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Sandoval, who has taught at Cal State Northridge since 2002, is perhaps the premier scholar on lowrider culture and also an exemplar of what an academic should be.

Sandoval’s reputation is such that when the owners of Lowrider Magazine, which shut down in 2019, came back last year for a one-off edition celebrating women cruisers and creators, they asked her to serve as editorial director.

The two were on the cover of the special-edition Lowrider magazine along with two other middle-aged women, a choice that Sandoval said she insisted on because it would “flip the script” on the cliché of bikini-clad women standing before cars like hood adornments.

She saved up her allowance while attending Bishop Amat High to buy copies of Lowrider and also of Teen Angels, an influential zine that celebrated Chicano culture.

At UC Berkeley in the early 1990s, she found old issues of Lowrider in the university’s archives and was struck by how Chicanas used the letters pages to assert themselves in what’s long been thought of as a macho realm.