60 Minutes - 07/13/2025: Healing Justice and Lowriders of New Mexico

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

It’s rare for 60 MINUTES to follow a story for 16 years, but correspondent Lesley Stahl reports on Jennifer Thompson, a rape victim who learned years after her attack that an innocent man had been sent to prison, a story Stahl covered in 2009. In this era of DNA exonerations, Thompson has come to believe that crime victims are forgotten, and even blamed, when the justice system gets it wrong. She has created Healing Justice, an organization that brings together the wrongfully convicted, crime victims and family members for multi-day intensive retreats. She invites 60 MINUTES to come along as they share their stories and move together on a path of healing. Correspondent Bill Whitaker cruises through Espanola, N.M., a town that’s a hub of lowrider culture: vintage American automobiles with vibrant paint jobs and street-scraping suspensions. He meets a community of “cruisers” who are turning their hobby’s bad-boy reputation on its head, paving a new route as activists and community servants, and claiming a place as custodians of Hispanic culture and champions of fine art. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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These people are dangerous. I'm doing this alone. Not at all. Every Batman gotta have their router. Coulter! Justin Hartley stars. I made a promise. I would never stop looking.

In Tracker, all episodes now streaming on Paramount Plus and returning CBS fall. episodes now streaming on Paramount Plus and returning CBS fall. It's rare for 60 minutes to follow a story for 16 years, but tonight you'll be reintroduced to Jennifer Thompson, a rape victim who mistakenly identified an innocent man who was sent to prison. And then I'm going to tie my string. Jennifer has created something called Healing Justice, a program that brings together crime victims, family members, and innocent men.

Dear Chris, you failed in life. Why did you confess? I will never have confessed. Why can't you just be quiet? You are a angry black man. You will never know love. You will always be a prisoner. SIGHS

TICKING You got to have your siren. You got to have your siren. Espanola, New Mexico calls itself the lowrider capital of the world. And when we were there, we watched a candy-colored caravan of cars strutting their stuff. Whether they hopped to the sky or sat ever so low to the ground, each lowrider we saw seemed to say, here I am. It's sleek, it's classic, it's beautiful.

It's kind of me. Ha ha ha. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,

tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick on 60 Minutes. I can feel it. Of TV's number one show. These people are dangerous. I'm doing this alone. Not at all. Every Batman gotta have their Robin.

Call term! Justin Hartley stars. I made a promise. I would never stop looking. In Tracker, all episodes now streaming on Paramount Plus and returning CBS Fall. 16 years ago, we reported on a woman named Jennifer Thompson, a rape victim who was devastated to learn

years after her assault, that she and the police had identified an innocent man who was convicted and sent to prison, while the actual rapist had gone on to attack several more women. It's not an uncommon story in this era of DNA exonerations, and Jennifer Thompson has tried for years to do something about it. Thompson knows firsthand that wrongful convictions scar not just the unjustly convicted, but also the original crime victims, who are often overlooked. So as we first reported early last year, she's doing something no one else has tried,

and perhaps only she could pull off, bringing together crime victims and innocent men from different cases for what she calls healing justice. What I'm gonna ask you to do is turn your bowl upside down. What we saw on day one of a multi-day group retreat Jennifer Thompson is leading sure didn't look like healing. Ten men and women plus an observer. Nice job, Leslie! Smashing bowls with a hammer.

Nice! What I'm going to ask you to do now is I'm going to ask you to repair it. Good job, Leslie! Smashing bowls with a hammer. Nice! What I'm going to ask you to do now is I'm going to ask you to repair it. It was quite something to realize that gluing pieces back together at one table were two women who had been raped at the ages of 15 and 12. Sitting across from two men who, in unrelated cases, had been wrongfully convicted of sexually assaulting children and had each spent more than two decades in prison. Anyone need a little blob of glue?

At the next table, another woman who survived a sexual assault, sitting beside a man exonerated for rape and murder. And at our table, the partner and daughter of a murder victim. Everyone here, part of a case where the wrong man was sent to prison for years and years. You have said that wrongful convictions aren't a single bullet. Mm-hmm.

