Mufflers and Museum Pieces
The El Pedorrero muffler shop pulses like a beacon amid the meat markets, liquor stores and tire shops on Whittier Boulevard in East L.A. Its exterior painted in eye-popping yellow and blue faux tile patterns, this folk art landmark offers more than catalytic converters and balm for the noisy exhausts alluded to in its name, a Spanish reference to, ahem, flatulence.
While their cars’ mufflers are repaired, patrons are invited to browse the shop’s grounds, which are a veritable museum of art, bric-a-brac and oddball junk. In a warehouse-sized shop space, fine art, folk art, kitsch Americana and antiques are displayed in fantastic combinations. Working traffic signals, religious icons, road signs and a phone booth on wheels give way to ceramic figurines, a Model A Ford hot rod, toys, sculptures, metal gadgets and a woman’s torso carved from one piece of wood. Here and there, some objects have been touched up with new brass or chrome fittings, others anointed with racing flames and pin-striping.
“Everything here has meaning,” says proprietor Guillermo “Bill” London, 66. El Pedorrero’s burly Colombian American owner set up shop here some 24 years ago. For more than 40 years, he has applied his big-top, funny-paper sensibility and tinker’s aesthetic to shaping his enormous collection, which salutes his adopted country with items such as an original newspaper account of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and a framed copy of Nicole Brown Simpson’s birth certificate. There’s also his own artwork on the tailgate of a truck, depicting the Statue of Liberty and the Stars and Stripes under the date 9/11/01.
On the boulevard in front of the shop, a mufflero man sculpted of junk parts beckons next to a yellow-and-black custom Honda festooned with more than 100 chrome tailpipe fins welded on at odd angles. The car, which resembles a mutant Batmobile released from a manic wash-spin-dry cycle and left to shrink in the sun, is operational; attendants fire it up each morning and park it along Whittier, where a monster-size tractor tire on the car’s roof advertises a free muffler with each catalytic converter.
El Pedorrero was part of a 1994 American Institute of Architects tour and has been featured on the Univision network. “Journalists have come from all over: Germany, Canada, Japan, even Channel 4 from England,” London says.
For London, even the shop’s exterior paint has meaning. As he explains it, yellow is the color most associated with caution, while postal blue (the trademark shade used by the U.S. Postal Service) inspires confidence.
London, whose patrons are largely working-class immigrants from Mexico and Central America, consciously keeps his prices down, a populist policy that goes for his collection as well. “‘It belongs to everyone, because without others, I don’t exist. Someone filled each of these objects with their energy. I’m just the caretaker.”