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mom? [ stopwatch ticking ] across america, everyone has an opinion on, quote, wokeness, nowhere more than on our college campuses. >> politics should be studied at university. it shouldn't be the operating system of the university. >> in texas, one new university is prioritizing open debate to reset the marketplace of ideas. >> if our universities are screwed up, and i believe they are, that will screw up america as a whole quite quickly. [ stopwatch ticking ] tonight, meet the people who sort, label, and sift through reams of data to make artificial intelligence run smoothly for american tech companies, jobs that are often farmed out to developing countries with conditions likened to sweatshops with computers instead of sewing machines. >> it's terrible to suggest how many american companies are doing wrong here and it's something they wouldn't do at home.

[ stopwatch ticking ] you've got to have the siren? >> espanola, new mexico, calls itself the lowrider capital of the world. and when we were there, we watched a candy-colored caravan of cars strutting their stuff. whether they hopped to the sky or sat ever so low to the ground, each lowrider we saw seemed to say, here i am. >> it's sleek, it's classic. it's beautiful. it's kind of me. [ stopwatch ticking ] i'm lesley stahl. >> i'm bill whittaker. >> i'm anderson cooper. >> i'm sharyn alfonsi. i'm jon wertheim. i'm cecielia vega. >> i'm scott pelley. those stories and more tonight on "60 minutes." i got the power of 3.

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these are not soaring times for higher education. tuition costs rise unchecked. contempt for today's campus culture, trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, helped swing the election. in this past week, president-elect donald trump nominated former wwe executive linda mcmahon to lead the department of education, an agency that each year distributes billions to u.s. colleges, some that trump has vowed to tax ensue for their, quote, wokeness. but if america does one thing well, it's innovation. conceived largely by frustrated professors at schools like harvard, princeton, and brown, the university of austin started classes this fall.

the college start-up touting open debate, a shout nothing but say anything philosophy and for now, free tuition. will this be another politicized campus swinging right or a true disrupter resetting the marketplace of ideas? 140 years old, the university of texas at austin ranks among the country's largest schools. football games draw more than 100,000 fans. but blocks away, in between a ruth's chris and a velvet taco on a floor of what was once a downtown department store, one of america's smallest universities, uatx, the university of austin. how would you describe members of the founding class? >> very outspoken. >> you'll never enter a conversation and leave without something you didn't know before talking to someone. >> olivia antunes, dylan woou, constantin whitmire, grace price, and jacob hornstein are

among the 92 students in the inaugural class. if ut is built around longhorn football, the focal point of uatx -- >> pursuing the truth. >> you start by telling the truth. >> pursuit of truth. >> the pursuit of truth to me is i have this kind of mentality that the best way that you should go about your life is to always assume that you're wrong in some capacity. >> you're prepared for that. >> right. >> to be challenged and stress tested. >> it's not just even prepared, that's why i'm at the school. i want them to be challenged. i know i'm wrong in some way. >> what are some things that differentiate you guys? >> we're very intellectually diverse. i've met people from every political persuasion, far left democrats who are for bernie sanders or to the left of that even to people who make donald trump look liberal. >> roughly half the students come from texas. a third are female. they share academic strength, averaging in the 92nd purcell tile on the s.a.t. some were accepted to schools like university of chicago and

georgetown but chose uatx for what it is and is not. >> i remember visiting a college in the northeast of the u.s., and the student guiding me there was like, we have different dorms for different student groups. i didn't want to go to a space like that. >> why do you think it's important to be at a college where differing views aren't just accepted and tolerated, but welcome? >> we're actually listening to the other side and understanding each other. still we're friends with each other. i immediately disagree with many of the things jacob says. i think you do -- >> it's likewise. >> but we get along pretty well. it's a beautiful thing. >> not exactly the vibe on other campuses. long before hamas attacked israel on october 7th, colleges have been sites of protests and have leaned left. but the atmosphere has intensified over the past decade.

