Smithsonian Exhibit Corazón y Vida Brings Lowriding Culture Into the Museum Spotlight

01 October 2025

A lowrider car on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's Corazón y Vida – Lowrider Culture exhibit in Washington on Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025.(DC Bureau)

When curators at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History recently rolled a fully restored 1963 Chevy Impala Super Sport tipped at nearly 4,000 pounds through its gleaming white halls, the moment said more than a car show. It marked the launch of Corazón y Vida: Lowriding Culture, a sweeping exhibition that spotlights decades of automotive artistry, cultural identity, community and political voice within Mexican American lowrider traditions.

The exhibit is carefully conceived as an immersive narrative. The car painted in candy red with etched chrome and delicate pinstripes was only the beginning. The museum enlisted the owner, builders, and members of car clubs to help usher it into its new home. Surrounding it are archival prints, video interviews, tool kits, trophies, and a playlist of oldies and hip hop. Together they weave an emotional, visual and historical tapestry of lowriding as more than a hobby it is expressed as identity, resistance, and artistry.

Lowriding, traced back about eight decades, remains deeply rooted in Mexican American communities and linked to Chicano cultural and political movements across the southwestern United States. The exhibition emphasizes that customizing cars with hydraulic systems, custom paint jobs, and culturally resonant motifs was a way to map Mexican identity onto American machines asserting presence and pride.

One section of the exhibit titled “Scraping and Staking Claim” tracks the history of the movement. Large wall portraits show pachucos from the 1940s, while archival photos reveal overt discrimination: a 1949 Texas restaurant sign read “We serve WHITE’S only, no SPANISH or MEXICANS.” Those images speak to how lowriding communities responded to exclusion by creating visible, joyful expressions of identity.

Automobiles, the exhibit makes clear, became canvases. The 1964 Gypsy Rose Impala is among the star pieces: plush velvet interiors, faux candelabras, hand-painted roses all glittering under carefully positioned spotlighting. Behind it, video screens animate its movements flips and dips, hydraulic motion bringing to life the kinetic drama of cruising culture. That car was once a street icon; now it is displayed as a polished art object.

Curator Steve Velasquez has said the intention was to explore Latino and Mexican American history through the lens of car culture. The exhibit quietly challenges the notion that cars are merely tools or status symbols; here they are cultural mediums, maps of lineage, and embodiments of pride. He adds that the show remains unaffected by recent scrutiny over how Latino immigrants are portrayed in museum spaces.

Beyond cars, the exhibit honors community rituals: mirrored plaques engraved with religious iconography, as seen in one display of a mirror engraved with Our Lady of Guadalupe, a common element at lowrider shows. Another part highlights all-female lowrider clubs, making visible voices too often sidelined in automotive subcultures.

The visual contrast is deliberate. The lowriders are staged like film stars in a dimmed gallery, while behind them projected footage makes them seem like puppets in motion their flips and bounce magnified. It asks viewers to accept both the celebration and the performance that these cars existed on the streets first, to be seen.

The creators view Corazón y Vida not just as a retrospective but a living archive. One piece on display is a 1937 low-slung modified stroller a playful precursor to more elaborate builds. Another shows how young builders practiced customizing on bikes before graduating to cars. The exhibition is full of such generational throughlines.

What also pulses through the exhibit is the notion of activism. When city ordinances forbade cruising or loitering, these became coded attacks on communities that used roads as public performance stages. A Sacramento sign reading “No Cruising or Loitering” remained in effect until 2022. The exhibition uses such policy artifacts to underscore lowriding’s battle over legitimacy.

Corazón y Vida: Lowriding Culture runs through late 2027 and is free to visit. It centers on more than machines it centers people, voices, stories. It reframes lowriders not as novelty or fringe for display, but as enduring expressions of identity, craft, and collective memory.