I have been around bikes for five years now. My brother-in-law Willie got me started. I saw how he fixed them up, made them look good. It's pretty amazing how a piece of metal becomes a beautiful bike. When I work with the bikes I get a feeling of completion, of doing something... seeing how one thing turns into another, into a pretty thing that I created, that I did. As a girl, I think I have to work twice as hard on a bike to make it known that I can do just as well as a guy...I don't mind getting dirty, like some women do, I like doing what I do, I just want to work with the bikes, just want to build them, just want to ride them.
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I am 16 years old. I had my first bike when I was 10 years old and I still have the same bike. I had to save $250 for the paint job. I saved the money from my allowance and have been working on the same bike for 6 years... it feels good. When I first got started my brother bought me a frame and a few months later he got me all kinds of parts and when Christmas came I got even more, since then I've been saving up to customize. My dream bike would have all kinds of graphics... and a real nice paint job.
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I got my first bike when I was 14 years old. It was a complete original Schwinn Sting-Ray lemon Peeler. My brother started the tradition of my collection and then little by little my family started collecting more and more bikes and eventually they kicked them down to me. My favorite styles in lowrider bikes are the original stock or restoration of stock style. This means that you try to have the bike with all Schwinn parts with no room for replicas. My lowrider bicycles represent a sense of pride and joy to me. It also means a lot of money. To put my thoughts on the drawing board and actually making it a reality is quite an accomplishment. With a little effort from my family and friends I started my own bike club. Now I have up to 15 bikes and working my way up. My club is a variety of people... I have boys and girls... my family and my friends, and we all get together, we BBQ, talk about ideas on how we can fix them up, paint them, detail them.
Lowrider...it's not something you just pick up out of the street, you have to know what you are doing and really put your mind into it...it's not like you can say, “I'm gonna go with that and make my own thing,” you really have to have a heart to do it, and then there's common sense in making a lowrider bicycle, not just making something out of scraps but you have to take a lot of time and effort and the patience to put it together. |
Finally, we are seeing a time when all the negative media bashing about lowrider (at least bikes) may be subsiding. But there are still lots of problems because of certain punks that ruin it for everybody. I am building a car now and people ask me: what are you going to do with it when you are finished? And I tell them: “ride it down Santa Clara Street and get pulled over.” That's it. It will happen. It's a big hassle being a lowrider today. But it's worth it to me because there's a strong cultural connection to me that cannot be denied.
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Marcos Gaitán |