Custom Contestations: Lowriders and Urban Space

BEN CHAPPELL
University of Kansas

Abstract ciso_1029 25..47

This article examines the production of space and contestation of spatial governmen-
tality that occurs in the everyday cruising practices of lowrider car customizers in
Austin, Texas. Lowrider style, practiced mostly, but not exclusively, by Mexican
Americans, is a form of automotive aesthetics which carries associations with
working-class, Latino/a barrio communities. Drawing on critical theories of the
production and governance of space, I trace the politics inherent in lowrider cruising
and the confrontations with police it occasions. From the perspective of lowriders, I
present a critique of community policing as a practice of government, which has the
effects of criminalizing lowriders and subjecting them to heightened levels
of surveillance. [Keywords: lowriders, space, Mexican Americans, spatial
governmentality]

I
t was a warm spring Saturday night in Austin, Texas, and the Boule-
vard Kings lowrider car club was winding down their customary
fast-food meal following the weekly club meeting.1 Deciding to “hit
up Riverside,” the group of a couple dozen men, women, and children—
all but two or three Mexican American—departed the restaurant, piled
into cars displaying varying degrees of customization, fired up engines
and stereo systems, and pulled out into traffic. The club president’s early
1970s Monte Carlo with blue metal-flake paint led the way, followed by
others: a recent-model import pickup, uncustomized apart from its
chrome wire-spoke wheels and smooth vinyl bed cover, another Monte
Carlo of earlier vintage with a recent coat of primer, and a relatively
nondescript black SUV. Rolling with the club as a researcher and guest,
I moved into line in my 10-year-old Toyota sedan.
The impromptu parade caravaned to the Pizza Hut situated on one
of the busiest blocks of East Riverside Drive. When we arrived at around
11:30, the cruising scene was just getting started. Although that stretch
of the divided boulevard was lined with hills and embankments, the
Pizza Hut parking lot was at street level, with only a narrow sidewalk
separating it from the traffic. On a corner with a stoplight, it was a prime
location for watching the cruising action and interacting with people in
cars stopped at the intersection. The parking places close to the street
were often taken first, but that night they were clear as we pulled in.
Eddie, the president of the Boulevard Kings, engaged his hydraulic
suspension to lift the Monte Carlo onto three wheels so it loomed in the
City & Society, Vol. 22, Issue 1, pp. 25–47, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X. © 2010 by the American
Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-744X.2010.01029.x.
 City & Society

air, seeming frozen in the act of lunging toward the cars that passed, as if
it could spring out of the lot.
We stood around the parked cars and watched traffic, commenting
on other custom vehicles as they passed, with metal plaques or stickers—
“logos”—in the windows claiming rival or friendly club allegiances. A
truck with tinted windows, wire spoke rims and a customized lowrider
bike on display in its bed pulled in next to us, followed by a root-beer
brown 1965 Impala. Logos on both rear-view windows identified them
with Stylistic Syndicate. Members of the two clubs greeted each other
with handshakes, and stood around chatting, always with an eye on the
flow of traffic nearby. I noticed a car parked on the opposite side of the
lot, slightly uphill from the street—a 1980s GM sedan that I had not seen
before, relatively uncustomized apart from its shiny chrome rims. The
logo covering the rear window identified the car as belonging to Just
Cruzin, a relatively new car club in town that was quickly acquiring a
reputation among the Kings and the Syndicate as being “troublemakers.”
A lone Cruzer stood leaning against his car and watching the traffic and
the rest of us warily.
A car passing in the westbound lanes on the other side of the street
gunned its motor and sounded its horn in a rhythm something like
“Shave and a Haircut,” the signature of the Cruzers. A few minutes later,
a caravan of several cars rolled by the opposite direction, all honking the
cadence. One car did the first section, “Shave and a haircut,” and the
others responded with three honks, as if to articulate the syllables of “Just
Cruzin” instead of “six bits.” The Kings observed, nonplussed—the tune
didn’t carry quite the aggressive connotation it would on some streets in
Mexico—but the encounter was not without tension. Whether or not
they deserved the reputation for making trouble, the Cruzers were a rival
club.
The Cruzer caravan pulled onto the side street and began to make
their way into the lot, pulling up beside their lone comrade. Someone
beside me said softly “chota . . . ” (police). I turned around and saw an
Austin Police Department patrol car entering by the opposite driveway.
The red and blue strobe lights on the roof came on as the car stopped in
the middle of the lot. The officer did not leave the car, but spoke over his
“Alright.
loudspeaker: “Alright. Everybody clear the parking lot,” We all casually
Everybody clear walked to our respective cars, calling over our shoulders to each other to
establish the next meeting place.
the parking lot,”
“Want to go to the pawn shop?”
“What about the Bingo?”
“Alright, the Bingo.”