You said they're bombs. A wrongful conviction doesn't hurt, like, a person. It's not just Raymond Tower got hurt. Like his whole family got shrapnel, and the victims got shrapnel, and the community received shrapnel because a child molester was still in the community. There's just so many people in a wrongful conviction case.

I think it's hundreds of people for every single wrongful conviction case that are hurt. Jennifer Thompson was one of them. She was a college student in 1984 when a man broke into her off-campus apartment and raped her at Knife Point. Jennifer worked with police to create a composite sketch, then identified a man named Ronald

Cotton in the photo and physical lineups police showed her. Jennifer testified in court against Ronald Cotton and was relieved when he received a life sentence. But after 11 years in prison, DNA testing proved Cotton's innocence and identified the actual rapist, whose photo had not been in the lineup. Ronald Cotton was exonerated, and Jennifer was wracked with guilt, as she told us in 2009. Shame?

Shame. Terrible shame. Suffocating, debilitating shame. Jennifer turned that shame into action. She apologized to Ronald Cotton in person, and then started speaking around the country to police and prosecutors, sometimes together with Cotton, about how to make wrongful convictions less likely. But over the years, as exonerations of the innocent have multiplied, with more than 3,600 freed so far, based on new evidence, including DNA, Jennifer began focusing in on what was being overlooked.

What do you think most people feel and see when they see an innocent man come out of prison? It's the day that that man or woman who's wrongfully incarcerated and their families are rejoicing. I know you didn't do it. I know. It's the day they've been dreaming about. They've prayed for it. They're on the court steps and their arms are raised high and it's a day of celebration, but for the crime victims,

for the murder victim family members, they're sitting back here saying, hey, hold up a second. This is another nightmare on top of a nightmare. The victims have been forgotten. Victims, she says, like Tamisha Carrington-Artis, who was 12 years old, when a man broke into her bedroom and raped her. He grabbed me by my throat and put a knife to my throat and said if I screamed he was

going to kill me and my mom. Grabbed me from behind, put me in a chokehold and... Penny Bernsen, sexually assaulted at age 36 as she went for an afternoon run along the shore of Lake Michigan. And he said, now I'm going to kill you, now you're going to die. And Loretta Zillinger-White, who was raped at age 15 on the way to school one morning after she'd missed her bus. It's hard.

People expect you to just put it behind you and not think about it again. And they don't realize that it's going to affect you for the rest of your life. All these women, like Jennifer, had identified a suspect the police showed them, only to learn years later that those men were innocent, and they were gripped by a whole new nightmare. I felt so bad for him, because I felt like I sent this man to prison. That's all I could think about. I got scared I felt like that he was gonna try

to come out and kill me. I just... I shut down. Did people blame you? Oh, absolutely. The first time I went out in public, a friend came up to me and said, I can't believe you're showing your face.

They were saying that I needed to go to prison. That you needed to go? Yes. That I intentionally sent Narom in to prison. Oh my gosh. Yeah. It was bad. Yeah.

Memory experts have long understood how crime victims can get it wrong. In our earlier story about Jennifer's case, Professor Gary Wells showed us a simulated crime scene and then a lineup. Now you know now after we've talked, probably not to pick anyone. No, no actually. I actually know who it is because if I had come upon that, I think it's this guy. Am I wrong? Am I wrong? Yeah, you're wrong. It's none of them. Studies have shown again and again when the actual perpetrator is not in the lineup,

witnesses often pick the wrong man who then comes to replace the original offender in their memory of the crime. In Jennifer's case and to Misha and Penny's, the real perpetrators, revealed by DNA years later, had not been in the original lineups. Twenty years later, when they come to me and say, by the way, the person who raped you never went to prison. And the person we thought is innocent. See ya. And oh, by the way, it's all your fault. It's not the system's fault. I mean, here was my narrative. Rape victim falsely accuses an innocent man and sends him to prison.

