A Love Letter To The Pachuco And Cholo Culture Close To LA’s Heart

There are two ways that people look at what filmmaker Brandon Loran Maxwell calls “homeboy culture,” that of the pachucos, cholos, and lowriders who’ve long been a part of the L.A. fabric.

“They look at it as either a meme, it's just a joke to them, and they don't have any understanding of the history behind those things,” he said. “Or they look at it like it's an abomination, like it's corrosive, and it's ‘all these people are criminals and they're bad.’”

Both interpretations are wrong, Loran Maxwell said.

“They're missing the bigger picture. And so I wanted to go into that bigger picture.”

That bigger picture led Loran Maxwell to spend the last three years producing American Homeboy, a new documentary that’s been screening in select cities. It comes to Santa Ana’s The Frida Cinema this Saturday, and to the Gardena Cinema in Gardena Oct. 12. Next month, the documentary is set to be on Chela TV, a new subscription streaming app dedicated to amplifying Chicano and Latino voices.

The movie combines interviews and archival footage to explore the rich history of pachuco and cholo culture, set against the backdrop of the Chicano and Mexican American experience that gave rise to it, in L.A. and around the Southwest. 

"American Homeboy" director Brandon Loran Maxwell on Whittier Boulevard in East L.A.

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Brian Feinzimer

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The film takes in historic events and policies that fueled Chicano youth counterculture: anti-Mexican racism after the Mexican-American war and the Mexican Revolution, discrimination during World War II (including L.A.’s 1943 Zoot Suit Riots), the Vietnam War and the Chicano civil rights movement.

In more recent decades, gangs, mass incarceration and prison culture also played a role in shaping a subculture that has since risen to global influence. Cholo culture has inspired fashion, music, tattoos, street art and lowrider car clubs as far away as Japan.

“You have this subculture that was refined over a century through different events, different world events, multiple wars,” said Loran Maxwell. “I wanted to explain how some of these events and some of these policies shaped this subculture.”

The first-time director sifted through 50 hours of archival footage to make the film, and interviewed a dozen-plus experts — lifelong cholos, authors (including Luis Rodriguez (of Always Running fame), other filmmakers, lowriders, artists, academics, a former law enforcement officer, a full-body tattoo “collector” — several of them from Los Angeles, where cholo culture is inextricably tied to the city’s identity.

Loran Maxwell himself grew up Mexican American far from Los Angeles, on the outskirts of Portland, where as a teen he absorbed cholo culture imported from points south. He became involved in gang life, too — but as the film portrays, he said, cholo culture is much bigger than that.

“I was very conscientious of, you know, putting forward another gang movie,” he said. “I didn't want to do that, because this is different.”

Exploring Pachuco roots

The origins of pachuco and cholo culture go way back.

“The word ‘cholo,’ let's focus on that for a minute,” said James Vigil, a retired professor with UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology, who was interviewed for the film. “That word stems from the 16th century, when the Spanish arrived.”

Vigil said the term was used derogatorily by the Spanish to refer to mestizo children born to Spanish and Indigenous parents, typically children born out of wedlock who were deemed outsiders.

“They had no roots, no family standings, no recognition to be absorbed into 'normal' society,” Vigil said. This sense of outsiderness endured and carried over to the U.S., as the Mexican American population grew in the early 20th century following the Mexican Revolution.

Pachuco culture, the early progenitor of cholo culture, with its Caló slang and baggy zoot suits inspired by the Black jazz scene, didn’t start in Los Angeles. It’s believed to have originated in the late 1930s in El Paso, Texas, migrating west with transplants to L.A., San Jose, San Diego and other Mexican American cultural hubs.

While pachuco and later cholo culture took root and flourished in other cities — notably San Jose, the original home of Lowrider Magazine — it holds a special place here in L.A.

“I think L.A. does it in its own way that's different than the rest of the Southwest,” Loran Maxwell said. “I think California has really embraced it and owned it and championed it, in a way that other states haven't, and continues to.”

Zoot suiters line up outside a local jail on their way to court after the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, begun when sailors attacked pachucos in Los Angeles.

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Pachuco culture became popular among rebellious young Chicanos and Chicanas in 1940s L.A. It also gained notoriety: In 1942, several young L.A. pachucos were accused of murder, without sufficient evidence, in what is known as the Sleepy Lagoon case.

The following year, as anti-pachuco sentiment grew, American servicemen stormed East L.A. streets, assaulting, beating, and stripping the clothes off pachucos they encountered in what became known as the Zoot Suit Riots.

L.A. as 'motherland'

The film delves into this and other slices of L.A. Chicano history, like the lowrider car culture that became synonymous with Whittier Boulevard and other local cruising strips.

“I feel like L.A. is kind of the motherland of lowriding and Chicano culture,” said Sandy Avila, president of the Lady Lowrider car club, who is interviewed in the film.