The lowriders rolled one by one out of the Pizza Hut lot and dissembled
into the night.
This vignette illustrates how the mundane weekend cruising of low-
rider car clubs produced and contested various configurations of social
space. Lowrider cars are identified by a set of customization techniques
26
 Custom
Contestations
distinct from other styles like “hot rods” and “tuners,” and are
predominately, though not exclusively, built and driven by Mexican
Americans in the southwest U.S. (Best 2005; Bright 1995, 1997, 1998;
Chappell 2006a, 2008; Mendoza 2000; Penland 2003; Sandoval and Polk
2000). Lowrider style is an idiom of everyday performance that had been
consistently popular on the street for years before showing up in main-
stream media culture via films like Boulevard Nights, Heartbreaker, Boyz in
the Hood, Selena, Napolean Dynamite, and Cars; as well as west-coast
hip-hop videos; and most recently television shows like Pimp my Ride and
The Low Life. These mediations, however, and the competitive car shows
where the most elaborately customized vehicles are on display, are less
representative of everyday lowriding than the cruising scenes that take
place in cities and towns around the country, where lowriders gather to
show off their cars and socialize. This article uses lowrider style as a focal
point, not for formal or aesthetic analysis (Chappell 2008), but to
conduct an ethnography of space and power from the vantage point of
the cruising scenes created by lowriders on a regular, contingent basis.
While the specific material poetics of lowriding is a topic worthy of
inquiry, my concern here is to track the effects of this cultural form by
crafting an encounter between everyday lowrider practice and social
theories of space. By this route, lowriding offers a view on governmental
practices of managing criminality in a diverse and stratified U.S. urban
setting.
During my field work with lowriders in Austin from 2000–2001, with
revisits in 2003, 2005 and 2006, it was cruising that particularly con-
vinced me that lowrider car style, like many expressive cultural forms, is
a spatial practice (de Certeau 1984; Thrift 2004). When a lowrider
appears in traffic, it affects (indeed, it effects) the space it occupies. Since
lowriders are associated in particular with urban, working-class Mexican
Americans, the appearance of lowriders has the capacity to inscribe a site
as a “barrio” place.2
If the performance of lowrider style produces a particular social space
by asserting race- and class-associated signs, it is essential to recognize
that the resulting lowrider space is specifically gendered. Like in other
genres of car customization and imaginaries of “the street” and automo-
bility more generally, lowriding carries multiple associations with mas-
culinity, represented, for instance, in club names like the Boulevard
Kings. Yet to define lowrider style simply as a form of masculinity presents
it as more monolithic than it is, and discounts the long-standing presence
and involvement of female lowriders, who do not necessarily view their
own participation as masculine (Bright 1994; Sandoval 2003; Penland
2003). While lowriders are more frequently assumed to be men, gender
roles within lowriding are diverse and subject to negotiation. Women
were present in various capacities in the cruising scenes I frequented as a
researcher: as car enthusiasts themselves, as less interested but tolerant
wives, or as players in courtship that is a major social activity in lowrider
space. By no means a utopia of gender equality, the space of lowriding, in
its contingent and mundane construction, presented at least possibilities
27
 City & Society

for subtle flexibility between gender scripts that made gender no less of a
complex and negotiated field than race, class, or culture.
What I call “lowrider space,” results from the performance of a
particular version of Mexican American identity in public. On the street,
lowrider style makes specific and precise reference to a particular range of
social positions that are themselves complex, contested, and ambivalent.
In my field research, the possibility of inscribing space with this social
content, that is of giving sites particular spatial identities, at times con-
tested dominant identifications of an area, and had the capacity to
stimulate repressive responses from authorities. Thus lowrider cruising
and its reception are factors in what Henri Lefebvre called the social
production of social space (1991). The spatio-cultural activity of lowrider
cruising provides an optic on the politics of the production of space, in
tension with the effects of policies, practices, and discourses of policing
and other factors in the urban spatial regulation. The result presented
here, like any “partial truth” (Clifford 1986), is not a comprehensive
account of what goes on in the urban spaces where lowriders cruise.
Rather, my aim is to render the everyday operations of a particular
formation of “spatial governmentality” (Merry 2001; Foucault 1991) as it
was experienced and encountered by lowriders in a particular context.
Without being a definitive representation of this context, such a render-
ing indicates part of what is at stake in the spatial politics of everyday
cultural practice.

Constructing and contesting “the barrio”

D
avid Díaz notes that studies focusing on the experiences of
Latino/as have been grossly underrepresented in the planning and
urbanism scholarship, despite the centrality to urban studies of Los
Angeles, which is home to the second-largest population of Latino/as in
the U.S. after New York and the second-largest population of Mexicans
after Mexico City (2005). Recently, a burgeoning literature has sought to
address the ways Latino/a communities and social positions are histori-
cally constructed in relation to urban space (Arreola 2004; Brady 2002;
Dávila 2004; Davis 2000; Dear and LeClerc 2003; de Genova 2005; G.
Pérez 2004; Ramos-Zayas 2003; Valle and Torres 2000).
Raúl Homero Villa’s study of the cultural politics of space for
Chicano/as in Los Angeles is particularly relevant (2000). He details how
“dominating spatial practices” in arenas of law and policy, the material
construction and destruction of urban landscapes, and public discourse
have operated historically to relegate Mexican American populations to
particular locations and to construct those spaces and communities as
marginal, giving them what Michel Laguerre terms a “minoritized” status
(1999). Villa follows Albert Camarillo in calling this “barrioization”
(2000:15). Through barrioization, space comes to be viewed as both
reflective and constitutive of the subjects that occupy it, in the same way
that Laguerre argues that public imaginaries take minoritized space to
28
 Custom
Contestations
provide both a causal explanation and political justification for the social
marginality of a population (1999:96). In addition to the “top-down”
processes originating outside of the communities on which they work,
everyday practices in urban space can reinforce this designation, experi-
enced as police surveillance, selective law enforcement, and collective
punishment. Yet Villa notes, the historical reality of the barrio is not only
repressive. The production of “geographical identity” also provides cul-
tural material to be deployed as a resource in the legitimation of local
knowledges, what he calls, borrowing from the underground magazine
Con Safos, “barriology” (2000:6). Through the unofficial or “subjugated
knowledges” (Foucault 1980) of barriology and its outward performances
and textualizations, Villa charts the production of an alternate city
within the metropolis of LA:

If not always with the producer’s awareness of their collective effect,

these practices cumulatively produce and reproduce a mexopolis within
the metropolis . . . This Raza second city—contrary to the rigid laws of
physics but consonant with the fluid arts of urbanity—exists in the
same space of the putative Anglo-American first city (signs of its
diminution are everywhere to be seen), yet in a significantly other place
from its dominant cultural milieu (2000:234–235).

