Last ride: KC’s ‘queen of lowriders’ honors friends with Dia de los Muertos altar
When a certain, elegant 1948 Chevy Stylemaster coupe, custom painted pearly white with a baby-blue top, lumbers down our city streets, everyone in Kansas City’s lowrider community knows the woman behind the wheel.
That’s Monica Pena, a lifelong resident who grew up on Kansas City’s west side and was elected earlier this year as the first female president of the small but mighty KC Estilo Car Club.
You can call her “queen of the lowriders” in Kansas City. Or the “First Lady of Lowriding.” Lots of people do.
When she’s having a bad day, she’ll fire up her “Sunday car” — the “48 Bomba” — and go for a spin. She takes it to the West Bottoms every fourth Friday of the month for the club’s regular lowrider showcase. She joins the lowrider cruises up and down Southwest Boulevard on weekends.
On Friday, she will display it with something special in the trunk after the Dia de los Muertos parade through Kansas City’s west side neighborhood, hosted by Mattie Rhodes Center. The parade and street festival run from 6 to 10 p.m.
Pena has created a Day of the Dead altar in her car to honor members of Kansas City’s lowrider community who have died. Central to the Dia de los Muertos tradition, ofrendas, or altars, honor the memory of deceased loved ones and ancestors.
The displays typically include photos of the loved ones, candles, their favorite foods and drinks, and sometimes strong-scented marigolds to attract the spirits to the altar.
“Every time I was putting someone in, I thought, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe they’re gone now,” said Pena, who is 49. “Sometimes you don’t realize what kind of impact someone has on a community, until something sparks. It has been a very emotional time trying to put this together.
“I want to highlight them. They’re gone but not forgotten.”
Kansas City’s lowrider community is small and familial enough that Pena refers to her fellow car enthusiasts as her brothers, sisters, cousins. She came by her love of cars through her father — she’s a daddy’s girl — who was always working on old cars when she was growing up. He still does.
When she was 15, her parents gave her a choice: You can have a quinceanera or a car.
She picked the car.
But in order to keep the car, her parents said, she had to abide by two rules. She had to finish high school and do it without any boyfriends to distract her.
She did both, and found out later in life that she inspired other women around Kansas City to get involved with car clubs when they saw her driving around in that ‘64 Chevy Impala.
Back in 2011, she said, she took an idea to the folks at the Mattie Rhodes Center, which hosts the city’s largest Dia de los Muertos events in Kansas City.
Pena had seen how popular trunk ofrendas, or altars, had become in lowrider communities in California and suggested the center invite Kansas City’s community to festivities here. The lowriders have become a staple since then.
Over the years Pena built altars honoring her grandparents and even pet dogs that have passed. But this year, struck by how many beloved members of the community have died, she went in a different direction.
And as she decorated her trunk, she thought of each soul lost.
She memorialized Jamie Shelley from the Down IV Life car club, the friend she knew since high school, the guy who helped install the air bangs in her Chevy, the guy she could talk to for hours without realizing it.
He died 10 years ago.
She still picks up the phone to call him, forgetting that he’s gone.
She honored Josh Flores, the president of the Realistic Impressions car club, one of the oldest car clubs in town. He died in 2011.
She memorialized a fellow “sister” in the community, Patrice Cavlovich, one of the last members Pena recruited for the all-female car club she founded, Stilettos on Pedals.
Cavlovich died this year of cancer. She was 47.
It broke her heart to have to include her friend Efrain Gonzalez, known to friends as “Preacher,” who took the lowrider scene by storm when he came to Kansas City from California in 1993.”
He infused Kansas City’s lowrider community with his West Coast style, in both clothing and cars, and helped grow it. Last month, 50 lowrider cars and their owners assembled for his funeral in KCK.
“He was just so friendly. He never met a stranger. He just made you feel so welcome,” said Pena. “We miss that energy that he brought.
“I just want to make sure that everybody remembers them because they all contributed something to the lowrider community.”
As she built the altar, she realized that she would never, ever, again hear any of them ask: “Who wants to roll today?”
But they will. One last time. On Friday night.
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