Everything's wrong with that because a false accusation denotes a lie. Deliberate. Why would a crime survivor, why would a victim want the wrong person to go to prison? That doesn't make any sense at all. You know, when you hear what you're saying, then we get it, but we don't hear it. As you said, there's a blazing headline, man is freed, person who fingered him got it wrong.

That's it. And the system now doesn't get held accountable for how it failed me, and it failed my family, and it failed the innocent person, and it failed the innocent person's family, and it failed everybody. That failure, Jennifer told us, is also devastating for families of murder victims, even when they played no role themselves in identifying the wrongfully convicted person.

That's what happened to Andrea Harrison and her father, Dwayne Jones. Andrea's mother, Jacqueline, was raped and murdered in 1987 when Andrea was just three years old. It was one of the most horrendous crimes. She was brutally raped, tortured. Someone found her body, walking the dog. A local man named Larry Peterson

spent more than 17 years in prison for the crime before DNA testing proved his innocence, and he was released. Did you know that he was gonna be released? Did they tell you? No. No. No. For many, many years years someone was tried,

convicted, and put away. Yes ma'am. And then you find out that the DNA doesn't match. I mean you go back into flight or flight. Yeah. You got scared. Absolutely. Absolutely we did. Can you tell us of what? Who's the person who hurt my mother? What happened to Jackie? Who did it? Whoever that person is, they're still out there. But since Larry Peterson's exoneration, with the case now cold, they feel the original crime and victim

have become an afterthought. It's always been, what do you think about Mr. Peterson? That is not my charge. I care about Jackie. I'm worried about Jackie. What about Jackie? But even while victims and their families are left reeling in the wake of wrongful convictions, Jennifer knows from her friendship with Ronald Cotton and her work with other exonerees, that heady, blissful first day of freedom is just the start of a tough, years-long struggle to rebuild.

Only freedom Raymond Towler, exonerated after 29 years in prison, 29 years, plays in a band with other exonerees and says he struggles with the lingering stigma and hurt of being charged with such a heinous crime. Tell us, if it's not too painful, what the crime was. It's painful. I know. I'm sorry.

I'm laughing over it, but it is painful. It was rape of 11 and 12-year-old kids. When DNA testing finally proved Towler's innocence and won his freedom, he says it was thrilling, but also daunting. The adjustment was difficult. Yeah. I couldn't even really go out the door by myself. You don't feel like you fit in anywhere.

At least I did. Exoneree's stories are often filled with egregious police and prosecutorial misconduct. In Chris Ochoa's case, abusive interrogations that led to a false confession to rape and murder. For Howard Dudley, evidence withheld by prosecutors that likely would have cleared him of child sexual abuse, for which he served more than 23 years. I always, you know, being there with my kids, see the football game, see them on the basketball court.

Didn't get a chance to see none of that. So I would like for everybody to introduce themselves. So Jennifer came up with a novel idea. So I am Jennifer Thompson. I am a victim survivor. My name is Raymond. Raymond Talner. I'm an exoneree. My name is Loretta.

She started an organization called Healing Justice that brings together exonerees. My name is Chris. I'm an exoneree. And crime victims. My name is Penny. All from different cases. I am Tames cases, as well as family members. My brother was an exoneree. My name is Andrea.

Healing Justice paid to bring them from around the country to this rented retreat center in Virginia, spend three days sharing stories, playing games, and eating all their meals together. This is the 17th retreat Healing Justice has done. How effective is it when it's not the same crime? Very effective. There's something powerful in healing when an exoneree can hear what the victim in their case must have felt like.

And for crime survivors, it's really healing to also hear about the experiences of exonerees. The biggest thing I lost was trust. Three days of emotional release, rebuilding trust, and healing when we come back. Jennifer Thompson's goal when she created the nonprofit organization Healing Justice in 2015 was to help all groups harmed by wrongful convictions. Healing Justice now advises prosecutors' offices around the country on dealing more effectively and empathetically with crime victims in exoneration cases. But it's what they call the healing side of their work that is most meaningful to Jennifer.

