SAN ANTONIO — In 1975, Rosie Castro took her baby twins, Julian and Joaquin, to a farmworkers' rally. They slept in strollers while she handed out union fliers.
The boys have grown up to become two of the more recognizable faces in San Antonio. Julian is a member of the City Council, Joaquin is a state legislator, and both are seen as modern-day successors to Chicano leaders like their mother -- as comfortable in a boardroom as a barrio.
They are just 30 years old. Nevertheless, Julian Castro has become a leading candidate for mayor here, and the election is expected to hinge on whether voters see him as a political wunderkind or an upstart who needs more seasoning before taking the helm of the nation's eighth-largest city.
Though he has been outspent by a large margin and has failed to win the support of a business establishment that frequently has handpicked mayors, one independent poll has given him a 19-point lead over his closest competitor.
The man running second, 70-year-old Phil Hardberger, is a former judge who had earned three college degrees, served in the Peace Corps, flown planes in the Air Force and worked as a newspaper copy boy before Julian Castro was born.
Some say a mayoral victory for Castro would be part of an important chapter for Latinos. Henry Cisneros, the former San Antonio mayor and Housing secretary under President Clinton, has pointed out that two major cities could elect Latino mayors within two weeks -- Castro on May 7 and Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles on May 17.
A Castro win would fuel descriptions of the twins that already border on breathless. In some quarters, their potential is compared to U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat whose skin color is seen as having shaped, but not defined, his public persona.
Raised by a single mother, the twins finished high school in three years, received scholarships to Stanford University, gained encyclopedic knowledge of public policy and urban development, went to Harvard Law School, then came home and got hired by a powerful law firm. They were soon elected to public office.
"When I was in college, in the early 1970s, you were either with the system or against the system," said Luis Fraga, a Stanford associate professor of political science who taught the twins and mentored them while they were writing senior theses on economic development in San Antonio.