Thus in the interplay of barrioization and barriology, both the production

of particular formations of social space and their representation in dis-
course become sites of struggle over social position and the makeup (one lowriders play a
might say the complexion) of the public sphere that is construed as the
“mainstream” of society. dynamic
Lowriders play a dynamic role in these processes by carrying an role . . . by
association with the barrio even as they move throughout cities calling to
mind Susan Stewart’s brilliant work on graffiti. She argues that graffiti carrying an
pieces linger as trace signatures of their authors on city walls (1994:215).
As Stewart suggests in the title of her book, Crimes of Writing, and as association with
other scholars elaborate (Sánchez-Tranquilino 1995; Ferrell 1996; the barrio even as
Austin 2001), in a social context in which populations are governed
spatially, such representations acquire a spatio-cultural politics that pits they move
claims to autonomy against a perception of social disorder. Like graffiti,
lowriders assert a presence of marginalized urban knowledge and practice. throughout cities
Serving to mark a neighborhood as a barrio, or to assert barriological
knowledge in the public sphere, lowriders are often interpreted by police
and other authoritative audiences as social indicators of marginality,
even as members of barrio communities see them as signs of home.
In the space of traffic, lowriders serve a synechdochic function, the
barrio that moves. The closure of popular cruising sites by police, the
most famous of which was L.A.’s Whittier Boulevard (Rodríguez 1997),
not only targets lowriders in an assertion of control of public space, but
becomes a symbolic exercise of state power over an entire community.
Interviewees in Austin related to me how, when moving outside of
demarcated “barrio” neighborhoods, they often met with a range of
responses that figured them as a threat to the spatial order, from
29
 City & Society

questioning—”What are you doing in this neighborhood?”—to more

aggressive and even violent reactions. Functioning as a flashpoint of
ongoing spatial conflicts, lowriders lay bare the processes through
which social space is produced and contested, and the relationship of
these to the shifting and yet permanently uneven ground of cultural
identity.
Barrio spatial and collective identity was particularly contested when
I started fieldwork in Austin at the turn of the century during a period
that could be recalled as the “high-tech boom.” Austin’s status as one of
the fastest-growing cities in the U.S. during this time related to a nation-
wide reputation as a center for the “creative class,” a Southwestern
bohemian outpost and self-styled “Silicon Hills” (c.f. English-Lueck
2002). Despite the importance for Austin’s distinctive cultural character
of an historical relation to Mexico, consumably manifested in food and
music (Valle and Torres 2000:ch.3; Dávila 2004), the construction of
Austin as a high-tech, artsy mecca harbored an image of a largely white
and high-income city. Contrary to accounts of the high-tech economy as
making a substantial break with the industrial economic past (Florida
2002), the centrality of information industries did not eliminate so much
as obscure class relations, reproducing a “digital divide” in the social
landscape (Fuentes-Bautista and Inagaki 2005). The persistently seg-
mented economy still required a substantial “Other” to this high-tech
city (Pitti 2004; Ross 2002:123–4). Mexican Austin, including recently
arrived migrants and second- or third-generation Mexican Americans,
provided much of the labor in service industries (e.g. automotive
mechanics) undergirding the information economy.
The need to rethink a notion of Austin as inhabited by Anglo/
white, well-financed “knowledge workers” persists. At the close of the
1990s, it was newsworthy when the local press “discovered” that a plu-
rality of students in the public schools had Spanish surnames—more
recently, Latino/as made up 60 percent of the student body. Latino/as
accounted for 63 percent of Austin’s population growth in the past
decade, and in 2007 constituted 34 percent of the city’s population
(Castillo 2007). Austin’s diversity, like that of so many American cities,
has been represented, managed, and contested spatially. Most generally,
“East Austin,” demarcated from the University of Texas, the state
capitol, and centers of the high-tech industry by the concrete curtain of
Interstate 35, was constructed in a 1928 city master plan as a majority-
“minority” side of town (Garza 1998; Shank 1994:11). The central
neighborhood known to residents as the “Eastside,” had been a barrio
with a predominately Mexican-descended population for a couple of
generations by the time of my fieldwork, but was targeted for gentrifi-
cation due to the “character” offered by its residential housing stock and
proximity to downtown (Aoki 1993). Thus there were high stakes to
lowriders’ identifying with “barrio” spaces and communities: it
amounted to proclaiming a Latino/a presence in “gringolandia” and
claiming territory in the cut-throat political economy of real estate and
public space in a “lifestyle” city.
30
 Custom
Contestations
The production of space

T
he Lefebvrian notion of the production of space has animated recent
spatial theory (Massey 2005; Merrifield 2002; Soja 1989, 1996;
Thrift 1996). Among the aspects of Lefebvre’s work that contem-
porary scholars find particularly useful are his open-dialectical approach
to socio-spatial analysis and his concern for cultural and signifying prac-
tices in everyday life and political economic and physical contexts
(McCann 1999:168). This is a crucial corrective for spatial analysis that
dwells exclusively on such “macro” or “top-down” concerns as the design
of the built environment, but neglects the practices of everyday life (de
Certeau 1984). For example, in Fredric Jameson’s famous article on
postmodernism and his spatial critique of the Bonaventura Hotel, he
notes only in passing the “great Chicano market” that adjoins this build-
ings, and that serves him rhetorically as its Other (1991:12). He does not
enter that market (or rather, the market does not enter his analysis) to
see how postmodernity is “made effective” (Ferguson and Gupta
2002:983) and experienced “on the ground” (Limón 1994:107), which is
to say in the less-theorized, more improvisatory processes than those
sedimented in works of architecture.
Such a restricted sense of the “production” of space as building,
designing, and policy-making, to the neglect of what Setha Low calls the
“construction” of space through its use and consumption (Low 1999:112)
reflects a more general pitfall in social analysis. The risk is that when
considering the making of streets and buildings as opposed to the popular
use of space, scholars fall prey to the same fallacy as in considerations of
structure versus agency or base versus superstructure; that is, taking one
term in the relation to be uniquely determinative while relegating the
other to a more benign, epiphenomenal status (McCarthy 2006). Lefe-
bvre rails against this reification of analytical distinctions as anathema to
his method of a dialectical apprehension of social totality. He writes

We note that the concept of socio-economic formation has almost disap-

peared from Marxist writing, to be replaced by the simplified scheme:
“economic base—political superstructure”. Theoretically, Marxist thought
and method have become impoverished. Practically, neither capitalist
society nor socialist society in the process of formation has been studied
in a concrete way (1992:52 emphasis in original; cf. Soja 1996:36).

