By Derek Kravitz Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, June 1, 2010; B01
At first, a Northern Virginia developer's plan to build a gathering place for immigrant day laborers seemed like a simple solution for a local problem. But as the national immigration debate continues to ramp up, the idea of erecting a double-wide work center in Centreville -- privately funded and staffed by church volunteers -- is facing increased scrutiny from those on both sides of the debate.
Albert J. Dwoskin, once described as the region's "shopping center king" and a longtime Democratic Party donor, last month proposed setting up a trailer behind his Centreville Square Shopping Center as a de facto work center for about 50 Guatemalan day laborers who for years have sought construction and landscaping jobs near the stores and the adjacent Centreville Public Library. Fairfax County Supervisor Michael R. Frey (R-Sully) has supported the plan, and a group of churches, calling itself the Centreville Immigration Forum, has offered to staff the facility.
But a town-hall-style meeting Tuesday to discuss the proposal is expected to bring out hundreds of shopping center tenants and nearby residents who oppose a day-laborer site because they worry that it could lure more immigrants seeking work. Dwoskin acknowledged the potential for a firestorm.
"The less press this gets, the better," Dwoskin, 67, said last week.
Frey, a moderate Republican with a low-key demeanor, said he, too, feared that the meeting could devolve into a larger discussion of federal immigration policy and threaten the community's carefully hatched plans.
"People have wanted me to grandstand and become some kind of a demagogue on this issue," Frey said. "This is a Centreville problem, not a federal problem. Not to say I wish this hadn't bubbled up, say, three months before Arizona," referring to a new Arizona law that makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally.
Debate about Spanish-speaking day laborers gathering to seek work has been common in the Washington region, from Herndon, Annandale, Culmore and Falls Church in Northern Virginia to Wheaton, Silver Spring and Gaithersburg in Maryland.
In Centreville, a Fairfax County community of about 50,000 that is both prosperous and quickly diversifying, the controversy focuses on the four dozen or so Hispanic men, some of whom are undocumented immigrants, who often stand near Lee Highway and Centreville Road. For five years, Dwoskin has fielded complaints from many of his 120 shopkeepers, who say their customers are being scared away.
"I personally don't like to see them hanging around there. I have families with kids that come in, and it can be a problem," said Rayman Hamid, a Guyana native and former winner of the Centreville Businessman of the Year award who owns a Baskin-Robbins franchise a few blocks from where many of the laborers gather. "But I feel sorry for them, too. They're human beings, man. I don't know what to do."
A year ago, Dwoskin hired a full-time security guard to keep the men off his property, so they took refuge near the library. The Centreville Immigration Forum, the church group that organized three years ago to work with the Hispanic community, has offered its services, holding public forums about immigration and the difficulties of day laboring. Many of the men have told church officials that they have been cheated by employers, said Alice H. Foltz, a parishioner at Wellspring United Church of Christ. She is the unofficial "convener" of about 40 churchgoers who have agreed to staff the trailer as a day-laboring work center.
"It's an issue of exploitation," said Holtz, a history teacher at Northern Virginia Community College's Loudoun County campus. "But we're not trying to solve immigration here. We're trying to help these men."
No taxpayer funds would be used, Frey said, and Dwoskin would pay for the trailer and its utilities. Edgar Aranda-Yanoc, a community educator in the Falls Church office of the Legal Aid Justice Center, called it a "local solution to a local problem," adding that it has the support of the day laborers who live in a stretch of townhouses near the library.
David Garcia, 35, who moved from Guatemala with his wife about four years ago, said a work center could give him and other immigrants a haven and a steady income. "Sometimes they pick us up and don't pay. So a trailer would help," Garcia said.
But many shopping center tenants and customers said they fear that a hiring center would attract more immigrants seeking work, overwhelming already congested roads and spurring a spike in vandalism, loitering and petty crime.
"It's a terrible idea. They're going to come from all over, and we're going to get a reputation for not being a safe place," said Gary Malm, who owns Centreville Tire and Auto near the trailer's proposed site. "I wouldn't want my daughter or son or my wife dropping off a car at night around here if they were hanging around."
Del. Timothy D. Hugo (R-Fairfax), whose district includes Centreville, sent an e-mail to 9,000 supporters urging them to attend Tuesday's meeting -- scheduled for 7 p.m. at Centre Ridge Elementary School -- and oppose the work center plan. "Centreville is turning a blind eye to the concerns of its residents," said Hugo, who co-sponsored a bill this year that will allow Virginia localities to prosecute those who sell "goods or services" on roadways.
Church forum members say they fear that Centreville could experience the turmoil that occurred in Herndon in 2006 over a plan for a town-sponsored day-laborer center. But Dwoskin and Frey hope the work center idea calms tensions. "We'll see what happens Tuesday," Frey said.
Arizona once again delves into uncharted constitutional waters by seeking to ban courses catering to minority--again, in this case, primarily Hispanic -- students. Indeed, the Arizona State Superintendent, Tom Horne, said it was written to target Mexican or Chicano ethnic studies classes, which he claims divides students by race and promotes race resentment.
The statute bans courses that "promote resentment toward a race or class of people . . . are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group . . and advocate ethnic solidarity." The statute then goes onto exempt courses on the Holocaust because, of course, without that exemption, every class that shows Schindler's List where at the conclusion you resent the Nazis (a class of people) and wanting to save the Jews (promoting solidarity), you would have violated Horne's law.
Horne's dilemma is that enforcement will be so arbitrary, so capricious, relying, most likely, on Horne's particular biases and whims that the statute is begging for a First Amendment challenge. How do you quantify or measure "resentment." "Ethnic solidarity?" If two Latino students, hearing about the plight of migrant workers in the lettuce fields of California, feel that they should send a donation to the United Farm Workers to help them combat the agrigrower owners, has that crossed a line? If a teacher shows "Roots" and black students feel compelled to talk about the anger they still feel at the legacy of slavery, is that a violation? If students leave a classroom finally understanding the prejudice and struggles of their parents of whatever race or religion or background, and feeling justifiably angry, will Tom Horne be there with a questionnaire to gauge whether their teacher fueled their discontent so he can yank their funding?
And let's not forget Arizona's participation in one of the most shameful acts of racism in American history: the incarceration of over 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. The Arizona desert was a lovely place for west coast Americans to spend their time simply because of their ethnic heritage. If a Park Ranger spoke at a class in Arizona about Gila River and Poston, and condemned the paranoia and racism at the time, and several Asian American students petitioned their school to form an afterschool group for Asian Americans, is that the "ethnic solidarity" deemed a no-no by the law?
