounds and forcing Danny to confront his family's turbulent past.

And while it feels a bit redundant to see yet another film about Mexican-Americans getting shot and going to jail, my biggest gripe with Lowriders isn't that it sits in the shadow of American Me. Instead, it's the way they leave out lowrider culture's history and radical politics.

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