Julian Castro has an identical twin

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/

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I didn’t know the Castros well at Stanford, but we had friends in common and a natural affinity as fellow Mexican Americans from Texas, meaning we smiled at each other when we crossed paths on campus. I perceived them to be more mainstreamed Hispanics less invested in the ethnic politics that others of us had embraced away from home. When one or the other showed up to a party at Casa Zapata, the Chicano-themed dorm, I sensed he was there mostly to watch, to check it out, maybe, to understand one part of his constituency better. I had no idea they’d already had their own schooling in 1960s-style Chicano activism from their mother, Maria del Rosario Castro, a longtime community organizer (and single mother) who’d battled for the political inclusion of Mexican Americans, a demographic majority that remained outside the power structure in San Antonio.

It was Rosie Castro’s values around public service that made Julián, the elder of the twins by one minute, wonder if it now was his turn to continue advancing her cause. In a lyrical essay he penned in a freshman writing class in response to the prompt “Do people ever make assumptions about what you’ll do after college, and how do you feel if they do?” he described the political gatherings he’d grown up around (“functions,” his mother called them) that all seemed to him to blur together (“the same speeches and speakers, the same cheese and ham sandwiches”). But he concluded that “maybe politics” was his future.

Stanford became the Castros’ first staging ground. Both brothers double-majored in political science and communications, working under the mentorship of professor Luis Fraga, who specialized in Latino urban politics. After they graduated in 1996, they returned home for a year and took a job at City Hall while they waited to begin Harvard Law School the following fall. Ever more aware of the media cache of their personal story, they granted an interview for another feature in the local newspaper (“Double the Talent, Twice the Ambition”). Though they claimed not to know what they’d be doing in the future, Julián vouched it would include public service, adding that no San Antonian had ever been elected to the two highest offices in Texas. “We do not consider the office of governor or senator an impossibility,” he told the reporter.
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Still, as I heard Julián speak and watched the twins I went to school with grin and embrace each other on the stage—this time in smart business suits, commanding the attention of a nation—I found myself swelling with pride. Whether there’s any hope for Julián to first climb the political ranks in Texas, where the Democratic Party is powerless and in disarray, and whether he has enough of a record to satisfy conservative critics who accuse him of riding on potential, Tuesday was a big day, and not just for the Castros. Because they hadn’t been plucked from obscurity or landed on-stage overnight. They’d been working their way there for almost two decades, and for two generations before that. And that was a story some of us could recognize.