I remember a history class at UC Berkeley I took on American history. It left me shaken, and angry, and ultimately disappointed that my high school history glossed over the tremendous struggles that workers and minorities suffered through in the rise of the industrial age. If anything, shouldn't Tom Horne be targeting universities, the real hot-beds of controversial thinking? On-line education? Any Learning Annex lecture given by a minority lecturer? Isn't Horne, Brewer, and the entire Arizona Legislature, plain and simple, engaging in censorship and whitewashing promoted by a state government?
If the Governor, legislature, and education departments of Arizona are worried about "resentment" towards them by the substantial Latino population in the state, there are greater things to worry about than simply 1984'ing the state curriculum. Perhaps if they addressed the inequities in health care, living conditions, the standard of living for many Latinos living there the "resentment" level might just die down. Perhaps if they didn't pass laws targeting Latinos, regardless of citizenship, for racial profiling and police interrogations on the "suspicion" that they may be undocumented persons there wouldn't be any fears of "resentment."
Learning about your heritage and your roots is part of who we are as Americans. Perhaps if the Arizona government recognized that undeniable, indisputable fact, if they just behaved like human beings who should care about other human beings, without regard to skin color, ethnicity, or nationality, then maybe, just maybe, their claims about "ethnic chauvinism" wouldn't sound so hypocritical. Because, right now, everything they have done in the past month bears the ugly stain of racism.
Less than a month after signing the nation’s toughest law on illegal immigration, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona has again upset the state’s large Hispanic population, signing a bill aimed at ending ethnic studies in Tucson schools.
Under the law signed on Tuesday, any school district that offers classes designed primarily for students of particular ethnic groups, advocate ethnic solidarity or promote resentment of a race or a class of people would risk losing 10 percent of its state financing.
“Governor Brewer signed the bill because she believes, and the legislation states, that public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people,” Paul Senseman, a spokesman for the governor, said in a statement on Thursday.
Judy Burns, president of the governing board of the Tucson schools, said the district’s ethnic studies courses did not violate any of the provisions of the new law and would be continued because they were valuable to the students.
“From everything I’ve seen, they empower kids to take charge of their own destiny, gain a sense of the value of their own existence and become more determined to be well-educated contributing members of society,” Ms. Burns said.
The new law, which takes effect at the end of the year, is a victory for Tom Horne, the state superintendent of public instruction, who has fought for years to end Tucson’s ethnic studies programs, which he believes teach students to feel oppressed and resent whites.
“The most offensive thing to me, fundamentally, is dividing kids by race,” Mr. Horne said.
“They are teaching a radical ideology in Raza, including that Arizona and other states were stolen from Mexico and should be given back,” he continued, referring to the Mexican-American studies classes. “My point of view is that these kids’ parents and grandparents came, mostly legally, because this is the land of opportunity, and we should teach them that if they work hard, they can accomplish anything.”
Mr. Horne, a Republican who is running for state attorney general, said he also objected to the textbook “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire.
The schools in Tucson, where about 56 percent of the students are Hispanic, offer Mexican-American studies classes in history and literature and African-American literature classes. Although the classes are open to all students, most of those who enroll are members of the ethnic or racial group being discussed.
In June 2007, in an open letter to the residents of Tucson, Mr. Horne said, “The evidence is overwhelming that ethnic studies in the Tucson Unified School District teaches a kind of destructive ethnic chauvinism that the citizens of Tucson should no longer tolerate.”
In that letter, he said he believed that students were learning hostility from La Raza teachers, citing an incident in which students at the Tucson High Magnet School walked out on a speech by his deputy, a Republican Latina, who was trying to refute an earlier speaker who had told the student body that Republicans hate Latinos.
Sean Arce, director of Tucson’s Mexican-American studies department, said the ethnic studies courses do teach students about the marginalization of different groups in the United States through history.
“They don’t teach resentment or hostility, in any way, shape or form,” Mr. Arce said. “Instead, they build cultural bridges of understanding, and teach the skills students need to understand history.”
Furthermore, Mr. Arce said, the ethnic studies courses have been highly effective in reducing students’ dropout rates and increasing their college matriculation well above the national average for Latino students.
Mr. Arce and Ms. Burns said that they had repeatedly invited Mr. Horne to visit the ethnic studies classes, but that he had declined the invitations.
“We wish he’d come see it, so he’d know what we do, and not just go on hearsay,” Ms. Burns said.
Mr. Horne acknowledged that he had never sat in on a class, but said he did not believe that what he would see would be representative of what regularly took place.
NATIVE SON Castro at a meeting in January about the rebuilding of the east side of San Antonio.
By ZEV CHAFETS
In early December, Julián Castro, the newly elected mayor of San Antonio, visited the White House to attend President Obama’s national jobs-and-economic-growth forum. Castro was one of only five mayors in attendance and, at 35, the youngest. When his turn came to speak — the subject was the creation of green jobs — the president looked at him, midway down the long conference table, and said: “I thought he was on our staff. I thought he was an intern. This guy’s a mayor?” The other participants — world-famous economists, environmentalists and politicians — burst into laughter.
“Of San Antonio, Tex.,” Castro said evenly.
Obama grinned. “I’m messing with you,” he said. “I know who you are.”
Castro was neither flustered nor flattered by the president’s bantering familiarity. Of course Obama knew who he was — gate-crashers might make it into White House social events, but they don’t get to the table of high-level West Wing policy meetings led by the president himself. Castro smiled politely at Obama’s jest and then proceeded to the business at hand, delivering prepared remarks about employment and the energy market in San Antonio. He is cerebral, serious, self-contained and highly efficient. If he were an energy source, he’d be zero-emission. A video of the event shows the president listening intently to Castro’s presentation and nodding occasionally, Harvard Law ’91 silently encouraging Harvard Law ’00.
A few days before the meeting, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood visited San Antonio and told the mayor that he was “on the radar in Washington.” The morning of the meeting, Castro was included in a small working breakfast hosted by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; Valerie Jarrett, one of the president’s closest advisers, was there, too. Castro was being noticed and auditioned. It had been about a dozen years since another brilliant young man from San Antonio, Henry Cisneros, regarded by many as the emerging national leader of the Hispanic wing of the Democratic Party, lost his political future in a sex-and-money scandal. Cisneros’s implosion left an opening. For a while, Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico, and Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, were Great Hispanic Hopes, but scandals eventually knocked them out of contention too.
