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Oral History Interview with John Castillo, 1998


Interviewee: John Castillo
Interviewer: José Angel Gutiérrez, Ph.D., J.D.
Transcribers: Karen McGee and José Angel Gutiérrez
Date of Interview: June 26, 1996

Location of Interview: Houston, Texas
Number of Transcript Pages: 63
Cite this interview as Oral History Interview with John Castillo, 1998 , by José Angel Gutiérrez. CMAS No. 50


John Castillo

Dr. Gutiérrez: And this is John Castillo interview, Mayor Lanier, members of the council at large one. Gracie Saenz, Joe Roach, Mayor Lanier, Bob Lanier, Orlando Sanchez, John Peavy, Jr., Judson Robinson. These are by places. Lloyd Heely, John Castillo, Felix Fraga, John Kelley, Larry Driscoll, Ralph Todd, Jew Don Boney, Jr., Martha Wong, Michael Yarborough, Helen Huey. City Council government of the city of Houston. Interview with John Castillo, city council member District 1, City of Houston, 27th of June 1996. We are in his city council office at city hall. We are going to cover four things because this is an archive interview. It is not for commercial purposes or, or any other purpose except educational. It will be placed there. It will be like your private safety box.
Mr. Castillo: Great.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Whatever you want to add in there for posterity or for anything, it’s yours.
Mr. Castillo: Sure.
Dr. Gutiérrez: It will be in the Special Collection UT Library in Arlington.
Mr. Castillo: Great.
Dr. Gutiérrez: You accept?
Mr. Castillo: Sounds like a good, good deal.
Dr. Gutiérrez: All right. We are going to cover four areas. Your biography, your early political lessons, then your political career, and then lastly, issues and, and agendas that are going on with Mexican-Americans nationally and in the state. So, why don't we just start out with who is John Castillo; your parents, your grandparents; where did they come

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from; their names, your family; your, your wife, your children; all of that biography?
Mr. Castillo: Well, my name is John Castillo and I am named after my dad, John Castillo. His middle name is Vargas for his grandmother, maternal grandmother. My name is, middle name is Espinosa for my maternal grandmother and I was born in, in Houston September the 20th, 1938. My, on my mother’s side, her mother was Petra Urata, U-R-A-T-A and she doesn't know her origins because she was an orphan and came to this country with her husband back in the early Twenties and they worked as field hands in, out in the Valley. Goodness knows where. But one day in the field the man, the man, Carlos was his name, went swimming in a water hole and drowned. So, the family moved to Houston and my mother and her sisters and brothers were still little. Her mother found work in a cotton compress in Houston and that was her employment while they were growing up.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Do you know why they moved to Houston as opposed to somewhere else?
Mr. Castillo: Well, I guess it was just the closest place where they could find work basically. At that time, cotton was, was a, a big industry in, in Texas, particularly in Houston. Houston has been always a shipping center for cotton and, and there were many cotton compresses here being a port and also in Galveston being a port, but Houston had a big compress down on Clinton Drive that employed many, many Mexicanos. Obviously at that time they were illegal, but nobody cared and so that’s where they worked for, you know, I am sure less than a dollar a day. On my dad’s side, his family came from, came from, through Piedras Negras [city in Mexico across Eagle Pass,

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Texas], haven't determined where they were from, but my dad’s father was Casiano Castillo and his mother was Catalina Vargas Castillo.
Dr. Gutiérrez: When did they cross? Do you know?
Mr. Castillo: It was in the, it was, it had to have been in the 1910’s, ‘20s, between 1910 and 1920. They first went to San Antonio where my dad was born. San Antonio, Texas and he went to Lanier and the family then moved to Pennsylvania because there was work in the coal mines and I think my grandfather was in, in that line of work and for some reason, I guess, that was hard times anyway. They moved to Chicago because they could make more money there working in the caterpillar factory. And both my grandfather, Casiano, and my grandmother, Catalina, lived in Chicago during the, the Thirties or the Twenties. It was late Twenties when they lived in Chicago and they worked at the caterpillar factory. And finally when the Depression hit, well, it was 1928 or thereabouts, they had saved up enough money and they, they tell me they bought a, a Packard that was a city block long. They put everything in the Packard and my dad was an only child, so they packed up and came to Houston. They came to Houston because there was work here and, or they thought there was work here. And they landed in Second Ward of Houston and my grandfather got a job as an itinerant fruit peddler because nobody had any work and my dad was a, a struggling young man. Married my mother when my mother was fifteen and he got a job as a machinist and learned a trade and he stayed at the first job he ever got and worked there forty four years. He was number one on the time card when he, when he became the first employee. When he left the company, it was a multi-national

