San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro: Rising Latino star in Democratic Party to deliver keynote address

San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro will give the most significant speech of his political career Tuesday night when he becomes the first Latino to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.

 

Comparisons to the 2004 Barack Obama are inevitable. The then-Illinois state Sen. Obama gave the same address in Boston, launching him onto the fast track for the presidential nomination in 2008.

 

Castro, 37, shrugs off the similarities and talk that he could eventually become the first Hispanic president.

 

"Oh, I would be lying if I said that's not flattering. Of course it's flattering to anybody," he said last week from San Antonio. "But the biggest mistake I can make in this situation is to believe the press, to believe the hype."

 

That humble response can be attributed to his modest upbringing.

 

Castro's grandmother immigrated to Texas from Mexico as an orphan at the age of 6. She taught herself to read and write in Spanish, eventually finding work in San Antonio as a maid and a cook.

 

Castro's mother, Rosie Castro, learned a tough lesson at a young age while in school in San Antonio, where her teachers discouraged speaking Spanish.

 

"They would charge us a quarter if you were caught speaking Spanish, and incidentally that's how much lunch cost," Rosie Castro said. "We were put down so often that the message was clear -- Spanish was a bad language that shouldn't be spoken."

 

As a result, Julian Castro and his twin brother, Joaquin, grew up in a home where Spanish was rarely spoken. Neither speaks the language fluently.

 

"I understand Spanish better than I speak it," Julian Castro admits.

 

It was Rosie Castro who inspired Julian's political future. While in college she became president of the Young Democrats at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. Out of college, she joined the Chicano movement, working with the "La Raza Unida Party" to fight for reforms beneficial to the Mexican-American community.

 

In 1971, Rosie ran for San Antonio City Council and lost the race. Along the way, though, she took her sons to various community and political events where they witnessed battles for voting rights and an end to discrimination on city services.

 

"I dragged them to every meeting, rally and voting booth," Rosie Castro said. "They helped me on different campaigns and handed out literature. I wanted them to realize it is your duty to be involved."

 

Now, less than two weeks shy of his 38th birthday, Julian Castro, a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard's Law School, is the youngest mayor of a Top 50 American city. At age 26, he was the youngest councilman ever elected in San Antonio. Joaquin Castro, who will introduce his twin Tuesday night, is a politician in his own right -- currently running for the House of Representatives in a contest Democratic leaders expect him to win.

 

"Since they were young, I imagined they would do great things," Rosie Castro said of her sons.

 

A source familiar with Julian Castro's planned speech Tuesday night set the bar high for the San Antonio mayor, saying it was akin to Obama's career-making 2004 address.

 

Castro himself says he'll focus on his own story of achieving the American dream.

 

"I'll be talking about opportunity, and how America creates opportunity, relating that to my family story in the United States," he said.

 

He plans to draw a link for those working to write their own success story, addressing "the clear choice that voters have in this election, and why the policies that President Obama has put forth make more sense to creating opportunity, bringing the middle class back, and assuring prosperity in the future."

 

The choice of Castro for the convention's keynote address is strategic in an election where the Latino vote will be key.

 

Obama handily won the demographic's vote in 2008 over Republican John McCain and it will be pivotal for him to do the same in November.

 

The Romney campaign also knows the importance of Hispanic voters. Last week's GOP convention in Tampa had no shortage of prominent Latino speakers, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American who was among those in consideration for Romney's vice presidential pick.

 

Obama's advantage over Romney among the politically imperative demographic remains steady from previous months, with the president taking 61% to Romney's 29% of registered Latino voters' support in August, according to a Gallup survey.

 

Romney's campaign has publicly identified a "magic number" for the Latino vote if the former Massachusetts governor has a chance of winning the election: 38%. McCain garnered 31% of the Latino vote in 2008.

 

But Latino interest in the 2012 election appears to be lagging. Compared to the 2008 election cycle, Hispanic interest levels in 2012 are 10 points behind where they were in the previous election, according to an NBC-Wall Street