A lot of very smart people, not all of them in Texas, see Julián Castro as the favorite to fill the leadership void. “Julián really stands out,” says Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, an associate professor of Chicano and global studies at U.C.L.A. “There are other talented young Hispanic politicians around, but few have his stature or national potential. He’s from San Antonio, but he’s very much admired in California. He’s like Obama — one of us, but someone who also comes out of a broader American experience.”
Castro “has all the assets to become the next favorite son,” is how John A. Garcia, a political-science professor at the University of Arizona, puts it. “He has an elite education, which has given him a national network, and a quiet, serious public persona that appeals to a lot of younger Hispanic voters,” Garcia says. “People look at him and say, ‘Finally, we have somebody who won’t screw up.’ Of course, he’s still young, and he might be too good to be true, but if I were betting on the next national Hispanic political leader, I’d bet on Julián.”
In 1984, Mexican-American political activists were thrilled when Walter Mondale publicly considered Cisneros for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination. But second place no longer seems such a great prize. “In 1984, there were 20 million Hispanics in America,” according to the political activist Antonio Gonzalez, who heads the William C. Velasquez Institute. “Today, we are 50 million, and more and more people are registering to vote.” Who they will vote for and what issues will cement their party loyalty is one of the great questions of American politics. This year Democrats hope to exploit the ire among Hispanics over the new G.O.P.-inspired law in Arizona that empowers local police forces to crack down on illegal immigrants.
Mark McKinnon is prepared to be more explicit about the long-term stakes. An early member of George W. Bush’s inner circle in Austin, he knows Texas political talent when he sees it. “Julián Castro has a very good chance of becoming the first Hispanic president of the United States,” he says flatly.
Julián Castro is the son of Rosie Castro, a well-known ’70s firebrand who was among the leaders of La Raza Unida, the radical movement in Texas that was dedicated to defending the civil rights of Mexican-Americans and promoting a strong “Chicano” identity. One of Castro’s first acts as mayor was to hang a 1971 La Raza Unida City Council campaign poster, featuring his mother, in his private office. But this was a gesture of filial loyalty, not of ideological solidarity. A Democrat, Castro is a pragmatist, sometimes unpredictably so. He supports free trade, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, advocates an energy policy that includes fossil fuels, believes in balanced budgets and refers to David Souter as his ideal Supreme Court justice. Like a large plurality of his fellow San Antonians, Castro is a Roman Catholic, but he was the first San Antonio mayor to be grand marshal when he marched in the annual gay rights parade, and he is pro-choice. “We disagree on this, the pope and I,” he says with a smile.
Nothing seems to ruffle him. Recently, after Arizona passed its tough immigration law, most Hispanic politicians reacted with fury. Some even compared the decision to apartheid. Castro, through a spokesman, phrased his own opposition to the decision in characteristically understated and inclusive language, saying, in part: “Texas has long been an example of how two neighboring countries can co-exist in a mutually beneficial way for the American economy. A law like Arizona’s would fly in the face of that history.”
Julián Castro seems entirely comfortable expressing views on national and international matters normally outside the purview of first-term mayors. He and his identical twin, Joaquín, are scions of the west-side barrio political machine their mother helped build, and they were raised with the expectation that they would be leaders, young men of personal excellence and public spirit. They were the undisputed stars of Jefferson High School, where they played on the tennis team, earned top grades and skipped 10th grade. In their spare time they accompanied their mother to political events and strategy sessions, where they were exposed to her fiery style of radicalism (which, in any case, was softening over time); met the key figures in the Chicano political world; became practiced community organizers on political campaigns; and learned to make the system work for them.
“Joaquín and I got into Stanford because of affirmative action,” Julián says. “I scored 1,210 on my SATs, which was lower than the median matriculating student. But I did fine in college and in law school. So did Joaquín. I’m a strong supporter of affirmative action because I’ve seen it work in my own life.”
In college, Julián majored in communications and political science and tied his brother for most votes in the student senate election their junior year. During the summer of 1994, he was a White House intern. (“You think I look young now, you should have seen me then,” he says.) When Joaquín did not get into Yale Law School, the brothers settled for Harvard. Julián joined Alianza, an Hispanic organization at the school, and served on the Law School Council, but his thoughts were on San Antonio politics. In his last year at Harvard, he decided to run after graduation for the City Council seat that had eluded his mother, and he was so eager to get going that he held his first fund-raiser among his fellow students in Cambridge. He won that race and took a seat on the council in 2001. The following year, Joaquín was elected to the Texas State House of Representatives from a district that includes San Antonio. The Castro boys were back in town.
“Julián and Joaquín were young but not new,” Jim Dublin, a veteran San Antonio political consultant, says. “We’ve been reading about their exploits in the paper since they were at Jefferson High.”
A place on the San Antonio City Council doesn’t come with a salary, and the Texas State House of Representatives, which meets only 140 days every two years, pays what averages out to be about $16,000 annually. The Castro brothers already had day jobs at the local branch of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, a major law firm with offices around the world. Later they started their own practice. A celebrated personal-injury case, in which they represented victims of a fatal drunken-driving accident, earned them enough to comfortably continue their political careers.
In 2005, Julián ran for mayor. His opponent was the retired judge Phil Hardberger, a Democrat who was a decade older than the combined ages of Julián and Joaquín. Rosie Castro cast a shadow; Julián found it hard to raise money in the Anglo business community, and he worked hard to reassure voters that he was not just a barrio candidate. “When I represent, I represent everyone,” he said. He won a plurality in the first round of balloting but narrowly lost the runoff to Hardberger. It wasn’t just the Rosie factor that hurt. Hardberger’s predecessor, Ed Garza, was widely regarded as lackluster, and voters weren’t in the mood for another boy wonder from Jefferson High, as Garza had been. Four years later, Hardberger retired from office, and Castro captured City Hall in the first round of balloting. At 34, he was the mayor of the seventh-largest city in the United States.
SAN ANTONIO is located in south central Texas, about 150 miles from the Mexican border. Like Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Oklahoma City, San Antonio swallows its suburbs and expands as it goes. You can fit Chicago, Boston and Miami into the city limits and still have room for Manhattan. At the center of this sprawl is the old town of San Antonio, built by the Spanish in the early 18th century. And at the heart of the old town is the Alamo. When I visited in September, the small mission and the plaza surrounding it were full of tourists of all ages. “This place means so much to so many people,” says Bruce Winders, the curator and historian of the Alamo, who, with spontaneous Texas hospitality, had volunteered to serve as my guide. “Folks come here as pilgrims. They want to see the cradle of Texas independence. To those from around the country, it reinforces their identity as Americans. To Texans, it says, ‘You are part of this story.’ The Alamo is a place that helps parents pass their history along to their children.”