She did coursework in trauma recovery and worked with psychologists to design a program to safely bring together victims of crime and exonerees. They work in small groups on the wounds left behind when the justice system gets it wrong. Remember the breaking and gluing back together of those bowls? Did anybody notice how fast and easy it was to break it and how hard it is to put it back together again? That was just the start of this retreat's opening exercise and perhaps a metaphor for the whole endeavor.

So what I'm going to ask you to do now is to paint your broken places with gold. This is actually 24-karat gold paint. She told us it's called kintsugi. Kintsugi. Kintsugi, mm-hmm. What is that? It's the Japanese concept that even in our broken places,

we're still beautiful, because we're strong at our broken places, and we're not disposable. But before they can paint their real wounds with gold, they have to look hard at the breaks that need repair. I lost part of my heart. So, sitting in a circle, using a rock to give whoever holds it the floor, and with a healing justice social worker always present, they talked about their losses. I lost believing in myself.

I had so much confidence. I had so much. That first, you know, slamming the doors. Everything got real right then, you know. I seen people suicide, death by a cop just getting beat up, killed. You know, the talk comes back. And I have to keep reminding myself, you know, right here, I'm in the present right now.

The hardest part for me is hearing what the exonerees went through in prison. It's so hard to hear, but it's so necessary. On day two of the retreat, Jennifer led an exercise on how the harsh words used against each of them end up becoming internalized. You might have been called a liar. You might have been called a liar. You might have been called a rapist. And those words really do take on a life of their own. I'd like for you to write a letter to yourself from the space of the critical mind, that

loop that plays in your head over and over again. You had them write letters. What was the purpose? I've done this before. When they're writing it, they're not happy. And then I had them read it out loud to the circle. They didn't like it. Dear Chris, you failed in life.

Why did you confess? I will never have confessed. Why can't you just be quiet? Dear Raymond, you are a angry black man. You will never know love. You will always be a prisoner. And then there was Loretta's. Dear Loretta, you deserve to be raped and beaten. You really don't deserve to be alive. beaten. You really don't deserve to be alive. You aren't brave nor strong. You are a failure as a woman and a mother. Loretta, Jennifer told us, faces one of the most excruciating situations for a victim

in an exoneration case, when the DNA clears one man, but doesn't identify who the actual assailant was. I'm stuck. She told us she relives the assault daily and can't get the exonerated man's face out of her memory. So even though he was cleared through DNA, his face is still there. Yes. The DNA said it wasn't him.

You didn't believe it? No. I feel guilty. Because I feel like I did something wrong. So you're having both the feeling that he was the one and that you did something wrong? Yes. Oh my God, you really are stuck. I don't know who did this. For Andrea Harrison, whose mother's killer also remains unknown, it's a familiar struggle. What was told to me was that he was the person who murdered my mother.

And so that was a belief of mine for a lot of years. I can't get that out of my head. On his side of it, I mean, that's sad. It is sad. It is sad. The justice system failed him just like it did us. Until now, Andrea and her father had not been willing to attend a retreat with exonerees present.

Do you think that the exonerated person and the victim are almost pitted against each other when they shouldn't be? They're both victims of the same perpetrator who knows someone sitting in jail for what he or she did. That's right. At the end of the day, when an innocent person's in prison, a guilty person's not. We should all be concerned about that. And maybe they go off and do it many more times. In my case, the person who wasn't caught committed six more first degree rapes before he was ever apprehended. I just love that we're here working on this. In the circle, after reading the critical letters,

Jennifer turned the tables. So I want you to write a second letter now to yourself from the self-compassion voice, the voice that you would use for the person you love the most. So they rewrote it. They did, they turned the- Oh yeah, and then they read that out loud in their faces.