As in the best of Western Marxism, Lefebvre’s dialectical approach

to social analysis views base and superstructure, economy and ideology, as
mutually constitutive (Williams 1977). In the same vein, considering
that spatial questions address economies of access to and control of
territory, it makes sense to analyze a “socio-spatial formation” as perpetu-
ally contested, an unsynthesized dialectic. The challenge is to glimpse
how the spatial productivities of policy, the state, and the built environ-
ment operate in kinetic relation to the constitutive uses of space, to the
human beings who occupy and traverse it, and to signifying practices like
31
 City & Society

lowriding. Matters of performed identity and the spatial practices of

everyday life must not be consigned to “some superstructural attic” (Soja
1989:43), but be considered as aspects of the production of social space
(McCann 1999:168). It is in this mundane process of production that I
joined lowriders during fieldwork on Texas streets, and in which I argue
lowriders in many cities take part regularly.

Lowrider cruising

I
n Austin, there are particular spots where lowriders gather on week-
ends. During my research, Friday and Saturday nights were the times
for cruising on Riverside Drive, and most early Sunday evenings low-
riders gathered in a park in Austin’s Eastside barrio. The park was known
officially as Fiesta Gardens, but nearly every lowrider I met called it
Chicano Park. These had not always been the cruising sites. Several
lowriders in their 20s and 30s told me about “back in the day,” the 1980s,
when they spent weekends cruising Sixth Street, the main downtown bar
and nightlife district of Austin. There was also an active Sunday cruising
scene then that filled Chicano Park. By the early 2000s, Sunday cruises
were generally restricted to a parking lot at one end of the park next to
an elementary school, and Sixth Street was closed to automotive traffic
during the peak partying hours of Friday and Saturday nights.
Lowriders generally attributed the attenuation of the park scene to a
rise in gang violence in the 1980s, which was a traumatic period for the
community. José, a lowrider who witnessed a gunfight as a young father in
Chicano Park with his children, remembered this time as a turning point
in the spatial regulation of lowriders by police. He noted, “after that they
came out with the curfew, open containers, no glass containers, and they
started showing up on horses, so they can look down and see into your car
better.” In addition to interpreting the appearance of mounted police as
a measure of spatial regulation, José considered the closure of Sixth
Street traffic as an attempt to control cruising.3 Without considering the
lowriders’ perspectives, turning Sixth Street into a pedestrian zone make
sense as an attempt to appeal to tourists and college students the same
way that Beale Street in Memphis and the French Quarter in New
Orleans do. Regardless of the plans and intentions that actually led to
this policy, which are not my immediate concern, the effect of pedestri-
anizing Sixth Street was to move lowriders and cruising out of the
downtown area on weekends. During my fieldwork, lowriders did not go
quietly along with this arrangement, cruising around the perimeter of the
closed areas in downtown until the lanes reopened after last call at 2:00
am. Since the advent of these circumstances though, the situation for
lowriders has been a constant struggle over space: “People are getting
places [to cruise], and then after a week or two, cops will shut it down.”4
The experience of police shutting down cruising sites ties the Austin
lowrider scene to a broader history of street closures and conflict between
police and lowriders (Penland 2003:38–39).
32
 Custom
Contestations
The cruising on Riverside that I experienced was a constant game
of “getting places,” which lowriders also called “posting up,” and being
“moved on” by the police, as illustrated in the anecdote that opens this
article. Contrary to José’s implication that lowriders manage to keep
“places” for a couple of weeks, I found this to be a process that could
occur multiple times in one night. Lowriders began to gather in a
every lowrider I
parking lot, usually of a closed business near the main drag, and when
police arrived or took notice, dispersed. This practice of moving people met had been
on coincided with police pulling lowriders over in traffic. Every low-
rider I met had been pulled over, often times for reasons that they pulled over, often
described as dubious at best— like allegedly broken brake lights that
times for reasons
mysteriously fixed themselves as soon as the car was stopped.5 By both
breaking up impromptu lowrider gatherings and subjecting lowriders to that they described
heightened surveillance through traffic stops, police may have been
responding to the popular association of lowriders with gang culture, as dubious at best
but from the lowriders’ point of view, it was clearly a matter of racio-
cultural profiling.
Many lowriders take great pains to distance themselves from asso-
ciations with gangs, drugs and criminality by forming self-described
“positive” clubs with strict membership requirements and disciplinary
structures, or taking on various charity projects. In Austin at least once
this included a “taco plate” fundraiser for a police benevolent fund—the
APD declined to send a representative, which the lowriders took as a
slight. Nevertheless, it is clear that some gang members do appreciate
lowrider style, and I doubt any lowrider would claim that there has
never been a lowrider car financed in part by the odd drug deal or other
illicit means. But any characterization of lowriding as necessarily linked
to criminality oversimplifies matters. In any event, my research does not
provide an answer to the moral question of whether lowriders are essen-
tially or predominately criminal (Jameson 1991:62). More to the point,
as Andrew Ross argues in a different context with reference to rap
music, censorship, and obscenity debates in the courts (Ross 1993), the
generalizing question of “positive” or “negative” misses a crucial point
about the effects, if not the intentions, of moral panics over expressive
culture. Despite ostensible aims of preventing crime, many times the
effective function of police interaction with lowriders in public space is
the regulation of space. This regulation of space is thus a stake in the
public reception of lowrider style regardless of the accuracy of lowrider
profiling.
Spatial regulation itself involves a political problematic that is by no
means self-evident or settled. City parks, for example, must remain acces-
sible to the public in theory, but can also be subject to rules such as a
sundown curfew. The production of public space also implies a process
of designating and sorting out of the individuals and uses that are
constituents of “the public” from those that are unwelcome (Deutsche
1996). Such interpellations often proceed obliquely through the man-
agement of space through measures like park use fees (Davis 2000:63) or
quality-of-life ordinances (Mitchell 2003).
33
 City & Society