The Alamo, where a small band of volunteers held off the Mexican Army for 13 days, inspiring the ultimately successful fight for Texas independence, is run by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. For a decade, according to Winders, the Daughters have been trying, in vain, to get permission from City Hall to put up some explanatory signs on municipal property bordering the plaza. He attributed this failure to “ideological hostility” in a city where some people take a dimmer view of the Alamo. People like Rosie Castro.
I met the mayor’s mother in her office at Palo Alto College, where she runs a student-services center. She was born in San Antonio in 1947 to an immigrant mother who didn’t get past fourth grade; she didn’t meet her father till she was 34. To Rosie, the Alamo is a symbol of bad times. “They used to take us there when we were schoolchildren,” she told me. “They told us how glorious that battle was. When I grew up I learned that the ‘heroes’ of the Alamo were a bunch of drunks and crooks and slaveholding imperialists who conquered land that didn’t belong to them. But as a little girl I got the message — we were losers. I can truly say that I hate that place and everything it stands for.”
That evening I dined with the mayor and his wife, Erica, at Rosario’s, a large, upscale cantina favored by young businesspeople and political types. Erica is a consultant to math teachers, four years Julián’s junior, who grew up on the south side hearing tales of the amazing Castro brothers. Julián and Erica met one summer when he was home from Harvard, and then dated, mostly long distance, for eight years.
The mayor asked about my session with his mother. “She hates the Alamo,” I said.
“Yes, I know,” he said with what might have been a slight smile.
“What about you? How do you feel about it?”
“The Alamo?” he said. “It’s the largest tourist attraction in Texas. And tourism is one of San Antonio’s major economic engines.”
I mentioned that the Alamo’s curator complained that the city wouldn’t give permission to put up signs on municipal property.
“I’ve never heard that before,” Castro said. “I’ll look into it.”
“The curator called it a shrine.”
Castro considered that briefly, then nodded. “There are people for whom the Alamo is a sacred place,” he said without any discernible emotion.
ROSIE CASTRO proudly calls herself a “Chicana,” a term that connotes political activism and ethnic pride, but she says her son is different. “I don’t think Julián would call himself a Chicano,” she told me. “A Latino maybe.” When I relayed this to the mayor, he didn’t disagree. “I consider myself Mexican-American, both parts of that phrase,” he said. “I don’t want to turn my back on my mother’s generation. But we are less burdened.”
Historically, Mexican-Americans have generally been considered “white” in Texas; they served in white units of the segregated military, including the National Guard, and were allowed, during the Jim Crow years, to marry white (but not black) partners. In the early ’40s, the Texas Legislature even passed a “Caucasian Race Resolution,” which affirmed their status as white. Today the U.S. Census treats “Hispanic,” “Latino” and “Spanish origin” — terms that apply to anyone of Spanish-speaking background — as an ethnic category. Race is a separate category, with various options, including a nonspecific “some other race.” In 2000, about half of all Hispanics checked “white” for race. Castro told me that he was planning to check “some other race” in 2010. He is uncomfortable referring to himself as “brown,” and he doesn’t use the term “people of color” when he discusses Mexican-Americans.
Whatever their racial and geographic differences, Americans from Spanish-speaking cultures in different parts of the country increasingly see one another as sharing a common identity and interests. Partly this is a result of astute marketing by Spanish-language mass media. But politics plays a major role. “The pan-Latino process in the U.S. encompasses everyone, though the Cubans lag behind,” says Antonio Gonzalez of the William C. Velasquez Institute. “And the biggest single unifier among subgroups across the Latino community is compatibility on issues.” Roughly 60 percent of Hispanics identify themselves as Democrats. And because Mexican-Americans dominate the national pan-Latino community through sheer numbers — they make up about 60 percent of the total Hispanic population — and they are concentrated in key electoral states like Texas and California, simple arithmetic and political logic make it very likely that one of the next national political leaders of Hispanic America will be a Mexican-American Democrat.
In 2000, while Castro was still in Cambridge, the political theorist Samuel P. Huntington argued that mass immigration from Mexico poses an existential threat to the United States. “Mexican immigration,” he wrote, “is a unique, disturbing and looming challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity and potentially to our future as a country.” At the heart of Huntington’s critique, which many Americans share, is the sense that Mexican-Americans will form a permanent, unassimilated superbarrio across the Southwest and elsewhere. Julián Castro’s San Antonio is one place that counters that concern.
“San Antonio is the city of the future, the avatar,” says Karl Eschbach, until recently the official demographer of the state of Texas. “The Mexican-American population is about 60 percent of the city, but it is now several generations old. There is comparatively little immigration these days. Mexican-Americans in San Antonio experience a continual drift” into a blending with non-Hispanic whites and others.
Arturo Madrid, a professor of humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio, agrees with Eschbach’s assessment. “The power of America is undeniable,” he says. Like Rosie Castro, Madrid is a proud product of the Chicano movement, but he has no illusions about the shape of the future. “People may check ‘Hispanic’ on the census, but in San Antonio they are Tejanos, Texans of Mexican ancestry,” he told me. “This is the model of what America will look like in other cities. English will be the dominant language. Young Mexican-Americans may display minor symbols of their ethnicity — ‘I eat spaghetti, therefore I’m Italian,’ that sort of thing — but their kids will consider themselves American. We are already your neighbors and fellow workers, and are or soon will be your in-laws.”
Madrid considers it only natural that the young mayor of San Antonio is seen as the new man in Hispanic politics. “We were the first big city with Hispanic political leadership,” he says.
Paradoxically, Julián Castro’s appeal to fellow Hispanic voters may be limited by his own assimilation. Although he pronounces his name “HOO-lee-un,” he doesn’t really speak Spanish — a fact he isn’t eager to advertise. La Raza put a high premium on the mother tongue, but Rosie Castro spoke English to her sons, and Julián studied Latin and Japanese in school, while Joaquín studied Latin and German. A lack of Spanish fluency isn’t unusual in San Antonio, especially among Castro’s generation, but in the immigrant barrios of Houston and the colonias south of Interstate 10 down to the border, Spanish is the first and often only language. A Mexican-American with statewide political aspirations needs to be able to do more than pronounce his name correctly. Early in his administration, Castro assigned his chief of staff, Robbie Greenblum — a Jewish lawyer from the border town of Laredo whose own Spanish is impeccable — to discreetly find him a tutor. Rosie Castro’s son is now being taught Spanish by a woman named Marta Bronstein. Greenblum met her in shul.
