Celebrating lowrider culture at the heart of 2024 Watsonville Film Festival

On New Year’s Day 2024 — just two months ago — a new state law went into effect lifting decades-old restrictions on lowrider cruising in California. You read that right: As recently as maybe the last time you bought shampoo, driving a lowrider was technically illegal, while cruising in, say, a woodie wagon — which happens every summer at the Woodies on the Wharf event in Santa Cruz — was not only tolerated but applauded. 

Lowriders and the way of life that have sprung up around them are, of course, a rich and deeply ingrained part of Mexican American culture. And the shamefully late turnaround on the legality of cruising is the latest and most dramatic blow to the baldly racist association of lowriders with gang activity and street violence that goes back at least to the 1980s. 

In this realm, the Watsonville Film Festival has a particularly good sense of timing. This year’s WFF, which begins next Thursday, March 7, is celebrating lowrider culture, and in a big way. 

On Saturday, March 9, the festival — operating at the CineLux Green Valley Cinema for the first time — is highlighting the 2009 drama “La Mission,” set amid the lowrider culture of San Francisco’s Mission District. The next day, March 10, the WFF and Pajaro Valley Arts will unveil an art exhibition called “More Than Cars: Celebrating Lowrider Culture,” with an opening reception at the Porter Building on Main Street in Watsonville.

And then? The cruise. On Sunday, March 10, at 4 p.m., many of the lowrider clubs and groups based in Watsonville and the surrounding area will converge in downtown to do what is now fully legal throughout California: drive their cars.

WFF executive director Consuelo Alba said that when she and her team began planning and writing the grant requests for this year’s festival last summer, they had no way of knowing that the cruising ban would be overturned right before the festival. Neither did she quite realize how deeply lowrider culture was embedded in Watsonville until she started making connections with various local car clubs.

“We tapped into something that we didn’t even know,” she said at a pre-festival meeting with some of the Watsonville car clubs that are participating in the cruise. “It’s so deeply rooted in this community.”

The Watsonville Film Festival is not focused solely on lowrider culture. The festival features a wide range of subjects all revealing some part of Latine culture. The festival presents feature-length and short films, documentaries and dramas on everything from gender identity to immigration, from the love of soccer to the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Many of the films are from local filmmakers, such as “Watsonville Drag Story Time,” a short documenting local drag performers. 

“La Mission,” starring Benjamin Bratt, is a father/son drama set against the backdrop of San Francisco’s lowrider culture. Film director Peter Bratt — known mostly for his documentary on the life of Latine icon Dolores Huerta — will be on hand before the March 9 screening for a red-carpet photo op, and after the movie, he’ll answer questions from the audience.

The festival will take place at the CineLux Green Valley Cinema on March 7-9. The rest of the festival will be online, through March 17. 

At the center of this year’s WFF, however, is its collaboration with Watsonville’s most prominent visual arts organization, Pajaro Valley Arts, to co-present the art exhibition in PVA’s new space at the Porter Building. Five Watsonville-based car clubs each contributed to the exhibit of photos and artwork that also includes artifacts from the cars, as well as work of artists Juan Fuentes, Guillermo “Yermo” Aranda and Tyrone “Malow” Diaz. 

“More Than Cars: Celebrating Lowrider Culture” will be on display March 10 at the PV Arts Porter Building, 280 Main St., Watsonville. The free exhibition runs through June 30.