San Diego Bikers
By: Maria Watson
Published: April 24, 2022
Story highlights
- In California, there are almost 1 million registered motorcycle owners according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
- “People act around you the way you act around them,” says Trinidad.
- “I’ve had people flick cigarettes at me, or they box you in so you can’t get past us, I’ve had a guy open his door on me and he was laughing,” says Bino Avalos.
SAN DIEGO–In California, there are almost 1 million registered motorcycle owners, and over 86,000 of them are registered in San Diego (PDF). Add a half million more owners, and that would be as many registered motorcycle owners as there are residents in America’s finest city.
In San Diego, the mother chapter of the Black Sabbath Motorcycle Club hosted its “47/48th annual dance,” while also celebrating its retired President Trinidad. The mother capter was stated officially in the 1970s, although founding members cite earlier and different years.
San Diego is also home to nearly 400 motorcycle dealers registered with the Better Business Bureau. There’s a dealer for every 221 motorcycle owners registered in San Diego.
You may even be surprised o know there are several motocycle clubs in San Diego.
Motorcyclists in the Black Sabbath Motorcycle Club mother chapter have been taking advantage of the ideal riding conditions that is the San Diego climate for decades. The club began here in 1974 with eight members, and currently spans 10 states across this country.
And, their founding members are very familiar with any prejudice that bikers may face when riding a motorcycle.
However, those prejudices are from a subculture of outlaw clubs, and the majority of bikers are law-abiding citizens. The biker community is more welcoming than it can be credied for, and most clubs are just goups of motorcycle enthusiasts with common values like respect and family.
Treat people how you want to be treated
Recently, the Black Sabbath Motorcycle Club hosted its “47/48th annnual dance,” while also celebrating its Retired President Trinidad.
The dance was hosted at the Black Sabbath Clubhouse on Home Avenue, and the rumbling of motorcycles could be heard all the way down the street. It was an open invitation, and riders rom all over California came out. The clubhouse is a one-story building made to host dances, wih a bar, dining area, bathrooms and a large parking lot that wraps around the whole venue. The annual dance was vibrating with music, the dance floor inside was surrounded by enough round tables to seat a hundred people, and Trinidad sat watching from the head table in his club jacket.
The retired preident was kind enough to lend an interview while people filed into the event and paid for their tickets. Outside, there were booths fo food, drinks and even some small businesses.
Larry Blackman goes by his club name, Trinidad, like most people in the club, and leaves the formaliies up to his jacket. Like most other club jackets, the name is on the right side, with the motorcycle club’s symbol, and colors, covering the back. Any other importan signifiers belong on the front of the jacket.
The event was familial, but welcome to any stranger who wanted to attend. It speaks to the principles of the ofunding members like Tinidad. Behind the leather, he crisply folded slacks and the thinly wrapped eye-glasses is a lifetime of riding motorcycles in San Diego.
“People act around you the way you act around them,” Trinidad said.
The Black Sabbath Motorcycle Club is special in the fact that it was started by a group of young Black men when the United States was involved in the Vietnam War. The beginnings of the chapter started with more riders than there wre bikes, accordig to Frank Atkins, one of the original members of the club.
Both Trinidad and Frank and U.S. veterans.
Frank Atkins was one of the “first chosen,” members of the mother chapter, the original road captain of the club, he told me at the annual dance. The first road captain sat down in the clubhouse away from the dancefloor to talk about the origins of the Black Sabbath.
The mother chapter started out as a ritual between family and community members who discovered a new kind of independence through the motorcycles.
As road captain, Frank’s job was to take care of the bike maintenance while the chapter made a trip somewhere. He was 18 when he became a member, and he attested to how the club gave many young men like himself something o belong to. While we spoke, close to a dozen different people came up to greet Frank, and to show him their respect.
The club’s impact on the members’ communities has produced a bigger, family-oriented network of motorcycle enthusiasts around the United States. Today, there are 16 chapters in 11 different states across the United States.
At his retirement party, Trinidad looked back on more than thirty years of working for the military, for the San Diego government and more than forty years riding motorcycles. For Trinidad, his favorite part of riding is, “meeting people, the community and the family aspect.”
