Sotero "Shorty" Villarreal was born in a small town on the outskirts of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. His father moved the family back and forth from Mexico to California and he eventually settled down in a town called Selma, which is in Northern California. His dad joined the farm laborers who worked in the fields picking fruit.
Shorty recalls growing up around the times when Boulevard Nights came out at the local theaters. Back in those days, things were getting bad because people were trying to act like gangsters or cholos. With a bad education in a small, poor town the choices were limited--you either lived a straight life working the grape or peach fields or you could roam the streets and get locked up. In 1979, Shorty was given the choice to move with his brother to Houston. At that time, he thought it would be fun to fly the coop, go out and party, and do things without his parents' supervision. But that was not the case because he dropped out of school in the ninth grade and had to start paying for rent and bills on his own.
He started working for a Mercedes-Benz dealership sweeping floors and taking out the trash. After a while he started to get paid a little more whenever he did oil changes. His brother had given him advice about making choices and living in the real world, so he started to save his money. Around that time Shorty started building a lowrider bike in his spare time because he was growing up in a lowrider-influenced neighborhood. Shorty attended Lowrider car shows and would cruise with his older friends who had lowriders on the north side of H-town's Airline Street. At 17 he'd saved up enough money to purchase his first car: a '77 Cougar. Unfortunately, he got fired from his job, but soon after he started working at another job.
Shorty's interest in hydraulics started when he purchased a one-pump setup from Louie La Fuentes' hydraulic shop after he had received his first Christmas bonus. The setup included one pump, two cylinders, batteries, and a switch. At that time Rudy Carrion, from the Finest Few Car Club, was the person to get your setup hooked up. Rudy was also the local distributor of Lowrider magazine back in 1979, so he was well-known and respected by the lowrider community. He lifted the ride for a six pack of Schlitz beer and some candy for his kids. When Shorty was helping Rudy put the setup in the Cougar, he became addicted to installing hydraulic systems. He was amazed by the fact that he could raise the rear end of his lowrider with the hit of a switch.
Shorty's Cougar hit all the cruising hot spots in Houston until one day, after getting home from work when it was parked out in the street, someone crashed into the back end and smashed it against the sidewalk near a telephone pole. The car was totaled out, of course, so Shorty went out and bought a '74 Caprice convertible that happened to be a full show car with suicide doors, trunk, hood, and a custom paintjob.
In 1984, the car was put away in storage while Shorty and some of his close friends started Latin Fantasy Car Club. After helping out a few of his members juice up their cars, people began asking Shorty to hook up their cars with setups. Since it was also hard to find hydraulic setups in Texas, Shorty started stocking up on hydraulics and selling parts out of his house. Around that same time, he met his wife Sheila and together they developed a growing hydraulic business. With time Shorty's house became too small to handle the business, so he partnered up with a mechanic, painter, and stereo installer to split the cost of the building. Shorty's business was so successful that when he put up a sign for his customers to know where he was at, his partners tore it down. Shorty then packed up and moved to his now-famous location on Main Street where he's been for the past 15 years.