Twins Peak
Their mother was a chicana firebrand who fought the San Antonio establishment. Three decades later, Julián and Joaquin Castro have followed her into politics, not as outsiders but as Harvard-Educated Lawyers—and symbols of generational change.
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WHEN I WAS A STUDENT AT Stanford University in the early nineties, I thought of Joaquin and Julián Castro as two preppy, courteous, interchangeable San Antonio brothers I had been introduced to because of the Texas roots we shared but whom I seldom saw. Every now and then one of them—I never knew which—would show up alone at one of our parties at Casa Zapata, the university's Chicano-themed dorm. He would watch silently from the room's shadowy corners or balance himself on the armrest of a couch while the rest of us grooved to hip-hop, swayed to Chicano oldies, and hopped to the thumping, jumping rhythm of West Coast Mexican banda music in a carpeted dorm lounge. We brought on Christmas with a posada, with rackety ballet folklóricos and mariachis. We were members of Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán ("MEChA" for short), tutored barrio kids, tried to get grapes eliminated from the university's dorm menus, designed a Chicano studies major, taught the university's Latino cooks and janitors to speak English, and printed our own publications, Aztec symbols dancing across the top. We fought the good fight. We were Chicanos.
That was not Julián and Joaquin's scene. Though I mistook them for those private-school kids who came to Stanford from San Antonio, the truth was that while the rest of us reveled in our newfound ethnic identity and social consciousness, the Castro twins had already completed their political initiation at home, years before. Their father, schoolteacher Jesse Guzman, had once served as the director of Colegio Jacinto Treviño, founded in the height of the movement for and by Chicanos. Raising twins was a project, especially since their parents were more concerned with changing the world than with making money. When the boys were seven, Rosie and Jesse, who had never married, split up, and Rosie had to stretch her salary as an employee in the city's personnel department among two growing boys, her aging mother, and herself.
But as she did with politics, she had a handful of core principles she applied to child rearing. No guns was one. ("I was trying to get 'no loud musical instruments,'" she recalls wistfully.) No matching clothes for birthday presents, please. And especially, no dream quashing. Her philosophy went like this: "If you really want to teach someone that they can be whatever they want to be, you don't start by telling people what they can't be." And so, whatever the idea was that week—"whether it was boxer or police officer"—she worked her social and political networks and introduced her boys to people whose careers they thought they might want for themselves.
By junior high Julián and Joaquin Castro were confident and ambitious and notoriously competitive teens, which drove their mother crazy. ("I was, like, 'Have fun! Not everything has to be competitive!'") They monitored each other's grades viciously. Once, the story goes, their tennis coach had to stop their doubles match because the twins wouldn't quit screaming at each other. At Jefferson High Julián graduated ninth in his class and Joaquin twenty-seventh. They had applied to a smattering of in- and out-of-state universities, but when Stanford said it would take them both, their choice was made. "I guess staying together didn't require any special effort or thought," says Joaquin. "I remember noticing when I went to college, I would refer to things in the collective—'Our mom,' 'Our dad.' It probably took about a year or two to drop that and speak in singular form. In fact, I probably didn't have a best friend at Stanford because I was always hanging out with my brother."
In almost every way, the San Francisco Bay Area was a different world from South Texas. It was green, ethnically diverse, politically progressive. It was also a place where, curiously, families and groups seemed largely absent from the public scene. At the frenetic San Francisco airport, Joaquin noticed, "it was always individuals taking the SuperShuttle or a cab or bus home." But stepping out of the familiar changed their perspective forever, the Castro brothers now say. The experience made them highly reflective—about themselves, about San Antonio, about how the two might come together someday.
During his freshman year, Julián wrote an essay in which he described his gradually awakening social consciousness. Titled "Politics . . . maybe," it was a response to his writing instructor's question: Do people ever make assumptions about what you'll do after college? How do you feel when they do? The eighteen-year-old responded: "How many of these 'functions' have I been to in my lifetime? They all seem the same to me now—the same speeches and speakers, the same cheese and ham sandwiches, the same people, ones whom I see only at these political gatherings, 'functions' my mother calls them, and, of course, the same expectations of me. 'So, what are you going to do after you finish school?' my mother's friend asks me. 'Uhh…' Can he see my eyes float along the carpet?" After describing his initial resistance to his mother's hectic and seemingly rewardless political world, Julián reflected on the effects of her work. "Maria del Rosario Castro has never held a political office," he wrote. "However, today, years later, I read the newspapers, and I see that more Valdezes are sitting on school boards, that a greater number of Garcias are now doctors, lawyers, engineers and, of course, teachers." By the end of the essay, the child replies to his mother's friend's question: "Maybe politics." So impressed was Julián's professor that she had the essay published in a writing textbook called Writing for Change, where it was placed just before Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham Jail."
