Tracing the Culture and Artistic Legitimation of Southern California's Hot-Rods and Kustom Culture

Author(s)	Mr. Kaustav sk
Country	India
Abstract	Southern California hot-rod and custom-car culture is usually told as a single, linear story: from juvenile-delinquency stigma to art-world recognition. This paper examines how that narrative was actually contested and reshaped from the postwar period to the present, and asks whether it fully accounts for the culture's internal diversity and its ongoing tension with commercialisation. Drawing on literature-based historical and cultural analysis, the study finds that "hot rod" was a publicly contested term, that the culture built its own self-regulating institutions, that individual craftsmen earned real artistic recognition, that nostalgia helped revive the culture decades after its peak, and that Los Angeles car culture was in fact several overlapping cultures shaped by race, class, disability, and sexuality. The paper concludes that Southern California Kustom Culture's legitimation as art and heritage is genuine but incomplete, and that it continues to negotiate the same tension between grassroots authenticity and commercialisation that shaped it from the start.
Keywords	Hot rods, Kustom culture, Southern California car culture, cultural legitimation, commercialisation
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On	2026-09-23
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i05.88282

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