Originally published in the “My Ride Section” of the Wall Street Journal from July 31, 2022. Article by AJ Baime photos by Ryan Schude
Citlalli Gonzalez comes from a family of classic car lovers. She decked out a 1965 Chevrolet Corvair Monza with her own unique touches.
At 24, She Turned Turned a 1965 Corvair Into a Rolling Expression of herself.
Citlalli “Lolly” Gonzalez, a tax and marketing consultant living in Santa Ana, California, never imagined herself owning a Chevrolet Corvair, let alone one as distinctive as her 1965 Corvair Monza. But during the early months of the pandemic, an unexpected opportunity changed everything.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, everything was shutting down. After a week, I was asked to come back to work. Because everything was on lockdown… I was saving. I had an idea to achieve a goal, something I have always wanted to do: get a classic car.”
She initially searched for Chevrolet Novas, Buicks, and even Corvettes. Then one listing stopped her cold: a Chevrolet Corvair. She had never heard of the model before, which led her down a rabbit hole of research. The more she learned, the stranger the car seemed. It had an air-cooled engine mounted in the rear, something you’d never guess from its appearance. Even more surprisingly, it was famously criticized in Ralph Nader’s 1960s book Unsafe at Any Speed. To Citlalli, however, the Corvair didn’t look unsafe at all. Its oddness intrigued her.
Eventually, she found a Corvair for sale and drove an hour into California’s Inland Empire to see it. The car was being sold by a 19-year-old who said it had belonged to his grandparents. He wasn’t interested in keeping it and was asking $6,000. Citlalli only had $5,000, and because the car came without paperwork, he agreed to the lower price. Getting the Corvair registered and titled through the DMV took time, but she persevered.
“Nobody believed that a woman my age would know of a car like this, let alone own one. They assumed it belonged to a boyfriend. I would go to car shows with one of my uncles and they would want to talk to him about it, even though I was the one driving.”
Citlalli began customizing the car with her own unmistakable style. She added velour berries to the ceiling, rear speaker accessories shaped like organ pipes, and a heart-shaped steering wheel, among other details.
“I noticed at car shows that a lot of Corvair owners wanted their cars all-original. I wanted to make mine different, and more expressive of my interests.”
Her connection to the car runs deeper than aesthetics. Citlalli grew up immersed in classic car culture. Her uncles owned lowriders, and she spent her childhood watching them work on their cars. Buying the Corvair was a way of honoring that family tradition and bringing it forward into her own life.
Last fall, she decorated the Corvair for Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, a deeply meaningful cultural tradition in which families honor loved ones who have passed away. Several members of her family who shared a love for classic cars are no longer with us, and Citlalli chose to use her Corvair as a tribute to them. Though Día de los Muertos is traditionally observed from November 1 to November 2, she recreated the tribute again for this photo shoot, blending heritage, memory, and automotive passion.
Leave a Reply