These processes are also not dependent on the intentions, stated

rationales, or character of the individuals involved in them. The pat-
terns of regulation that became clear from the vantage point of lowrider
space are not to be taken to indicate the unique culpability of particular
actors, such that their replacement would eliminate the problem. Urban
spatial regulations that I am examining here are more a matter of
“policing” than “police officers,” in a way analogous to Foucault’s notion
of “governmentality” as a rationality emergent in discourse and other
practices that proceed according to a certain logic (1991). Foucault’s
concept has been picked up by scholars interested in recent neoliberal
operations or “technologies” of power that have extended many func-
tions of government to everyday spheres. Rather than being cotermi-
nous with the state, “government” in this Foucauldian usage refers more
generally to the “the conduct of conduct,” which may also be practiced
by non-state actors. The scholarly discourse on governmentality signals
a critical method of tracking historically specific forms of rationality
through which government is practiced (Inda 2005). The self-
governance and production of docile subjects represented by discipline
(Foucault 1979) may be part of this overall assemblage. The converse of
disciplinary production is the management of those populations deemed
not self-governable.
A governmental dynamic of spatially configuring who and what
“belongs” in the public was played out weekly in the lowrider scene of
Austin. Most Sunday cruises I attended at the park ended with a police
car pulling into the entranceway to the parking lot after dark, so cars
could only leave, but not re-enter the lot. When not intervening to alter
the scene this way, the police generally parked on an empty field adjacent
to the parking lot and observed the cruising. Occasionally patrol cars
themselves would take a cruise on the circuit into and around the parking
lot, or officers would walk among parked lowriders. Although they did at
when lowriders
times write tickets for moving violations, much of the interaction police
paused in the had with cruisers was reminiscent of teachers trying to maintain an
orderly classroom through close surveillance and the micromanagement
midst of a cruise of behavior. Officers would direct lowriders to straighten out their
parking jobs so that cars fitted entirely between the lines of a parking
through the
space without crossing into the next space. When lowriders paused in the
parking lot to chat midst of a cruise through the parking lot to chat with others outside the
car, officers ordered them to keep moving so as not to impede “traffic.”
with others outside Just by their presence, officers regulated the use of hydraulics and sound
systems, both of which could bring tickets for their owners. If someone
the car, officers was playing their system to show off its power when a patrol car
ordered them to approached, friends would warn the lowrider to turn the music down and
avoid being cited.
keep moving so as Very much akin to Villa’s dialectic of barrioization and barriology,
the contestation of lowrider cruising space in Austin was part of a larger
not to impede a struggle between a narrative of criminality and a narrative of positivity
“traffic” or community. On top of its relevance for the interpellation of citizen-
subjects, this struggle produced contested space, as sites came to be
34
 Custom
Contestations
defined simultaneously as high crime areas and as home places with
names like Chicano Park. The contestation of spaces through their use as
lowrider cruising scenes epitomizes a long-standing ideological battle
over whether urban places and populations are to be represented as
pathological, disorganized, or dysfunctional; or as sites of social agency,
knowledge, and self-representation (Kelley 1997). The production of
space is not a point of arrival, when one of these narratives wins out over
the other; it describes a process, the ongoing clash between possibilities,
like Villa’s metropolis and “mexopolis” (Thrift 2006).
To be clear, the intentions of either lowriders or police officers alone
are insufficient to sway this contest one way or the other. Analysis should
therefore move beyond tidy definitions of the parties in conflict to
examine the historically specific operation of politics with these sites of
struggle (Hall 1981). It is crucial to include in this analysis the question
of how the productive process of spatial formation works through every-
day practice, including the ways that culture serves as both the object
and instrument of power.

Community policing/spatial governmentality

I
n 2000, the Austin Police Department (APD) held a series of public
town hall meetings to discuss with various neighborhood communities
the new community policing approach that for about a year had been
designated as the department’s official strategy. Community policing has
acquired a certain cachet in most cities around the U.S. (Merry
2001:16), and the term refers to nostalgic images of beat cops who know
the neighbors, check storefront doors at night, and in general enjoy a
good rapport with their constituents. As Ramona Pérez demonstrated,
community policing has the potential to be informed by cultural con-
trasts between officials and community members, with the possible effect
of disrupting stereotypes and uninformed presumptions of criminality
(2006). This may well be the purpose of community policing, as well as
its reality in some contexts, but from the vantage point of lowrider space,
policing practices looked very different. The Austin town hall meetings
provided clues about this discrepancy, as the discourse turned to the
management of space, including the discernment of the potential crimi-
nality of particular sites and populations. This theme advanced a par-
ticular rationality or logic through which practices of everyday life could
be interpreted as either legitimate or symptomatic of disorder. The meet-
ings were not a glimpse of some kind of control center directing the
regulation of space, nor did they provide a generalizable representation of
individual officers. Yet as public presentations in the communities with
which lowriders were identified, they were part of the discursive practice
of the policy—the voicing of its rationale.
The narrative at the APD meetings called for self-policing as part of
the community policing program, presented through recruitment of citi-
zens as “partners,” the expansion of neighborhood watch programs, and
35
 City & Society

