THE MISSION PIÑATA MAKER, 78 YEARS OLD, WHO HAS MADE ONE FOR EVERY BIRTHDAY ON HIS BLOCK SINCE 1979

Don Julio Mendoza's garage on Folsom is half-piñata, all the time. He charges what he charged in 1989. He has never run out of newspaper.

In a garage on Folsom Street between 25th and 26th, behind a wooden gate painted blue, Don Julio Mendoza has been making piñatas by hand since 1979. The garage is half-piñata at any given moment: paper-mache donkeys, dragons, stars, princesses, superheroes, and one very particular bear that Don Julio has, by some unspoken vote of the neighborhood, been making for every Mission birthday party with a child under six since 1991.

He is 78. He came to San Francisco from Puebla in 1971 with his wife, Lupita, who died of breast cancer in 2007. They had four children. The middle two, Carlos and Sofía, still live in the Mission. Carlos is a teacher at John O’Connell. Sofía runs a daycare on Capp Street.

Don Julio learned the piñata trade from his uncle in Puebla starting when he was nine. The basic method has not changed in his lifetime: a clay pot or a balloon as the base, strips of newspaper soaked in flour-and-water paste, layered and dried over four days, then the decorative paper (papel china in seven colors) cut into fringe and glued over the body.

He charges $35 for a standard donkey or star, $55 for a custom character (Spider-Man, Elsa, Pikachu), $80 for the bear. He has not raised these prices since 1989. He works on commission, by handshake. He has no website. People find him by word of mouth and a notebook in Sofía’s daycare.

On a typical Saturday afternoon he makes between two and four piñatas. He delivers them on foot in a wagon his son welded for him in 1993. The wagon, painted yellow, has carried, by his own count, somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 piñatas to Mission birthday parties.

“A piñata is the part of the party you destroy on purpose,” Don Julio says. “That is its job. To be the thing everyone breaks together. The candy is not the point. The breaking is the point.”

In 2018 a city ordinance briefly threatened the use of certain papier-mâché materials at city-permitted gatherings. Don Julio went to the hearing. He testified in Spanish, with Sofía translating. The ordinance was clarified to exempt traditional party objects. The Mission Cultural Center put his name on a small plaque inside their lobby.

During the 2020 pandemic, his commissions dropped from about 180 a year to 22. He kept making piñatas anyway. He left them at people’s doors with a small handwritten note: “For when you can have a party again.” He gave away 34 piñatas that year. He has not asked for the cost back.

On the Saturday I visited he had three piñatas in progress: a Spider-Man for a six-year-old’s party that night, a dinosaur for a Sunday brunch, and a third bear, the universal Mission bear, for an order he had not yet been paid for. He does not require payment up front. He has been stiffed, he estimates, four times in 46 years.

A girl named Camila, age 5, walked by with her mother and pointed at the dinosaur through the open gate. Don Julio asked her name. He wrote it on a small piece of masking tape and stuck it on the dinosaur’s tail. The dinosaur was now Camila’s, he said. Her mother said it was not her birthday for two months. Don Julio said the dinosaur would wait.

“A piñata is the part of the party you destroy on purpose. That is its job. To be the thing everyone breaks together.”

JULIO MENDOZA, 78