IT’S NOT CLEAR what Castro can accomplish as mayor. His executive clout is limited. The daily business of San Antonio is conducted by a professional city manager. The mayor’s power derives from being the senior elected official in the city and his role as chairman of the City Council, the body that wields ultimately authority over municipal affairs. He gets an office, a car and driver, a secretary, police protection and the same per-meeting stipend paid to other members of the council. Some of his predecessors have treated the mayoralty as a part-time job, but Castro is at his desk every day. He has also surrounded himself with a high-powered staff that includes Greenblum, who was a prominent local attorney before signing on with the mayor; the spokesman Jaime Castillo, a former political columnist for The San Antonio Express-News; and Manoj Mate, a friend from Harvard Law and a Ph.D. candidate in political science who serves as senior policy adviser. This is not the sort of team you put together if you are planning to settle in for a nice long career as a politician in San Antonio.
Castro knows that his future is a matter of constant speculation; given his age and his meteoric career path, it could hardly be otherwise. But talking about it is dangerous. “There’s a push-and-pull here,” he told me. “I’ve read about Bill Clinton, how he rose. Even Arkansas people who didn’t like him took pride in his success.” But in San Antonio, he added, “nobody likes people with big heads.”
Still, in his quiet way, Julián Castro is fiercely competitive, and he keeps score. In our first conversation he rattled off the names of his Harvard Law contemporaries who have already been elected to public office around the country. Most, like Joaquín, are still in state legislatures. And being in the House of Representatives “means being one of 435 Representatives,” he told me. “You can’t really get that much done on your own. I prefer executive positions.” (Joaquín is considering a Congressional run in 2012 if there is an open seat. He is a minute younger than Julián and, for now, defers to his elder twin.) Julián conceded that the Senate might be a slightly more interesting job, but there remained the problem of being one in a crowd.
“Would you accept a cabinet position?” I asked. That was the route taken by Cisneros.
“Not likely, no,” Castro said in a way that suggested he had been considering it.
I asked what that left: “President?”
“It is way too early to be thinking about that,” Castro said.
“TO BE HONEST, I can see a path to Washington for Julián,” Joaquín Castro says. “That path leads through the governor’s mansion in Austin. A Democrat who can win the governorship of Texas would automatically be under consideration for a spot on the national ticket.”
For the moment it seems a distant goal. Texas is Republican territory — Republicans hold every statewide elected office — and polls show Gov. Rick Perry running ahead of his Democratic opponent, the former Houston mayor Bill White. But if White loses in November, it will present Castro with an opportunity. Mexican-Americans already make up a third of the state’s population, and they are registering to vote in increasing numbers.
The majority of the Mexican-American vote in Texas (and beyond) went to Obama in 2008, and it is widely assumed by Democratic strategists that their party will continue to benefit from Latino voters. This, however, is not settled political science. “The Democrats are way ahead of the Republicans,” John Garcia says, “but there isn’t a complete buy-in. The attitude is, They are better than the Republicans, but not great.”
This year, Marco Rubio is making a strong run for the open U.S. Senate seat in Florida. Rubio, the favorite son of the Cuban community, is an attractive young Republican, but his appeal doesn’t extend to the broader Hispanic community. Sergio Bendixen, a Miami-based political consultant, predicts that Rubio would lose the non-Cuban Hispanic vote to Kendrick Meek, the African-American Democratic candidate.
Rubio’s problem is not simply ethnic; it is not very likely that any Republican will make strong inroads with Mexican-American voters as long as the G.O.P. remains hawkish on border control, supports Arizona-style policing of illegal residents and calls for fewer government entitlements. If Republicans hope to compete nationally, they will need more flexible policies and candidates as appealing as Julián Castro. The name that most often arises is George P. Bush, son of Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, and nephew of President George W. Bush. As governor of Texas, W. was popular with Mexican-Americans, and in the 2004 election he won more than 40 percent of the national Hispanic vote. His nephew George P. (whom George H. W. Bush famously described as “one of the little brown ones”) is now all grown up and living in Texas. He is a graduate of Rice University in Houston and the University of Texas law school and recently helped found a political-action committee in Austin to recruit Hispanic Republicans. He has all the tools — good looks, fluent Spanish, ethnic bona fides on his Mexican-American mother’s side, instant name recognition and access to a network of political and financial connections on his father’s — that could make him a formidable vote-getter. Mark McKinnon, who helped put Bush 43 in the White House, half-jokingly refers to George P. as “47.”
Julián Castro and George P. Bush have been aware of each other for some time. “We have mutual friends,” Castro told me. “They introduced us in Austin, three or four years ago. George worked for Akin Gump after law school, just like Joaquín and I did. He’s a reserve officer in the Navy. There’s a lot to admire about him. And of course, he has a lot going for him.”
Still, the Castros are not intimidated by the Bush pedigree or by other contemporaries in the Anglo establishment. “Julián and I are just two guys from the bad side of San Antonio,” Joaquín told me. “When we went away to school, we didn’t know what to expect. At Stanford and Harvard, we were among all these people from the leadership class, people with fancy educations and pedigrees, and very often we were the only Hispanics in the classroom. But we listened to the people at Harvard, and I have to say, we were never overwhelmed.”
ON SEPT. 16, the Castro brothers celebrated their 35th birthday as they always do, together. This time, though, they were joined by a thousand or so of their best friends and voters at a gala held in Sunset Station, an old railroad depot near the Alamo that has been remade into an ornate party space. A long line of people waited for the chance to have their pictures taken standing between Julián and Joaquín, who were dressed in nearly identical suits and ties. In the 2005 mayoral race, the brothers caused a minor scandal when it was discovered that Joaquín substituted for Julián at a campaign event. Some voters were amused by this, others infuriated, claiming it raised questions about the mayor’s maturity.
Perhaps the greatest difference between Julián and his younger brother is that Joaquín is still single and known to enjoy his status as San Antonio’s most eligible bachelor. During the course of the evening, a number of very attractive young women posed between the brothers. Erica, who can tell them apart, kept a watchful eye, although probably unnecessarily. From an early age Julián and his brother have been taught by their mother that bad company — especially bad female company — is Kryptonite to young politicians.
