Julián Castro, San Antonio Mayor 
Letter from San Antonio
Alamo Heights
One year into his first term as mayor of San Antonio, Julián Castro is emerging as perhaps the most prominent young Hispanic politician in Texas. Get ready to get used to him.
Gayle says: As always, Jan wrote a great article. Am curious about the title, though. "Alamo Heights?" I need some clues about how the editors came up with that one. Thanks. postcardsfromsanantonio (May 2nd, 2010 at 4:32pm)
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His manner is not hypercharged in the usual style of the braggadocio Texas politician. Instead, Castro is never less than respectful, often reserved and always deliberative. He pauses a lot and sometimes sighs. His dress is business-appropriate: dark suits; black, well-shined shoes; white shirts; and a preference for pale ties, like the off-white one he wore for this particular speech. “He doesn’t show his hand,” said Jim Dublin, a public relations adviser for many top executives in San Antonio. “But the business community likes the way he’s handling himself so far. We’re pulling for him.”
Still, Castro’s ability to deliver on his outsized vision for San Antonio is questionable. He came into office in the middle of a recession, faced an $11 million deficit in the city budget, and inherited a mismanaged plan for San Antonio to invest in a proposed expansion of a nuclear power station, the South Texas Project, in Bay City. To deal with these pitfalls, Castro successfully made collaboration part of his playbook, which kept the controversies from flaring and collapsing along the old ethnic patterns of Anglos versus Hispanics. San Antonio has a council-manager system of government, and Castro worked closely with the city manager to solve the budget crisis. Cuts were made quickly and quietly without drama.
Regarding the South Texas Project, he carved out a clear, centrist position. He said he supported it as long as the numbers made sense, and he patiently stuck to it. Most business leaders supported his pragmatic stance. But when Castro learned that CPS Energy, the city’s utility, had concealed a $4 billion cost overrun, he went public, making transparency another part of his playbook. He forced the resignation of high-level staff and the chairman of the CPS board. He also initiated the filing of a lawsuit against the city’s managing partner, NRG Energy, which owned a 50 percent stake in the nuclear project. In the end, the parties reached an out-of-court settlement that reduced San Antonio’s share to a little more than 7 percent. Castro’s approach to the nuclear issue was firm but not antagonistic. Unlike Cisneros, who played offense, Castro let the fight come to him while building alliances across Hispanic and Anglo lines. In the end, he forged consensus.
It’s not likely, however, that he can deliver on 20,000 new jobs; to do so would require Castro to defy all economic trends. In 2009 San Antonio lost 10,000, more than 500 of them when AT&T moved its corporate headquarters to Dallas. On the other hand, the city has actually benefited from Toyota’s recent economic troubles. The company decided to shift production of the Tacoma, a compact pickup, from California to its plant on the South Side, which means more positions.
As for tackling the high school dropout rate, Castro has little official power as mayor to effect change, other than persuasion and his own motivational story. He has started a mentoring program, pairing at-risk eighth-graders from the inner city with lawyers, engineers, and other professionals. He has created a center on the edge of downtown where students can apply for college and apply for student loans. And he’s made it a priority to visit every middle school in Bexar County. His message is always the same: “My brother and I were just like you, poor kids raised by a single mother. We went to inner-city public schools, and we weren’t that special. But we worked hard. If we can do it, you can too.” His commitment to education might sell better statewide among Democrats, but to move the needle on such an entrenched social problem locally seems unlikely. Another big-city mayor, Los Angeles’s Antonio Villaraigosa, made dropout rates a priority early in his administration, without much success.
Late one Friday afternoon, Castro slipped behind the wheel of his midnight-blue 2007 Lexus sedan and pulled out of his parking space at city hall. He was taking me on a tour of the West Side. As we drove away from the center of the city over the West Commerce Street Bridge, we headed into the close-knit neighborhood of small bungalows and businesses. I asked if he felt the kind of pressure to mediate ethnic tension that Cisneros had nearly thirty years ago. “No, I really don’t,” he said. “Part of it may be that now there is a larger number of bridge builders, both Anglo and Hispanic, than when Henry was mayor. I’m not trying to do this all by myself.”
We drove deeper into the West Side and parked in front of 814 Plainview, a small wooden house. In September 1974, after Julián and Joaquin were born, Rosie, a Chicana activist and former chair of the Bexar County La Raza Unida party, and their father, Jesse Guzman, a schoolteacher in the Edgewood district, brought the twins to this rented house. Unlike Cisneros or Gonzalez, the Castro twins grew up in a poorer, less stable family. Their parents never married. When the boys were seven, their father left. Rosie, who’d run for city council and lost three years earlier, worked in the city’s personnel department. Some mothers have the ability to impart their personal values and ambition to their children without crippling them with expectations. Rosie is one of them. On the day that Castro moved into the mayor’s office, he carried only two items. One was a campaign poster from Rosie’s 1971 race for the city council, a symbol of who brought him to the table of power. The other was a dock for his iPod.
This particular moment the song playing on the iPod was “Take It Easy,” by the Eagles. We rode along in silence during the chorus: “Take it easy, take it easy, don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.” I remembered what Castro said about not feeling much pressure, and the placid look on his face, combined with the sunny lyrics of the song, convinced me it was true.
He’s taken the path that worked for Cisneros—his Ivy League education that transcended the West Side, his message of economic development, and his furious pursuit of ideas that will solve every major problem facing San Antonio. He should learn as well from Cisneros’s mistakes. Castro seems to understand that in today’s partisan climate, the most effective way to amass power may be to avoid being seen as powerful at all.
Castro knows that his future depends on his success in San Antonio. The climb from council member to mayor to governor is a steep one. But if Castro delivers as mayor, he might have a shot at running for governor in 2014, should Republican incumbent Rick Perry win this fall, or in 2018, if Democrat and former Houston mayor Bill White does. “I’m not a flash in the pan,” said Castro. “I’m going to be around a long time.”
Toward dusk, we pulled up to a small red-brick house on a lot filled with trees at 715 Sunshine. This is where Castro lives with his wife, Erica, a pretty brunette who works for the school district, and their daughter, Carina, who was born less than two months before Castro was elected mayor. The house is decorated in earthy colors of crimson and beige and has plushy sofas and a large-screen TV. Castro headed straight for the kitchen, where Carina squirmed in a high chair. At city hall, Castro chooses his words carefully, does not express emotion, and does not show his hand quickly. Here he instantly relaxed. As he offered his daughter Cheerios—one round piece at a time—he laughed easily. Whether with Castro or someone else, the future of Texas will one day be in the hands of someone who speaks English and Spanish—with a dash of Big Spring or Lufkin thrown in (a talent Castro does not yet have). Nonetheless, in that moment with his daughter, the wonder of possibility and the weight of obligations seemed stunningly present. In the face of it, Castro took it easy.
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