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company and his time card was still number one and he is living today and he’s eighty two years old.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Is your mom living?
Mr. Castillo: My mom passed away last year. She was seventy two. I have seventeen brothers and sisters.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Name them.
Mr. Castillo: Oh, that’s cruel.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Name them.
Mr. Castillo: Yeah, I, I have missed a few in naming them. But it’s, it’s myself, my brother Bill, my sister Concepcion, my sister Maria del Rosario, my brother Carlos, my, my sister Irene, my sister Rachel, my sister Maria Louisa, my brother Jim, my brother Richard, my brother Paul, my brother Michael, my brother Steve, my brother, I don’t know. Let’s see. Do I have seventeen yet?
Dr. Gutiérrez: I have no idea. I wasn’t counting.
Mr. Castillo: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen.
Dr. Gutiérrez: You are missing four.
Mr. Castillo: Four. I am missing four.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Has anybody passed away?
Mr. Castillo: My sister Rachel, but I have already counted her. Let’s see. My sister Anna, my sister, my brother Robert, my brother Joseph. That’s one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. And there was one child that was stillborn. That’s seventeen.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Wow. I, I am curious, not only for the size, but later when your mother probably made up for the only child grandfather?

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Mr. Castillo: Apparently that seems to be a, a compensation in nature that most single siblings seem to, seem to have large families. Everyone of my brothers and sisters with, have small families with the exception of my brother, my sister Maria del Rosario, who has ten children. Everybody
Dr. Gutiérrez: Are they all living in the Houston area?
Mr. Castillo: They all live, well no, they, they have kind of scattered after school. My sister Maria Louisa is, is a nun at St. Andrew’s Convent in San Antonio. My brother Mike, my brother Joseph lives in Victor, Victoria, lives in Corpus, works in Port Lavaca and my brother Frank, whom I forgot, so that’s, that’s another brother. My brother Frank works for Union Carbide and he lives in Victoria. But everybody else is here.
Dr. Gutiérrez: I am curious, you know, the girl’s names are in Espanol, the boy’s names are in English.
Mr. Castillo: Yeah.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Is that true on their birth certificates or was that just what you all called each other?
Mr. Castillo: Well, that’s what we, well like my name is John, but my, my birth name is Juan Felipe.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK. So, on your birth certificate it is Juan Felipe?
Mr. Castillo: Juan Felipe.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK.
Mr. Castillo: Everybody has a Spanish name....
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK. All right.
Mr. Castillo: ....in my family. But anyway, so we grew up, we grew up in a family that kept growing over the years, obviously. My dad worked real

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hard. He, his job was to work from five to five. My mom stayed at home and worked probably twice as hard as he did keeping up with all the, the kids. All of us went to high school, everybody that, that, that wanted to, had an opportunity to go to college. Five of us have. And some may still. About six of us have. I went, my brother Frank and my brother Mike, my sister, my sister Connie, my sister Maria Louisa, so that’s, that’s five.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK.
Mr. Castillo: And so it’s been, it was fun growing up because you always had something to beat up on. And you were always not bored. Life was fun coming up. We were dirt poor. I tell my kids, you know, that I, I never quite figured out how my, how my mom and my dad made it through the week from paycheck to paycheck, but sometimes it got so tight that my mother would borrow ten, ten dollars on Friday or Thursday night to, to feed us on Friday and my dad got paid on Friday afternoon and she would pay it back on Monday because she knew she had to borrow it the following Friday. And that’s the way it worked. It was a, I guess, deficit spending. I, I tell them the story that sometimes, like on Wednesdays, my mother would borrow a ham bone from the lady next door to make beans and then she had to give it back because the lady needed it to make beans herself. So, but there is a lot of truth in those stories, but we never missed a meal or missed a night at home or I felt that we never needed for anything. It was a happy house.
Dr. Gutiérrez: How big was your home?
Mr. Castillo: Well, the, our home basically was, was built by my dad and his compadres (godparents to his children) and it had one, two, three, it

