Welcome to Texas Talk.

I'm Gilbert Garcia, metro columnist for the San Antonio Express-News.

On this show, we bring you in-depth one on one conversations with some of the most fascinating figures in Texas politics, sports, culture and business.

In 2001, a 26 year old San Antonio City Council candidate named Julian Castro was asked to name his greatest political asset.

His answer was short and sweet, ma'am.

He wasn't lying.

After more than half a century of work as a civil rights activist and political organizer, Rosie Castro has been a powerful force in the fight for Mexican-American representation, women's rights, social justice and educational opportunity.

She passed those values on to her twin sons, Joaquin, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Julian, a former San Antonio mayor and secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

52 years after Rosie ran for City Council on a committee for Barrio Betterment Slate, she is now applying for an interim appointment to fill the vacant council seat.

On tonight's show, she'll talk about that City Council bid, her remarkable life and the historical changes she's witnessed.

Let's get started.

Rosie, thank you so much for being on Texas time.

Oh, thank you for the invite.

I really appreciate it.

Well, the big news now is that in January, San Antonio Councilwoman Understandable announced that she was resigning and wouldn't fill out the remainder of her term, which runs until June.

And very quickly, you announced that you were going to apply for the interim appointment to fill out the remainder of her term.

What made you decide that you wanted to seek this appointment?

Well, for one thing, I really respect what honor has done and the years that she's been on council.

I supported her at the very beginning.

Our family did.

We've known her since she was in high school.

She would tie school with.

My us and we're very pleased with.

I live in District seven and my sons live in District seven.

And we've been pleased with all the work that she's done.

I felt that for two months or three, maybe if there's a runoff, all you need to do is really make sure that District seven has a voice and that it has a vote, because there's only two issues.

There's bond issues, neighborhood infrastructure, all those types of things that need to be looked at.

And you don't want not to have somebody there that understands and knows District seven and can hopefully vote on behalf of the constituents.

Also, I know personally that the different neighborhood associations often have problems and they need help from their councilperson to make sure that the city is able to fix whatever that problem is.

And so I felt that I've had enough experience both working for the city before and working for the housing authority that I know how government works and that I know many of the players.

And then that.

That would be helpful.

And of course, I know a lot of people in District seven because my son has run.

There, that this opportunity is coming.

52 years after you ran in 1971 as part of a four person committee for Barrio Betterment slate of City Council candidates.

This was at a time when the good government league basically controlled the San Antonio municipal politics.

It was we still had At-Large districts, meaning that a city council candidate had to run citywide.

You were a 23 year old first time candidate.

You could probably write a book on this book.

But what was your experience like?

Well, you know, at that time it was exciting, first of all, because there were four of us.

We were all young.

We were all in our twenties.

I think I was just starting law school.

Right.

But, you know, everybody was on the verge of their careers.

And what we all believed in was that we were not being represented by the good government league.

First of all, hardly anyone that was part of the league even lived in our areas.

Another couple of did at some point in time, but for the most part, without single member districts, you had people that lived on the North side and really didn't know the needs of the West, south and east side.

That shows even today by the lack of funding that went into certain areas of job.

But we were young, we were very idealistic.

We felt that we could make a change.

And although we did not win, there were, I think, benefits that came out of that.

One, you had more women that started to apply for council, and a few years down the road you get married and you get several women and then two, the need for single member districts became very apparent.

Our race was used to show that would single member districts because I came and serve second to the person that won.

Gloria came in second.

You know, we were coming in with and this is at large with several people running on that.

So it showed demonstrated that single member districts would probably yield a fair representation for those areas.

And so for me, it was very worth it, even though we didn't win.

So as you said, I mean, Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, they filed lawsuit with the Justice Department challenging the San Antonio's election system and essentially ultimately ended up with a single member district.

And they cited that that election to us.

And one of the things that happens then in tandem is right after we run, then you have the growth of COPS and their advocacy, because in order to get single member districts, not only do we have to show the need, but we also have to convince the community that single member districts would be both fair and would represent everyone.

Because the fear was that what people would say, Well, if you have single member districts, those people are not going to care about the city at large.

They're only going to care about their own district.

So we had demonstrated that that would not be the case when everybody cares about the city of San Antonio.

Now, when you were a student at Our Lady of the Lake University, you started a young Democrats organization.

I understand you also had to start a young Republicans organization because they had to have both both parties represented.

So you kind of helped with that part.

Was it during that period that your your sort of political engagement really began or headed started before that?