related measures. But this was not to undermine or even challenge the
authority of the police proper. At the Eastside APD meeting an officer
argued that people living in places designated as high crime “hot spots”
should not complain about police harassment, since “you have to trust
that the police know what they’re doing.” This notion of community
involvement that does not diminish in any way the authority of police
mirrored a document from the same era of Austin politics, the city’s
representation of its mid-1990s Anti-Gang Initiative to the United
States Conference of Mayors for its Best Practices Database (City of
Austin 1999). The Database document notes that “the community has
been involved” in that “citizens get training and other information from
the officers and officers get current information about gang activity from
the citizens.” Any civilian responses to or critiques of law enforcement
policy are absent from this official record of community involvement—
the role of any involved community members was to be as consumers or
providers of information.
More important than community involvement at the APD meetings
was an implied cartography of the city, in order to identify “hot spots” of
probably crime, and to focus “suppression” activities there. The APD
presented its strategy as being to saturate hot spots with uniformed
officers in an attempt to deter crime in places where crimes were likely to
occur. This relied on a calculus of risk that, as it classified certain sites as
likely scenes of crime, by implication classified the people there as likely
criminal. At one town-hall meeting, an APD spokesperson reported
proudly in her presentation on the success of a hot-spot strategy called
“high-profile interdiction” which involved stopping and identifying
anyone “out there” in a hot spot. This served as a performance of police
control, but was also legitimate, she argued, since when people are seen
in hot spots, “after a certain time, they’re up to no good.” At this point,
she showed a slide of a man viewed from the back wearing the cholo style
favored by many lowriders—an oversized plaid shirt, shaved head—being
put into a patrol car.
As implied by the photo, the tendencies of community policing
toward spatial regulation, especially through the interpretation of visual
cues as symptomatic of criminality, can have a particularly strong
impact on lowriders. The high visibility and race- and class-marked
aesthetics of lowrider cars increases a driver’s chances of being targeted
for surveillance. Even more generally, lowriders stood to be found on
the wrong side of the “community” boundary implied in the discourses
about “quality of life” issues. As one of the focal points for policing hot
spots that the APD announced, this referred to a range of minor infrac-
tions that were interpreted within a “broken windows” theoretical
framework as indicative of social disorder. According to this logic, a
non-functional parts car on blocks in a driveway or the sound of a
high-wattage and bass-heavy stereo system diminishes the quality of life
for legitimate subjects of a community, either by putting them ill at ease
or by contributing to a context of likely criminality. No one at the
meetings I attended self-identified as a lowrider or car customizer,
36
 Custom
Contestations
despite the high number of clubs that cruised some of the host neigh-
borhoods. In this way the meetings performatively constituted a com-
munity to which lowriders were figured as “Others.”
As I have suggested, the effects of community policing in Austin,
(with regard to lowrider cruising) resonate with Foucault’s analytics of
governmentality, particularly the sociospatial relation that Sally Engle
Merry has termed “spatial governmentality” (2001). Spatial forms of
governmentality in contemporary urban contexts depart in key ways
from the discipline that Foucault documented in early liberal techniques
of government (1979). In particular, Merry argues, recent governmental
technologies of spatial production and policing tend to abandon the
therapeutic or reformatory aims of discipline, which seek to produce
docile subjects through such means as incarceration in the penitentiary
or psychological treatment. Rather, spatial governmentality emphasizes
the regulation of space by managing populations, that is by removing
undesirable persons or practices from particular sites: “The logic is that of
zoning rather than correcting . . . ” (Merry 2001:17). In a situation of
spatial governmentality, then, it is not that particular behaviors (devi-
ance) render the production of a particular legitimate kind of subject
problematic, so much that the presence of certain individuals or collec-
tivities renders problematic a particular production of space. Given that
APD practices in regulating lowrider space were directed by a cartogra-
phy of hot spots, and that material signs had the potential to figure a
place as probably criminal, the production of a site as anything other
than a hot spot was contingent upon removing or managing those signs.
Thus a strategy of “moving on” offending bodies from a particular site
jibes with spatial governmentality in that “there is increasing focus on
managing the spaces people occupy rather than managing the people
themselves” (Merry 2001:19). This way the practices of spatial regulation
promoted by the APD meetings could be construed as not directed at
particular individuals, and hence as not discriminatory, despite the fact
that their effects are concentrated on particular populations and collec-
tive identities.
Yet the point is not to assert contrasting theoretical positions on
the nature of power or to periodize its history by alternately emphasiz-
ing discipline, governmentality, or more suppressive police action
(Barry, Osborne, and Rose 1996:7; Chappell 2006b; Foucault
1991:102). Again, such terms provide an analytics through which to
examine how particular combinations of different techniques of gov-
ernment are deployed in historical situations. In examining the spaces
of lowrider cruising that constituted my field site, the optic of govern-
mentality clarifies how the production of particular subjectivities and
spaces are mutually imbricated with the governmental project of
managing a range of acceptable or possible practices (Merry 2001:18).
While spatial governmentality has coincided with “the neoliberal
regime of individual responsibility and accountability” in the U.S.
(Merry 2001:20), techniques of discipline also continue as possibilities
for those individuals who fail the test of self-governability. Hence “in
37
 City & Society

American cities, spatial strategies are typically used by the wealthy to

exclude the poor, while those who fail to respect these islands of safety
are incarcerated” (Merry 2001:20).
Here again, however, Lefebvre’s open, that is, unsynthesized, dialec-
tical method is instructive of how to read such analytical divisions: like
Low’s delineation of the “production” and “construction” of space,
Merry’s analytical distinction between incarcerating technologies that
produce disciplined subjects and spatial technologies that organize desir-
able or undesirable bodies and populations actually can be seen as
describing two moments in the same social process. Spatial governmen-
tality, then, is best understood not as the essence of a particular political
structure, distinct from discipline or punishment as other essences, so
much as a rationality of government that combines various techniques of
social management and repressive violence into an historical assemblage
that emerges in practice (Chappell 2006b).
For this analysis, as in a multiscalar notion of the production of
space, Lefebvre’s refusal to map a determinant-epiphenomenal relation
onto everyday politics is instructive. The implication is that spatial
identity is not only an a priori quality to which political technologies
respond. Moreover, policing and other technologies of spatial govern-
mentality do not only react to stable identities, they also produce them.
This is illustrated in another vignette from my fieldwork.

