Francisco Mendoza (born 1962) is a custom handmade bootmaker in El Paso, Texas, operating under the name GM Boots. Rooted in the city's deep border-country craft tradition, Mendoza builds 100% bespoke boots from the ground up — one pair at a time — and is regarded in boot collector communities as one of El Paso's finest living artisans.
Biography
Francisco Mendoza was born on January 5, 1962, in El Paso, Texas, and has spent his entire life in the city. El Paso sits at the center of one of North America's richest bootmaking traditions: a corridor stretching across the Rio Grande into Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, where generations of craftsmen known informally as agujas de oro — golden needles — passed the trade from hand to hand through regional apprenticeship. Mendoza came of age during the craft's 1970s and 1980s peak in the border region, and his style reflects that deep local lineage.
He founded GM Boots in the early 1990s — Facebook business records place the shop at roughly 33 years of operation as of 2026. He works as the sole artisan, building every pair himself rather than operating a production floor. That singularity of hand is central to his reputation: customers know they are getting boots made by one person who takes responsibility for every stitch, welt, and last.
Mendoza specializes in exotic leathers, with seamless caiman construction among his most documented work — boots built without a visible seam line across the vamp, requiring exceptional layout and cutting skill. His documented materials include caiman, alligator, python, pirarucu (Amazonian fish scale), ostrich, and hippo, including wild African blue hippo — one of the rarest and most sought-after leathers in the custom boot world. He also performs boot restoration and relasting, a demanding specialty that involves rebuilding an existing boot's structure to a new toe shape or size without destroying the upper.
Word of Mendoza's work travels primarily through the r/cowboyboots community on Reddit and through Facebook boot collector groups, where customers share photographs and firsthand accounts. Demand is high enough that wait times of a year or more are common. Pricing — reported at roughly $700 for plain leather and $1,700 and up for exotic inlaid work — reflects handmade custom quality at a fraction of what comparable work commands from better-known names.
Customers call him "the Master boot builder" and "El Maestro." One Reddit post from 2022 describes him simply as "an old school master that will make you a pair that you'll be proud to own." He is reachable directly by phone and Instagram, and customers note his willingness to source rare skins on their behalf — sometimes finding them at significantly below-market prices through his regional supplier network.
Why He Matters
- Mendoza keeps alive the El Paso/Juárez border bootmaking tradition — a craft lineage that produced some of the twentieth century's greatest custom boots — at a time when the number of full-time one-man custom shops has declined sharply.
- His mastery of exotic leathers, including rare materials like wild hippo and preban rhino, places him in a category of very few active bootmakers anywhere in the world.
- His shop operates on a purely artisanal model — no factory, no subcontractors, no production runs — making GM Boots one of the purest expressions of the custom boot trade still active in Texas.