Jonathan Mendez, known on social media as Brooklyn Jon, made a name for himself online in the early 2020s when he began documenting New York City’s little-known lowrider scene. This year, when the new administration doubled down on its campaign against Mexican-Americans—most recently by attempting to ban narcocorridos, a genre of Mexican music—Mendez felt a calling. In recent months, the tone of his social media channels have taken on a decidedly more confrontational tone: In addition to documenting New York’s lowrider scene, some of his most viral videos have been of protests.
This sense of defiance is coming at an important time for a community that can sometimes feel fragmented. When it comes to the ubiquitous Latin presence in New York City, you don’t often hear about Mexicans: Unlike the West Coast and southern states like Texas, which boast their own blended cuisines (Tex-Mex) and globally recognized subcultures (Chicanos, Tejano music), there aren’t many well-known cultural pillars of New York’s more than 330,000 Mexicans.
Part of it might be due to the lack of one singular neighborhood where the community can congregate, a fact that’s complicated further by rapid gentrification. In the place of a Chinatown or Little Italy, there are pockets of Mexican communities all over, from East Harlem and Bushwick to Sunset Park and Corona, Queens, among others. Sometimes, the thriving and disjointed Mexican presence in the city is referred to affectionately as “Puebla York,” a nod to the state from which many of those immigrants arrived from.
Mendez grew up in the Puebla York neighborhood of Sunset Park, where he learned to be proud of his heritage. His earliest memories of Mexican culture, like so many kids who grew up stateside, were of the cumbais and bandas his mom played while she cleaned the house on Sundays. Every morning, Mendez would walk down the street to order coffee and Mexican pastries at their local panaderia called Las Conchitas Bakery. “Even though I was born and raised out here, anyone who asks me where I’m from, I always say Mexico,” Mendez tells Time Out. “I just grew up with the culture.”
In 2019, Mendez’s life changed when he was invited to a motorcycle club in the Bronx, where he saw a group of lowriders cruising down the street playing West Coast oldies for the first time. Growing up in New York, lowriders weren’t a common sight. The culture was created in Southern California in the 1940s as a way to show cultural pride in the face of racial hostility and segregation. Mendez was instantly enamored with the cars and the expression of pride they represented, and it was then when he began to document the scene for TikTok and Instagram.
For the unfamiliar, lowriders are customized cars, usually with a lowered chassis. The best are known for their elaborate and expressive paint jobs and hydraulic suspensions that make the cars bounce up and down as if they’re dancing. Keeping a lowrider requires an immense level of patience and maintenance. In West Coast Chicano communities, people gather to admire each other’s lowriders and then go "cruising" for hours. In New York, there’s a blossoming community that gathers at Bryant Park on Fridays, from which they take off and cruise around Times Square, met by awe from tourists and locals.
But lowrider gatherings aren't just about admiring cars. “There are all types of people, not just Mexicans, who started to get involved in the scene,” Mendez tells Time Out. He tells me the story of a Russian guy with a lowrider bike who always carries a Mexican flag. “That’s the thing with these lowrider events, it’s not always to show the cars. They’re an excuse to bring families together, have barbecues, and make people feel welcome in our community,” says Mendez. “To me, lowrider culture represents unity.” If you want to check out the scene, Mendez suggests experiencing the Mexican Independence Day Parade that happens every September, where you’ll see some of the most emblematic lowriders in full display.
Recently, lowrider culture has taken on new meaning simply because the act of being “visible” as Mexicans has taken on new meaning, too. A report by the Times documented the vibe shift in some predominantly Mexican neighborhoods, where people are feeling too scared to leave their houses and the streets have gone quiet. There’s paranoia in the air, and an urge to become invisible. “You can look a certain way, and based on that people will think you don’t belong here,” says Mendez. “Right now, I see people in our community panicking even to go to work.”
As hard as times might feel, history has proven that communities only get stronger and more defiant in the face of adversity—After all, that’s how the lowrider scene formed eight decades ago. If there’s one place that exemplifies that growing unity right now, it’s probably La Placita de Knickerbocker, a makeshift food hall where vendors, who face constant pushback from police, gather to sell their products. “These vendors are used to always being in the streets and for them to get a real venue so they’re not freezing in the cold is amazing,” says Mendez. Recently, he started going around and interviewing the business owners at La Placita. One of the vendors who organizes the event, Fidel Cortes, has a stand called Las Nieves Cortes, where he sells a type of Mexican icee. You’ll also find tamales, atole, tacos and more.
Before now, you didn’t always see that sense of unity among Mexican New Yorkers, some of whom might have felt a sense of competition in a country that has continuously signalled that there’s already “too many” Mexicans. “Sometimes, Mexicans have a lot of hate towards each other, because some might be selling the same product,” says Mendez. “But I always tell people that you might sell the same product but it might not have the same taste.” Slowly, a realization is beginning to form that the sense of scarcity many immigrants are taught to internalize is an illusion—that ‘too many’ is a unit of measurement created by those bent on obscuring your humanity. For anyone who thought it was possible to purge our city or country of Mexicans, they should know that the community is organizing; talking to each other more than ever before and becoming a powerful cultural force bubbling just under the surface. It’s only a matter before the valve makes way.
“I always get the question: ‘Are there Mexicans in New York?’ or ‘How big is the community over there?’” says Mendez. “And I tell them: Mexicans are everywhere.”
