Aren’t lowriders always gangbangers? And, don’t they always hold high status in their neighborhoods? Contrary to both stereotypes, the people who build and drive lowrider cars perform diverse roles while mobilizing a distinctive aesthetic that is sometimes an act of resistance and sometimes of belonging. A fresh application of critical ethnographic methods, Lowrider Space looks beyond media portrayals, high-profile show cars, and famous cruising scenes to bring readers a realistic tour of the “ordinary” lowriders who turn streetscapes into stages on which dynamic identities can be performed. Drawing on firsthand participation in everyday practices of car clubs and cruising in Austin, Texas, Ben Chappell challenges histories of erasure, containment, and class immobility to emphasize the politics of presence evidenced in lowrider custom car style. Sketching out a partially personal map of the lowrider presence in Texas’s capital city, Chappell also explores the interior and exterior adornment of the cars (including the use of images of women’s bodies) and the intersecting production of personal and social space. As he moves through a second-hand economy to procure parts necessary for his own lowrider vehicle, on “service sector” wages, themes of materiality and physical labor intersect with questions of identity, ultimately demonstrating how spaces get made in the process of customizing one’s self.

Lowrider Space: Aesthetics and Politics of Mexican American Custom Cars

Politics & Social Sciences

Chappell, Ben

Social Sciences

University of Texas Press

History

Americas

Mexican American Baseball in Kansas City highlights the standout teams and players in the greater Kansas City area and other communities in the Sunflower State. Following labor opportunities, Mexican immigrants proliferated in the region in the first decade of the 20th century. Eventually, they and their offspring settled in countless communities, including Kansas City, Topeka, Newton, Chanute, Emporia, Wellington, Wichita, Dodge City, and Garden City, and had extended family networks in Colorado, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Iowa. Baseball and softball in their own unique ways confronted discrimination and promoted the spirit for social equality. These remarkable photographs and wonderful memorabilia provide ample evidence and insight about those who loved the game.

Mexican American Baseball in Kansas City (Images of Baseball)

Arts & Photography

Santillán, Richard A.

Chávez, Gene T.

Martínez, Rod

Olais, Raymond

Photography & Video

Arcadia Publishing

Mexican American Fastpitch: Identity at Play in Vernacular Sport

In Mexican American communities in the central United States, the modern tradition of playing fastpitch softball has been passed from generation to generation. This ethnic sporting practice is kept alive through annual tournaments, the longest-running of which were founded in the 1940s, when softball was a ubiquitous form of recreation, and the so-called "Mexican American generation" born to immigrant parents was coming of age. Carrying on with fastpitch into the second or third generation of players even as wider interest in the sport has waned, these historically Mexican American tournaments now function as reunions that allow people to maintain ties to a shared past, and to remember the decades of segregation when Mexican Americans' citizenship was unfairly questioned. In this multi-sited ethnography, Ben Chappell conveys the importance of fastpitch in the ordinary yearly life of Mexican American communities from Kansas City to Houston. Traveling to tournaments, he interviews players and fans, strikes up conversations in the bleachers, takes in the atmosphere in the heat of competition, and combs through local and personal archives. Recognizing fastpitch as a practice of cultural citizenship, Chappell situates the sport within a history marked by migration, marginalization, solidarity, and struggle, through which Mexican Americans have navigated complex negotiations of cultural, national, and local identities.

Stanford University Press

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Books by Chappell, Ben