speakers shouted down. >> you're not listening. >> professors canceled when students feel unheard. [ crowd chanting ] >> then the reckoning this past year. campus chaos led first to congressional hearings -- >> miss mcgill, the fact is the penn regulates speech that it doesn't like. >> then resignations of presidents at columbia, university of pennsylvania, and harvard. >> from a historian's point of view, it's terribly important that the united states improves, reforms, revitalizes its universities. >> scottish born, neil ferguson is one of the founders of uatx. an historian also known for his conservative views, ferguson spent more than a decade as a professor at harvard and is now a senior fellow at stanford's hoover institution. >> you say something is rotten in the state of academia. what do you mean by that? >> right up until i guess the

early 2000s, it still seemed like universities were the places where you could think most freely and speak most freely and take the most intellectual risk. and at some point in the last ten years, that changed, and it changed in a way that began to stifle free expression. >> we came across data that less than 3% of the harvard faculty identifies as conservative. more than 75% identify as liberal. >> widely out of proportion with the american public. >> there's a huge disconnect between the academic elite and the average american voter. >> ferguson says this political imbalance plus social media plus an army of campus administrators monitoring speech equals a culture where, per one study, nearly 80% of today's students self-censor on campus, for fear of being ostracized. faculty feels the chill too. >> the president of a university i won't name once told me that he received, on average, one

email a day from a member of the university community calling for somebody else to be fired for something they'd said. that reminds me vividly of the bad old days of stalin's soviet union and yet it's happening on american campuses. >> the stakes are that high? >> i think if a university system starts to go wrong, then something is bound to go wrong for the society as a whole. the ideas that start on campus pretty quickly spread to corporations, to media organizations. university forms the way you think about the world for the rest of your life. if our universities are screwed up -- and i believe they are -- then that will screw up america as a whole quite quickly. >> in 2021, ferguson launched uatx with former "new york times" journalist barry weiss, joe longsdale, and pano kanelos. larry summers, the former harvard president and u.s. treasury secretary under clinton

became adviser. in this ad, they announced they were done waiting for america's universities to fix themselves. uatx received initial approval from the state of texas and raised nearly $200 million from private donors, in part to cover tuition. kanelos was named president. >> our work is to stir up settled ideas. >> he says that to the detriment of learning, colleges have become echo chambers. >> what is going on on campuses? >> it's as if people expect there are two versions of everything and therefore there's a right version and a wrong version. depending on which side you stand. but the truth is that one opinion meeting another opinion shouldn't leave us with two opinions. it should leave us with better opinions. >> what do you mean by that exactly? >> christian values we have -- >> to combat fears of saying the wrong thing in class, uatx comes

armed with a weapon. tell an american audience, what do you mean by chatham house rule? >> the chatham house rule is a great british invention. it says if you are a participant in a discussion and you hear an interesting thing said, maybe a controversial thing, you can refer to the information that you've gleaned, but you can't attribute it to a person. people fear that the thing they said that was not right was politically incorrect ends up on x or for that matter on instagram. and that which happens in the classroom should stay in the classroom. >> at uatx, classes are small, seminar-style, and based in western civilization, the bible, greek classics. faculty includes a navy captain, greek orthodox priest, and a tech entrepreneur. >> you're trying to play the steve jobs role here, right? >> there are no on-campus science labs, but founders chose austin for its booming startup culture.

linking students with companies like elon musk's neurolink. >> how do you take this cutting edge research -- >> and helping the kids sharpen their tech skills and even fund their own ideas. >> we have both a non-profit and a startup side. >> to stem the scandalously high cost of higher education, the uatx campus is bare bones. no dorms. the students live in apartments next to ut undergrads, and no meal plan. cook for yourselves, kids. the closest thing we found to a college rager, students learning the texas two-step. >> the guys next door are playing beer pong, and you're reading aristotle and working with lasers. any envy? >> it's not to say that, you know, we're all prudes and spend all day reading aristotle. we have fun. >> as for admissions, uatx swaps dei, diversity equity and

