The Power of Two

*There’s no denying the Castro brothers’ star is quickly rising. HUD Secretary Julian Castro appeared on The Daily Show this week, and Congressman Joaquin Castro will be on the Bill Maher program as well. VL

By Andy Kroll, National Journal

On a summer morning in 1999, Joaquin and Julián Castro pulled up in front of a double-wide trailer a few miles outside San Antonio. The twins, back home on break before their final year at Harvard Law School, had come to seek wisdom and advice from Lionel Sosa, a Republican political sage who ran the largest Hispanic advertising agency in America. (He was living in the trailer while his family’s new home was being built nearby.) Politicos across the country knew Sosa as the ad man and consultant who’d helped Texas Republicans win substantial chunks of the Hispanic vote, and who’d led outreach efforts for Ronald Reagan’s and George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaigns. Soon, Sosa would be advising George W. Bush during his White House run.

Sosa didn’t know the Castro brothers, but he did know not to expect right-wingers. Their mother, Rosie Castro, had been a fiery community organizer in San Antonio during the Chicano movement of the 1960s and ’70s; after an unsuccessful run for city council in 1971, three years before Joaquin and Julián were born, she’d remained a political force in San Antonio, chairing the county chapter of La Raza Unida, a Chicano third party, and running other progressives’ political campaigns. The twins had grown up tagging along to rallies, parades, and political functions. As Julián recalled in a college essay later published in an anthology called Writing for Change, political slogans “rang in my ears like war cries”: “Viva La Raza!” “Black and Brown United!”

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[Screenshot courtesy c-spanvideo]

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