I bought my first car when I was 12. I got my full license when I was 14. It was still illegal.

Cars are, like, a really big part of my life because cars represented agency, represented independence. It represented empowerment.

Feels like home. Lowriding to me, and cruising, and car culture, especially from where I come from, is almost zen, right?

You’re surrounded by this car that has, like, so much love invested in it, and you’re sharing that with other people. It is, for lack of a better word, medicine.

We’re here at the de Young museum in San Francisco to install my two cars in a show called LEXICON, which has a large mural with two of my custom cars: a 1985 Chevy El Camino named Maria and a 1964 Buick Riviera named Bosque. The El Camino is a street rod, and Bosque is a lowrider.

Maria, the 1985 Chevy El Camino, I’ve been working on since about 2012. What’s incredible about an El Camino is that it has a truck bed, so it’s like a mullet. It’s, like, a car in the front and truck in the back.

And I always thought that it was a missed opportunity. And so this is when I finally realized this idea of putting a vehicle in the back. So I actually built a, a custom street rod bicycle that goes in the back, which kind of activates that space.

A happy realization was that the, the hood actually reflects some of the mural. And so to see that reflected in the glass parts of the paint is place. And that’s the whole point. It’s a symbolic reflection of place itself.

But when we put her underneath this mural that represents that very thing, and the glass reflects the patterns on the mural itself, it’s so exciting because it comes full circle.

Bosque, the 1964 Buick Riviera, I drove to Detroit and got this car, and have been working on her ever since. Started with the electric system, then put hydraulics, and then started in the bodywork. Me and my crew worked really hard for the last, like, eight months.

The two cars are based on our traditional pottery styles from my Tribe. The term LEXICON is about a pattern understanding or an interpretation of space itself in place. So the cars are basically written on with the symbolic translation of the environment of place. And that is why the mural was painted in that certain way. And then the cars are placed in the environment that builds this language that they also are a part of. So exciting to see all together.

I hope that viewers are able to read into this show that there are other ways to interpret the world around us, and that other communities and cultures actually see the patterning of the world and read it in an entirely different language, and that it’s all encompassing. And that that environment itself feeds who you are.

And when you become not from a place but of a place, which is participatory, and open to learn from something, it can change you and can redefine your entire identity.

And I think value systems and cultural value systems can easily be traced to this language, this visual language, that is bigger than one thing. It’s all encompassing.