The party was loud and eclectic, a mélange of Mariachi, cool jazz, R&B and country music performed by locals. A parade of men in black shirts, playing drums, whistles and maracas, and women decked out in gold lamé snaked through the party. The boys took the stage and thanked everyone for coming. Julián announced that the Senate had just confirmed Sonia Sotomayór for a seat on the Supreme Court, which elicited a loud cheer.
Rosie Castro was working the room that night, and I was on her to-do list. She introduced me to old comrades from the movement, made sure I got a piece of cake and reminded me that, while I may have come to San Antonio to write about Julián, Joaquín was just as talented. “There is a potential for them both to go much further,” she said. It was hard to disagree. When Barack Obama was their age, he was still only on the cusp of entering the Illinois State Senate.
About two months later I got a call at home from Julián. He was in Boston attending a conference, but there was something on his mind. “I looked into the problem you asked about,” he said. “The signs for the Alamo? I think there might have been some misunderstanding about that in the past.” City officials could find no record of a request for signage. “But of course we’ll allow them to put up their signs on city property. I’ll see to it personally.”
I can’t say I was surprised. You don’t get where Julián Castro is — or where he intends to go — by forgetting the Alamo.
Zev Chafets is a frequent contributor to the magazine. He writes often about politics and religion. His new book is “Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One.”
Recent Hispanic immigrants are more likely to return their census questionnaires than Hispanics born in the United States, according to a new study that suggests a census campaign targeting Spanish speakers has been wildly successful.
A telephone survey of about 1,000 people conducted in the third week of March by the Pew Hispanic Center also found that foreign-born Hispanics are less skeptical that their census information will remain confidential.
The study was released Thursday, which the government dubbed "Census Day" -- the day by which, officials hoped, people would have filled out their forms and mailed them in. To encourage participation, the White House released a photo of President Obama filling out his questionnaire.
The government will continue to promote the census throughout April, particularly in areas with low response rates. At the end of the month, officials will compile lists of addresses from which surveys have not been received by mail. Census-takers will be dispatched to those addresses to try to get survey questions answered.
Major Hispanic groups have said there is widespread fear among immigrants that data will be shared with immigration authorities. In response, groups have stressed the confidentiality of the census in a campaign called "Ya es hora. ¡Hagase contar!" or "It's time to be counted."
"It shows the work we have been doing has had an impact," he said of the effort that enlisted newscasters, entertainers and other prominent Latinos to spread the message that Hispanics should send in their forms regardless of their legal status. "It shows that this population understands what we need do as a community to move forward, to be counted and to be heard."
But, ironically, the survey suggests that the message did not get through so readily to U.S.-born Hispanics. While 91 percent of the foreign-born said they had returned their forms or would do so soon, only 78 percent of the U.S.-born said they would participate. Both figures would be an improvement over the last census, when 69 percent of Hispanic households returned their forms.
Hispanics are the largest ethnic group in the United States, as well as the fastest growing. About 35 million were counted in the 2000 Census, and they were estimated to number 47 million by 2008, or 15 percent of the population.
This year, the Census Bureau mailed bilingual forms to neighborhoods with a large Hispanic presence. It also spent more than $25 million, about one-fifth of its total advertising budget, for Spanish-language media.
The sharp focus on messages in Spanish may have created the disparity in how recent immigrants and natives regard the census.
Maria Teresa Kumar, executive director of Voto Latino, said that recent immigrants are the main consumers of Spanish-language programs aired on Univision and Telemundo, which introduced a census-taker as a character in its top-rated telenovela. Generations born in the United States tend to prefer English-language media.
"The more acculturated you are, the more you have the same views as the rest of mainstream America, and a lot of folks are distrustful of government," she said.
The Pew survey also suggests that a census boycott called by some Hispanic evangelical ministers to protest the lack of immigration reform has been a failure. Only 16 percent said they had heard calls for a boycott.
"We're not sure why it didn't gain traction," said Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center. "We know that when it was announced, there was a very broad effort to counter it."
Carlos Aragon, general manager of Radio Fiesta, which broadcasts in the Washington area, said many Hispanics consider the boycott "ridiculous." He also said he hears myths that the Census Bureau will turn in undocumented immigrants to the authorities.
José Robles, director of Hispanic Ministry in the Phoenix Catholic Diocese, said the concern about information being handed over to authorities is more pronounced among members of the clergy than parishioners. The diocese has heavily promoted the census, but Arizonans are among those who are slower to return forms than the national average.
The states whose response rates are lagging are mostly in the South and Southwest.
The U.S. is subject to powerful cultural forces rooted in demographics and ethnicity. Nowhere is the influence of these cultural crosswinds more evident today than in our growing Hispanic population and its increasing claim on a share of the American Dream. By the numbers, Latinos are the dominant minority group in the nation, totaling more than 15 percent of the population, a proportion that continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. They make up just under 13% of the U.S. workforce nationwide, certainly a significant portion but still lagging their overall share in the American population.
But the participation of Hispanic-Americans in the federal workforce is a different story. According to the latest data (2008) from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Latinos make up barely 8% of the Federal workforce. In recent years, a number of high-visibility initiatives have been directed at the challenge of Hispanic participation, but the numbers continue to lag. Despite their seeming best efforts, Federal agencies have generally made little progress in recruiting and retaining Hispanic employees over the last decade.
At TMP Government, this situation has puzzled us as well. In the March Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership (ERE’s print publication geared at recruiting leaders), we lay out a seven-step suggested solution to the problem.
For now, though, we’ll kick it off online by suggesting a few possible causes and symptoms of the government’s apparent failure to make headway on this challenge.
Statistics Tell the Tale
Again, Hispanic-Americans are the largest and fastest-growing minority segment in the U.S. By all predictions, this trend will continue at least through the first half of this century. As of its last estimate (2007), the U.S. Census Bureau pegs the median age of U.S. Hispanics at 27.7 years, compared to 36.8 years for the rest of the population. And almost 34% of U.S. Hispanics are younger than 18; for the population as a whole, only 25% of Americans are under 18. By 2050, again according to the Census Bureau, Hispanic-Americans will make up nearly 25% of the total population.
These predictions promise significant implications for our culture and economy — not to mention the U.S. labor market. Overall employment numbers in the U.S. are already showing the impact of this accelerating demographic shift. Since 1980, the American labor force has grown by more than 41%. Fully a third of this increase is accounted for by Hispanics.
Human capital professionals in the corporate world appear to dealing effectively with this groundswell of Hispanics in the general workforce, and are diligently preparing for the new HR imperatives it will bring in its wake. But this is not the case with government human capital leaders. We have one question for them:
Why is the Federal government’s track record of recruiting and developing Hispanic employees so bad?