Tickets to warrants: producing criminal subjects

W
hen I pulled into the carwash for the weekly car club meeting,
the first person to greet me was Miguel, the son of the club
president. “Somebody got arrested at the car show,” he said,
announcing the main news of the week.6 I recalled a previous Boulevard
Kings club meeting at which several members announced their intention
to travel to a small, predominately white town outside of Austin for a
custom car show. The Anglo organizer of the show had strongly encour-
aged them to come, saying he wanted lowriders represented. Someone had
passed around a flier for the show, and members particularly took note of
the slogan “We don’t discriminate; we appreciate.”
“I don’t know, Williamson County . . . ” said one King, shaking his
head. His apprehension referenced the reputation of the place as a
conservative area, where police would be quick to target those who did
not “fit the context.” Eddie nevertheless announced his intention to go,
to “represent” and support the welcoming gestures made by the show
organizer. The club’s newest member, Darren, also went. Darren was
white and had just moved to town from west Texas. He had found the
club by cruising by the carwash when a meeting was going on and was
quickly accepted on the basis of his lowrider minitruck, which featured
an expensive, multicolored paintjob and body modifications including a
“cap” with tinted windows and a tailgate that was split in half in order to
open like a Suburban’s.
38
 Custom
Contestations
At the Williamson County show, the Kings later told me, a former
friend showed up and accused Darren of stealing his truck. The accuser
had done the paintjob and was accepting payments over time for it,
holding the title as collateral. By the time Darren moved across the state,
he had fallen behind, and the friend reported the truck stolen as a means
of repossessing it. In the faceoff at the car show, though, this became
moot: the police checked Darren’s driver’s license and found warrants in
the computer. He was arrested. While the police were holding Darren in
a patrol car, according to Eddie, other club members approached to find
out what was happening. The Williamson County officer ordered them
to step back. As Eddie reported the exchange, the officer said, “You’re
threatening me by standing so close.” Interpellating the club members as
a threat, the officer seized control of the spatial arrangement of the
situation.
“I don’t know what you’re going to do while I’m arresting your friend
here,” he told Eddie. “You’re putting my life at risk. I’ll take you all
downtown. You have any warrants? I’ll shut this show down.” Uncertain
how welcome they were at the show by that point, Eddie and the club
members withdrew and left Darren to spend the weekend in the county
lockup.
Though Darren was white, he was participating in lowrider style
and collaborating with the otherwise Latino club to establish a lowrider
space at the car show. Further, he had customized the car via working-
class means, rather than buying it outright. These factors situated him
in a particular relation to the law, intensified by his outstanding war-
rants. This experience of finding oneself in an adversarial position to
the law and profiled as a target for police inquiry joined many others
that lowriders narrated to me, as well as the tense interactions with
police I witnessed as a participant-observer in lowrider cruising, as a
consistently invoked characteristic of lowriding. Even when practiced
by white participants, lowrider style remained racially-marked and
barrio-identified, which I argue made lowriders particularly subject to
regulation by pullovers. Whatever the given reason for pulling over a
lowrider at a traffic stop, police often run a routine check on the driv-
er’s license for warrants. Thus a calculus of threat and probability,
directed according to racial and cultural logics at the regulation of par-
ticular spaces (Butler 1993; Gilroy 2001), creates situations that set in
motion routine policies that ostensibly would apply to everyone. The
sense among lowriders, however, was that this was a targeting applica-
tion of general policy.
This “exceptional” relationship between lowriders and police prac-
tices of profiling and pullovers functioned to regulate access to and use
of public space, but it also affected the subject position of the target
population. For these kinds of encounters often lead to tickets (for
moving violations, unsanctioned customizations, inadequate or lapsed
insurance, hitting hydraulics in traffic, or playing loud stereos) which,
when unpaid, become arrest warrants. When a disciplined subject
receives a traffic ticket, he or she governs him- or herself by paying it,
39
 City & Society

the and thus joins the population that is willing and able to conform to
this social contract. The governmentality of traffic regulation estab-
governmentality of lishes a script for legitimacy that is class-specific: the easiest way to

traffic regulation remain on the right side of the law is to have the necessary disposable
capital to pay the fines for periodic deviations. Yet everyday life pre-
establishes a script sents an abundance of reasons not to pay a ticket, and working for an
hourly wage in a neoliberal environment that demands flexibility from
for legitimacy that its workforce meant that paydays for the Boulevard Kings could be less
than dependable.7
is class-specific
This was the case for many in the Austin lowrider scene. The
service economy of Austin was filled with “work at will” jobs, which
meant it was easy to quit a job, and easier to get fired. Turnover in
wage workplaces was high. Being a wage worker also meant that about
the only way to acquire the expensive commodities necessary to main-
tain a certain stylistic identification was through credit. Often in cruis-
ing spaces, conversation would turn to various things people were
making payments on: their car, a paint job, hydraulics setup, jewelry,
televisions, or cell phones. Despite the displays of luxury and invest-
ment that are part of lowrider style, Austin lowriders generally did not
occupy the economic position implied by such consumption. The
middle-class finances that go into the most famous award-winning
show cars are available only few lowriders, many more of whom scrape
together a fabulous ride by bartering work and materials, working long
overtime hours, and other elaborate strategies of stretching scarce
resources.
The instability of wages and the ubiquity of payments placed pri-
oritization at the center of personal finance. If paying a traffic ticket
means losing phone service, not having gas to drive a car to work, or
not being able to pay rent, it can be demoted on the scale of priorities.
In a curious parallel to the way that spatial governmentality often oper-
ates in an “actuarial” calculus of risk (O’Malley 1996), mandates to
self-governance in a situation in which resources are finite invites the
weighing of possibilities. Not paying a phone bill will surely cancel
your service, but not paying a ticket only raises the possibility of being
arrested. Choosing to live with this possibility rather than the certainty
of losing the phone or some other contracted service therefore pro-
duces a certain warranted subject position. It quite literally criminalizes
the ticketed driver as a fugitive from the law, compounding the
original misdemeanor. While it is not at once physically evident
who has warrants and is thus undesirable or unwilling to fulfill the
contracts regulating public space, profiling by logics of probability led
police to subject Mexican American lowriders to a greater degree of
surveillance and regulation than some other citizens. This was not a
matter of which individuals were employed by the police force, but
a manifestation of the logic ingrained in an historical formation of
governmentality.

