Texas Twofer: Julián and Joaquín Castro

Julián Castro

• Older by one minute. First to run for office, winning a San Antonio city-council seat in 2001, with the activist Castro matriarch, Rosie, as his campaign manager.
• Accepted to Yale Law, but because Joaquín didn’t get in, both brothers—Stanford grads—decided on Harvard.
• Julián “has always been the more quiet, more serious,” Rosie told Vogue last year. “Joaquín likes meeting people and trying something new.”
• Third-term mayor of San Antonio, HIs foreign-sounding name and stirring keynote at the 2012 Democratic National Convention have invited comparisons as “the Hispanic Obama.”

Joaquín Castro

• Elected to the Texas legislature in 2002; after ten years, won a US House seat.
• Education is key for both. Joaquín focuses on getting poor students through college, Julián on funding full-day pre-K in San Antonio.
• Since Joaquín’s 2013 marriage to Anna Flores, who works for a San Antonio tech firm, Julián’s wedding ring [he’s married to Erica, a schoolteacher] is no longer the giveaway.
• Says Joaquín: “When I was in San Antonio, probably ten times a day they called me mayor, so I’m hoping he gets some of that in Washington.”

This article appears in the July 2014 issue of Washingtonian.

Rebecca Nelson