Just north of the intersection of Nolensville Road and Harding Place, Mark Janbakhsh is on the verge of fulfilling a long-held dream — turning the footprint of an abandoned Kroger into a vibrant Latino marketplace, an indoor hub of food, shopping, business and music.
It’s taken him a lot longer than he planned — three years longer — but Plaza Mariachi is finally set to open this spring. The 85,000-square-foot space will have a grocery store, seven dining options and 25 retail shops, as well as businesses like a beauty salon, insurance sales and a law firm. There will be an art gallery and the headquarters of Janbakhsh’s burgeoning radio empire. Live music — most of which will be broadcast on the radio — is planned seven days a week, as are library storytimes and other events. The space has been crafted to look like streets in a Mexican village — the town square, is, of course, the food court. But Janbakhsh has ambitious plans for his plaza, plans he hopes can unite the community despite the current political atmosphere.
The 42-year-old businessman didn’t start his career in retail — in fact, Plaza Mariachi will be his first large-scale retail development. His parents, Iranian immigrants who left the country in 1975, moved to Nashville in the 1980s. When Janbakhsh enrolled at Lipscomb University after graduating from Overton High School, he began working at his father’s small used car lot. Soon he was running it. A couple of years out of college, he bought it for himself. That one dealership grew into 10, the Auto Masters Automobile Dealership Group, expanding rapidly once Janbakhsh was able to originate his own loans via an LLC now called America’s United Financial Partnerships.
“And that’s when business took a big turn,” Janbakhsh says. “And a big part of our clientele was Latino. Being married to a Latina, I picked up Spanish — or enough to sell cars — so I began to understand that market and started to advertise on radio.”
A few years later, Janbakhsh was bought his first radio station. Now he owns 15 stations in seven markets in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Missouri and Tennessee. The profits led to the creation of the nonprofit Hispanic Family Foundation with Janbakhsh’s wife Diane, 40. The couple met in middle school, although they didn’t start dating until after high school. As the children of immigrants — Diane’s mother is Mexican — both hope Plaza Mariachi can provide the sort of community they didn’t have growing up in Nashville.
“When we moved here in 1985, we might have been one of maybe 50 Hispanic families,” Diane says. “People didn’t know what we were.”
Davidson County’s Latino community is now 10 percent of the population, and one estimate projects growth up to 34 percent by 2040. But the Trump presidency is already causing a slight decline in business, Janbakhsh says.
“There is a lot of fear from the community,” Janbakhsh says. “A lot of uncertainty about the future. It’s sad.”
Still, he says he’s had no problem hiring a projected 180 people to staff Plaza Mariachi. “It takes a degree of magic to create an atmosphere like that, where two demographics can come together and enjoy culture, music and food, so that’s what we’re after,” Janbakhsh says. “I think it could be a bridge where, if you have that [negative] opinion of the other demographic, here you can kind of see it in action and see that they’re not so different — I think it’s actually interesting that it’s happening in this [political] climate.”