inclusion for mei, merit, excellence and intelligence. >> gender, race, ethnicity, what is the factor of that? >> we don't take any of that into consideration in admissions. the primary thing we're interested in is the mind. >> meaning what? >> the capacity to think deeply, to answer questions, to challenge norms. >> i've got to tell you, we did not see a particularly diverse student body. >> we are putting resources into finding talent of an intellectual variety. and if you're interested in diversity, i recommend you look at the social backgrounds of our students, at the family circumstances of our students. >> high profile uatx donors include bill ackman, a harvard grad to vocally criticized his school after october 7th, and harlan crow, close friend of

conservative supreme court justice clarence thomas. critics attack uatx as a right wing university simply wearing the cloak of free speech. >> uatx has been called the anti-woke university. harvard is liberal, uatx is going to be conservative. >> politics should be studied at a university. it shouldn't be the operating system of the university. any university that is identifiably political is not fulfilling its highest mission. >> pushbag might be are you too dependent to donors. we've seen at some campuses, donors are dissatisfied. >> if donors are pushing us in that is not aliouned, someone will call us out. >> and the backers aren't solely from the right. a libual was president of the aclu for nearly 20 years. she's now an uatx adviser. >> the most important topics of public policy debate are not being candidly and frankly discussed on campus, including

abortion, immigration, police practice, anything to do with race and gender. >> provided it comes with no serious harm, strossen argues all speech should be allowed. >> you think censorship leads to worse outcomes than allowing even the most objectively hateful speech. >> my concern is to try to eliminate the underlying discriminatory attitudes. you don't do that by punishing expression. you do that through education, through more speech, not less. >> free range free speech resonated. when uatx announced its founding, thousands sent in job inquiries. some were disciplined, canceled they may say, at their previous schools. >> some of the advisers and faculty came here under some clouds of controversy. >> that's not what we're

seeking. >> even for people who have been canceled. >> many of the people who are pushing boundaries in academic culture, let's say in the public sphere, have paid a price for that and still should be heard. >> uatx's national accreditation won't be decided until the first class has graduated, the standard for new universities. meanwhile, applications are open for the second class. tuition still free, so is the speech. [ stopwatch ticking ] if you have generalized myasthenia gravis, picture what life could look like with vyvgart hytrulo, a subcutaneous injection that takes about 30 to 90 seconds. for one thing, could it mean more time for you? vyvgart hytrulo can improve daily abilities and reduce muscle weakness with a treatment plan that's personalized to you. do not use vyvgart hytrulo if you have a serious allergy to any of its ingredients. it can cause serious allergic reactions like trouble breathing and decrease

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the familiar narrative is that artificial intelligence will take away human jobs. machine learning will let cars, computers, and chatbots teach themselves, making us humans obsolete. well, that's not very likely, and we're going to tell you why. there's a growing global army of

millions toiling to make a.i. run smoothly. they're called humans in the loop, people sorting, labelling, and sifting reams of data to train and improve a.i. for companies like meta, openai, microsoft, and google. it's grunt work that needs to be done accurately, fast, and to do it cheaply, it's often farmed out to places like africa. >> the machines, you are teaching them to think like human and do things like human. >> we met naftali wambalo in nairobi, kenya. one of the main hubs for this kind of work. it's a country desperate for jobs because of an unemployment rate as high as 67% among young people. so, naftali, father of two, college educated, with a degree in matsmatics was elated to

finally find work in an emerging field, artificial intelligence. >> you were labelling. >> i did labelling for videos and images. >> naftali and digital workers like him spent eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labelling them, teaching the a.i. algorithms to recognize them. >> you label furniture in a house and you say, this is a tv. this is a microwave. so, you are teaching the a.i. to identify these items. and there is one for faces of people, the color of the face. if it looks like this is white, this is black, this is asian, we are teaching the a.i. to identify them automatically. >> humans tag cars and pedestrians to teach autonomous vehicles not to hit them. humans circle abnormalities to teach a.i. to recognize diseases. even as a.i. is getting smarter, humans in the loop will always

be needed because there will always be new devices and inventions that need labelling. you find these humans in the loop not only here in kenya but in other countries thousands of miles from silicon valley. in india, the philippines, venezuela. often countries will large low-wage populations, well educated but unemployed. >> it's like modern day slavery because it's cheap labor. >> whoa. >> cheap labor. >> like modern day slavery, says nerima wako-ojima. a kenyan civil rights activist, because big american tech companies come here and advertise the jobs as a ticket to the future, but really, she says, it's exploitation. >> what we're seeing is an inequality. >> it sounds so good, an a.i. job.

