Jorge Mendoza grew up in Argentina, but suddenly had to move to the United States when the safety of his family was threatened. He now operates the well-known Vinoteca di Monica restaurant in Boston’s North End and has emerged as a community leader and fundraiser for public schools.

Mendoza’s family had a long history in Argentina. His father was a successful businessman. “He owned a company with two gentlemen, the DuPont brothers. One of the DuPont brothers was called to testify in a tribunal against the military at the end of the dictatorship. The following day he was kidnapped, tortured, and killed,” said Mendoza. “By 1982, my dad was told by someone in the military that there was a list of people that they were going to get rid of. Him included. They suggested that he leave the country.

“My father said, ‘Where am I going to go? What am I going to do about my family?’ The person that talked to him said, ‘Just get out of the country, don’t worry about your family. Relocate them and find a means to get them out of the country’, said Mendoza. Soon after, his father came to the United States.

“Our situation had worsened in Argentina. By 1984, my mother wasn’t able to liquidate any of the assets and the military had found out where we were,” said Mendoza. “Early in June of 1984, they started making threatening phone calls to the house that we were living which was the house of my grandmother, my mother’s mother. Quickly, with two days’ notice, my mother gathered the kids, bought passports and left the country. I was 17.”

“When we get to Boston, my dad couldn’t find an apartment. He found a place in the North End where there were still families living. We kind of started a life there,” Mendoza said. “We get settled, and a couple days into it my mother grabs my brother, Pat, and I. She said ‘Guys, we’ve got to get jobs. Rent is $850 your dad makes 800 bucks a month.’”
As a child, Mendoza was aware of his goals and his purpose. “I clinged on to what I had learned growing up. I was very fortunate. I went to very nice schools. I had language, good international history background, so I knew where I was. I knew what the country was about. Then I was working hard, trying to help my parents make ends meet. I was just thinking about the future, thinking about what needed to be done so I concentrated on the task at hand,” Mendoza said. “I never really got involved with the community until the ‘90s when we opened up the business. I worked in the neighborhood for a couple of years.”

“I didn’t have anything much else going on anyway. I think it was family, faith, perseverance. Finding out that when you’re in a hole, the only person that can get you out of the hole is you,” said Mendoza. His sense of personal responsibility helped drive him toward success. “It became a mission that was very gratifying. I remember when I first started working, I had two shifts a week a night at Villa Francesca. I was the assistant busboy. I would go in and work at 6 o’clock and leave at 10 o’ clock. It was 30 bucks each shift, cash. It’s across the street form Vinoteca di Monica. The next job they offer me is a dishwasher. It’s from until 2 o’clock in the afternoon until midnight, 30 bucks, $3 an hour,” said Mendoza. “But I’m eager because I got nothing to do, I need to make some money, and every dollar that I bring home, improves the situation at home. Three months into it, I’m working seven days a week. All of a sudden I’m full time busboy, then I became a food-runner, then I became a waiter, so I’m making more money, saving more money. For a 17 year-old-kid.”

“I had nothing else to do but work,” he continued. “I didn’t have a big social life. I had a big mission. In my case, that adversity fueled something that I had in me since I was a kid. I had always decided to build, to invent, to create. It kind of fueled it and gave me a purpose. I’ve always kept my interest in nice things, not in the monetary value but nice things like art, literature, sitting down at a good meal with the family, that type of thing. The things that have value but don’t have a monetary value, but a spiritual value.”

“You have a choice when you arrive to a neighborhood like that when you’re a kid. You either go and put your head down and do your things. You fight the local kids or you join them,” said Mendoza about the challenges of growing up in a low-income neighborhood.

“In the early ‘90s we would flirt at the dinner table that we would open up a restaurant one day,” said Mendoza. “In ’95 we found a spot. We opened up a little restaurant and we started our business. That was on Prince Street and that is a location we still have. We started in ’95 and by ’97 we had a few businesses and a piece of property that we bought.” This was the start of the family business. The family opened two restaurants and an Italian market, Trattoria Di Monica, Monica’s Mercato, and Vinoteca di Monica.

Mendoza was a competent businessman from a young age. “I specialize in building businesses without money. I have a lot of good connections with the people that do work for me. I contract the jobs myself, so I have a lot of good friends that work for me,” said Mendoza. “The big restaurant on Richmond Street, the Vinoteca, I built that place on a handshake. A lot of my contractors said, ‘Alright when you open up, you pay us back,’ and I paid everybody off within a year.”

Moving from Argentina to the United States so suddenly and as a teenager was hard. “To go to bed in one country and wake up in another one the next day, where your first life ends and a new one begins is quite traumatic. Everything you know, everything you thought, believed was there for good whether it’s your home or your neighbors, your friends, your culture, the things that you do every day abruptly end and you start over,” said Mendoza. “I did leave Argentina with some resentment because it was that my ancestors were part of the founding fathers of the nation, 500 years there, and here we are leaving the country and being pretty much expelled from the country.”

