San Francisco lowriders take over Palace of Fine Arts this Saturday 

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San Francisco lowriders are celebrating this weekend: On Jan. 1, a new state law went into effect that decriminalized lowriding across California and, on Saturday, as many as 2,000 lowriders will be coming out to the annual “Kings of the Street” car show at the Palace of Fine Arts before cruising down Mission Street.

“That’s like a dream come true. Can you imagine a lowrider in the Palace of Fine Arts?” said Roberto Hernandez, the president and founder of the San Francisco Lowrider Council and a candidate for District 9 supervisor. “Forty years after we were getting arrested for lowriding, now we’re going to be at the Palace of Fine Arts.”

“Kings of the Street” will feature competitions for best paint job and most luxurious car, among others, and a dance contest for “popping,” the 1970s West Coast style of robotic, Michael Jackson-like movements. The festivities start at 9 a.m. and go until 4 p.m., when lowriders will continue on to Mission Street for “the largest cruise in the United States,” said Hernandez. 

The cruise to the Palace of Fine Arts was not easy. 

In 1958, California modified its vehicle code, prohibiting any part of a modified car to have less clearance from the road than the lowermost portion of its rim. 

That change affected the lowriders’ ability to cruise freely, because it allowed police officers to cite and ticket those who didn’t comply with the new regulations. 

In 1981, Hernandez and other lowriders created the San Francisco Lowrider Council as a response to what they described as a racist law that led to harassment and profiling by police departments across the state. 

Hernandez said that in his years cruising the Mission, he was beaten at least three times by the police, and arrested multiple times.

Nelson Alvarado, who created Kings of the Street with Hernandez said, in those years, lowriders couldn’t drive far without being profiled.  

“They looked at us like criminals,” said Alvarado. “One time, I drove from San Francisco to San Bruno, and I got pulled over in San Francisco. I got pulled over in Daly City. I got pulled over in Colma, and I got pulled over in South San Francisco.”

In the short film “The Mission,” about neighborhood activism during Covid-19, Valerie Tulier-Laiwa, who works with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and is on the executive committee of the Latino Task Force, told director Helénè Goupil that lowriding took on a social importance and led to her political awakening.

“Lowriding is telling society: ‘I am going to fix this car. I’m going to cruise low and slow. You are going to see me, because you don’t want to see me in society. But I’m going to make you see me, because I’m going to go low and slow and I’m going to be beautiful’ … that was a form of social resistance.”

“We used to get in trouble, because we would be on 24th and Mission, and there would be a big circle of people watching the dancers,” added Don Alonzo, a member of the Mission District’s Low Creation Car Club, who joined the lowrider community in the early ’80s after spending a few years in popping competitions. “The cops would come and would think we were fighting, but we weren’t.”

Alonzo said dancing and lowriding kept many young members of the community away from trouble.

“Dancing saved a lot of people’s lives, because it was a thin line between gang-banging, dancing, building cars or staying out of trouble,” said Alonzo.

As a response to the police harassment, Hernandez and other lowriders filed a civil-rights suit against San Francisco in 1979. They eventually won a settlement that allowed local lowriders to freely cruise on Mission Street without police intervention. 

“We photographed, and we had somebody film all this. We started building a case against them,” said Hernandez. “I went to Mayor Feinstein, and she couldn’t believe it, but didn’t do anything. We went to the supervisors. They didn’t do anything. We went to the police commission. Everybody acknowledged there was a problem, but nobody did anything about it.”

Still, that lawsuit did not spur similar changes in other cities, as Hernandez had hoped.

A few years later, in 1988, state lawmakers gave municipalities the power to enact their own rules and restrictions against cruising.

Now, 35 years later and after decades of organization that led to the creation of the California Lowrider Alliance, the lowriding community successfully lobbied at the state level. They pushed Assemblymember David Alvarez, who represents Chula Vista and other parts of San Diego County, to introduce the legislation that officially erased regulations against cruising across the state.

California’s governor and former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newson signed AB 436 last fall. The law was a major victory to those cruisers who lived through the years of police profiling, said Hernandez.

“For us, this is something huge to celebrate this year,” he said. 

The local lowrider community has already had the opportunity to celebrate the victory earlier in the year at the Selena tribute in April, Cinco de Mayo and Carnaval in May, however, for them said Hernandez, no other celebration is as big as the “King of the Streets” and this is the first one post-AB 436.

“There’s a lot of excitement right now. I can’t wait until Saturday,” said Hernandez.