is there job security? >> the contracts we've seen are very short term. i've seen people with contracts that are monthly, some of them weekly, some of them days, which is ridiculous. >> she calls the workspaces a.i. sweatshops with computers instead of sewing machines. >> i think we're so concerned with creating opportunities but we're not asking are they good opportunities? >> because every year a million young people enter the job market, the government has been courting tech giants like microsoft, google, apple, and intel to come here, promoting kenya's reputation as the silicon savannah, tech savvy and digitally connected. >> the president has been really pushing for opportunities in a.i. >> the president? >> president ruto. the president does have to create at least 1 million jobs a year, the minimum.

so, it's a very tight position to be in. >> to lure the tech giants, ruto has been offering financial incentives on top of already lax labor laws. but the workers aren't hired directly by the big companies. they engage outsourcing firms, also mostly american, to hire for them. >> there's a go-between. >> yes. >> they hire, they pay. >> mm-hmm. they hire thousands of people. >> and they are protecting the facebooks from having their names associated with this. >> yes, yes, yes. >> we're talking about the richest companies on earth. >> yes. but then they pay people peanuts. >> a.i. jobs don't pay much? >> they don't pay well. they do not pay africans well enough. the workforce is so large and desperate, they could pay whatever and have whatever working conditions and they will have someone who would pick up

that job. >> what's the average pay of these jobs? >> about $1.50 to $2 an hour. >> that is gross before tax. >> naftali, nathan, and fasica were hired by an american outsourcing company called sama that employs workers here and hired for meta and openai. in documents we obtained, openai agreed to pay sama $12.50 per worker, much more than the $2 the workers actually got. though sama says that's a fair wage for the region. >> if the big tech companies are going to keep doing this business, they have to do it the right way. so, it's not because you realize kenya is a third world job. you would say, this job i would normally pay $30 in america, but in kenya, $2 is enough for you. >> okay. $2 an hour in kenya, is that low, medium? is it an okay salary?

>> so, for me, i was living paycheck to paycheck. i have saved nothing because it's not enough. >> is it an insult? >> it is. of course, it is. >> why did you take the job? >> i had a family to feed. and instead of staying home, let me just at least have something to do. >> and not only do the jobs not pay well, they were draining. they say deadlines were unrealistic, punitive, with often just seconds to complete complicated labelling tasks. >> did you see people who were fired just because they complained? >> yes. we were walking on egg shells. >> they were all hired per project and say sama kept pushing them to complete the work faster than the projects required, an allegation sama denies. >> let's say the contract for a certain job was six months. what if you finished in three months?

does the worker get paid for those extra three months? >> no. >> kfc. >> what? >> they would pay us in kfc and coca-cola. >> they would say, thank you, they give you a bottle of soda and kfc chicken, two pieces, and that is it. >> worse yet, workers told us some of the projects from meta and openai were grim and caused them harm. naftali was assigned to train a.i. to recognize and weed out pornography, hate speech, and excessive violence, which meant sifting through the worst of the worst content online for hours on end. >> i looked at people being slaughtered, people doing sexual activity with animals, people abusing children, physically, sexually, people committing suicide. >> all day long? >> yes, all day long, eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. >> the workers told us they were

tricked into this work by ads like this that describe these jobs as call center agents to assist our client's community and help resolves inquiries empathetically. >> exactly what was the job you were doing? >> i was basically reviewing content which are very graphic, very disturbing content. i was watching dismembered bodies or drone attack victims. you name it. whenever i talk about this, i still have flashbacks. >> are any of you a different person than they were before you had this job? >> yeah. i find it hard now to even have conversations with people. it's just that i find it's easier to cry than to speak. >> you continue isolating yourself from people. you don't want to socialize with others. it's you and it's you alone.