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was six rooms. There was a, a living room that doubled up as a bedroom and every, every room doubled up as a bedroom after dark. But we, we, we had a lot of bunk beds, we had a lot of, of brothers and sisters that kind of inherited beds when the older ones got married and went off. But it was, there is an old joke that they always ask my dad how many kids he had and he always said, "“Cuantos hijos tienes Castillo?”" Tengo diez y seis.” "“Todos vivos?”" "“No, unos vivos y otros tontos, pero todos comen.”" (“How many kids you have, Castillo?” “I have sixteen.” “Are they all alive?” [but in this context the word “vivo” is taken by Mr. Castillo to mean smart.] “No, some are smart, some are dumb, but they all eat.”) But it, there was no problem. We, we seemed to get along real well. We, we acquired a lot of negotiating skills.
Dr. Gutiérrez: What number of child were you?
Mr. Castillo: I am number one.
Dr. Gutiérrez: You were number one? So, you had a lot of responsibilities, no, and who was the oldest female?
Mr. Castillo: My sister Connie.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Well, did you two play out the traditional roles that she was the surrogate mother and you were the surrogate father?
Mr. Castillo: Well, I think that, that all of us played that within, within, you know, a certain, a certain sphere like when my, when I and Bill and Connie and Rosie and Carlos were, were the only ones there, you know, we kind of took care of each other. We looked after each other and then when others, say the middle group, the next five, came on, then the top five kind of looked after the, the middle five and then when the last five came in, then the middle five took care of the, the last five.

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So, it was kind of like that. I think when the last five or seven were born, I wasn’t living at home anymore, so I really didn't have anything to do with it.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Did you marry or did you leave?
Mr. Castillo: No, I got, I got married and left. That's kind of like
Dr. Gutiérrez: When did you get married?
Mr. Castillo: I got married in 1962.
Dr. Gutiérrez: And who did you marry?
Mr. Castillo: I married a, a, my wife’s name was Irene Castillo.
Dr. Gutiérrez: She had Castillo on her own then?
Mr. Castillo: No, this is Irene Castillo. I have been married twice. My, my second wife is Mary Castillo who was Castillo already in her own right.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK. What was the, the maiden name of the first one?
Mr. Castillo: The maiden name of the first one was Sanchez.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK.
Mr. Castillo: Irene Sanchez.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Any children?
Mr. Castillo: Yes, we had two children. John, John and Patrick.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK. And where did Irene come from and her parents?
Mr. Castillo: Her parents, basically I knew very little about their background. They, her parents were divorced, but her, they, they lived in Waco, Texas and that’s where they were from. They just happened to be, when they split up, the mother and her children moved to Houston and her father stayed in, in, in Waco and of course Mary Castillo, Castillo was born in Victoria, Texas and all of that branch of the Castillos, unrelated, moved to Galveston and were raised in Galveston and her father was Seferino Castillo and her mother was Anita

