A Message to our community

A Message to Our Community

After four years at Navy Pier and twelve years of building Slow & Low: Chicago Lowrider Festival, we have difficult news to share.

Slow & Low will no longer call Navy Pier home.

This was not our decision.

Following the 2025 festival, Navy Pier informed us that Slow & Low would not return as part of its Hispanic Heritage Month programming, citing attendance and financial performance.

We understand that institutions make business decisions. But we also believe our community deserves to understand the circumstances surrounding this one.

Last year, Operation Midway Blitz brought intensified immigration enforcement to Chicago, creating widespread fear and disruption within immigrant communities.

Several attendees, vendors, and exhibitors made the difficult decision not to participate because of concerns surrounding immigration enforcement, resulting in significantly lower attendance than in previous years.

We chose to move forward with the festival. Working closely with Navy Pier, we remained committed to creating a safe and welcoming space because we believed our community still deserved a place to gather, celebrate, and be together during an extraordinarily difficult moment.

Communities should not be measured by attendance during moments when people are afraid to gather.

Attendance data cannot be separated from the conditions in which people were being asked to gather. The effects of immigration enforcement reached beyond individual families. They changed how communities participated in public life, including cultural events like ours.

We believe that reality deserves acknowledgment.

But this moment is about more than one year, one decision, or one venue.

Over the past twelve years, Slow & Low has grown from a grassroots gathering in Pilsen into Chicago’s largest celebration of lowrider culture.

Together, we built more than a festival.

We built a cultural home where artists, families, musicians, entrepreneurs, car clubs, bicycle clubs, motorcycle clubs, solo riders, volunteers, neighborhood organizations, and visitors from across Chicago and beyond could come together around creativity, craftsmanship, music, history, and community.

To every artist, volunteer, sponsor, exhibitor, performer, vendor, community partner, club, rider, supporter, and family who has been part of this journey: thank you.

You helped build something that changed Chicago’s cultural landscape.

The measure of cultural impact has never been numbers alone. It lives in the relationships built over time. In the artists who keep creating. In families who return year after year. In communities that continue to show up for one another. And in institutions willing to invest in cultural work through moments of celebration as well as moments of challenge.

For twelve years, Slow & Low has existed because people believed that lowrider culture, and the communities that created and sustained it, deserved to be seen, celebrated, and understood on their own terms.

That belief has not changed.

Slow & Low has always been bigger than a venue.

It belongs to the community that built it.

Our story is far from over. We look forward to sharing what’s next.

Team Slow & Low

Peter Kepha
Edward “Magic” Calderon
Lauren M. Pacheco