They smiled when they read it. Dear Raymond, you have a kind heart. You are loved. Raymond, your dreams have come true, and you are free to dream more and create. You are a great mother, grandmother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, and so on and on. Keep going, you got this. I've seen you stumble, and I've seen you bounce right back. Dear Loretta, you know that it's never too late to follow your dreams. You should never stop believing in yourself. You didn't deserve to be hurt by anyone or anything. I will always

be your biggest fan and supporter. I love you. That was different. So why is it that we speak to ourselves in a way that we would never speak to the people that we love? Something that I need to change, you know, is that it was actually harder to write the happy letter for me. I do believe the good things about myself,

but I don't think I really say them to myself enough. And the reality is, if we really want to do good in the world, hating ourselves serves nobody at all. Who's ready? After two emotion-filled days came a scene we weren't expecting. Catch it! The group gathered together for improv games. In just two emotion-filled days came a scene we weren't expecting. Catch it! The group gathered together for improv games, acting like animals, smiling and laughing.

You play a lot of games. The games are just really a way of inviting that child to come back and play again. If you feel safe, you can pretend like you're a monkey. Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. Ha, ha, ha, ha. You can do all kinds of ridiculous things, and it's OK, because everybody else is doing it too.

I know, but not too, too, too, too. We noticed a loosening and connecting. Later that night over an art project, the kind of impromptu conversation Jennifer says this retreat is all about. How can somebody look at me and think that I would do something so heinous like that? That's part of the trauma for me. For me when you hear some of our stories. Do you ever? like blame us Like me by an exoneree

Yeah, do you ever see yourself blaming the victims for you didn't do anything wrong? It's not your fault It's not your fault. The next morning, as they gathered in the circle for the third and final day... I feel blessed. I feel light as a feather. The mood had shifted dramatically. I feel open. I feel courageous.

I feel nurtured. Even though it's painful to let it out, I think you guys do it because you know it's going to help the next person. And it has. So how did the retreat go? Very enlightening. Very powerful. We took off the mask that everybody sees.

What questions did you ask each other? Exonerees to crime victims and back around. I asked what happened to you. When everyone was honest. When everybody was honest, I asked right away. I shook Mr. Howard's hand. And I feel for this man and my other two friends back there that are exonerees.

I see it now because we only looked from our side of the table. We never seen it from their side. I had that fear, even when I came here. I didn't know if I would be coming into hate because I was an exoneree. Because, you know, nobody believed me for, you know, 30 years. I think we believe it. Thank you. I had questions myself for an exoneree,

and I was able to build up the courage to even ask Raymond because I still hold this guilt. And I was finally able to let it go after talking to him. I knew he was speaking from his heart. And it took 30 years for him to let me get that guilt off of me. Wow. I thank you. May you keep spreading your love to everyone that needs it.

So as the retreat drew to a close, they clasped hands and shared wishes for one another. Penny, may you continue on your journey of healing? What happened in your case that allowed you to heal? I think I'll always be healing. But I think what has helped me more than anything is the relationships I've built along the way with people that have been harmed and hurt just like me.

Because you're helping other people. Jennifer, may you always be in our lives and may you always be courageous. I'm helping other people, but what they don't realize is they're also helping me. Why? I didn't know that movie. They're healing. They are healing. And I want to walk with them on that journey. Woo wee!

The Merriam-Webster Digest is a project that has been working on for over a decade. It's a chassis that has been lowered so that it narrowly clears the ground. Low rider also is used to describe the person driving such a vehicle, and both car and driver have long been potent cultural symbols, particularly among Mexican Americans. In the 1980s and 90s, many cities passed anti-cruising ordinances because police departments and the public often saw low riders as menacing,

connected to drugs and gangs. That perception is finally changing. And as we first reported last year, nowhere is the transformation more pronounced than in the low rider hotbed of northern New Mexico. The ride will be a little bit rough. That's okay. That's what hydraulics is.

But we look cool. Yay. On Good Friday 2024, we're cruising down Riverside Drive in Espanola, New Mexico, with Epi Martinez and his family in his 1953 Chevy Bel Air, his pride and joy. You gotta have your siren. You gotta have your siren. He's been cruising this road in this vintage car since he was a kid with his dad at the wheel and Good Friday has long been the day for local low riders.

