Lowriding: This Culture Is About More Than Cars Lowriding is a social medium. That's the message brought by an anthropologist who has spent years looking at those curb crawling, brightly painted, hydraulically athletic vehicles that have become a familiar image of Hispanic culture across the Sun Belt. Ben Chappell, author of "Lowrider Space: Aesthetics and Politics of Mexican American Custom Cars" (University of Texas Press) and an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Kansas, discovered the world of lowriding when he was in graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin. "It's about taking your car out in a caravan and making sure that people see it out in public," Mr. Chappell said. A lot of time, it involves finding an empty parking lot late at night and just hanging out. It's a chance to talk about the cars, but also discuss what's going on in the community. It was really a public sphere where people were talking about what was going on in their lives. More than a decade ago, Mr. Chappell said in a telephone interview, he began to spend time with the clubs and got to know the car owners. A widespread image of lowriders as dangerous, ganglike characters is generally misleading, he said. "Owning a lowrider generally shows a lot of stability and responsibility," he said. You put in a lot of time and money into a car. You have to have your life in order and don't want to put that at risk. Academics tend to stereotype lowriders as youth culture, he said. But the lowrider culture has been around since the early 1950s and includes people of many ages. "One thing they emphasize is that it is not a fad, it is a lifestyle," he said. Lowriders move through stages of life, sharing relationships inside their clubs. "I called the book 'lowrider space' because in effect they create a social space, an environment where conversation happens," he said. A parking lot full of lowriders with their music can become a temporary social space, a public sphere like a town square or plaza. For Hispanic clubs in particular, this sort of community space may be especially attractive because discrimination in the prevailing culture has denied them access to other common spaces. In the beginning, he said, "I was interested in the everyday life of lowriding," he said. The car should be an expression of the owner, and you have to work to build and maintain it. So working on cars and sharing knowledge is a big part of it. People will barter labor and parts. There's a really extensive social network around lowriding. Among vehicles, the original preference of lowriders was for 1960s Chevys, especially Impalas, Mr. Chappell said. Their chassis offers a good basis for attaching hydraulics and their bodies provide wide flat spaces for painters. Later, as the supply of the Chevys has diminished, he said, other models became popular, like 1970s Oldsmobile Cutlasses. The base car had to have substance. It was the classy ride, however you defined that. General Motors models seemed to win out. "Those were associated with nostalgia for early days of prosperity for some families," he said. There were practical considerations as well. One thing a lot of the cars had in common was you could drop a small block Chevy V-8 into any of them. While Mr. Chappell spends lots of time studying lowriding, the lowrider is not for him. He drives a 2004 Volvo station wagon. It doesn't take an anthropologist to tell you he is a married professor.