Art on the curb.

Betsabee Romero's love affair with cars began when she was a toddler.

Growing up a couple of blocks away from Buenos Aires--a Mexico City neighborhood overflowing with auto-part stores--she was always fascinated by these colorful noisy machines that the local men dedicated their lives to fixing and selling.

So after Romero studied fine art at prestigious universities in Mexico and Europe, cars were a natural medium for her artistic expression. She took abandoned automobiles lying on the streets of Mexico City, Tijuana and East Los Angeles and used paint, plaster, wood, silk, plants and animals to transform them into works of art.

Cars may be meaningless, materialistic heaps of metal for a lot of artists. But for Romero, automobiles are cultural icons and a crucial part of the identity of ordinary Mexicans living on both sides of the Rio Bravo.

"Almost everywhere in the world there is car culture, but in each place the car culture is different," she said.

In the United States, car marketing stresses speed, efficiency and modernity, and pushes the need to buy new models every couple of years. But for many Mexicans driving on congested inner-city highways or battered old roads, speed does not have the same importance. And the economic realities mean that few Mexicans can afford to buy the latest SUVs or the flashiest sports cars. Cars remain within families for decades and are often repaired with any parts the owners can get their hands on, giving the vehicles distinctive characters. Romero says that in these circumstances, cars gain a special meaning within households.

"Cars are part of the family," she said.

Romero happened upon a 1959 Gilman roadster in Buenos Aires and covered it with Talavera tiles in the pattern of an 18th-century hacienda. The work symbolizes the car as a domestic environment, a physical extension of the home.

In Mexico City, there are thousands of broken-down cars sitting outside houses, but people hold onto them and use them as storage spaces and places to hang out, effectively transforming the automobile into a part of the home.

In another project, Romero found an old Grand Marquis and covered it with plaster and bandages. Over the bindings, she transcribed accounts from Buenos Aires residents about the killings of six local teenagers at the hands of policemen and soldiers in 1997.

The car tells the story of the atrocities and, as a bandaged and injured vehicle, symbolizes the wound in the community.

Romero also turned her attention to Mexico City's most popular automobile: the Volkswagen Beatle, affectionately called el bocho.

"The bocho is an icon for Mexico City. It is amazing the way it can be fixed with anything and keeps surviving," she said. "It is just like the way chilangos [people from Mexico City] adapt and survive to the crazy environment they live in."

Romero reconfigured a smashed-up Beatle using a variety of garbage including Coke cans, corrugated iron sheets and old wooden doors, to create an authentic Mexico City road warrior.

Romero's work sits not in art galleries, but in streets and communities. Most of the cars she has transformed remain unchanged after several years, making curious sites in the rough neighborhoods they decorate.

Colleagues in the art community told her she was crazy for leaving five works unattended in Buenos Aires, which is famous for its high crime, especially when one work incorporated a cage full of birds and another used a giant nopal cactus. However, Romero held meetings with local residents and found them very receptive to the projects and eager to help maintain them.

Kids were told about the artworks and encouraged to give the birds names.

Two years on, the Talavera tiles are intact, the birds are healthy and the nopal is alive and producing fruit.

"They are always trying to vilify and isolate the Buenos Aires," she said. "But it is a strong and caring community with a unique and vibrant culture. Residents showed great generosity in housing the art projects in their streets and were very open minded about incorporating the art into their world."

Ioan Grillo is a freelance writer based in Mexico City.