It really did.

It was while I was at the lake, and it was prior to what I do is I kind of fell into what it is because I was studying to be a teacher.

And at that time, there were a number of people running for governor in Texas, and education was something they were talking about.

And that was for me, the big interest, you know, as a Chicana.

One of the things that we saw is that when I graduated from high school, there was an 80% dropout rate for our folks and there was only a 4% college going rate.

So that was important to me and that race was important as we worked it.

We were researching it at Olelo.

Then we looked at the idea of, well, maybe we need to start young Democrats, because that would help people to be politically involved.

That would give us a chance to ask all these candidates what they believed in and what they hope to do as governor.

And so we started at them, and we were very fortunate.

We had a person, Dr. Margaret Kramer, who was a psychology teacher who became our mentor.

And you need a sponsor.

Now, she didn't sponsor the young Republicans, but she helped start the young Republicans group so we could do young Democrats.

Now, you talk about how important education was to you.

Now you're your mother emigrated from Mexico at the age of seven, I think.

Is that right?

And my understanding is that she was pulled out of school in third grade.

Yes.

And so I was I was curious because the drive to to get an education, to get to go to college always seemed to be really important to you.

And I was wondering where that drive came from.

Well, it came both from her and my garden, Maria Garcia.

My mother really regretted that she had not been able to go to school.

She loved school.

She would always tell me how much she loved school and she regretted that.

I found out later she had wanted to be.

She wanted to see her name in lights.

She wanted to be a journalist and, you know, she couldn't do that with a third grade education.

And so I think she was committed to the idea that if she didn't have the chance, maybe I would have the chance.

And in our home, we always had books.

She wrote a lot.

Even though she hadn't gone beyond third grade.

She taught herself to read and write in English and Spanish.

And then also my garden.

We always had books.

And that from there came also the love of libraries.

I worked in a library at the lake, but the importance of education was very much stressed that it would make a difference in anyone's life to transform people from poverty into something better and give you an opportunity to take care of your family.

And when you were at Our Lady of the Lake, you and some other activists traveled to the Midwest.

You followed migrant workers up to the Midwest, and you basically created kind of a mobile school where you were teaching the children of the farm workers.

Yes.

It sounds like such an incredible experience.

I mean, what stands out to you from from that time?

Well, of course, watching the the work that the farm workers did, picking cherries, picking strawberries, we were in the Midwest.

The other thing that one of the first things that struck me terribly was the weather in the Midwest, the way Native Americans were looked at and the language that they were spoken about.

And it was something I had never seen or heard or we don't normally think about Native Americans here in San Antonio in terms though there are some, but it was very, very violent.

And the other thing that was important was that, as you know, our kids would go to school late, they would start school late because their parents were coming, you know, from picking cotton or picking the crops and they would have to leave early.

So consequently, most of our kids that were in the migrant stream, so many of them wound up staying in the migrant stream because they had no other formal education that they could count on.

So to me, knowing that the childcare and the early education makes the biggest impact, it was important that we followed the migrant group and tried to help make sure that they were getting the education that would let them start early enough or start with enough of the background for the education and that they would not miss out on that education that they were missing out on before that.

This is this is what's fascinating to me about the connections between your activism, the work you did, and how there were there were seeds that were planted.

You've seen how your sons have sort of picked up on some of those same issues and you you taught preschool in the Edgewood School District.

And we all know Julian's signature achievement as mayor was pre-K for us, and that was something that he was committed to from the moment he was elected there.

This is this is the key to our city achieving its potential.

Did you have a lot of conversations with him about your what you had experienced as a teacher and how much you valued?

We did most of the conversations about the history of of things that I had done, like the run for office and all that my mother did.

My mother would take care of them.

But in terms of policies and things like that, we often talked about it.

We often talked about why some kids performed well in school, why some did not, why some people were troublemakers and was you know, and we talked about, look, not everybody starts at the same level.

Not everybody has two parents.

Not everybody has the income.

So we'd have those discussions.

And, you know, when children are young, you think they're not listening, but they very much do listen.

And you see that later.

They listen and they learn and they they form these values.

And I think that's what the guys did.

They picked up on a lot of things that we talked about.

And we lived in a poverty area.

We lived in District five at the time when they were little and they could see the poverty around them.

And we were not much better off at that time without when I was bringing them up along with my mother.

So they come from from that poverty and they understood what it was like to struggle.

And so I think that makes them more sensitive now.

In the seventies, you were the Beaver County leader of La Raza.