Across the board, the feds have managed to achieve only 7.8% participation by Hispanics in the government workforce. And the news gets worse: Hispanic men and women today represent only 3.6% of individuals at federal senior pay levels — a proportion that drops to 2.5% when you take political appointees out of the calculation.
These numbers are puzzling, to say the least. The government has traditionally been the standard-bearer for minority participation in the workforce. Consider African-Americans: they make up 13% percent of the U.S. population and — according to the latest available count (2008) — more than 18% of the Federal workforce. Certainly we should credit most of this progress to vigorous initiatives by Federal agencies, beginning in the early 1970s, to recruit and retain talented African-Americans.
But when it comes to leveling the playing field for Hispanics in government, today’s recruitment initiatives appear to be yielding only marginal gains at best, and in some cases they are barely holding the line against attrition.
We’re prepared to suggest several factors that may be diminishing the government’s success in making recruitment gains among Hispanic-Americans. At the same time, we are identifying a number of technical and strategic measures that in our view can go a long way toward helping the government succeed in this mission. Moreover, these innovations have the potential to enrich other dimensions of Federal human capital management substantially — beyond recruitment and beyond the Hispanic-American segment.
What factors influence the government’s disappointing track record in recruiting and retaining Hispanics?
Here, in brief, are a handful of factors that may be contributing to the Feds’ apparent lack of success with the Hispanic-American segment.
Competitive Barriers From Industry
The corporate community has seemingly mastered the Hispanic recruitment challenge. Indeed it may hold the trump card here, both by reason of the resources it can devote to Hispanic engagement programs and the pay premiums it can offer to talented Latino candidates. The government simply can’t keep pace on either score. The Feds aren’t empowered to offer pay incentives based on minority status, and most agencies today don’t have the budgets or staff resources to build comprehensive recruiting/retention programs targeted at the Hispanic segment.
“Geo-Demographic” Barriers
Most federal entry-level positions tend to be in the national capital region. In the District of Columbia and the two adjacent states (Maryland and Virginia), the population of Hispanics is well below that of many other regions, especially in the Southwest and California. The “hire-able” population is simply not that deep in Washington, despite some clustering of Hispanic blue-collar workers in Washington and its near suburbs. Compounding this difficulty is a disconcerting “psychographic” factor suggested anecdotally by many recruiters: young, job-seeking Hispanics in general are less inclined to relocate, because it means leaving their extended families for new positions away from home. In the absence of family ties here, a move to the Washington area for a government job may be inherently less attractive for some Hispanic-Americans.
Lack of High-level Commitment and Resources Among Individual Agencies and Departments
Let’s face it: campaigns to improve Hispanic participation in the Federal workforce simply cannot draw on the same driving momentum in society as the widespread movement for civil rights and equal opportunity for African-Americans. From the 1960s on, in fact, the federal government was the primary institutional driver behind this movement, and a natural leader in the crusade to roll back hiring barriers impeding black Americans.
But when it comes to Hispanics and other underserved minorities, there’s neither the degree of enforced commitment nor even (so far as we can tell) a deeply felt personal commitment at high levels. Without the visible presence of management champions of the cause, there’s little incentive to build real momentum for Hispanic programs within agencies. By the same token, agency funds are rarely available to mount Hispanic programming on the same scale as earlier equal opportunity initiatives centering on African-Americans (except, perhaps, where Spanish language skills are a job requirement).
Misleading Emphasis on Recruiting for Spanish-speaking Positions and Bilingual Skills
Break down the government’s current roster of Hispanic employees and you will find a disconcerting reality: they tend to cluster in public interface positions that call for fluency in Spanish, as well as in low-paying service jobs, like maintenance and food service. In the first instance — although it’s anything but pleasant to contemplate — we’re suggesting that some agencies that need to recruit aggressively for bilingual positions may unconsciously put bilingual qualifications first when they evaluate any Hispanic-American candidate. The result: they may unconsciously filter non-Spanish speaking Hispanics out of consideration for ‘mainstream’ positions that don’t require Spanish-language skills.
We realize that this element is potentially controversial, and are not suggesting that conscious prejudice plays any part in this cycle (if it exists). But we are suggesting that maybe, just maybe, unconscious habits of mind among hiring officials could be channeling Hispanic candidates into the constituent interface track and not considering them carefully enough for mainstream positions if they don’t — or even if they do — fit the bilingual mold.
Scarcity of Agency Resources to Take Comprehensive, Top-down Action
It’s the rare individual agency or department that elevates the full cycle of Hispanic recruitment, retention, and development to a top-level institutional initiative. We have encountered few agencies that have set out to elicit engaged participation from senior leadership, the agency management team, hiring managers, and their operating components, and all units in the agency HR infrastructure. An agency that adopts this kind of vertically integrated organizational strategy would have an advantage ion recruiting all diversity classes, not just Hispanic-Americans.
There’s another flavor of integration that might also help at the agency level: effectively integrating its recruitment outreach thematically by underscoring:
the full employment life-cycle at the agency, and
the agency’s commitment to productive inclusion of all diversity classes in the workplace community.
Agencies that approach the Hispanic/diversity recruitment challenge from all of these integrative perspectives, it seems to us, stand a much better chance of success than agencies that revert to standard “checklist” practices of minority hiring.
Lack of Concrete, Government-wide Initiatives for Meeting This Challenge
Up until now, agencies have tended to go it alone rather than teaming with other agencies in the Hispanic recruitment mission. While surely this is due to budgetary constraints (as well as something of a competitive dimension, owing to the perceived scarcity of Hispanic candidates), it’s a less-than-effective way to tackle the challenge. In the typical agency HR infrastructure, recruiting resources are limited and/or distributed across multiple initiatives. The result: Hispanic recruitment and retention (despite the current hue-and-cry) may not attract the urgent managerial, budgetary, and strategic attention they deserve. And while a given agency may have its share of individual champions for the Hispanic cause, it can find itself without the resources and allies to gain real purchase on the initiative.
The alternative is collective effort across agency boundaries. If insularity and inter-agency competitiveness can be set aside and budget barriers cleared, this approach could create empowering economies of scale, not to mention bringing individual, agency-based champions together on the same team, where their collective talent, energy, and enthusiasm can be harnessed and channeled.
Of course, government-wide taskforces to analyze the challenge are a critical (and-all-too familiar) first step, but up to now they haven’t demonstrated the power to implement collective solutions. Luckily, today’s Office of Personnel Management is a leading champion of collective government-wide common action among agencies. OPM is developing similar programs to coordinate recruiting pools of special talent, like technology and finance, for multiple agencies to draw on for new employees. A similar initiative for Hispanic recruiting could go far to address the current challenge.