>> are you a different person? >> yeah, i'm a different person. >> i used to enjoy my marriage, especially when it comes to bedroom fireworks, but after this job, i hated sex. >> you hated sex? >> after countlessly seeing the sexual activities, pornography on the job that i was doing, i hate sex. >> sama says mental health counseling was provided by, quote, fully licensed professionals. but the workers say it was woefully inadequate. >> we want psychiatrists, we want psychologists, qualified, who know exactly what we're going through and how they can help us to cope. >> trauma experts. >> yes. >> do you think the big company, facebook, chatgpt, do you think they know how this is affecting the workers? >> it's their job to know. it's their [ bleep ] job to know. they are the ones providing the work. >> these three and nearly 200

other digital workers are suing sama and meta over unreasonable working conditions that caused psychiatric problems. >> it was proven by psychiatrists that we are sick, have gone through an evaluation a few months ago, and it was proven we are all sick. >> they know we're damaged but they don't care. we're humans. just because we're vulnerable for now, that doesn't give them the right to just exploit us like this. >> sama, which has terminated those projects, would not agree to an on-camera interview. meta and openai told us they're committed to safe working conditions, including fair wages and access to mental health counseling. another american a.i. training company facing criticism in kenya is scale a.i., which operates a website called

remotasks. >> did you work with remotasks? >> joan, joy, michael, and duncan signed up online, creating an account and clicked work remotely, getting paid per task. problem is, sometimes the company just didn't pay them. >> it gets to the day before pay day, they close the account and say you violated the policy. >> they say you violated the policy and they don't pay you for the work you've done? >> yes. >> would you say that's common? that you do work and you're not paid for it? >> yes. >> and you have no recourse. you have no way to even complain. >> the company says any work that was done in line with our community guidelines was paid out. in march, as workers started complaining publicly, remotasks abruptly shut down in kenya altogether. >> there were no labor laws here?

>> our labor law is about 20 years old. it doesn't touch on digital labor. i do think that our labor laws need to recognize it. but not just in kenya alone. because what happens is when we start to push back in terms of protections of workers, a lot of these companies, they shut down and they move to a neighboring country. >> it's easy to see how you're trapped. kenya is trapped. they need jobs so desperately that there's a fear that if you complain, if your government complained, then these companies don't have to come here. >> yeah. and that's what they throw at us all the time. and it's terrible to suggest how many american companies are just doing wrong here, just doing wrong here. and it's something that they wouldn't do at home. so why do it here? [ stopwatch ticking ] how kenya became a global hot bed for technology. >> kenya is the tech capital of

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[ stopwatch ticking ] >> the merriam-webster dictionary defined lowrider as a

customized car with a chassis that has been lowered so it narrowly clears the ground. lowrider is also used to describe the person driving such a vehicle, and both car and driver have long been potent cultural symbols, especially among mexican americans. in the 1980s and '90s, many cities passed anticruising ordinances because police departments and the public often saw lowriders as menacing, connecting to drugs and gangs. it's taken decades, but that perception is finally changing. and nowhere is that more pronounced than the lowrider hot bed of northern new mexico. >> the ride will be a little rough. >> that's okay. we look cool. >> on good friday, 2024, we are cruising down riverside drive in espaniola, new mexico, with epi

martinez and his family in his 1953 chevy bel-air, his pride and joy. he's been cruising this road in this vintage car since he was a kid with his dad at the wheel. and good friday has long been the day for local lowriders. >> this is the grand opening of spring. so, everybody looks forward, as you can see today. >> it blew my mind. >> definitely. >> martinez is leading a candy colored caravan of cars for his viejitos car club. that's old men in spanish. espanola calls itself the low rider capital of the world. and on good friday, the viejitos were joined by lowriders from many other local car clubs for a chrome and tail fin celebration of their culture. some were shining up and staying

