“I’m trying to carve out a space for the young folks like myself because there’s so many of us here,” Margarito Pérez declares loftily. Paprika, his critically acclaimed “taqueria pa la gente,” recently opened a brick-and-mortar at 6539 N. Lamar and stands as a testament to his burning passion for self-expression.
Although Pérez was born in Valle Hermoso, a small town near Matamoros in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, his parents moved to Indiana to work in a meat processing plant when he was young. “I grew up in a very small, very racist, rural town in the Midwest. I didn’t really know what it meant to be an immigrant or Mexican until I started getting a little bit older,” says Pérez.
“I loved hip-hop, and I loved football. It was all I wanted to do,” he muses. “Then, one day I realized that my friends were getting ready to go to college and they were getting calls for grants or scholarships. But when the schools that were interested in me for playing soccer said, ‘Yeah, we need your social security number, and then we can start looking at how we can help you financially,’ and I realized that I don’t have that, I started to get really disillusioned. I saw my surroundings, and I was like, ‘Oh, wait, I don’t fit in here.’ It felt like there wasn’t much of a future for me.”
He ended up moving to Houston to finish out his high school, reasoning that it would be closer to his homeland of Mexico and that it would be easier to go back there after he graduated from high school in the United States. His goal of graduating was more to please his family than out of his own desire to finish school. “I was like, ‘Let me finish high school. I feel like I owe that to my pops,’” Pérez says. “My parents made this huge sacrifice and frankly they never really liked the U.S. They were only here to give us a better shot.”
Credit: Haris Qureshi
It was in Houston that he first entered the culinary world and became engulfed in Hispanic culture. “I remember seeing a billboard when I got to Texas that said, ‘If you believe, you can achieve,’ Pérez reminisces. “I know it’s corny, but it stuck with me because it really felt like that in Houston. You saw everyone else around you hustling, despite the circumstances or their socioeconomic standing. Everyone’s out here doing their thing. No one’s really stopping to complain about it. If you want to mope, they’re like, ‘Get out of my way. I got shit to do.’”
Living up to Houston’s “Hustle Town” moniker, Pérez began hustling in school and selling tortas to his classmates and teachers before moving to Austin. An uncle who lived in the Austin area had promised Pérez he wouldn’t charge him rent if he came up to finish school there; in Houston, Pérez was splitting a one-bedroom apartment with four other guys.
“Austin was different. It was a change of pace but it was cool,” Pérez says. It was in the Austin area that he graduated high school and ended up working in kitchens, meeting his wife, and saving up enough money to buy his food truck in October 2019, right before COVID-19 struck.
Although he started off catering at office parks, the pandemic and subsequent lockdown meant that Pérez had to rethink his whole strategy. He ended up in the back alley behind his old workplace of Michi Ramen and realized he needed to dramatically shrink his main menu to achieve his aesthetic.
“A lot of folks have critiqued it as being a small menu but I said, ‘No, I want to stay laser-focused,’” Pérez says. “Everything on there is something that we’re super proud of. We don’t want to put anything on there if it’s not a banger. I think it’s important, especially in this day and age, to accept and realize that you can’t have everything you want, whenever you want. It’s not realistic. It’s not sustainable.”
Now that he is a seasoned taquero who has moved into a brick-and-mortar, Pérez’s quesitacos (double-wrapped tacos with a layer of cheese between them), quesadillas, and tacos have amassed more and more of a reputation around the city, culminating in mentions from The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and more. I’ve stopped by numerous times to try his staples such as suadero, carnitas, and chicken tinga, along with his vegetarian options such as nopalitos (diced prickly pear cactus) and champinoñes (mushrooms). I’ve always left impressed with the flavors of the tacos and how easy they are to finish.
Credit: Haris Qureshi
Authenticity is important to Pérez, who constantly uses his home country’s traditional culture as a guiding star while trying to avoid exploiting or oversimplifying it to appeal to outsiders. “I’ve always felt strongly against monetizing my culture or anyone’s culture,” he says. “It’s really tough in a city like Austin to find that balance of staying true to ourselves. How do we pay respect to the folks that have been doing this for many, many years before us, because we didn’t make any of these things up, you know? Every time we get stumped with something, it’s like, ‘Well, how are folks doing it in Mexico?’”
Ultimately, Pérez’s goal is to use his culinary skills to help shine a light on not only Mexican culture, but also for his adopted hometown of Austin. “It has been super cool for me to have this space and be able to use it to bring other folks to it,” he says. “I’m trying to carve out a little corner of the world that I want to live in and share with other folks and hope that they enjoy it.
“We’re not trying to get a Michelin star,” Pérez continues. “We’re trying to nourish people, nourish their souls, and hopefully give them that comfort of feeling at home. What matters is being able to really connect with the communities that eat with us beyond just the food because it really is important to show up and show solidarity.”