Quick Take
Watsonville's always-rich lowrider subculture has matured into a scene where local car lovers get together, swap stories, raise money for charity and embrace the all-consuming love of old cars. On Sunday, the culture will be celebrated downtown.
At 55, Philip “Hapo” Sanchez has been around the block a few times, specifically the block that surrounds the downtown Watsonville Plaza. He remembers a time when driving a lowrider was asking for trouble.
Standing on the Union Street side of the plaza, he gestured to the East Beach Street side.
“I got pulled over right over there for going too slow,” he said. “The cop said, ‘I’m going to give you a ticket.’ I was like, ‘For what?’ He said, ‘Going too slow. You’re cruising. That is considered cruising. Speed it up.’ So he follows me on his police bike, then he pulls me over again. He says, ‘I’m going to give you a ticket because you’re still driving too slow.’ I’m like, ‘How fast do you want me to drive on a street like this?’”
That wasn’t the only time, either.
“I used to get pulled over back in the day just for driving, one cop coming up one side, and one cop on the other side, with guns drawn,” he said, next to his breathtaking cream-colored 1942 Chevy. “It’d be, ‘Your license and registration, please. Are you on probation?’ I’d go, ‘No.’ ‘Well, looks like you got a light out.’ I’d get home and I didn’t have no light out.”
That kind of casual harassment was, of course, decades ago, a sign of a bygone era when cruising in a low-riding old car was associated with gang activity and street violence and, in many jurisdictions, illegal. Surely, those days are over, right?
Sanchez pointed to his friend, Jason Garza. Garza is 24, a Gen Z lowrider. “He got pulled over one time,” said Sanchez, “and they treated him like a gang member.”
Garza confirmed the story. “It was about five or six years ago,” he said. “I actually cut my hand working on an old ’51 Chevy, and they tried to say that the scar I had from having surgery was gang-related.”
And where did this happen?
Garza smiled. “Just right there,” he said, pointing to a spot on East Beach near the iconic Taylor Brothers hot dog stand.
It took until New Year’s Day 2024 for the state of California to formally lift all bans on the practice of cruising. And now, just a couple of months after the new law took effect, Watsonville is hosting a celebration of cruising, as part of a new art exhibit on the richness and diversity of lowrider culture, presented by Pajaro Valley Arts and the Watsonville Film Festival.
“More Than Cars: Celebrating Lowrider Culture” opens officially Sunday at the Porter Building, right next to the Watsonville Plaza on Main Street. An opening reception at 1 p.m. will be followed by cruising of lowriders at 4 p.m. The exhibit is an effort to represent Watsonville’s rich lowrider subculture. It includes a special display of each of five local car clubs — the Watsonville Impalas, Killer Klownz, Classic Memories, Family First and the Watsonville Riders. Those displays are part of a larger exhibit that features more than 50 artists and Watsonville residents in painting, photography, mixed media, ceramics, and sculpture. Also included will be photographs from celebrated car photographer Tyrone “Malow” Diaz of StreetLow magazine, based in San Jose.
Lowriders, a broad term associated with older model American-made cars refurbished and tricked out in any number of ways, has been a central part of California Chicano culture for generations. And if it’s taken a while for the mainstream to finally uncouple lowriders from illegal activity, for Latinos, lowrider culture has matured into more than a fun pastime. For many, it’s a passion, a crucial social matrix, a vocational enterprise, a means to maintain familial wealth, and a platform for creative expression.
Israel Garcia of Watsonville is the leader of the Watsonville Impalas car club. As its name implies, Garcia’s group focuses exclusively on the Chevy Impala, most notably from the mid 1960s, a particularly beloved model in lowrider culture generally for a number of reasons — it was affordable (at least back in its heyday), it came with a robust V-8 engine, and its build made it easy to modify, especially in adding hydraulic suspension.
Garcia owns two Impalas, both ’65s. One is “blood red,” as he calls it. The other is a pale gold that, he said, officially is called “Driftwood Metallic.” The gold one is named — “Treasure Out of Darkness,” (or “Treasure”) for short. It’s a reference to scripture: Isaiah 45: 2-3. He purchased the car back in the early 1990s when he was struggling with addiction and caught in what he felt was a vortex leading either to prison or death.
“My family supports me,” he said outside his Watsonville home, sitting next to his beloved Treasure. “But sometimes they think I go a bit overboard with the cars. And I just have to tell them, ‘You guys have to understand, this thing saved me.’ It saved my life, it really did. If you think about it, me and him, we’re the same. This guy could have been in a wreck, gone, burnt. I could have been dead. But we’re still together after more than 30 years. Back [when I first got it], people were saying, ‘you’re doing nothing with this thing, man. It’s just going to rot.’ And I kept thinking, one of these days. And that day came.”
The car clubs are mostly social organizations. Many hold events such as barbecues or picnics, often to raise money for schools or nonprofits. They are usually divided into different kinds of cars (the Ford/Chevy dichotomy still appears to be a strong dividing line). They exist for like-minded car lovers to swap stories and ideas, help in getting parts, offering services in everything from paint jobs to chromework to detailing, sharing information on car shows, and just hanging out.
Hapo Sanchez is the president of Killer Klownz, a car club in Watsonville he founded in 2006. The name of the club is a reference to the notoriously weird — some would say awful; others might say so bad it’s good — horror movie “Killer Klowns From Outer Space,” largely shot in Watsonville in the mid 1980s.
“I just woke up in the middle of the night,” said Sanchez, “and I was like, ‘That’s it!’ But these days, not many people even know about the movie.”
He said that the club’s oddball name reflects to some degree his club’s oddball character. “Yeah, we are the misfits,” he said. “I try to pick my members of people who build their own cars, and not just throw money around to buy other cars. I do everything myself. I paint. I do chassis work. I do motor work. And [many of us in Killer Klownz] do the same thing.”
My family supports me. But sometimes they think I go a bit overboard with the cars. And I just have to tell them, “You guys have to understand, this thing saved me.” It saved my life, it really did. ISRAEL GARCIA
Sanchez is known for his willingness to drive his cars anywhere — as opposed to having it shipped by trailer to spare the wear and tear of a long road trip. He’s driven his priceless cars to Los Angeles and back. “People know that about me,” he said. “The guy who drives everywhere.”
Lowrider culture is a kind of offshoot of DIY culture. Technically, the cars are old — almost all lowrider clubs focus on cars designed and manufactured before the 1970s. But they are endlessly adaptable to the point that, with care and vigilant attention, many of these cars could go on indefinitely, even long after their drivers are dead.
“Yeah,” said Sanchez. “They’ll go forever, until they take gas away. Then we’ll just put electric motors in them.”
But what were once inexpensive, middle-class cars have now become classic cars. “These cars just keep going up in value,” said Israel Garcia next to his prized gold Impala. “I bought this car [30 years ago] for $3,000. I mean, it was a decent car, but [nothing special]. Now, these things are valued at $75,000, $85,000. This is my 401(k) plan right here.”
The participation in Sunday’s cruise in downtown Watsonville will have a lot to do with the weather. Garcia drives his gold Impala without a hood — better to showcase the dazzling chrome work in its engine — and he’s not a fan of rain. The cars are so valuable and painstakingly fussed over that many car owners will bypass rainy days.
But, with the unprecedented lifting of all bans on cruising throughout California, lowrider culture could again be on the cusp of another big moment.
“It’s going to get way bigger,” said Malow Diaz, a familiar face on the Northern California lowrider scene through his work with StreetLow. “Cruising, it’s something that’s going to happen every weekend. Just wait until the weather clears up.”
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