In 1995, as a freshman at Stanford, I watched two Texans two years above me land the highest number of votes in the race for student senate. They were identical twins, no less, a fact that made for a catchy story in the school paper (“Twin Senators Not Two Close for Comfort”) and a portrait of the smiling, newly minted politicians clad in khakis and polo-style shirts, sitting back-to-back on the floor of the Stanford Quad. It seemed Julián and Joaquin Castro had grasped a critical lesson my sister and I had learned running for our junior high student council: Being a twin pays in politics because it doubles your publicity and votes-and people love twins.

That was 17 years before Julián would keynote the Democratic National Convention, “plucked from relative obscurity,” as CBS News put it Tuesday, though he is now the mayor of the nation’s seventh-largest city.

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.

Several years later, I met up again with the twins to write a piece for Texas Monthly about their formal launch into politics. They’d finished law school, and now 26-year-old Julián was serving his first year as San Antonio’s youngest councilman, while Joaquin, previously less sure about politics, had thrown his name in a local state representative race he’d win that fall.

Surrounded by energetic young volunteers, they were running grassroots campaigns that hinged on heavy analysis of voting data and relentless canvassing. Their mother served as their chief strategist; always a feminist, she wouldn’t allow them to use the supposedly masculine term “war room” for their workspace. In fact, it was a failed attempt by Rosie 30 years earlier to get on the council that helped the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund to make a case, successfully, to the U.S. Justice Department that San Antonio needed single-member districts to ensure fair representation.

That Rosie’s son was now the direct benefactor of those struggles moved her, enough to inspire her to believe a Latino could someday be president, she confessed to me. But that was before Barack Obama, when many of us couldn’t yet imagine the country embracing anything but a white president.

In Julián’s case, his next step was to move from the city council into the mayor’s office, and, though he hoped to break another age record, he fumbled a run-off in his first attempt in 2005. The business establishment had found him too far left on some council issues, so they supported an older, more conservative candidate. Julián was forced to sit out the next four years but returned a more cautious, centrist candidate in 2009-this time winning comfortably.

It was an important lesson in broadening his appeal that Julián would carry forward as his popularity began to grow. That December, he was invited to a White House economic forum where he caught the eye of the President. By the next summer, The New York Times Magazine was branding him a “post-Hispanic Hispanic politician,” a Democratic pragmatist who favored affirmative action, gay rights and green energy policies yet supported free trade and championed balanced budgets.

Julián in that piece seemed like much more of a centrist than the one I’d gotten to know as a journalist eight years prior. About his mother’s politics, he told the Times, “I don’t want to turn back on my mother’s generation, but we are less burdened.”

The rest now seems like history. In January, Michelle Obama invited Julián to sit with her at the State of the Union address. Then the president asked him to co-chair his re-election campaign and chose him to be the first Latino to deliver the same DNC keynote that catapulted Obama into fame. Joaquin, for his part, is likely to win a fall race for the 20th Congressional District seat in the U.S. Congress. The twins have become the convention’s darlings and an overnight media sensation.

In his keynote address (which received high praise and Al Gore called a “grand slam”), Julián reflected on his family’s past and his college experiences with “some of the brightest folks in the world” but questioned whether other students from his public high school shouldn’t have been at Stanford, too. He hammered home the argument that prosperity demands opportunity and that opportunity demands investment.

“We know that in our free-market economy some will prosper more than others,” he declared. “What we don’t accept is the idea that some folks won’t even get a chance. And the thing is, Mitt Romney and the Republican Party are perfectly comfortable with that America.” Romney, he said, was a “good guy” who “just has no idea how good he’s had it.”

As I watched the address unfold, I detected a bit more of Julián’s evolution, the frames that had subtly shifted to accommodate this audience in this political moment. Julián now underscored his immigrant roots. The leading character in his story became not his activist mother but his newcomer grandmother: an orphaned child who crossed the border while very young and spent her life “barely scraping by” as a maid, cook, and babysitter, cleaning homes so her daughter could get to college.

Certainly, Julián’s speech was part a strategic effort to capture more Latino votes for Obama in critical swing states. But I also wondered if the narrative of immigration-a narrative of new beginnings, not unlike that of Barack Obama, of America as a land of opportunity and exceptionalism-wasn’t intended to replace Rosie’s stories of battling structural racism and the narrative of America as a nation of social exclusion rather than inclusion.

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.

Cecilia Ballí is an anthropology professor at the University of Texas and a contributor to Texas Monthly.

*Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Jason Reed.