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Castillo, Moreno Castillo. She was a Moreno from the Morenos in Roma, Texas. There’s a whole tribe of Morenos in the Valley and they are all related. And her father, Seferino Castillo, came from a family of ten from the Valley of Texas, mostly from, from Roma, McAllen, that, that whole area and of course, she has a sister, Anita Serrano, and a brother, Lionel Castillo, and a brother by the name of Seferino Castillo, so that rounds out Castillo Castillo.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Any children with Mary Castillo?
Mr. Castillo: No.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK. So, that’s basically the biography here of, of....
Mr. Castillo: Yeah, that’s, that’s who beget who.
Dr. Gutiérrez: All right.
Mr. Castillo: I'm, I'm, it’s kind of unfortunate that I haven’t had the, the forwithall or the, the, made the time to go back and try to trace back, you know, for my kids and their kids just how far back that family goes.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Well, again if your grandparents that crossed Piedras Negras, they were coal miners, chances are they are from that immediate area because that’s where there is coal mines. Down to Saltillo, Monterrey, Piedras Negras, that area.
Mr. Castillo: Right. Yeah.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Not much further than that. There is no coal that I know of. But anyway, it could have, he could have been a miner of silver and coal would be the big area.
Mr. Castillo: Yeah. But it’s just unknown, because, cause, you know, those stories were never told and were never recorded. But I remember my maternal grandmother, I mean pura indita (pure Indian), you know,

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decia que era india Chichimeca. (she said she was a Chichimecan Indian.) I don't know if that is a tribe or if she made it up.
Dr. Gutiérrez: It is, it is. No, it is one of the very famous big groups.
Mr. Castillo: And that’s what she said she was and if you see her picture, you know, you would see, you would see that, that, that stereotypical Indian face with all the, all the wrinkles and, and characteristics of, of an Indian face.
Dr. Gutiérrez: All right. Well, let’s talk about growing up in Houston. Your neighborhood, your relations with Blacks, with whites.
Mr. Castillo: Sure.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Subjects that you were interested in in school.
Mr. Castillo: Sure. Part of my growing up was, of course, that my dad worked real hard and, and made sure that we went to school obviously. I went to grade school at Our Lady of Guadalupe School and we went, I think all of us went to grade school at Our Lady of Guadalupe School and that’s where my mother...
Dr. Gutiérrez: Was this a private school? This a private?
Mr. Castillo: Yeah. It’s a private Catholic school in the Second Ward of Houston. That’s where my mother went to school. It was an old wooden building when she went to school. There was an upstairs, served as an auditorium and there was a downstairs that were the classrooms. The school was run by the Sisters of Divine Providence which is a, which is an order from San Antonio also from Our Lady of the Lake and she was fourteen when she married and so when, when I became of school age, I was six years old, she was only twenty. So, we kind of grew up together in every sense of the word. You know, we, she, she could have been a, an older sister, but I went to that old wooden

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school also while it was still there. Later on they built it out. That second building, the, the only, only the second building that that school has had is still standing and there is people, there’s students there. It is an active school. I never thought much about whether I was going to go to high school or go to college or anything like that, but in, in the process of going to school I got to like learning. My, my parents praised learning. They, they, they made you feel good when you knew things and so it was a motivation to keep going. We had a very tight knit family. My mother is a, my father’s mother and grandmother lived with us up until the time they passed away, which was in the early Fifties, so they, they, I guess, I lived with them for like almost twenty years. So, my first language was Spanish and I didn't learn English until I was in the second grade. Of course it caused, it caused me some problem because I had to do a lot of catching up, but my paternal grandmother, Paula Cruz was a very strict disciplinarian and her daughter, my dad’s mother was, they were also very nurturing, maternalistic family, and so they kind of ran the show. So, education was a big, was a big factor. But in the course of learning, I was able to, to go to St. Thomas High School which is a private school run by the Basilican Fathers here in, in Houston. And had a good education, good liberal arts education and from there I went to the University of Houston.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Let me stop you here. Were your brothers and sisters following the same track of going to Catholic school?
Mr. Castillo: My brothers went to Catholic school and I think by the time we got past the first five or the first six, it became quite expensive and my dad started putting, particularly because there was a, a string of boys