Sandy Avila in the driver's seat of her 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, Simply Beautiful.

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Avila grew up in Pasadena with parents who didn’t consider themselves cholos but embraced the lowrider lifestyle. She remembers cruising Pasadena’s Old Town back when Colorado Boulevard was a popular spot.

Her mother would tell her about being harassed by police.

“She would say, ‘I hated taking out the Impalas, ‘cause I always got pulled over,’” Avila said.

Growing up, Avila also didn’t consider herself a chola, a term that at the time was associated with female gang members, she said. But she was drawn to the bigger scene nonetheless.

Sandy Avila of the Lady Lowrider car club in a still from "American Homeboy."

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“For us Chicana girls, those were the guys you wanted to date,” she said. “That was what was in — that culture, that look, that style.”

‘From something bad, something good’

As pachuco culture gave way to cholo culture, that style evolved, giving way to uniforms of crisp khakis and white t-shirts, influenced by blue-collar workwear and the military. Influences from gang and prison life, including a distinctive tattoo style, began playing a bigger role in self-expression as well.

Also in the film is “Compton” David Oropeza, a self-described full-body tattoo “collector” who’s intimately familiar with the unique, highly detailed monochromatic Chicano tattoo style that cholo culture helped popularize.

“The prison system is where it really got its legs, you know, because you have nothing else better to do,” said Oropeza, who served as a co-producer on the documentary Tattoo Nation. “They would just practice and practice … the shading, the black and gray with the single needle. And the designs just got better and better and better.”

"Compton" David Oropeza with some of his tattoos; the face is tattooed onto his scalp.

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Michael Jaffe / Courtesy David Oropeza

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Oropeza, who got his first tattoo as a teenager, said those who wore them were once looked down upon; now, these prison-inspired tattoos are considered art.

“From something bad, something good came out of it,” he said.

Why make 'American Homeboy'?

For the filmmaker, American Homeboy grew out of a desire to tell Chicano stories in a deeper and more nuanced way than what Hollywood and mainstream media tend to put forth.

The DIY documentary is the first film produced by Chela Media, a small digital media company that he launched in 2020. It all started as a labor of love for the writer and essayist, whose day job was (and still is) in marketing as a video editor and copywriter.

“I wanted to talk about issues that related to culture and related to Latinos and Chicanos,” he said. So, “I went out and I raised some money and I launched my own little small company.”

First came The Daily Chela, a freelance-driven digital news and culture website.

“Really the goal was to like, just put forth different perspectives,” Loran Maxwell said. “‘Cause there's so many different personalities and perspectives within the Chicano community that aren't usually covered by the media.”

The Daily Chela recently led to Chela TV, the streaming app that will carry the documentary starting in October.

The film “was kind of our first major project,” said Loran Maxwell, who said he spent a grueling year pitching and competing for funding from venture capital startups until he gathered enough to produce the film.

To get around hefty fees charged by photo and video archive collections, he tracked down original photographers and videographers, pleading his case, cutting licensing deals. One such acquisition was footage from Barrio Expressions, a community access cable TV show that ran between the late 1970s and early 1980s in the East San Francisco Bay area.

Brandon Loran Maxwell as a teenager.

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Loran Maxwell said he contacted the city of San Jose, and “they told me that I needed to find the original filmmaker, and so I tracked him down and I found him in Oakland.”

In the end, “I think we had 20 terabytes of archival footage” from multiple sources, he said. Loran Maxwell edited the footage down himself and used AI technology to restore some of it.

There’s even some VHS footage that he shot himself back in the 1980s and '90s, he said, when he was a teenager in the Portland gang scene.

“Believe it or not,” he said, “I've always been into film.”

The documentary features original music with an oldies vibe, including from Bay Area artists Andre Cruz and Chris Lujan.

Why screenings are like 'a revival'

The plan had been simply to release American Homeboy on Chela TV in mid-September. Loran Maxwell said early on while producing the film, he had been in touch with a larger streaming service, but “they asked me if I'd remove the word Chicano from it — and I told them no, not gonna happen.”

The director crossing Whittier Blvd in East L.A.

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As he proceeded DIY, the trailer started drawing interest from theaters. Since last month there have been screenings in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and San Jose, as well as Tucson, Chicago, Albuquerque and Portland.

The director, left, with fellow filmmaker Kenneth Castillo, right, at a recent screening. Castillo is also in the film.

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This Saturday it will screen both in Santa Ana and Sacramento, before its planned final screening in Gardena next month.

Loran Maxwell said he’s been blown away by the reception from audience members.

“Every show has had a bunch of lowriders come out,” he said. “To be honest with you, it's felt more like a revival than a documentary screening.”

The plan now is to release the documentary on the Chela TV subscription streaming app by mid-October.

“And then I'm gonna meet with some distributors,” Loran Maxwell said, “and we'll see if there's any interest of taking it to a bigger audience.”