After working on cars for gangs, battling crystal meth addiction and facing three criminal convictions, legendary lowrider painter Rob Vanderslice might not have expected to be hired by the Albuquerque Police Department to paint a car for them. 

But it happened, and Vanderslice’s personal journey of rehabilitation serves as a powerful sign of the path taken by New Mexico’s lowriders in recent years.

For years, lowriders and their drivers — also called lowriders — were seen as inextricably connected to drugs and gangs. It’s taken decades, but that perception is finally changing and the candy-colored cars are now steadily rolling into admiration and respectability. 

The transformation has been particularly pronounced in the lowrider hotbed of northern New Mexico.

What are lowriders?

Lowriders are customized cars with the chassis lowered so that they narrowly clear the ground.

The cars are also known for crazy gymnastics made possible by hydraulic pumps tied to their suspensions. Eppie Martinez has installed hydraulics in more than 500 lowriders, including his own 1952 Chevy Bel Air. 

“It’s aircraft technology,” Martinez said, pointing to the pumps originally designed to control aircraft flaps and landing gear, now controlled by switches at the driver’s seat to make cars tilt and bounce. 

Over the years, Martinez has installed hydraulics that transform cars into what lowriders call hoppers, bouncing sky-high. In Espanola, New Mexico, which calls itself the lowrider capital of the world, there are competitions among hoppers to see which car can jump the highest. 

Most lowrider cars are Cadillacs, Pontiacs and Chevys from the glory days of Detroit. They’re customized with elaborate interiors, intricate engravings and kaleidoscopic paint jobs. The cars are all labors of love — either do-it-yourself projects or professionally restored vehicles that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. 

But they all have one thing in common, whether they hop to the sky or sit low to the ground: lowriders are meant to draw attention.

“Lowriders are all about that, right? They’re the car amongst cars. They’re going to be the one that pops,” said Espanola native Patricia Trujillo. 

How lowriders became a part of American culture and gang culture

The roots of lowrider culture in New Mexico stretch back to just after World War II, according to Trujillo, a college professor and deputy cabinet secretary of New Mexico’s Department of Higher Education. She says many Mexican-Americans joined the Army, then came back home after the war and felt they were being treated as second-class citizens. 

“[They] basically created this counterculture to be able to speak back and say, ‘We belong here, too,'” Trujillo said. “It’s almost like a saunter or a swagger in vehicle form.”

Early lowriders embraced America’s car culture, but made it their own. 

In the late 1980s, gangster rap artists took perceptions of lowriders in a different direction. The cars made regular appearances in music videos, which contributed to a public impression tied to gangs and drugs. Many cities passed anti-cruising ordinances in the ’80s and ’90s. 

Vanderslice, a rare “gringo” in New Mexico’s lowrider scene, started painting lowriders in the 1980s. 

“Back then I did a car for just about every gang you could think, you know what I mean?,” he said.

He made the decision to turn his life around after this third conviction – he’s 13 years clean from an addiction to crystal meth – and he’s now painting lowriders for very different clients, including the Albuquerque Police Department. 

Lowrider image improves 

Lowriding was banned in Santa Fe for many years. But in 2016, the city’s mayor not only dropped the ban on cruising but also declared a Lowrider Day, during which lowriders slow-rolled through Santa Fe’s historic plaza  by the hundreds. 

“There was this real shift in culture in that moment of recognizing lowriders as an important part of our heritage, an important part of the artistry of our communities,” Patricia Trujillo said. “And I really feel like that marked a new moment in New Mexico.”

Joan and Arthur Medina personify the morphing of lowriders’ image in the Espanola Valley. Joan was in junior high school when she met Arthur more than 40 years ago.

Of course, she was drawn in by Arthur’s lowrider. “You could see it for miles,” she said.

That car is still in a makeshift museum full of lowriders outsider their home.

“Wherever we take our cars, people are drawn to his artwork, people are drawn to what we’ve done to the cars and who we are, and people know us from all over,” Joan said.

But if drawing attention was once the only goal, the Medinas are now using that attention to help kids and serve their community.