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that were born, so a lot of them went to public schools after that. They went either to San Jacinto High School which is a good school or they went to, some of them went to St. Pious, which is another private school, but, but not St. Thomas. But you know, school tuitions were, were steep, you know. They didn't come cheap. So, I know it took a lot of my parent’s income to, to put us through Catholic school.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Where was the family home?
Mr. Castillo: Well, we were raised in, in a home that, that’s where my dad still lives in a barrio called Bonita Gardens in, in Houston. It’s north, north of the city, north of downtown about eight and a half miles out off, off of Highway 59. But I was born in an area close to downtown, close to north of downtown in a barrio called El Alacran which was kind of like, I guess, comparable to San Antonio, Alazan area, but because it was, it was a, it was a barrio, it was a slum basically, and they call it El Alacran because they figured that’s the only thing that could survive there.
Dr. Gutiérrez: And these names survived as well?
Mr. Castillo: El Alacran yeah.
Dr. Gutiérrez: There are still areas like that?
Mr. Castillo: Well, El Alacran was, was, was upgraded. The government built a housing project on it and that housing project is still there. It’s called Clayton Homes.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK.
Mr. Castillo: But, but the streets of El Alacran are still out there. Clayton Homes took up only part of it. Then Highway 59 right of way took part of it,

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but there’s a piece of the original street layout of El Alacran is still there right now.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Yeah. When, when did you decide you were going to college and what did you want to study?
Mr. Castillo: Well you know, that’s interesting because in, in going to, to St. Thomas High School, my first surprise, pleasant surprise was the first semester that I was there, they called everybody up to give them a certificate of achievement and they were calling out names and I thought man, all these guys must be really smart because they are getting these certificates that had, you know, they probably print those for a nickel a piece, but it meant a whole lot because there was recognition’s. And they must not have been in alphabetical order or anything because I got the last one and I was so proud of that piece of paper because it was the first time that I recognized that I could compete with all these gringos on an, on an equal basis because I was the only Mexicano in, in that whole class. And it was something that kind of stayed with me and it kind of give me the, the, the confidence, you know, to take four years of Latin and take a lot of extra curricular academic courses that did me well in applying, you know, to, to go to college. And it wasn't until the, the end of the fourth semester or the fourth year of high school that everybody was making plans to go to college and people were going to Yale and Columbia and UT and, and I think man, where are these guys going and where am I going, you know, because here you got all these fine arts preparatory education and you don't, you don't, you know, you, you are packed and nowhere to go, you know. And I am thinking man, I didn't have any counseling. Nobody counseled me and of course, my parents

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didn't, didn't know anything about college or anything, but, but that’s when I realized that, that education and economics are, are part of the competitive process of this country in that, that people that, that have access to those two components, education and, and the economic resources, have an advantage over everybody else and it struck me that, that, that I didn't have it. So, the school, St. Thomas High School, gave me a, a, told me that I had a scholarship to St. Thomas University which maybe I should have taken, but, but I didn't. I decided that I wanted to go to, to a secular school, to a private school. And I did. Of course, I didn't have a lot, I didn't have any money, but at that time, the University of Houston was not a state school. It was a private school and you had to pay. It was, at that time, it was twenty dollars a semester hour, which was a lot of money because after you add the student fees and books and all that, annual cost of just the, the academics was about six to eight hundred dollars. So, you know, my dad paid the first, part of the first year and I applied for a scholarship from the IBEW and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers gave me a five hundred dollar scholarship which was almost all of the tuition and books for that first semester. And so that’s kind of like how I worked my way through school. I, I didn't finish in four years. It took me seven years because a lot of it was, was just taking, you know, five or six hours at a time because that was all I could afford to take.
Dr. Gutiérrez: How did you learn about this scholarship?
Mr. Castillo: Well, I learned about the scholarship because about that time my dad, at the place where he worked, became a union organizer. He teamed up with a, a guy by the name of Pancho Medrano in Dallas and

