Hidden among ficus trees in the heart of Avenida Cesar E. Chavez in Boyle Heights sits a vintage store with the evocative name QVO Laboratories. Sprayed on the right side of its white front wall is the shop’s yellow-and-black logo, above a list of what it offers: Ropa. Películas. Discos. Chingaderas.
The entrance is angled in a way that you cannot easily see inside. Its two storefront windows are either partially or fully obstructed. But as soon as you walk in, the name of Alberto Santillan’s three-year-old store begins to make sense.
A single hallway accesses three rooms — each bigger and more chaotic than the last. Up first is what Santillan calls the reading room, where classic graffiti, Playboy, film and art magazines lie on the floor or are positioned across the wall.
Following that is the media room, packed with bookshelves, boxes and tables full of CDs, cassette tapes, vinyls and most of the 2,000 Mexican and American movies on VHS tapes that he once bought for $300 in the Central Valley.
“You can drop 100 VHS tapes in front of me and I can tell you in two minutes which ones are worth watching,” said Santillan, a scrawny 35-year-old with thick-framed glasses who enthusiastically spoke about every item he touched. “I have years in this game.”
He described the final room as “the ballroom,” since it’s the largest section of QVO. Old-school novelty shirts and outerwear hang from three large clothing racks. A mix of clothes are stashed in a few medium-sized boxes and sit on the floor in piles. Against the wall on the left side of the ballroom is a projector screen; across from it is a Panasonic projector in between two speakers.
Since he opened three years ago, Santillan has hustled to make QVO more than just a place to shop. He has hosted everything from mental health support groups for Spanish speakers to screenings of underground films. His approach has earned praise from customers and collaborators.
“He really knows about some pretty obscure stuff,” said Dan Kapelovitz, a Hollywood-based attorney and experimental filmmaker, who allowed Santillan to screen his 2012 movie “Triple Fisher: The Lethal Lolitas of Long Island” after Santillan reached out. “I thought I knew about all this obscure stuff, but he knows even way more.”
“I think a lot of vintage stores now rely heavily on aesthetic and popularity,” said Michael Anthony Hall, who has collaborated with Santillan by screening LGBTQ-themed movies at the shop. “Now it almost feels like the vintage stores are competing with the department stores, whereas before that was an accessible route. I feel like QVO really holds on to that essence where it’s like for the community, it’s for Boyle Heights.”
“A space like mine is kind of unheard of, you know,” Santillan said sorrowfully as he looked down at the floor. “There’s no place like it and it’s worthy of your support.”
It’s also in danger of shutting down.
“They are trying to demolish this building,” Santillan said of his landlord, Tiao Properties. “They want skyscrapers that are gonna be expensive, nice apartments that nobody in the neighborhood can afford.”
Last year, QVO hosted community meetings for people, tenants and non-tenants alike, who opposed Tiao Properties’ plans. They informed one another about renters rights and protections in Los Angeles, and created a coalition that went to the city council to ask for help.
“[The meetings] succeeded in uniting a lot of desperate folks to get involved,” Santillan said.
Eva Garcia, a tenant organizer for the Community Power Collective, which works with low-income renters to win economic and social justice, said Santillan was kind and open to building community.
“While he lent us [his store as a space] to have our meetings and for our tenants to learn their rights, for me it was mutual support,“ Garcia said. “Alberto received [help] from the community in different [ways] and one of them was to defend [his] building from being destroyed, so that he would not be evicted.”
Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and raised in the Central Valley, Santillan grew up listening to 92.9 K-Fresno, which played classic rock such as The Doors, Jefferson Airplane and The Beatles. “That station got me on that ‘Maybe you’re into old things,’ you know?” he said. “And that’s cool, you know. Older s— will never go out of style. It’ll never die.”
Santillan moved to Los Angeles in 2014 after losing his job — “I used to be one of those dudes who would post up on a street corner and just flip a sign, you know?” — and after his brother joined the Navy. He bounced around L.A. — East Hollywood, Silver Lake — trying to find a place he could afford and that felt like home.
Then, Santillan came to Boyle Heights and never left.
“I’ve lived here for seven years,” he said. “I ride very hard for this neighborhood.”
Around the time he moved to the Eastside, Santillan dedicated himself to selling and curating clothes, cultural ephemera and analog media on eBay full time.
“It’s fun like knowing things and translating that knowledge because a lot of people don’t really have a grasp on that,” he said.
When his storage unit he was operating out of became too crammed to add any more items, Santillan decided to open a shop. He originally only wanted to run a store, but expanded his vision when he purchased a projector and sound system for $115, and found his current location through a Craigslist ad — “From looking at it to having the keys was like a week and a half.”
He chose QVO Laboratories as his store’s name from his interest in research and trying new things, and the abbreviated form of the Spanish phrase “quiubo,” a contraction of “que hubo,” which translates to “what’s up” — a friendly greeting used across Latin America. For his shop’s logo, Santillan drew inspiration from the iconic logo of the infamous Mexican crime magazine “Alarma!.”
“You know, with any retail space in Los Angeles, it’s a work in progress,” Santillan said. “It’s still rolling along, I’m still learning more, and finding more stuff.”
One issue that lingered in his mind since he opened QVO was that he said his landlord told him upfront that he only had two years before Tiao Properties planned to raze the building. The mixed-use establishment is about 100 years old with apartments upstairs and commercial spaces downstairs.
When 2024 rolled in, Santillan and other longtime tenants worked together. In March, they attended an East Los Angeles Area Planning Commission meeting at Ramona Hall in Lincoln Heights where they and other community members urged commissioners to reject Tiao Properties’ plans to replace the Avenida Cesar E. Chavez building with a six-story structure, arguing the new development would price out longtime residents and not fit the aesthetics of Boyle Heights.
Commissioners Gloria Gutierrez, Lydia Avila-Hernandez, and David Marquez agreed, citing a lack of parking and blocking out sunlight, among other concerns. Santillan and his fellow tenants won a temporary stop to the plan.
“We won fair and square, you know?” he said. “It was like, community banding together, and we defeated the evil landlord.”
Tiao Properties spokesperson Stephen Chavez told De Los in a statement that the real estate company is “looking at other options” for the QVO Laboratories building, “because of its delay and the feedback they are getting from the community. The original proposal is being reassessed, so there is no decision yet on how they are going to move forward on that property.”
Santillan is resigned to battling his landlord for the foreseeable future. However, he tries to stay hopeful by keeping himself busy with his ultimate goal and vision.
“I want to see [QVO] thrive, grow, and continue to find its community,” he said. “I want to keep this in the hands of the community because it’s a rare gem and it deserves to exist.
“But this is the long-term goal,” he concluded matter of factly. “I want to buy the building.”
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