I began living and photographing in San Francisco’s Mission District in 1974. In 1979, I was asked by Rene Yañez, the director of the Galeria de la Raza, to join him in a new project he was putting together, a photographic documentation of the lowrider car scene in the Mission and the mainly Latino youths who made up its participants. I spent time the next two years photographing the scene, from its high point in 1979 and the beginning of 1980 to the police crackdown later that year.