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Pancho was a representative of the United Auto Workers. So he convinced my dad to become a union organizer and try to put together a local unit of the United Auto Workers. And it took him about two years, but in those two years my dad organized Local 864, the United Auto Workers here in Houston. And it encompassed not only the company that he worked for, but a unit of Lufkin Trailer and Daniel Radiator and two or three other shops. And it was in that process that my dad found out about this scholarship opportunity. You had to write an essay on how important organized labor is to working men and women and I wrote, actually I, I remember and I found it one day in my papers, I found the essay that I wrote and it was on the, "“The Life and Accomplishments of Samuel Gompers,”" if that tells you anything. But that, that put me through school that first year and I think that, that transition from, from being sort of the odd man out at high school and, and trying to make that leap just so that you could land some place in, in the next, in the next phase of, of life was really important for me and if I hadn't made it by the skin of my teeth, you know, I don't know where I would be or what I would be doing. But it helped me although it took a long time. I kind of rambled around trying to find out what I wanted to do, didn't really have a lot of direction about, about what was out there, what were the jobs that were in demand, what was available, what was the right thing to do. So, it was just kind of like, like a free radical, you know, just going from one, from one end to the other. In any case, it became apparent to me that petroleum engineering, what I had, what I had wanted to do in the first was sort of unreachable because I didn't have the in-depth mathematical preparation even though I took all the math courses and

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did well in high school, I really didn't have a lot of, a lot of the original. I think I learned a lot by rote memory, by rote learning and I understood concepts, but I still didn’t have it well in hand, so I decided that what I wanted to do was tackle my weakness and so I majored in mathematics. So, I got a, I got a degree in mathematics with a minor in physics. [Interruption] Yeah. Yeah. Take it to her. But anyway...
Dr. Gutiérrez: Let me ask you about the, the, your dad organizing. Did you talk to him about what he was doing or because I imagine he did it after hours because he worked the shop and then he went and did this on his own? Did you go with him to meetings or....
Mr. Castillo: Yes.
Dr. Gutiérrez: ...help him?
Mr. Castillo: Sometimes we did. Sometimes we did and it was a, you know, when I went to school, we had to go home because we lived, we lived in, like I said about eight and a half miles from, from downtown and, and so we had our own transportation system. The bus service didn’t go that far and so when we were in high school, I didn't know how to drive, my brother Bill was the first one to learn how to drive, so my dad bought an old Suburban. I think it was an International Harvester that made the first Suburbans and so we’d get up, prior to that, we rode the bus. We had to catch the bus at a quarter to six to get to Guadalupe School and so we all caught the bus together. But after that, when he bought the Suburban, then my brother would do a route, you know, he would go drop, the little ones still went by bus, but all of us that went to high school, he had a route that he dropped us all off and then we went back too. So, we, we didn't have a lot of time

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where we could navigate by ourselves because, cause we were all tied to the transportation system, so when it was time to leave, it was time to go, go home. But a couple of times I went with him to meetings at Holiday Inn where there were meetings, strategies, stuff like that, but most of it was, was something that he did on his own. I remember a couple of times he came home con la camisa toda rompida. (with his shirt all torn.) Apparently they had a big old fight at the union meetings or something, so....
Dr. Gutiérrez: Was he organizing Mexicans or, or mixed groups or what, who was he organizing?
Mr. Castillo: Well, his job, his job, where he started was, was a pretty mixed bag. It was, it was a lot of, lot of Anglos that they were machinists or machine operators, almost no Blacks. But the Blacks that he did organize were Blacks that worked over at the Lufkin Trailer Company who were laborers and sweepers and a lot of them at the Daniel Radiator. A lot of them worked in a production line kind of thing. So, it was a, it was a little of everything. But that was the first hands on experience that I had with a, with a labor organizer and that was Pancho, you know. And Pancho stayed a friend for a, for a long time and of course, he is still a friend now, but at that time he, he seemed like God Almighty, you know. Tall and dark and muscular and powerful and so learned a lot from being around him in terms of working with people.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Did he come visit your family home and spend time there talking to you all?
Mr. Castillo: No. No, not really because he, he was, he must have been working in a lot of different places, you know, kind of concurrently or it was in