Either party, which is something I've always been really interested in the history behind that.

This was at a time when Democrats dominated state politics, but it was conservative Democrats who really controlled the party.

Right.

And so Russo knew there was really a progressive third party, an alternative I was curious with in at that time, when you were part of it was was the thinking we want this to be a viable permanent third party?

Or was it was the main goal to maybe push the Democratic Party to the left in some way in Texas?

I think for most of us, it was a viable idea.

We thought you could start a third party.

Now here I am, like, what do I know in my early twenties about, you know, two party systems and that the United States basically has never really had a third party that's viable.

But we we really felt that we could make a difference, that Russian leader might be able to go on for a longer time and that we could elect people that would be more representative of the community.

But, of course, you know, that didn't happen.

We were able to form a party which didn't have did not happen in many other states that also had Ross neither.

We were able to push the Democrats somewhat more towards representation.

For example, before us, we knew that there were zero people on the National Democratic Committee and on the state committees because it was so dominated by the conservative Democrats.

But now they see a reason to put more Latinos on there because they're afraid that the losing is on the left or Miss.

The other thing is, I had a man come to me.

He was a director of Sarah at that time, which was a nonprofit, and he said, Hey, thanks a lot.

And I'm like, What do you got for this as well?

The the governor just gave us a couple of million dollars because either they're afraid of us and either it's a will, it's good and it worked in our favor and that it was a couple of million dollars for workforce money that would help people to get jobs.

In September of 1974, your twin sons who are working were born.

And you're talking about how kids, you know, pick up a lot even, which I know in my experience as a parent.

I'll mention the story to my daughter.

She says, Oh, yeah, I already know the whole story.

She remembers when I told her eight years before.

I mean, they they remember things even when you don't think they're listening.

But one of the things that's interesting to me is that that this may have been sort of child care necessity, but you you would take them with you to if you had political meetings or rallies at a young age.

How much how did they respond to that?

And how much of that do you think it kind of rubbed off on them.

In some way?

Well, I mean, when they were little, it's like not interested at all, you know, But you take some toys with you and they sit there and they play.

But they were hearing a lot of this stuff and they many of my friends, really good friends, you know, they got to know them.

And as they grew up of money, Antonietta, for example, was running for office and they would help even though they were 11 or 12, you know, they were younger, but they helped in any way they could.

I think that when you model for a child, what is important that child is going to remember.

You go, I often tell people, you know, look, you go vote, take your kid with you, take them in there.

Let them see what you're doing.

Explain what this is all about.

And that's what we would do.

We'd also hand out literature, sometimes help a candidate.

To me, that's all part of being a good citizen.

And unfortunately, when we have when we don't have people that vote, then all sorts of chaos happens.

You know, you elect the wrong people.

And so to me, it's important that from a very early age, children learn that if you're going to be a good citizen, you're expected to vote, you're expected to give back to your community, you're expected to care about other people and to try to make sure that there are opportunities for all people.

Now, you did your graduate work at UTSA, and I know in the nineties you were one of the people who kind of active in talking about how you wanted to see UTSA do a better job.

I think it is hiring practices of sort of representing the Latino community in San Antonio.

You also one of the people pushing for a downtown campus which we had the groundbreaking for that in 1995.

How do you assess where UTSA is as compared to 230 years ago when you were fighting some of those battles?

Well, first of all, we were successful in getting the downtown campus and that was great.

But for a long time, the downtown campus was just kind of out here somewhere.

Lately has become more of a institution with classes, more classes there, and I think serves the community a little better.

Now, the worry is that as it's expanding, what will happen to the neighborhoods, You know, we got to make sure that we take care of those neighborhoods so that you don't have people that have to depart because of higher taxes and that kind of thing.

UTSA has grown and I have appreciated many things.

I still think they could do a better job in a couple of years.

One is the hiring of faculty that represent the community and two is the contracts.

Many of the organizations or many of the institutions in San Antonio still have a problem with awarding contracts.

You know, they get awarded to the same people and many of our people and African-Americans and Native Americans and Asian-American folks are not able to get those contracts because they haven't had a huge, you know, a huge amount of employees bonding.

They haven't had those opportunities.

And so we really need to see more of those institutions doing better about contracting, spreading the.

Wealth.

And I know working in this time in Congress talked a lot about about cities in the city and city agencies when it comes to awarding contracts.

And that's that's been a big one.

He's also talked about something that's been a big issue for you in your life, which is about representation in the media, whether it's entertainment or the, you know, the news media.

