São Paulo Journal: Lowrider Culture Spreads to Brazil and Beyond

“I’m pimping it,” said Mr. Crippa, 41.

With a knowing smile, Mr. Crippa, a businessman who owns a carwash and a hamburger restaurant, jokingly acknowledged that his pimping extended only to the restoration and customization of vintage automobiles. He peppers his Portuguese with his own interpretation of the street slang of the Mexican-American subculture rooted in East Los Angeles.

And he tries to look the part, too, down to barrio-chic details like his footwear, a pair of Nike Cortez track shoes, and the 8-ball tattoo on his forearm.

The spread of this seemingly distant subculture, with Brazilian followers calling themselves “cholos” and cruising around in their low-and-slow automobiles, is raising eyebrows here in South America’s largest city. Some who cannot afford to buy vintage cars and customize them into lowriders simply roam São Paulo’s labyrinthine streets at the helm of bicycles accessorized with high-rise handlebars and banana seats.

Even when they just strut around in oversize khaki shorts and white muscle shirts, they speak to something larger: the global fluidity of conceptions of ethnicity, identity and style, propelling a street culture once so closely tied to the borderlands of the United States and Mexico well beyond its birthplace.

Japanese musicians, for instance, are rapping in astonishingly precise Spanglish. Lowrider Volvos can be glimpsed on England’s country roads. Rap pioneers like Spanky Loco have cult followings in places like Barcelona, the Catalan capital in northeast Spain. In New Zealand, Maori youths on lowrider bicycles are recording music videos featuring a posse of men in flannel shirts and smiling women washing down vintage American cars.

“It’s kind of ironic because if some of these imitators are dropped into parts of L.A., the cops could arrest them or the gangs could roll up on them,” said Denise Sandoval, a professor of Chicano studies at the Northridge campus of California State University. “But the digital culture we’re in facilitates this fascination with L.A.’s urban culture, and it’s gaining momentum.”

Dr. Sandoval, who studies the spread of the subculture around the world, said she was amazed when a friend, Estevan Oriol, a photographer who documents California’s street cultures, returned from a trip to São Paulo with photographs of lowriders in seemingly pristine condition, along with their proud owners.

In some ways, São Paulo might seem to be a good place for a hard-edge lowrider scene to flourish. Parts of the traffic-choked megacity, with a metropolitan population of about 20 million, make the sprawl of Los Angeles seem somewhat quaint in comparison. Graffiti murals decorate elevated highways and asphalted river canals.

Still, the adoption of the lifestyle in São Paulo, which already encompasses hundreds of people involved in car clubs, bicycle shops and homegrown fashion labels, reflects immigration patterns and issues of ethnic identity that stand in sharp contrast to those in the United States.

The word “cholo” itself has a contentious history. In the Spanish colonial era, it was a derogatory term for some indigenous people, and by the 19th century it was used in the United States to demean Mexican laborers and some mixed-raced people, according to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States.

By the 20th century, the term “cholo” shifted to refer to people associated with a gang, or to those who simply copied their aesthetics and style, implying “a refusal to assimilate” into the dominant mainstream culture, the encyclopedia explains. Today, the term is deplored by some and embraced by others.

In Brazil, however, lowriders and the aesthetics of Mexican-American street culture took a different route, one that sometimes passed through another country first. “I saw my first lowriders in Japan, and I was immediately fascinated by their allure,” said Sergio Hideo Yoshinaga, 43, the owner of a garage in São Paulo where motorists pay hefty amounts, sometimes reaching more than $100,000, to have their cars transformed into curb-crawling masterpieces.

Mr. Yoshinaga is one of thousands of Brazilians, most of whom are descended from Japanese immigrants, who moved to Japan in the 1990s in search of relatively well-paying factory jobs. He stayed only about a year. That was long enough, Mr. Yoshinaga said, to be immersed in a scene big enough to support an array of car clubs and a Japanese edition of Lowrider Magazine.

“I was a pioneer when I returned to São Paulo,” Mr. Yoshinaga said. “Now there are these third-rate imitators here, saying they’re cholo-this and cholo-that,” he said. “Some think they can buy into the culture with their money.” He dismissed such aspirants as mere posers.

Jill Langlois contributed reporting from São Paulo, and Liam Stack from New York.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/world/americas/lowrider-culture-spreads-to-brazil-and-beyond.html?partner=rss&emc=rss