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for a day or two and then he was gone. But at that time, it was important for me, I guess he was a role model in a sense because he was this guy that I thought had the most powerful job that I knew of. As a matter of fact, when Lauro Cruz ran for state representative in 1965 or ‘65, I had just graduated that year from, from the University of Houston. And Pancho Medrano was a, was a factor in, in helping Lauro Cruz get elected to the first position of state representative held by a Mexicano in Harris County. And, so Pancho was a, was a, was a political mentor that, my first political mentor that, that, that I had. I remember at the University of Houston probably in, in, when I was classified as a junior, I happened to be walking down the halls because I had to spend a lot of time in the library. I didn’t have a library at home so I had to use the library. And there was a, it must have been like a Saturday morning and I passed down the hall and there were a bunch of, I could hear voices in a classroom and they were debating something that caught my ear. And I just happened to duck in and it happened to be a meeting of the Young Democrats at the University of Houston and they were having a big debate about U. S. Foreign Policy. They were talking about the Gulf of Tonkin and, and all these things that, to me, were obviously foreign in more ways than one, but in a just, it just amazed me that these Mexicanos had, which mostly is what they were, had the, had that kind of perspective to be talking about things international when I was just worried about how I would get home that afternoon. And I got to where I liked political science and my political science classes were, were, were enjoyable to me I had a professor by the name of Joseph Nogee, who I understand still teaches at the University of Houston main campus,

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pol, teaches political science, so I think there was a ferment going on. If you remember in 1963, ‘64, ‘65 those were the, the, the hippie years and the, the years of discontent. And, so there was discontent about the, the country’s policy on war and there was the War on Poverty itself, there was a lot of civil rights ferment going on and so it became a natural thing to become involved in voter registrations and so forth. One day in the early Sixties, in fact it was in ‘59, I got a call from Pancho Medrano and I was, had to have been ‘60, well in, no, in 1960 I got a call from Pedro Ortiz, who was a good friend of mine, who invited me to join the PASO group, Political Association of Spanish Speaking Organizations and they were just being organized because they were organizing for John Kennedy, as you remember. And so we went out and got involved, went to a couple of meetings, was very impressed with people like David Ortiz and, Al Mata, all of whom were also mentors on a more local basis.
Dr. Gutiérrez: They were not going under the name of Viva Kennedy Clubs? They were already PASO before the election?
Mr. Castillo: They were already, they were PASO. They were PASO then.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK.
Mr. Castillo: They were PASO then or maybe they were Viva Kennedy Clubs. Maybe I just inter, intermarried the two. But they were very, very active and I remember the first political sign I ever put up was a Johnson/Kennedy sign. On a Sunday morning David called me and they had gotten a call to come pick up some signs to go put up and that’s what we did. And I don't think I have quit putting up signs ever since. But that was sort of a, sort of a spiritual experience to me because here we were participating in a presidential election in a

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small way, as small as it was, but it was, it was an awakening that, that really kept me politically awake for all these many years. Later on when Pancho was in, in, involved in union organizing with my dad, I remember we, I got a call from Pancho one Sunday morning and I asked him where he was and he said, "“You wouldn’t believe where I am.”" I said, "“Well tell me where you are.”" Well, he happened to be in Santo Domingo and I asked him what the heck he was doing in Santo Domingo? He said, at that time, they were there to, to help elect a president. I think it was Bosch or somebody. I forget who it was, but I said, "“Well, I don't understand. What are you doing there?”" What apparently the United Auto Workers had been hired by the CIA to go help elect a president down there and that’s what they were doing. So, he wanted me to know because he was excited as hell because they had, they had parachuted them down overnight into the country to, to help in the elections. And I thought that was just so exciting.
Dr. Gutiérrez: In, in, at University of Houston, was that the name of it then?
Mr. Castillo: It was the University of Houston then. Yes.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Were you active in any clubs or any activities?
Mr. Castillo: No, at that time the University of Houston was, was a, was very, was very Anglo. There were Mexicanos, I am sure, but, but it was mostly a commuter’s school. You knew who, who were in your classes and that’s about all you knew unless you belonged to the fraternities or the, belonged to the professional groups like the architecture club or the, the science club and I just didn't have time or, or, or resources to be involved in that. I wish I had, but it was difficult enough just staying in school. But it was, it was an experience that, that, that