And when you look at San Antonio, how center is doing on that front and what do you what do you make of how we're doing.

In the in terms of the media?

Yeah, well, I think it's interesting in that we see from from when I was younger, we would never see you on air, for example.

So there has been a change, but there still is room to make sure that we have reporters interaction, not just at the reporter level, but that that that rises to the administration, to the people who own media.

You know, back in the seventies, we have the bilingual bi culture coalition on mass media and that addressed not just the hiring practices and scholarships for people to get into the media, but it also addressed the fact that these stations were sold to people that had no connection to the community.

That's true.

And interestingly enough, you still see some of that.

We need to make sure that you don't have the FCC like you had back then that would hold people accountable.

Now, it's harder to to be able to make inroads in terms of hiring and and making sure that you have people that understand at the top.

One of the things you were also involved in that that was really interesting to me was that you had concerns about the lack of Latino content in the San Jose Public Library and they put it in a Latino collection eventually.

The I guess there've been some questions over the years of how if that's if that's enough or the way they've done it in the right way, what do you what do you of.

Well, our dream back then was that and a lot of it was spurred by history.

When I went one day to hear Sandra Cisneros and Sandra have been pitching this, you know, it's get some more library, Latino library material.

And I'm giving my honorarium for the Latino collection, which there was no Latino collection, but we organized people.

And at that time we organized even young people that would come and tell the board, look, we were supposed to do an article on Cesar Chavez.

We found two baby books, two children's books on sense of choice.

That's not acceptable.

And so we fought for that.

But our vision at that time, which I'm not sure has totally happened, was also to make sure that for every book that was in the Latino collection, it would also be out in the libraries, in the community libraries as well.

Now, that didn't happen right away.

Another thing that happened that was real interesting during that time that we were fighting for it, a lady called and said, Hey, could you look after all these books that were given to the hemisphere during hemisphere that were brought from all South America and Latin America and Mexico, donated these books to the library, whatever happened to them?

And so we looked into it and found most of them had been done away with.

They said, Oh, you know, they're too old or whatever.

But but we've lost opportunities as everything that we saw.

You can go to some places like Atlanta and you will see all of these materials for African Americans, and that's what we needed, that we were told, Oh, but if we do that for you, we have to do it for everybody else.

And we said, good, Yes.

Sounds really good.

That's a wonderful idea.

I guess it's been now 22 years since Lujan ran for city council.

That was the first campaign and working, ran for state representative the following year.

So you've had about 22 years now where you have to get used to the idea of them being public figures.

And when people are involved in the world of politics is they're going to get criticism and all that goes with that.

How tough is it for you as their mother to to watch?

Because, you know, they're they get a lot of praise, but they also have to deal with a lot of there's a lot of the criticism that comes with that early on.

It's very difficult to hear things about your sons that are not complimentary because I was always used to, even when before they were in politics, used to hearing very good things about them.

I mean, they've been smart, they're very polite, you know.

But then you get in there and you hear these things and it makes you angry.

But in time you learn that, you know you're not going to please everybody.

I don't care who you are, what you do.

There are going to be people that thought you shouldn't have done that.

You shouldn't have said that whatever.

And you have to be used to that if you're going to be in politics, it comes with the territory.

Now, I say that, but today is an exception.

Today, I mean, in our world today, politics has gotten so ugly, in some senses.

Very personal.

To very personal.

But I mean, we can't use violence in this country.

It's one thing to say, oh, I don't like you, I don't like your politics, but it's a whole nother thing to threaten your family.

We've just got a little bit of time left, but I want to talk about I know how much you love poetry, and I know that you write poetry.

And I wonder if you find time these days to to to write.

Not really.

Not as much as I would like to, and I should, because I'm retired.

But there's always something to do.

That grandchildren.

With different organizations.

AARP keeps me busy and stuff like that.

So I think that I just haven't done as much as.

But I love going to hear poetry, and I love it when Sandra Cisneros is back and, you know, and there's a lot of local poets that I love to hear, too.

So I still love it.

I still read it, but I don't write as much.

Yeah.

Rosie, thank you so much for being on Texas talk.

Really appreciate.

It.

Thank you.

It's been a pleasure to be here with you.

I really enjoyed it.

That's all for this edition of Texas Talk.

Thanks for tuning in.

If you have any questions or would like to share your thoughts on the show, please email us at Texas, Talk at KLRN Dot org.

We'll be back next month with a new guest.

Until then, take care.