We realize that many of the influential factors we suggest above will likely stir discussion and controversy. It’s important to regard them as topics for consideration, not hard formulas. We want to inspire more dialogue on this topic, and ultimately spur progress on this very serious challenge. Again, check out the March Journal for our proposed solutions.
By Steve Fainaru and William Booth Thursday, December 31, 2009; A06
The Flores brothers had never looked like much in the eyes of local narcotics agents. But by the time it all came crashing down this year, the drug-distribution network allegedly run by the 28-year-old twins from the Mexican American barrios of Chicago was one of the largest and most sophisticated ever seen in the U.S. heartland, according to interviews and federal indictments.
Pedro and Margarito Flores allegedly operated as an American annex to a major Mexican drug mafia, and their arrest and the dismantling of their purported network opened a window on how powerful Mexican cartels operate in the United States, distributing cocaine and heroin with the corporate efficiency of UPS, while back home competitors are tortured and beheaded.
The fortunes of the Flores twins changed because the war on the cartels being waged in Mexico with U.S. help has reshaped the criminal landscape in both countries, generating unprecedented violence but also contributing to the kinds of vicious splits and betrayals that helped in the brothers' arrests, according to narcotics agents and federal indictments.
The sprawling drug operation was essentially a $700 million-a-year distributorship for the Sinaloa cartel, the largest criminal organization in Mexico. It used tractor-trailers to import two tons of cocaine each month for distribution from Chicago warehouses, with cash proceeds shrink-wrapped and shipped back across the border.
The crackdown launched by Mexican President Felipe Calderón has cost more than 16,000 lives and been widely criticized in both countries as ineffective in reining in the drug barons and slowing the flow of drugs into the United States. But the campaign has exposed networks such as the one allegedly run by the Flores brothers, which shipped cocaine from Los Angeles to Chicago and then distributed it to cities across the Midwest, according to interviews and the indictments.
Other than the indictments, few court papers have been filed in the case. The Flores brothers are in U.S. custody; attempts to reach their attorneys were unsuccessful.
Chicago is hardly alone as a home to Mexican cartels; the traffickers operate in 230 U.S. cities, the Justice Department says. But the competition in Chicago might be unusually fierce, with each of the five major Mexican cartels vying for business.
"Much like any legitimate corporation, the drug organizations utilize Chicago as both a distribution and trans-shipment point for their product," Stephen A. Luzinski, acting special agent-in-charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration office here, said in an interview. "The extensive accessibility to various modes of transportation, as well as the large and diverse population with an established customer base, makes Chicago an ideal location as a hub."
Pedro and Margarito Flores were born into a Mexican immigrant family with strong ties to the narcotics trade. Chicago detectives say their father ran drugs for the Sinaloa cartel, as did an older brother. The family melded into the culture in rough neighborhoods such as Little Village and Pilsen, where the Latin Kings and Two-Six gangs fight for turf.
The brothers eventually took over a barbershop and a Mexican restaurant called Mama's Kitchen. They moved to a more expensive neighborhood and drove better cars. But unlike in Mexico, where high-level traffickers are household names, the twins had low profiles.
In Chicago, "you are only as good as your connection," said a former drug dealer who served 10 years in prison and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns. And the Flores brothers reportedly had the best connections in town.
Authorities said the brothers worked for two factions of the Sinaloa cartel. One was headed by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the most wanted man in Mexico, recently named by Forbes magazine as the 41st most-powerful person in the world. The other was by Arturo Beltrán Leyva, whose self-appointed nickname -- the Boss of All Bosses -- frequently appeared on messages displayed next to mutilated corpses.
Factional trade, warfare
As described in court documents, the brothers' reach extended deep into Mexico, where Guzmán, Beltrán Leyva and their associates used Boeing 747 jets, private aircraft, submarines, container ships, fishing vessels and speedboats to consolidate enormous shipments of cocaine from Central and South America, including Colombia and Panama.
The Sinaloa cartel in Mexico was tasked with getting the drugs across the border for pickup in a warehouse outside Los Angeles. The Flores brothers allegedly employed dozens of operators to bring the drugs north, including truck drivers who concealed the contraband amid shipments of fruit, vegetables and other consumer goods, and off-loaded cocaine and heroin in the Chicago area at nondescript warehouses, condominiums and brick duplexes managed by their criminal gang. The drugs were split into smaller quantities and "fronted" to customers, who would pay after they sold the contraband on the street.
But the two Sinaloa factions split last year over the Mexican government's arrest of Beltrán Leyva's brother. The resulting violence consumed several Mexican states and, ultimately, Chicago, as the factions fought over "control of lucrative narcotics trafficking routes into the United States, and the loyalty of wholesale narcotics customers, including the Flores Brothers," according to an indictment filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
The brothers were said to be caught in the middle, with both Sinaloa factions threatening violence against them to maintain control over the critical distribution network. Ultimately, U.S. authorities were able to infiltrate the purported Flores crew, setting up sham cocaine sales to make dozens of arrests and to seize more than three metric tons of cocaine.
Pressure on both sides
It is not clear whether the Flores brothers are cooperating with the authorities, but they face life in prison if convicted, and authorities are seeking the forfeiture of more than $1.8 billion. In August, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for the district, called the indictments "the most significant drug importation conspiracies ever charged in Chicago."
Authorities and people familiar with the drug trade say violence in Mexico and increased enforcement -- symbolized by the Flores case -- are having a dramatic effect on Chicago street sales, at least for now. The wholesale price for a kilo of cocaine -- about 2.2 pounds -- has surged in the past 18 months, from $18,000 to $29,000 and often more, according to authorities.
U.S. officials declined to discuss specifics of the case or whether information from the investigation helped lead Mexican authorities to Beltrán Leyva, who was killed this month during a two-hour gun and grenade battle with Mexican forces in the city of Cuernavaca.
But Anthony Placido, chief of intelligence for the DEA, said in an interview that pressure on both sides of the border has forced the cartels to rely increasingly on inexperienced operators such as the Flores twins.
"There have always been gatekeepers -- people who use their familial relationships to facilitate the movement of drugs across the border," Placido said. "Those people used to be gods, and they would control an area for years. Now they often last months before they are arrested or assassinated.
"What that creates is opportunities for a 28-year-old who . . . isn't worried about dying," he said.
Staff writer Kari Lydersen and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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