put to be admired while others showed off the crazy hydraulic gymnastics lowriders are known for. among new mexico's low riders, eppie martinez is known as the man who makes cars do that. >> so, people come to you to have the hydraulics put in their car. >> yes, yes, yes, exactly. >> how many have you done? >> i've done over 500 probably. >> hydraulics in his '53 bel air are fairly modest. >> we got ourselves here, something not too much. got a two-pump setup. it's mostly aircraft. >> this is aircraft technology? >> exactly. >> but in a car. >> exactly. >> those hydraulic pumped designed to operate aircraft flaps and landing gear are controlled by switches at the driver's seat. >> see? that's all it really does. it doesn't do too much. i don't want to hurt it, you know what i mean? >> over the years, martinez has

installed hydraulics that seem guaranteed to hurt cars, turning them into what low riders call hoppers, that drew competitors and crowds to this espanola parking lot on good friday to see who could jump highest. whether they hop to the sky or set ever so low to the ground, each lowrider we saw that day seemed to say, here i am. >> it's an expression of who you are. it's an extension of your personality. >> they were there with their 1947 shav rochevrolet fleet master convertible. >> it's sleek, it's classic, it's beautiful. it's kind of me. >> it's round, it's shape pi, it's shiny. >> it's me. >> low riders are all about that. they're the car amongst ar cars. they're going to be the one that pops.

>> patricia trujillo is deputy cabinet secretary of new mexico's department of higher education. she told us the roots of the lowrider culture here stretch back to just after world war ii. >> you had many mexican americans going into the army and then coming back and still being treated as second class citizens. so, a lot of those people basically created this counterculture to be able to speak back and say, we belong here too. it's almost like a saunter or a swagger in vehicle form, right? >> it's, sort of, like embracing your americanness, the car culture. >> yes. >> but making it your own and saying, i'm part of america but i'm not part of this main stream. i'm doing my own thing here. >> yeah. and we are our own thing. >> so, low and slow and sort of fast and furious. >> yes, absolutely. >> these are buicks and pontiacs and chevys from the glory days of detroit customized with

elaborate interiors, intricate engraving, and kaleidoscopic colors in the paint jobs. the over the top style isn't for everyone, but these cars are all labors of love, whether do it yourself jobs or those restored by professionals for tens of thousands of dollars. >> this ends up about 100 coats of material when it's all said and done. >> 100 coats of paint? >> 100 coats of paint. >> rob vanderslice is a legendary painter from albuquerque, and a rare gringo in new mexico's low rider world. >> why not utilize the paint where youent up with a point through the middle. >> famous for using tape and spray paint to lay down layers of different colors, as he demonstrates in weekly youtube tutorials. >> we're talking hours and hours and it just is a beautiful breakup of, like, a darker orange, a medium orange, and a light orange. it's a fan of colors. >> vanderslice started painting

lowriders in the late 1980s. that's just about when gangster rap artists popularized the cars in music videos. that contributed to a public impression of lowriders as connected to gangs and drugs. >> back in the day, were most of your clients involved with gangs and drugs? >> back then i did a car for just about every gang you could think, you know what i mean? >> vanderslice himself had a years-long addiction to crystal meth while he was making a name for himself painting all those cars. >> congratulations on being clean. >> thank you. >> how long? >> 13 years clean now. >> how did you do it? >> got in trouble. i'm a three-time convicted felon. and the last time, i just said, you know what? i'm done. >> his personal rehabilitation parallels the path travelled by new mexico's lowriders, counterculture rebels turned gangsters, now steadily rolling into the main stream.