This is the grand opening of spring, you know, so everybody looks forward as you can see today, oh my God, you're going'll blow my mind, definitely. Martinez is leading a candy-colored caravan of cars from his Viejitos car club. That's old men in Spanish. Espanola calls itself the lowrider capital of the world. And on Good Friday, the Viejitos were joined by low riders from many other local car clubs for a chrome and tail fin celebration of their culture. Some were shining up and staying put to be admired, while others showed off the crazy

hydraulic gymnastics low riders are known for. Yo! Among New Mexico's low riders, Epi Martinez is known as the man who makes cars do that. So people come to you to have the hydraulics put in their cars? Yes, yes, yes, exactly. How many have you done? Oh, I've done over 500 probably. The hydraulics in his own precious 53 Bel Air

are fairly modest. We got ourselves here, something not too much. I got two pumps set up. It's mostly aircraft. This is aircraft technology. Exactly, but- In this old car. Exactly.

Those hydraulic pumps, designed to operate aircraft flaps and landing gear, are controlled by switches at the driver's seat. See? So that's really, that's all it really does. It doesn't go too much because you know, I don't want to hurt it.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Over the years, Martinez has installed hydraulics that seem guaranteed to hurt cars, turning them into what low riders call hoppers that drew competitors and crowds to this Espanola parking lot on Good Friday to see who could jump highest.

Whether they hopped to the sky or sat ever so low to the ground, each low rider we saw that day seemed to say, here I am. That's an expression of who you are. So it's kind of an extension of your personality. Delubina and Eric Montoya were there with their 1947 Chevrolet Fleetmaster convertible. It's sleek, it's classic, it's beautiful.

It's kind of me. It's round, it's shapey, it's shiny. I say it to me. Lowriders are all about that, right? They're the car amongst cars. They're gonna be the one that pops. Patricia Trujillo is an Espanola native, a college professor and deputy cabinet secretary

of New Mexico's Department of Higher Education. She told us the roots of the lowrider culture here stretched back to just after World War II. You had many Mexican Americans going into the army and then coming back and still being treated as second class citizens. And so a lot of those people basically created this counterculture to be able to speak back and say,

we belong here too. It's almost like a saunter or a swagger in vehicle form, right? It's sort of like embracing the American-ness, the car culture. Yes. But making it your own and saying, I'm part of America, but I'm not part of this mainstream.

I'm doing my own thing here. Yeah. And we are our own thing. So low and slow instead of fast and furious. Yes, absolutely. These are Buicks and Pontiacs and Chevys from the glory days of Detroit. Customized with elaborate interiors,

intricate engraving and kaleidoscopic colors in the paint jobs. The over the top style isn't for everyone, but these cars are all labors of love, whether do it yourself jobs, or those restored by professionals for tens of thousands of dollars. This ends up about a hundred coats of material when it's all said and done.

A hundred coats of paint. A hundred coats of paint. Rob Vanderslice is a legendary painter from Albuquerque and a rare gringo in New Mexico's lowrider world. Why not utilize the tape until you end up with a nice little point through the middle. Famous for using tape and spray paint to lay down layers of different colors as he demonstrates in weekly YouTube tutorials. We're talking hours and hours, and it just is a beautiful

breakup of like a darker orange, a medium orange, and then a light orange. It's kind of a fan of colors. Vanderslice started painting low riders in the late 1980s. That's just about when gangster rap artists popularized the cars in music videos. That contributed to a public impression of Lowriders as connected to gangs and drugs. Back in the day, were most of your clients involved with gangs and drugs? Back then I did a car for just about every gang you could think, you know what I mean? Vanderslice himself had a years-long addiction to crystal meth,

while he was making a name for himself painting all those cars. Congratulations on being clean. Thank you. How long? 13 years clean now. How'd you do it? I got in trouble. I'm a three-time convicted felon. And the last time I just said, you know what, I'm done.