40
 Custom
Contestations
Conclusion

I
have tried to present lowriders not as an exotic bit of local color but
rather as a focal point for the everyday, contingent productions of
social space, offering views on the contested sociospatial relations of a
diverse and stratified city. Such a spatial approach contributes to the
understanding of the political implications, if not direct intentions, of
expressive cultural practice (pace Aldama 2004). There is an extensive
literature documenting how Chicano/a cultural production has engaged
contemporary political struggles (Habell-Pallán 2002; Maciel, Ortíz, and
Herrera-Sobek 2000; Saldívar 1997). Lowriders use embodied presence
and the production of space to confront and contest social positions
attributed to Mexican Americans, as well as public imaginaries of the city
more generally. The analytical tools provided by Lefebvre and Foucault
help clarify the significance of this.8 While not always issuing a direct
message of resistance, the politics of lowrider space is certainly “opposi-
tional” (Sandoval 2000), a material instance of the “search for space and
place” (Vélez-Ibañez 1996:221). Such a politics is necessarily ambiva-
lent. As citizen-subjects, lowriders play a part in the policing of space,
one that is sometimes compliant as well as contestative. As suggested in
the field vignettes, struggles for space also occur between segments of the
population, not only in conflict with the state or the dominant class. This
is not to say that lowriders only have themselves to blame for any
criminalization that results from their everyday performances: rather, it
lends extra gravity to the decision lowriders sometimes make to refuse
particular mandates to self-governance. That lowriders persist in “repre-
senting” (Ramírez 2004), knowing it may make them a target of surveil-
lance and regulation underscores the importance of lowriding to its
participants.
From lowrider space, it is easy to see how governmental practices of
spatial management not only organize differently identified bodies by
moving some on and implicitly protecting others, but also, in the
process, produce the very identities needed to proceed with these opera-
tions. In this way, the spatial governmentality of automobile traffic in
the public is not only the result of an execution of structures of power,
but it is a production and reproduction of the social material necessary
for those structures to exist. The racist imaginaries that construe minor-
ity bodies and populations as “probably deviant” (Butler 1993; Moore
1985) are given form as a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is not only a
top-down production, defined at the level of policy, but rather a nego-
tiation of space, practice, and identification, which is ongoing in every-
day life. Whether or not a population conforms to the identity of a
self-governing, “decent” citizenry affects the nature of the social space
individuals produce by occupying certain material ground marked as
“public.” Alongside practices of profiling lies a process of recruitment: it
is in the failure or refusal—predicted or actual—to toe the governmental
line that unruly bodies become targets of “moving on.” Yet this is no
mere matter of personal choice, as the inclination and capacity to
41
 City & Society

this points to the participate in the governmental regime are overdetermined by position-
ing factors such as race, class, gender and neighborhood of origin or
profoundly residence. The intersection of these histories with everyday iconogra-
political phies of style and contestations of “the public” greatly expands the stakes
involved in racial profiling in traffic, and points to the profoundly politi-
undertones that cal undertones that infuse lowriding as a cultural practice of identifica-
tion and performance.
infuse lowriding as

a cultural practice Notes

of identification
Acknowledgments. This essay owes an intellectual debt to Matt Archer, who intro-
and performance duced me to governmentality. Fieldwork and writing were funded by the Wenner-
Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (grant #6600), The University of
Texas at Austin, and The University of Kansas. For critical readings and timely
encouragement of earlier versions, I am grateful to Anja Bandau, Jacob Dorman,
Richard R. Flores, Ruben Flores, Doug Foley, Adam Frank, Tanya Hart, Steven
Hoelscher, Marike Janzen, José E. Limón, Marc Priewe, Robert Rotenberg, Kathleen
Stewart, Pauline Turner Strong, and three anonymous readers. No one mentioned is
responsible for my mistakes. This research would have been impossible without the
help and generosity of the lowriders of ATX.

1
All names of clubs and individuals are pseudonyms.
2
Lowrider style does have a considerable following outside of Latino popula-
tions, most notably among African Americans. The Black lowrider scene of Los
Angeles, for instance, overlaps with west-coast hip-hop as part of a long history of
local intercultural exchange (Alvarez 2008).
3
In the interest of economy, I refrain from quoting lowriders at length, since my
focus here is more on embodied engagements with spatial politics rather than textual
ones. Lowriders’ own discourse is included in the larger project of which this essay is
part.
4
Lowriders’ constant awareness of being under police surveillance framed my
relationship to them. The president of the Boulevard Kings first introduced me to
club members as a researcher from the local university, and accounted for the fact
that my Anglo, middle-class bearing made me stand out in the scene by saying “So
if you see him out there on Riverside, he’s not the cops.” This got a laugh from the
club members, and turned into a ritual that he repeated over the years when I
returned for more fieldwork and there were new club members who did not know me.
5
Racial profiling was a national issue when I started fieldwork, but was generally
only discussed in terms of the identity of the driver, rather than considering car style
(Knee 2003). Support for the lowriders’ interpretation is available in public dis-
courses of gang identity and criminality, which refer as much on aesthetic, visual
markers as they do actual criminal acts (Chappell 2006b).
6
I presented the narrative of the Williamson County show and a much earlier
version of these ideas at the Potsdam University conference “Representing
Chicano/a Cultures,” and in its proceedings (Chappell 2006a).
7
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for the reminder that lowriders have
historically come from a variety of class positions, including the relatively stable one
that was once assured by employment in industrial production. In the specific
context that produced this essay, however, the more precarious situation suggested
here was the norm.
8
I am aware that Lefebvre and Foucault engaged in rigorous debate as contem-
poraries in the mid-century French intellectual scene. Yet the analysis of lowrider
42
 Custom
Contestations
cruising has benefited from a Levebvrian point of departure and a Foucauldian
analytical framework, drawing on Lefebvre’s open dialectic and insistence on attend-
ing to the everyday, and Foucault’s models for close-focus analysis of the particular
combinations of techniques of government. Indeed, I argue that to pit one thinker
against the other goes against the generous spirit in which both invite critical
engagement with their works, and the suspicion both expressed towards totalizing
ontological theories.

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