They volunteer in their community, and help organize other local lowriders for public service projects like clothing drives for the homeless and providing meals to area kids. 

Trujillo views the change as part of a redefinition of the rebellion at the heart of lowrider culture. 

“Rebellion now is healing,” she said. “To be that beacon of hope.”

Hope for the future 

Espanola needs hope. With rates of poverty, crime and drug addiction well above state and national averages, despair is part of the landscape. 

Many kids in the area are from broken homes, according to Ben Sandoval, director of Espanola’s YMCA Teen Center. 

“There’s drugs. There’s bad influences,” Sandoval said. “What we try to do through the Teen Center is to provide them a safe place.”

In 2023, Sandoval got a grant from the Drug Enforcement Administration for a project to build lowrider bicycles as a way to help at-risk kids. 

“First of all, it gives them an opportunity to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got to get to the teen center after school every Wednesday,'” Sandoval said. “They have to feel that they’re valued in their role as the engineer, as the designer, as the planner.”

The finished bikes were so creative and impressive that the prestigious Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe mounted a special exhibition to put them on display.

“I’d sit back with three or four youth, and I say, ‘Look at that. They’re taking pictures of your bike,” Sandoval said. “That’s what you did.” 

This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Bill Whitaker took a little trip to Española, New Mexico, the self-proclaimed lowrider capital of the world. 

Lowriders are exactly what they sound like: cars that ride low to the ground. But they also are also famous for their brightly colored, eye-catching paintwork.

While reporting the story, Whitaker met an artist named Rob Vanderslice, a rare “gringo” in the lowrider world, which originated in the Mexican American communities of the Southwest and West Coast just after World War II. 

Vanderslice made a name for himself with his elaborate, serpentine paint jobs that stretch across the vehicle, something that has become known as a “Rob job.” 

“Everything I do is with tape… you tape it, you spray it, you untape it,” Vanderslice explained to Whitaker in an interview. 

He said some designs take three or four months of careful planning, until the final layers and patterns are ready to be painted on. 

Despite their origins, lowriders first entered wider public consciousness during the heyday of gangster rap, when the cars were featured in the music videos of Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, and Dr. Dre, beginning in the late 1980s.

“The cars played a big role in a lot of the videos. But that also associated the cars with gangs, and even with drug dealing,” Whitaker told 60 Minutes Overtime. 

Vanderslice said many of his customers were gang members and wanted their own lowriders, emulating rap’s biggest stars. 

“If you were somebody from the hood, and you see all these fancy cars… what does it take to get one of those cars?” he told Whitaker.

“You would do whatever you could do… to end up with one of those cars.” 

Vanderslice became involved with gang culture and started using drugs as he rose in the lowrider world. He eventually became addicted to crystal methamphetamine. 

But after three felony convictions, Vanderslice quit drugs. He’s now celebrating 13 years of sobriety. 

Vanderslice showed Whitaker his personal car that illustrates his journey, as he says, “out of the darkness, into the light.” 

Parked outside his workshop, Vanderslice’s 1996 Cadillac Fleetwood sparkled in the sun, metallic flakes gleaming throughout the paint job. 

He said the car’s changing hues, going from dark colors on one side to light colors on the other, represent his life experience.

“I got the oranges, the reds, [and] violets on one side. And then this whole side is all…blue, magentas, violets… basically describing my life change out of the darkness, into the light. My past, and then my present.”

Vanderslice even added a unique feature: LED lights embedded in the paint that light up, the bright spots in his life on the other side. 

Through his reporting, Whitaker found lowrider culture has made a similar transition toward positive change. 

“The culture is changing… it’s moving away from its past and becoming more about helping the community develop,” he said. 

Communities like Española, and other parts of Northern New Mexico, experience high rates of crime, drug use, and poverty. And the lowrider community has stepped in to help. 

Vanderslice is now using his artistic talent to mentor young people in the community who may be struggling as he did in his youth.

He teaches them to build and paint lowrider bicycles, which are meant to attract attention – and ride low and slow – like their automotive counterparts.

“It keeps kids out of trouble. Whatever we can do to point people in the opposite direction that we went in, that’s what we’re trying to do now,” he told Whitaker.  

