How Lowriders Put a Vivid Stamp on New York City’s Car Scene

Growing up in Mexico, Marco Flores fantasized about the lowrider cars he saw in magazines, studying their colorful bodies and gleaming engine compartments. He adored his father’s Chevrolet Chevelle, too. In a tribute, Mr. Flores eventually restored a Chevelle in electric blue — the same muscle car his father had owned — with the help of his children.

Now his custom-made creations, which he designs and fabricates after work in his garage in Port Chester, N.Y., are featured in those same lowrider magazines.

His blue Chevelle “represents my entire childhood and the passion I have for cars,” said Mr. Flores, 55, who works six days a week at a Mamaroneck auto body shop. “When I turn the ignition, I am overcome with the emotion of feeling my father knows I did this for him.”

Family is a pillar of lowrider culture, which flourished in car-crazy postwar Los Angeles among Mexican Americans who took used cars they could afford and transformed them into bouncing, rolling works of art. Just as Mr. Flores shared his skills with his children, many fans embrace the scene as a family-friendly way to honor traditions and celebrate accomplishments, adding hydraulics in the trunk, bright paint across the body and iconography like Our Lady of Guadalupe on the hood.

California recently repealed prohibitions on lowrider cruising and vehicle modifications that had been in place for decades. Those issues have not caused the same concern in New York City, so as the city’s Mexican population has grown, so, too, has the visibility of lowriders on roads and in car shows. Once dismissed as gang-related, lowriders now win prizes, too, and support local charity events.

Alfonso Gonzales Toribio, a Chicano professor in the ethnic studies department at the University of California, Riverside, who himself owns a lowrider, traced the trend to a midcentury boom in unionized industrial jobs. It spread to hobbyists who recalled custom cars back in Mexico.

“It was done with a Mexican twist, giving cultural expression to the cars, lowering them and using loud colors,” he said, adding, “We change everything we do.”

On a gravelly parking lot in Astoria, Queens, several dozen lowriders — from full-sized contraptions to radio-controlled scale models — were on display last August, facing the East River and Manhattan. Children walked with parents, marveling at the details, much of the work done by owners themselves to save money. Young men with silver- and gold-plated lowrider bicycles lounged in chinos and T-shirts, while other men traded stories about cars past. At one point, the crowd watched a Mexican folkloric dance troupe perform in animal costumes.

Nobody knew much about lowriders in the New York City area when Mr. Flores left hardship in Mexico to join his mother and sister in Port Chester in 1998. He scoffed at the cheap paint jobs he saw, knowing he could do better, and persuaded someone to let him paint a truck with bold colors. Soon, word of his custom paint jobs and glistening hydraulics got around, and he has not stopped since. Now his cars compete — and win — in regional car shows that once looked down on lowriders.

The skills he uses to craft lowriders have also gotten him noticed at his day job: Mr. Flores has gotten so good at fabricating pieces that he now makes his own replacement body panels for luxury imported cars.

“We gained respect bit by bit,” he said.

Bikes and fashion, part of the lowrider scene as well, drew in Fidencio Cortez, a musician who lives in Coney Island. He commissioned Mr. Flores to paint his lowrider bike, a squat, metal-plated BMX-style machine he rides with friends.

“You really didn’t see these bikes at first,” said Mr. Cortez, 33, referring to New York. “But we saw them in videos of parades and on YouTube.”

Thanks to online popularity, the culture has gone global, Mr. Gonzalez Toribio said, pointing to lowrider clubs as far away as Japan. Rather than do the work themselves, like Mr. Flores, fans can order online all the parts one would need to soup up a car — if money is not an issue. Still, traditionalists have mixed feelings.

“The problem with commodification of the culture is we lose control over it,” Mr. Gonzales Toribio said, adding, “Will the market take over low riding?”

That’s why Mr. Flores raised his three children to care about the cars, holding flashlights and passing wrenches to their father. It reminded him of the days when he helped his father, a bus driver, clean his Chevelle before going on rides.

His passion has rubbed off. One son, Marco Jr., customizes Japanese compact cars, and his work has been showcased at the New York International Auto Show alongside million-dollar vehicles. Mr. Flores’s daughter, Sherry, will inherit his other car, a candy-apple-red Chevy Impala with filigreed gold trim and spotless hydraulic pumps in the trunk that make the car dance and bounce.

“She calls it her baby,” said Mr. Flores. “But when I die, I want my ashes put in the hydraulic tanks. That way, when she drives it, I’ll still be with her.”