MAYO PARDO: El Mayor de Sur Austin
June 1, 2009 by Thomas Esparza
Filed under Families
Mayo Prado
On a humid May afternoon, in the office of Jovita’s owner Mayo Pardo, the Doors provide a soundtrack. “Mr. Mojo Risin’” intones Jim Morrison dramatically as Pardo shuffles through some photos. Pardo’s got mojo all right, from the powerful pastiche of Jovita’s posters on his wall to a copy of Ward Albro’s Always a Rebel: Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican Revolution atop the stack of books beside his desk. He produces Richard Avedon’s portrait of Cesar Chavez and hands it over.
Chavez is a guiding light in Pardo’s world; his face adorns the walls of the South Austin eatery and live music venue, where Mesoamerican lore is brightly and iconically illustrated by Austinite Joyce DiBona’s murals. Jovita’s revolutionary consciousness is almost a world unto its own, built up from an old South First Street cantina Pardo saw as a kid growing up in the area, where he attended Becker, Fulmore, and Travis schools.
“This was a neighborhood where everybody knew everybody, and we went to school together – the black families, the Mexican families, the white families,” explains Pardo. “We’d have fights, yes, but tomorrow was another day.”
Always a Rebel would make an excellent title for Pardo’s own autobiography, though the trickster twinkle in his dark eyes makes him an ideal candidate for a Carlos Castaneda book. He’s also got a streak of Latino good-ol’-boyishness that comes out when he reflects on his childhood – watching Jailhouse Rock and Love Me Tender at the Austin Theatre, underage drinking at a Manchaca juke joint called the Blue Moon, going to the Eastside to hear Ike & Tina Turner and Fats Domino. And finally, Mayo Pardo at 61 still has a fiery political streak.
“I’ve always been political,” he says with pride. “I’ve always been conscious of the fact that if you do not have economic solvency, you cannot have political power. [When I was younger] I read Das Kapital, about who determines wages and labor. The light went off that there was another way to live, a better way of doing things.”
That lesson resonated with Pardo, whose political activities extended to organizing a boycott of an elementary school in Houston and “going to the City Council and Austin school board and giving them a hard time.” Still, nothing has been as gratifying to his social conscience as being able to marry a love of his culture with politics and music at Jovita’s.
“I used to walk by here and always thought, ‘I’m gonna open up this place,’” Pardo grins boyishly, nodding. “It’s like a dream you keep having over and over.”
The Importance of Being Earnest hd
On the wall, a Chronicle “Best of Austin” award from 1993 reads, “Best New Approach to a Mexican-American Cultural Center.” Indeed, Pardo’s vision for “a world in which all worlds fit” seems to be located squarely inside 1617 S. First.
And if the title of Mayor of South Austin has languished since Danny Roy Young’s death, Mayo Pardo is the hombre for the job.