His personal rehabilitation parallels the path traveled by New Mexico's low riders. Counterculture rebels turned gangsters, now steadily rolling into the mainstream. So you have gone from painting cars for gangs to painting cars for the Albuquerque Police Department. Right, right. That's a big leap.

Yeah, that's a huge leap. In the lowrider's leap, Patricia Trujillo remembers a particular pivot. In the plaza in Santa Fe, lowriding had been banned for many years. Santa Fe is the capital of New Mexico and its artistic center. So when the city's mayor not only dropped the ban on cruising, but declared a Low Rider Day in 2016, Trujillo says cars slow rolled in 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. And I really feel like that marked a new moment in New Mexico. So we're all a family. Joanne and Arthur Medina, everyone calls him Lolo, personify the morphing of lowriders' image

in the Espanola Valley. She was in junior high school when they met more than 40 years ago. As we were driving into Espanola, I'm like, oh my gosh, look at that car. And then I was like, look at the guy in it. I told my aunt. Was his car better than everybody else's car?

We don't like to compete with people, but yeah. It stood out more. It stood out more, a lot more. You can see it from miles. That car is still in a makeshift museum full of low riders outside their home, with a few in the yard awaiting makeovers. Lolo's masterpiece, covered front, back, and sides

with murals depicting the life of Jesus, was being repainted the day we were there. Is your car making a statement? Yes. Yes. And what's that statement? It's our fishing net. 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. So it draws people in. It draws people. But if drawing attention was once the only goal, they're now using that attention to help kids and serve their community. Words now we're saying family, community, faith. In the past, words associated with low riders were gangs, drugs, crime.

Yes, that's very true. What changed? I think what changed in a big way is that we started being out more in the community to kind of volunteer. We're always here to encourage. We're always here to help. We're always here to help. We saw a need for the homeless. And I said, OK, let's do a coat drive and a clothing drive.

Man, we got five huge truckloads of jackets and clothes and shoes. Is it almost as simple as the original low riders have just grown out of their rebellious ways? I wouldn't say they've grown out of rebellion. I think that they've redefined it. So what's the definition of rebellion now? Rebellion now is healing to be that beacon of hope, right? Espanola needs hope, with rates of poverty, crime, and drug addiction well above state and national averages,

despair is part of the landscape. A lot of our kids are from broken homes. Ben Sandoval is director of the YMCA Teen Center in Espanola. There's drugs, there's bad influences. What we try to do through the Teen center is to provide them a safe place. In 2023, Sandoval got a grant from the DEA, yes, the Drug Enforcement Administration, for a project to build low rider bicycles.

How does that help with the at risk kids? First of all, it gives them an opportunity to say, hey, I got to get to the teen center after school. Every Wednesday, they have to feel that they're valued and their role as the engineer, as the designer, as the planner, they do it all. The finished bikes were so creative, so impressive, the prestigious Museum of Spanish Colonial Art

in Santa Fe mounted a special exhibition to put them on display. It really is quite beautiful art. Thank you. These kids have created. It's remarkable. It was just this vibrant buzz of happiness in the room during the opening. Yeah, the kids hadn't seen them like this before.

No, never. And I'd sit back with three or four youth and I'd say, look at that. They're taking pictures of your bike. That's what you did. Car shows now feature low rider bicycles with trophies for the best. Same for kids with radio controlled cars that tilt and bounce. And the fanciest car shows rival any museum display. Now when you see cruises, it literally can feel like a moving art exhibit, right?

As you're watching it go by. a moving art exhibit, right? As you're watching it go by. A moving art exhibit. That's pretty good. Joanne Medina's artwork is a glittering Grand Prix. She and Lolo loved showing it off for us on an afternoon cruise in the hills above Espanola. All cars have a different style when you're cruising them.

This one, I have to tell you, is eye-catching. Thank you. That's what I wanted. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 minutes. Now streaming When people go missing, I get hired to help find them. When lives are on the line Coulter, please find my daughter. He's the man for the job.

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