>> so, you have gone from painting cars for gangs to painting cars for the albuquerque police department. >> right, right. >> that's a big leap. >> yeah, that's a huge leap. >> in the lowriding leap, patricia remembers a pivot. >> in the plaza in santa fe, lowriding had been banned for many years. >> santa fe is the capital of new mexico and its artistic center. so, when the city's mayor not only dropped the ban on cruising but declared a lowrider day in 2016, trujillo says cars slow rolled in by the hundreds. >> there was this real shift in culture in that moment of recognizing lowriders as an important part of our heritage, an important part of the artistry of our communities. and i really feel like that marked a new moment in new mexico.

>> so, we're all a family. >> joanne and arthur medina, everyone calls him low low, personify the morphing of lowriders in the espaniola valley. she was in junior high school when they met more than 40 years ago. >> as we were driving into espanola, i'm like, oh, my gosh, look at that car. and i was like, look at the guy in it. >> was his car better than everybody else's car? >> we don't like to compete with people, but -- >> it stood out more. >> it stood out more, a lot more. >> that car is still in a .- makeshift museum full of lowriders outside their home with a few in the yard awaiting makeovers. low low's masterpiece covered front, back, and side with murals depicting the life of jesus, was being repainted the day we were there. >> is your car making a statement? >> yes. >> yes.

>> and what's that statement? >> it's our fishing net. >> wherever we take our cars, people are drawn to his artwork. people are drawn to what we've done to the cars and who we are. people know us from all over. >> it draws people in. >> it draws people. >> but if drawing attention was once the only goal, they're now using that attention to help kids and serve their community. >> you're saying family, community, faith. in the past words associated with lowriders were gangs and drugs and crime. >> yes, that's very true. >> what changed? >> i think what changed in a big way is that we started being out more in the community to kind of volunteer. >> we're always here to encourage. we're always here to help. >> we saw a need for the homeless, and i said, okay, let's do a coat drive and a clothing drive. man, we got five huge truck

loads of jackets and clothes and shoes. >> it almost as simple as the original lowriders have just grown out of their rebellious ways? >> i wouldn't say they've grown out of rebellion. i think they've redefined it. >> what's the definition of rebellion now? >> rebellion now is healing, to be that beacon of hope, right? >> espanola needs hope. with rates of poverty, crime, and drug addiction well above state and national averages, despair is part of the landscape. >> a lot of our kids are from broken homes. >> ben sandoval is director of the ymca teen center in espanola. >> there's drugs. there is bad influences. what we try to do through the teen center is to provide them a safe place. >> in 2023, sandoval got a grant from the dea -- yes, the drug

enforcement administration -- for a project to build lowrider bicycles. >> how does that help with the at-risk kids? >> first of all, it gives them an opportunity to say, hey, i've got to get to the teen center after school every wednesday. they have to eel that they're valued and their role as the engineer, as the designer, as the planner, they do it all. >> the finished bikes were so creative, so impressive, the prestigious museum of spanish colonial art in santa fe mounted a special exhibition to put them on display. >> it really is quite beautiful art that these kids have created. >> it's remarkable. it was just this vibrant buzz of happiness in the room during the opening. >> the kids hadn't seen them like this before? >> no, never. and i sit back with three or four youth and i say, look at that.

they're taking picture of your bike. that's what you did. >> car shows now feature lowrider bicycles with trophies for the best. same for kids with radio controlled cars that tilt and bounce. and the fanciest car shows rival any museum display. >> now when you see cruisers, it literally can feel like a moving art exhibit, right, as you're watching it go by. >> a moving art exhibit. that's pretty good. >> joanne medina's artwork is a glittering grand prix. she and low low loved showing it off for us on an afternoon cruise in the hills above espanola. >> all cars have a different style when you're cruising them. >> this one, i have to say, is eye catching. >> thank you. that's what i wanted. [ stopwatch ticking ]

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tickets on sale now at sfballet.org [ stopwatch ticking ] >> the last minute of "60 minutes" is sponsored by united health care, reliable coverage for your whole life ahead. >> next sunday on "60 minutes" a unique first look at the rebirth of one of the world's great treasures, the cathedral of notre dame in paris. after a devastating fire nearly destroyed notre dame in 2019, french president emmanuel macron immediately promised to have it

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