She wasn't the only professor who took notice of the Castros' political potential. In their sophomore year the twins took a lecture course on urban politics with Luis Fraga, a Corpus Christi native. As the university's sole Mexican American political scientist, Fraga has mentored many of Stanford's Chicano students with political aspirations. In the twins he noted a far greater level of political sophistication. Other students who aspired to work in public service were debating whether to pursue politics at home or elsewhere, but with Julián and Joaquin, Fraga says, "there was a clear commitment to the home community and a very clear understanding of the work involved and the strategic decision making that had to occur. It makes you believe," he says, still amazed eight years later, "that some people are just political animals."
They tested the waters by running for student senate and picked up the same number of votes, more than anyone else on the ballot. By the time they enrolled at Harvard Law School, in 1997 (Julián turned down Yale to stick with his brother), they were ready to launch Julián's 2001 campaign for city council. The elder twin's commitment to politics was firmly evident by then, written, quite literally, on the wall. In his Cambridge dorm room, two thousand miles from San Antonio, hung a map of council district 7—the West Side neighborhood he called home but also the place that was soon to become his battleground.
IT'S ONLY EVERY TEN to fifteen years that San Antonio wholly convulses over some city matter, but when it does, the scene resembles something like a pep rally gone berserk or the meeting point for a parade at that chaotic moment just before the procession falls into order and marches out like it was never confused at all. The evening of April 4 was one of those rare occasions. At a meeting in the city council's chambers, the council would decide whether to create a special taxing district northwest of San Antonio for a luxurious golf resort and development known as a PGA Village.
Julián Castro studied the crowd curiously. The rest of his colleagues were only beginning to shuffle over to their seats, but he had already taken his place and was sitting on the edge of his chair, arms crossed on the table, back perfectly straight and head forward, like a good boy posing for his elementary school picture. He scanned the bodies that had filled the room: Elderly men and women in flashy hats, sporting yellow tags that screamed indignantly, "PGA No!" Nicely manicured men and women in business suits, flashing round white stickers that retorted, "PGA Yes!" His eyes ran up the sides of the high-ceilinged nineteenth-century chamber to the balcony, where activists stood in green vests, holding neon-pink protest signs. The guttural sounds of Native American drums and the rhythmic chanting of youth activists wafted in from outside.
Even as the pre-meeting chaos grew louder, Julián seemed to exist in his own silent world, as if in contemplation of the role he would play this evening. His vote against the project would not count much—nine of the council's eleven members, including Mayor Ed Garza, had already told reporters they would back it—but what he said in opposition to it, and how he said it, might count a great deal. Until now, Julián's actions on the council had been relatively inconsequential. He had stuck by his principles but for low stakes: on issues involving trees, historic buildings, senior citizens' centers, neighborhood policing programs, bicycling routes, family-friendly parks. The PGA issue was different. If the council created the special taxing district, the developer, Lumbermen's Investment Corporation, would get to collect and retain all of the property, sales, and hotel-motel taxes for the next fifteen years—an estimated $52 million gift from the city in exchange for the jobs and tourism the project would generate. It was a Rosie Castro kind of issue, a classic case, in Julián's eyes, of elected officials bowing down to corporate interests.
The debate had already caused him to leave his job at Akin Gump. On two previous occasions, the firm, which represents a list of moneyed players who do business with the city, had asked him to abstain from voting on matters in which he might have a conflict of interest involving the firm's clients. Then, the firm asked him to stay out of the PGA vote because the developers' proposed contract with the city had been drafted by the firm's attorneys. Already feeling constrained, Julián had a gutsy idea. In January he consulted his brother, who had left the firm five months earlier, then typed out an e-mail announcing that he was quitting his $75,000-a-year job, one that any aspiring young attorney would have killed for. (His original salary, like Joaquin's, had been $110,000, but he had arranged a deal in which he earned a smaller paycheck in exchange for time off to attend to his duties as councilman, for which he makes $20 a meeting.)
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