Latino stars rising in San Antonio

By Ruben Navarrette
2:00 a.m. July 8, 2009

A nationwide search is on for the Latinobama. With the country's largest minority on its way to representing one-third of the U.S. population by 2050, many are speculating about who might be the first Latino president.

Here's the winning formula: Someone who inspires Latinos without threatening non-Latinos, who appreciates one's ethnic background without feeling limited by it, and who isn't bitter over how Latinos have been treated but also doesn't gloss over that fact in order to be accepted by the mainstream.

For those who think that what started Barack Obama in politics was his election as president of the Harvard Law Review, the natural choice is 25-year-old Andrew Manuel Crespo — a recent graduate of Harvard Law School and the first Latino president of the law review. Then there is Marilinda Garcia, a 26-year-old Republican who was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 2006. She's a graduate of Tufts University and a student at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

But I'd put my money on it being someone named Castro from San Antonio. That way, I'd get two chances to be right.

Julian Castro is the 34-year-old newly elected mayor of San Antonio. A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law, the Democrat previously served on the San Antonio City Council for four years. His twin brother, Joaquin, who graduated from the same schools, is a Texas state representative. Both Castros were compared to Obama in a newspaper article as early as May 2005. The brothers are proteges of Henry Cisneros, the former San Antonio mayor and secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who has become a consigliere to a new generation of Latino leaders.

During a recent interview, I asked Julian Castro how he related to his ethnic background, and how he thought his experience compared to those of earlier generations.

“I was able to get through my education and get into the working world without feeling the sting of discrimination,â€