The post The Julián Castro I Knew–And How He’s Changed appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And yet the border’s crisis has now crept onto center stage. I am an anthropologist and journalist living on the border with Tamaulipas and doing research in Chihuahua, arguably the two Mexican states most ravaged by drug-related violence. In Chihuahua, which borders West Texas, a territorial dispute between drug cartels has ignited a wider conflict among the city’s poor that some days resembles social extermination. And in Tamaulipas, opposite the Rio Grande River from South Texas, the Mexican Navy is taking on two formerly allied criminal groups in a three-way war that features rocket-propelled grenades and hours-long gun battles on major thoroughfares.

These are unpleasant topics in unpleasant times, but I am still struck by the willful neglect of what is happening along the border, as well as in the other Mexican states where the drugs pass on their way to the world’s largest market, the United States.

A recent trip to Mexico City – which my U.S. correspondent friends had begun referring to as “The Bubble” – was a case in point. A city once obsessed with its own crime problem has now become a safe haven, spared the public shootouts, street blockades, and dismembered bodies ravaging the border, where the violence no longer offers any warnings or obeys any rules.

Mexico faces an unusual historical moment in which the most critical national issue is playing out nearly everywhere but the place where decisions get made. My takeaway from a week of meetings with leading Mexican journalists, politicians and entrepreneurs is that everyone finally recognizes that Mexico’s future fortunes are tied to the effort to dismantle the powerful cartels. But the admission is still too hedged, too qualified. There is still too much of a yearning to think of the problem of organized crime as a distant abstraction.

The message went something like this. Yes, it’s true that 30,000 Mexicans have died since the cartels first began fighting each other in late 2006, but the national homicide rate is not any worse than it was in the 1970s or ’80s, and it’s still far lower than in countries such as Colombia, South Africa or Russia. And yes, it’s also true that the murders have grown both more brazen and grotesque, but this can be chalked up to the crippling of the cartels by the federal government’s arrest or killing of some of their top leaders.

Language plays a funny role in creating this disconnect. One politician I heard from insisted that the violence was not generalized but limited to “certain spaces.” Another indulged in the argument that most of the murders should be properly thought of as “executions” – presumably these are less problematic than run-of-the-mill homicides, since they imply that the business is merely taking care of itself.

Numbers, too, can be parsed in different ways. Mexican officials like to note that nearly 80 percent of the murders have transpired in 160 of 2,465 municipalities, and that 90 percent of the victims are criminals. (Nobody explains how they arrive at this number if the Mexican attorney general’s office has acknowledged that only 5 percent of the killings are investigated.) In short, four years of bloodshed can be summed up this way: The violence is geographically contained, most of the victims had it coming, and Mexico is hardly in as bad a shape as Colombia or Brazil.

That said, there is a growing consensus that simply allowing the military out of the barracks wasn’t enough. Four years into President Felipe Calderón’s campaign, members of Congress are finally debating the kinds of reforms that might actually make a difference in the long-run – creating a central police command structure, enacting financial regulations to track money laundering, facilitating criminal investigations, and establishing better judicial oversight of human rights abuses committed by military and police.

All this news was making me optimistic. Then I picked up the latest issue of the magazine Proceso, where an article by reporter Marcela Turati described the mayhem that recently befell Tamaulipas after special forces gunned down a top capo for the Gulf Cartel in Matamoros, across the international line from my hometown. (The University of Texas at Brownsville, where I have an office, had to be locked down for the weekend because of the prospect of bullets flying over the Rio Grande.) The government claimed Ezequiel Cárdenas Guillén’s death as a major victory, and President Obama phoned Calderón to personally congratulate him. But the residents of Tamaulipas felt the fallout immediately.

The following day, the rival group known as the “Zetas” papered Matamoros with recruitment fliers. And a few days later, they raided Ciudad Mier, a border town formerly controlled by the Gulf, where they burned police buildings and forced the remaining several dozen residents to run for their lives. Those who didn’t have the resources to escape to Texas sought cover in nearby Ciudad Alemán, where they huddled on the ground of the Mexican government’s first shelter for drug war refugees.

Everyone in Mexico City these days is paying lip service to the imperative of addressing the violence that is unfolding everywhere but there, and yet it feels much like the way Americans might speak about the urgent need to pacify the tribal lands between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even the Calderón government’s attempts to galvanize national solidarity sometimes ring hollow. A slogan unfurled earlier this year – “Todos Somos Juárez,” or “We are all Juárez” – was the official response to a blunder the president made in hinting that 16 teenagers who were slaughtered at a house party there in January had been criminals.

The slogan remains a far-fetched aspiration rather than a reality, but it’s an aspiration we should all heed. Both Mexicans and Americans have to move beyond their historic neglect and contempt of our shared border, before this third space truly begins to undermine the future of both nations.

Cecilia Balli, a writer for Texas Monthly and an assistant professor of anthropology at The University of Texas, is working on a book about the U.S.-Mexico border fence.

*Photo of Mexican security forces courtesy Jesús Villaseca Pérez.

The post Bursting the Bubble and Minding the Border appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.