What is a lowrider? For many, the term may conjure images of souped-up cars cruising down Californian streets. The lowrider aesthetic is marked by endless customization—no two lowriders are the same, and their influence can be found all over the United States. But in the city of Olathe, Kansas, lowriders are represented by one organization in particular: the Olathe Leadership Lowrider Bike Club. 

The club’s members are all high school students learning to build and customize their own lowrider bicycles—typically characterized by short frames, long seats, and high handlebars—from the ground up. At the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, several students and their instructor shared their skills under the Streetwise tent.

Twenty-two years ago, program founder Erik Erazo moved from San Francisco to Olathe and got a job as a security guard at a high school. He expected the work to be temporary, but he quickly realized that many of the students were not getting the support they needed. He turned his longstanding love for lowriding into what he calls “a mentoring leadership program disguised under a bike club.”

With support from the Olathe public school district, he created an after-school program which meets weekly at the Olathe Advanced Technical Center. Since its inception in 2017, the club has grown to thirteen chapters, everywhere from Kansas City to Albuquerque, New Mexico. At the start of their freshman year of high school, students in the club each receive a “kit bike,” a relatively simple bike which they take apart and reconstruct to develop their skills.

“They learn a ton of skills from welding to painting to bodywork, pinstriping, gold leafing, how to build a bike, all that,” Erazo explains. “But they do not get to take that bike home until they graduate from high school. That’s given us 100 percent graduation rate, and it’s not just because of the bike. When the kids are building the bikes, they’re having conversations with mentors that are really deep and important conversations that need to be had.”

By the end of their time with the club, students find themselves prepared for life after high school—not only to do specialized mechanical work but also to be leaders. Recent graduate Mia Estrada is an example of the club’s ethos at work.

Estrada’s bike is nearly completed, and she will return to the program this year as a mentor.

She first met Erazo through her mother, who also works with lowriders. Estrada was only twelve at the time but says she knew right away that she was interested in the bike club: “I was like, ‘This is so cool. I want to do this when I’m in high school.’”

Now that she has graduated, Estrada is looking forward to the future of the club. As a mentor, she seeks to help even more students join the ever-growing organization, including her younger siblings.She notes that bikes are often reflections of the students who create them.

“Each one of the bikes has a different personality,” Estrada says. “Each one has a certain story to it and involving that, I think, draws in more people to join.”

Besides mentoring and skill building, the club offers students an outlet for creative expression, which Estrada takes great pride in. “I love the designing portion,” she says. “You have to be extremely patient, especially with the taping. When I first started, I would rush it. I wouldn’t let it dry, so then the paint would leak into the lines that I already had taped off. As soon as you finally get the hang of it, it turns into a beautiful piece of artwork that you just want to show off.”

Ilan Cuomo-Wilkerson, a previous president of the club, expressed pride in his own bike. Originally, he had planned a retro “woodie wagon” aesthetic with teal paint. The paint would be complemented by a faux-wood design on the tank—another customizable part which can be added to a bike frame to imitate a motorcycle. However, the bike’s exterior was damaged, and he eventually replaced the teal with candy-red paint.

“I’m very proud to say that I got a nice bike out of Bike Club,” Cuomo-Wilkerson says. “To be able to put a lot of effort into something and then see it turn out as good as you thought it would, if not better—it really made it all worth it.”

When a student starts working on a bike, it’s a blank canvas that can be developed in many ways. Some members love breaking the bikes down to repair or rebuild them. Others focus on the designs they paint on their bikes. The club’s shop space includes specialized equipment that allows students to learn the techniques that go into lowrider art.

“The paint gun and the paint booth, which has the ventilation and all this, gives us the ability to use actual automotive paints,” Cuomo-Wilkerson says. With the paint gun—or pneumatic paint sprayer—students can create a higher-quality product than they could with a spray can. In the mixing room, they use paint chips to select the precise colors they have in mind. Coats of paint are added and smoothed down to create different shades and patterns. Gold leaf, airbrushing, and pinstriping can be incorporated. Beyond the frame, customized handlebars and pedals are also sometimes added to ramp up the design even further.

The building experience requires students to adjust to changes and overcome challenges. For members of the bike club, that’s part of the joy. “With any piece of artwork, you look closely, you can see all the mistakes, how they fixed it, everything about it, and it’s like those tiny mistakes have a story to it,” Cuomo-Wilkerson says. “It’s beautiful in a way.”

Lowrider bikes don’t always have to follow traditional buildouts. They can take a myriad of forms. “It doesn’t have to be a lowrider bike to make it kind of lowrider,” Cuomo-Wilkerson explains. “We actually have a kid who is taking a tandem bike, and he chopped the front seat off of it. He’s going to make it a really long lowrider bike. We even have people doing little baby trikes just to have some fun with it. There’s really a lot of possibilities with Bike Club because you get to let your mind work with it.”

“Self-expression is the foundation lowriding is built on,” he adds. “Let’s say you’re a kid in California in the seventies, and your dad or your uncle has a lowrider, and you have this cool Schwinn Sting-Ray that looks kind of like a motorcycle. You want to make it look as close to your dad or uncle’s car as you can because it’s your form of that self-expression. It’s more accessible to younger people.”

Although the Olathe Lowrider Bike Club develops individual skills and passions, it also promotes a sense of community and family, developing confidence and resilience within its students. To achieve these goals, the club often partners with other organizations in the Olathe community, including the fire and police departments.

“We have a couple commission bikes, like a fire department bike that is all gold,” Cuomo-Wilkerson describes. “It has an Indian pump on the back and, on the tank, instead of having patterns, it has the fire department logo with gold leafing.” This bike, like all lowrider bikes, is uniquely suited to its rider: “Indian pumps” are small water tanks often used in wildland firefighting.

The club’s core values, especially its emphasis on community building and youth leadership, are among the reasons why the Festival’s curatorial team invited them to participate in Streetwise. Having grown up in California’s San Fernando Valley, a region with a strong tradition of lowrider culture, curatorial assistant Andrea Mayorga was especially excited.

“When [people] think of lowriders, there’s this image that’s painted in their head of a specific group of people in a specific way, and it tends to not be [in] the most positive light,” Mayorga says. “It’s not just about cars. It’s not gang culture. It’s really about family. It’s about coming together. It’s about having each other’s back.”

The Festival, it seems, successfully conveyed these ideas. Mayorga continues: “One of the most amazing comments that we’ve received is that people are now walking away with this newly found knowledge and respect and admiration for lowrider culture.”

Erazo expresses a similar sentiment. “Lowriding, to me, is not about car shows,” he says. “It wasn’t about any of that. To me, it’s always been about family. It’s about the feeling of cruising and being with people that you love. These kids are patterning bikes, and they understand that lowriding is about family.”

His students have grown to value this sense of family during their time with the club, and taking part in the Festival reinforced it further.

“[The club] is a community of enjoying the same thing in different ways,” Cuomo-Wilkerson says. “I even found that to be true at the whole Folklife Festival. Like, we all had similar goals, but we were doing it in different ways. Whether you were blacksmithing or doing leather work or in the writers’ workshop, it was just so cool to get to meet so many other people that really respect the thing that they know they love to do. I remember running down to the blacksmith booth a couple times and asking for a tool here and there.

“We’re all united on a commonality,” he continued. “It was so cool to get to have conversations with people who I admire, and I was surprised to find out that they admired me as well.”

Ella Peters is an intern in the Folklife Storytellers Workshop and a rising senior at Georgetown University studying anthropology and government.