“We’re going from out of the darkness, into the light.”

The video above was produced by Will Croxton. It was edited by Sarah Shafer Prediger.

Africa has a jobs crisis on the horizon. 

Home to the youngest, fastest-growing population on the planet, the continent is set to be home to one in four people on Earth by 2050, according to the United Nations. And this population will, of course, need to work. 

In Kenya, President William Ruto is banking on technology as an answer. He is positioning his country — and its capital city Nairobi — as a tech hub on the African continent. But how countries like Kenya try to create jobs — and whether the jobs will pay a living wage — will be a challenge of the next quarter century.

The “Silicon Savannah”

Often referred to as the “Silicon Savannah,” Nairobi is at the forefront of Africa’s tech revolution.

“This Silicon Savannah is very real,” said former U.S. ambassador to Kenya Meg Whitman, who stepped down from her post earlier this month. 

Whitman, who previously ran both eBay and Hewlett-Packard, was chosen by President Biden to be America’s representative to Kenya because of her business and tech background.

In an interview with 60 Minutes, Whitman pointed to growth in Kenya coming from a robust venture capital community, high-quality universities that provide serious academic investments in tech, and tech jobs coming to the country, such as full-stack code engineering and business process outsourcing.

This tech boom in Kenya, Whitman said, has been anchored by M-Pesa, a pioneering mobile money transfer service that has turned even the simplest mobile phones into secure bank accounts.

M-Pesa began Kenya’s push into technology and innovation in 2007, when Safaricom, Kenya’s largest cellphone provider, began the initiative as a way for people to send and receive money through texting, without needing a bank account.

“That launched Silicon Savannah in many ways, sort of like [Hewlett-Packard did] in Silicon Valley,” Whitman said.

In 2015, 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl reported on M-Pesa. She watched as people around the country used it to pay for everything, from taxi rides to new cows — even clean solar energy.

“People don’t buy a packet of cigarettes. They’ll buy a cigarette,” Bob Collymore, then the CEO of Safaricom, told 60 Minutes in 2015. “And so, we need to be operating at that level. People don’t buy a tube of toothpaste. If you go into the slums, you will see people buy a squeeze of toothpaste. And so, you have to operate at that micro level.”

It’s no longer just the micro level. Today, M-Pesa is used across Africa. According to the company, the platform enabled more than 28 billion transactions in eight countries in its last fiscal year — amounting to more than $310 billion.

M-Pesa is not alone in making Nairobi a tech capital. There are places, like the innovation center i-Hub, which help tech entrepreneurs grow their ideas.

There are companies, like the Nairobi-based Ushahidi, a nonprofit that leverages data for crisis response and election monitoring around the globe.

And there’s investment. Earlier this year, Microsoft and the UAE-based AI firm G42 pledged $1 billion toward expanding Kenya’s digital ecosystem.

But growth like this can have its shortcomings.

As Stahl reported this week on 60 Minutes, American tech giants like Meta and Open AI have been contracting middle-man companies to hire Kenyan workers for their operations. Those employees tell 60 Minutes that their work is mentally draining and emotionally harmful, there’s no job security, and the pay is dismal.

Whitman said Kenya must work to protect employees if it wants to become the global tech player it aspires to be.

“We’ve been working quite hard and have heard the complaints about, you know, respect for workers, decent pay, working conditions. And Kenya is getting there,” Whitman said in an interview before she resigned her post. “They need to update their labor laws to the 2010 Constitution. There’s more work to be done.”

Whitman said that, while Kenya is the tech capital of East Africa, it could reign supreme on the entire continent. “Getting the right laws in place, getting Kenya labor law updated, and applying influence is an important thing to do.”

Another important thing to do, according to Whitman, is to attract investment in Kenya’s tech space to help the country create jobs — especially for young people. She noted that approximately less than one-third of college graduates in the country end up finding a job that requires a college degree.

“If the jobs aren’t created, what will be the future of this continent in 20 years?” Whitman said. “It will not be what it could be.”

The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer. It was edited by Scott Rosann.