October 2002
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.
Julián and Joaquin Castro.
Photograph by Nils Juul-Hansen
HE CAN'T, TO SAVE HIS life, remember the words to the poem.
"God, I used to know this. Obviously, 'I am Joaquin,'" begins Joaquin, his untidy right eyebrow perpetually arched; dark, elongated eyes scanning nothingness for a clue. It is a sunny San Antonio day, a good day, I decide, for reciting poetry over breakfast and a linoleum table at Jim's Restaurant in the northwest part of town. But Joaquin is stuck, utterly so. "I used to know the first four lines!" Pause. "'Lost in a world of confusion,' something, something . . ."
"God!" he laments finally, flashing his Joaquin Castro smile now—a wide, infectious one that starts at the corners of his mouth and bursts into fullness without warning. "Now you're gonna write that I don't know 'I Am Joaquin.'"
The 1967 Chicano movement poem by Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, a standard Chicano Studies 101 reading assignment—which, I'll grant, I can recite only after looking it up on the Internet, but it has been seven years since I took the class—begins like this:
I am Joaquin,
lost in a world of confusion,
caught up in a whirl of a
gringo society,
confused by the rules,
scorned by attitudes,
suppressed by manipulation,
and destroyed by modern society.
My fathers
have lost the economic battle
and won
the struggle of cultural survival.
And now!
I must choose
between
the paradox of
victory of the spirit,
despite physical hunger,
or
to exist in the grasp
of American social neurosis,
sterilization of the soul
and a full stomach.
It seems ironic—at least melodramatic—to have Joaquin Castro recite this poem today, which is really the reason I pressure him into doing it. Truth is, I want to witness the incongruity of this prim, fashionable, smooth-talking, middle-class Mexican American fretting over cultural assimilation and grieving his alienation from gringo society. The guy graduated from Stanford and Harvard. He's vying for a seat in the Texas Legislature. He had, until the sobering tediousness of corporate legal work hit him like a brick, an extremely lucrative job, one that he's replaced by opening up his own legal practice with a high school friend and his brother, Julián—a rising politician himself, who sits on the San Antonio City Council. At the surface, the intersection of Joaquin trying to recite the story of his tormented namesake seems out of place, the perfect anachronism. And so I watch delightedly.
But as odd as it appears, it also makes perfect sense, and this too I know: Joaquin's mother, Rosie Castro, was the chair of the Bexar County Raza Unida party and helping out with a Diez y Seis de Septiembre menudo cookoff in 1974 when the labor pains struck and she ended up at the hospital delivering two teeny, premature, identical baby boys. The first twin got named by his father, the cookoff conspirator and a fellow Chicano activist: Julián it would be. And the one who popped out one minute later Rosie christened Joaquin, after the epic poem.
Those were the days, days Rosie Castro remembers well, when San Antonio's Mexican Americans—which is to say the city's ethnic majority—had little if any access to power because the place was run by an Anglo business establishment that handpicked the city's leaders, mayor included. They were taxed, yes, but the services their money paid for always seemed to end up on the fast-growing north side of town, not the west or the south, where the Mexican Americans lived, not the east, where blacks have traditionally made their homes. Inspired by the ideology of the national civil rights and anti-war movements of the sixties, as well as by the work of La Raza Unida, a flourishing but ultimately short-lived third-party movement, Rosie and her kind wanted neighborhoods to have a direct voice in matters that affected them. "Barrio representation" they called it.
And so they mobilized, organized rallies, registered voters, and ran for office—sometimes in droves, just to make a statement. A firebrand who could step up to the podium and incite a crowd "in real hell-raiser fashion," as one contemporary described her, 23-year-old Rosie herself ran for the city council in 1971 on a slate called the Committee for Barrio Betterment. She finished second among four candidates in the primary for Place 3. None of the slate's candidates won, yet their election results helped lawyers with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) convince the U.S. Justice Department that, if San Antonio council members were elected from individual districts instead of citywide, Mexican Americans in San Antonio would have chosen some of their own.
Two life-altering things happened because of Rosie Castro's engagements in those heady days. First, she had the twins, on Mexican Independence Day. Then, facing federal pressure in 1977, San Antonio voted to shift from electing council members at-large to a single-member system, forever changing the racial makeup of municipal leadership and making it possible for a future generation to achieve what she had not.
Rosie had uttered some prophetic words when she lost the election in 1971: "We'll be back," she told the San Antonio Light. And exactly thirty years later, she was. In 2001, just one year out of law school (on Cinco de Mayo, mind you), 26-year-old Julián Castro became the youngest city councilman in San Antonio history, soundly defeating five challengers with 59 percent of the vote. Friends and family had watched Julián's political ambitions blossom in college and felt certain that he would run, especially after he began raising seed money among law school friends at Harvard. It was destined to be, one could almost say, considering that Rosie had raised her two boys in the world of politics and activism and had showed them, over and over, the importance of serving their community. "When Julián was installed, it was just such an incredible thing to be there because for years we had been struggling to be there," Rosie says. "There was so much hurt associated with being on the outside. And I don't mean personal hurt, but a whole group of people had been on the outside—the educational, social, political, economic outside."
But that summer, surprising those who saw Joaquin as the less politically inclined one—the one who would carve out his own professional path, in business, perhaps—the younger twin quit his job at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer, and Feld, where Julián also worked, and announced that he too was running for office. He outpolled the District 125 incumbent legislator, Art Reyna, in the March Democratic primary, taking 64 percent of the vote. Next month he goes up against Republican Nelson Balido, who is 32, the president of a technology consulting firm, and the son of Cuban immigrants.
Physically, it is impossible for anyone but those closest to them to tell them apart. But in personality, the Castro brothers are significantly different. The older of the twins is respectful, pensive, soft-spoken, a homebody who likes to write and has meticulously studied the path of policymakers he admires—among them John F. Kennedy, Henry Cisneros, Bill Clinton—so that he might chart his own political journey, one he hopes will take him up the ranks of municipal government to the Texas governor's office, possibly beyond. "He's just an honest person," says Rosie about Julián. "He's like a good friend to have, which is one of the things I miss now that he's busy on the council." The other one is witty, energetic, fun, a world-class socializer who likes public oratory and is more interested in testing the waters politically than in setting his future in stone, curious to find out how he would be received as an elected official but hoping, along the way, to do something to change radically San Antonio's rather dismal education record. "He's a real joyful 'people' kind of person," Rosie says of Joaquin. "He's the kind of person that all of a sudden will throw his arm around you." Together they represent Rosie's second chance—two of them, actually—to finally enter what she calls the Inside, to sit at the table where policy gets made "instead of just having to pound on the damn door to have someone hear you." The twins bring together her two lives: her fight for the people and her role as a mother. Tearing up—a highly unusual event for the thick-skinned 55-year-old woman who sometimes swears like a sailor and mostly raised her boys as a single mom—she recalls how a friend once pointed out that, ultimately, "my greatest contribution to the community may be them."
And yet, her sons are doing politics in a different era. Julián and Joaquin Castro belong to a generation, our generation, that calls itself Hispanic or Latino, that learned about civil rights struggles in the past tense, that is having to draw the political agenda at a time when group rights have become increasingly unpopular. If the Castro story reflects the journey of Texas Mexican Americans from the political outside to its center, it also reveals an inside fraught with complications for people like them. Among many others, the twins' challenges will be to overcome the label of "ethnic politician" at the same time that they embrace their ethnicity, to define what it means to "serve the people" in a world of free-market economic development and centrist politics. Granted, they come to the task with the kind of training their mother and her generation could only have dreamed of. But the question is worth asking: Will Rosie Castro win this time around?