“I think one of the reasons that we have such harmony here is because you want to be American, you want to become an American. There’s all sorts of benefits about being an American and opportunity is probably the greatest benefit about being an American. I grabbed that opportunity and I did whatever the hell I could, I worked at night, I worked in the mornings I did deliveries, I did whatever I could do,” said Mendoza. “I was making more money, I was able to give a lot of money to my parents. I was able to save a little bit and I continued to concentrate on that.”

Mendoza was confident in himself and did not feel the need to develop his work ethic based on the opinions of those around him. “I just went ahead with blinders and kept going ahead and kept on doing my thing. I never let people, or their opinions, keep me from doing what I was doing, or anything get in the way. I never looked for acceptance. I never really cared what they thought.”

“I think that in most neighborhoods in the United States where there is only one ethnic group they cling onto that. In the country of many cultures, just focusing on the little bit of culture you’re gripping onto handicaps you,” said Mendoza. “They get together with their own people, so they never really become full-fledged Americans. In a way you handicap yourself by not knowing everything that’s available between your border of your neighborhood.”

Mendoza said, “What I’ve learned in the last 33 years of being in this country is that, stability can make you complacent and instability fuels innovation. Adversity promotes innovation.”

When Mendoza came to the United States, he had already learned a great deal of English. “I was learning English from kindergarten on, and Spanish. So when I came here I had those tools which were really useful to my family,” said Mendoza. His mother was always encouraging him, and she was the biggest influence in his life. “My mother was a driving force. She had a very positive outlook on a lot of things and she always found the bright side. She always said, ‘We’re in the United States, thank God because one of you guys would be dead in Argentina’. You could get killed by the government or the criminals started running around committing atrocities—kidnapping people doing all that stuff.”

“When I was a little kid, I was an odd kid, always inventing and doing things. My mom, she was the cheerleading team, she always patted me on the back and always kept me going,” said Mendoza. “On the same token, when we started our businesses and everything, she was always pushing me forward and saying, ‘You’re doing great, don’t give up, keep on going, keep on trying.’”

She died in 2006 and his father passed away in 2013. “They were a great couple, madly in love with each other. They had endured everything and the day she died my father started dying with her, and he died 10 years later from a broken heart and severe cardiovascular problems,” said Mendoza. “That has been another very trying part of our lives because she was the glue that kept the family together and was no longer there.”

“I have no doubts that there’s all sorts of great things in life and beautiful things and they come with bad things. I don’t believe that happiness is permanent,” Mendoza said. “I don’t believe really true happiness happens without sadness. I don’t believe that there is true success without struggles.”

Mendoza, who divorced after more than 20 years of marriage, said he and his ex-wife are still friends. “We do a nice job with the kids and all that stuff. Wonderful person, unfortunately it did not work out,” said Mendoza. “I still have the same mission to bring my family forward. It is not for economic gain, it’s for my kids to be well-educated, have good standing, good tools to bring forward to life and the next things. I’m very fortunate that they’re really good kids.”

His 20-year-old son, Jorge, was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome when he was eight, but is succeeding in a school for young people with disabilities. “The kid is doing amazing. He’s studying 3-D animation. He helps me do the books at work so he’s there five days a week, five hours a day, gathering all the information. He’s computer savvy, he’s got photographic memory. He remembers and organizes everything. He’s very socially capable,” said Mendoza. “He was written off by somebody that said he’s never going to write, he’s never going to draw, he’s going to need an aid to learn and an aid to survive. He’s completely independent. Part of the handicap comes from the way the parents treat the disability of their children. In my son’s case, it’s a blessing. My son is a brilliant student. I wouldn’t change him.”

“I’m different from most people. I’m driven. I can do 24-hour work days. I just built another store with my own two hands while I run a big business,” said Mendoza. He has worked to live his life to the fullest, remaining agile in response to projects put in front of him. “I do demo to finish. I do books. I was an elected council for eight years. I was the co-chair of the governing council at the public school, the biggest fundraiser for 10 years. I’m happy to do it. I’m able, I have gifts that were given to me by my creator that I continue to use,” said Mendoza.

Mendoza said he believes that people have the ability to accomplish whatever they put their minds to. “I would say that within our humanity, we have all the necessary tools to take adversity and make it work for us, put it on our side. We are the product of struggle,” said Mendoza. He recognized the importance of having courage through all the adversity that life throws your way. “Instead of avoiding the issues, or obstacles, or adversities, embrace them. Grab the bull by its horns and say, ‘Hey, how do I get out of this jam, how do I change things?’”

“I think that is one of our flaws right now in the last 50 years in America, we really don’t know how to suffer. We don’t know how to struggle. We don’t know how to realize that our brightest milestones come after our darkest times.” Perseverance was a big part of Mendoza’s life growing up, and it has helped shape his success today. “I would tell people, don’t give up, keep on trying. I would also tell people don’t fall into the social traps of trying to avoid having those feelings whether its need or inadequacy. Realize that those feelings are what is going to fuel your inner-self to get out of that.”