When Tim Lona was a teenager, he pestered his dad for a car.
“He was like ‘Hey, I'm not going to buy you one. You have to build your own. There's a '64 Impala in back that I'll give you,’” Lona said.So, with help from his family, he rebuilt the car from the ground up.
Since then, Lona has restored and rebuilt hundreds of cars at his family’s shop on Southwest Boulevard. He comes from a three-generation family of mechanics, and the shop has been in its location in Kansas City’s Westside neighborhood since 1912.
Now, Lona specializes in customizing low-rider cars with fancy metal flake paint-jobs, chrome wheels and hydraulic systems that allow these cars to go very, very low.
For Lona, personalizing low-riders takes both technique and passion. As he told host Gina Kaufmann on KCUR’s Central Standard, it’s an art form that explores and documents Mexican-American culture.
“Low-riders had a negative stereotype for a long time, and I think finally that's getting over with,” Lona said. “We want nothing but positive as low-riders. We want to show the community that there's other avenues of how to live and how to be.”
He said restoring and building low-riders opens up opportunities for Mexican Americans to become involved in the community. One of his favorite requests was to build a low-rider for the Kansas City Chiefs.
“I actually did a [low-rider] Monday night football game for the Kansas City Chiefs,” Lona said. “And I took out there, again another '64 impala, but this one was orange with flake.”
Ben Chappell is an associate professor of American Studies at Kansas University, and he studied Mexican-American art and culture and the aesthetics of low-riders during his graduate studies at the University of Texas.
“There's also a long history of that presence being ignored or erased, and I think that's so important for what gives low-riding its power because this is a style that associated with a particular community and a particular history,” Chappell said. “And like Tim described it, when a low-rider car is out in traffic you can't ignore it.”
Chappell said the low-rider look became popular in the 1960’s in Mexican-American barrios. For that community, the street was more than an outlet for travel. It was a common social ground, too.
“Every community that has a low-riding tradition,” he said. “They've got their street where people come together and that's where you meet your friends. That's where you try to court somebody. You might meet a spouse there. It's the social life of the community.”
Danielle Hogerty is an intern at KCUR 89.3.