Many people at the annual dance had family ties with each other, but just as many could have been strangers. There wasn’t a single club there that night, there were dozens of clubs, and not all male either. Clubs for female bikers, like the Hurricane Biker Chicks, were attending that night to support, and to enjoy the atmosphere.
Contrary to the popular belief that only men can ride motorcycles, there were many women sporting decorated leather jackets. They were riding their choppers with their chins up and, at the head of it all, running between groups, problems and tasks, was Trinidad’s co-captain orchestrating the whole event: Rayetta Taylor.
Some club members who preferred to not be named told me that women are usually not respected much at all in the biker communit, and Rayetta is respected almost more like a man. I spoke to them while they kept traffic moving, which Rayeta had asked them to do, while I waited for her to make her way back to me.
Trinidad and Rayetta were welcoming, and obviously proud of their part of the community that they’ve watched over for decades. People were still arriving a few hours into the event, adding to the laughter, the music and the engines rumbling.
What does a biker look like, exactly?
Co-owner of a motorcycle repair shop and lifetime member of te biker community, Bino Avalos, explains that bikers are much more than what they seem.
Avalos comes fom a family of bikers, and grew up around motorcycle club members throughout his life. Today, he stays away from affiliating himself with any clubs personally because he worries that it could be perceived as him aligning himsef as a one-percenter. There are few people, Avalos says, that are only a mechanic for people in their club, and there’s never any cross-over. But, that’s never been part of Avalos’ style, and it’s not much of a business model, either.
Despite negative stigmas from outlaw clubs like the Hells Angels, these clubs are a minority in the biker community, enough so that they’re commonly referred to as, “one-percenters.”
Regardless, the impact of outlaw clubs is strong, and it has real effects on the biker community. Avalos learned that perception of the motorcycle shop, and of bikers, is important when he kept running into pushback with his previous shop in Escondido.
Twisted Motorsports was raided by the police two separate times, but Avalos said they were only ever charged a $75 fine for a single fire-extinguisher not up to code. The shop even moved locations twice, and Avalos said that he continued to suspect that the shop was being monitored.
Avalos says that it’s because he didn’t discriminate when it came to customers. He also shared insight about the characteristics of biker culture.
At the grand opening of Avalos’ Zashop in Chula Vista, there were over 200 people, multiple clubs present and no conflicts.
Like a girl
Like the Black Sabbath mother chapter, Avalos’ shop is a space led by people with respect for women and their capabilities.
At his own shop, there’s a lot of respect for women and their capabilities. The co-owner of Zashop is a woman. But, Avalos shared a side of the motorcycle community that he is happy to see change:
We have a lot of chauvinistic men, unfortunately, we’re toxic men, I mean, I’ll be the first one to say that. There’s a lot of toxicity in our gender, so,
‘How are you gonna talk to me about a bike? You’re just a girl.’
“That’s unfortunately the way a lot of men think, it’s not how I think, I mean, but a lot of us do.
‘You don’t know anything. What do you know about bikes?’
“It’s the first thing we go to because it’s been a male-driven culture since its inception.”
Despite the past, there are growing numbers of women joining these clubs.
Some of the female clubs that are here in San Diego are:
There are fewer female riding clubs than there are exclusively male clubs. And, according to Avalos, co-ed clubs are not very common.
“There’s so many female clubs that are famous, you got 12 just in LA just by themselves, there’s about four or maybe five clubs here in San Diego that are just women, and that’s just beautiful,” Avalos said.
It’s a little different in Los Angeles, with nearly three times the residents, and almost twice the amount of registered motorcycles than San Diego.
Some of the most discoverable Los Angeles female clubs are the East Side Moto Babes and the Litas.
Also in Los Angeles is the Biker Chicks Foundation , a nonprofit organization, made to connect motorcycle lovers and help people in need. The founder is good friends with the owners of Zashop, and drove down for his grand opening.
The Black Sabbath Motorcycle Club, or BSMC, has 16 active chapters according to its main webpage site. This is the first finding shown on the infographic here:
This infographic shows the cities that have its own chapter, and compares it to how many female clubs are in the same area. The second finding is that there are fewer than five nationally recognized women motorcycle clubs that currently have chapters in San Diego. This is based on the reporter’s research and interviews with sources of the clubs around San Diego. All-women clubs that are based out of a club that was originally all-male were not counted in this search for the second infographic finding. Below is a map of the BSMC chapters.