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really happened to teach me a lot because I, I had to earn my way through it and it wasn’t given to me. My dad and my family helped me, obviously, throughout this whole thing, but it was kind of like pay as you go.
Dr. Gutiérrez: When you were going to school, where were you working?
Mr. Castillo: Well, I was working at odd, odd jobs. I didn't have a steady job because the classes were during the day so it was mostly odd. I, I did a lot of work around the church as a matter of fact. The church was a big factor then. And most of the work was part time work. You know, sacking groceries or just odds and ends. It was nothing permanent. In 1963 I went to work for the Texas Highway Department which, that was in 1961 and I wanted to work for the Texas Highway Department. So that was kind of like the first steady part time job that I had and I worked for the, at the district office that was in the east end of Houston. It’s not there anymore, but I got to, to work in, in a lot of the freeways that, you know, I tell my kids, boy, I helped, I helped work on this freeway and, and I believe that....
Dr. Gutiérrez: How did you get that job?
Mr. Castillo: ....and they believe that and it’s true. I think the way I got that job, there was a, there was a, there is a student center at the University of Houston and they had, you know, they post up jobs. And they posted this one. And it happened to be close to the bus line and so I applied for it and I, I got it. And I started working in the soil’s mechanics lab where they do all the soil testing and I got to be good at that, then they let me do construction inspection. They gave me a little yellow truck, so I was high and mighty. In fact, it was, I was in a little yellow truck out in Baytown, Texas on Highway Loop 102 when the news flashed

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over that John Kennedy had been killed and I will always remember the exact spot where I was and what I was doing in 1963.
Dr. Gutiérrez: How did that affect you since you had been on a fervent supporter for, for Kennedy/Johnson?
Mr. Castillo: Well, I think that it was probably the most catastrophic and traumatic experience that, that, that I have ever felt short of my, when my mother passed away because you kind of, you kind of, it felt like, like now what do we do? I think the only other time that I felt somewhat as bad was when Richard Nixon won in 1968. I thought that was the end of the world.
Dr. Gutiérrez: All right. I am going to jump to Lauro Cruz but if there is anything in between there, please fill in the gaps. You, you, you....
Mr. Castillo: Well, I think there was a transition
Dr. Gutiérrez: ...were the first one from Houston. Was that a created district or how did, how did you win? The day of the poll tax still is there and you got to pay.
Mr. Castillo: Well, in 19..., in 1964, as you remember the civil rights act was passed and the, the legislature of the State of Texas kind of saw the handwriting on the wall that, that equal rights or that, that segregation was, was not going to be tangible anymore. And I don't remember all of the, all of the process, but as, as best I can remember the legislature in 1963 or maybe, it was ‘64. The legislature that met on or immediately after 1964, redistricted itself to where urban counties like Harris would have multi-member districts. Harris County had, I believe, five districts, but in each district you had three or more positions, so you ran for position. So, in the district that corresponded to northeast Houston or east and northeast Houston, you had five

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places where people ran and I remember that Lauro Cruz ran against a fellow by the name of Bill Rice and several other people. But everybody in the district could vote; everybody in that sector could vote; everybody in the area could vote. See what I am saying? So, even, even though you ran by place, everybody in the district had to vote for you. And the way Lauro won was that when that came about the, the AFL-CIO, PASO, which was in existence at that time, the Harris County Democrats, the Teamsters, and the Harris County Council of Organizations, which was the Black political group, came together in a coalition. And so they organized a coalition in which each of the five groups pledged their membership, their work, and their vote to the slate that they would put together. So Hispanics, since they could all vote in the district, Hispanics voted for, for the labor candidate, the Black candidate, the Harris County Council candidate, and the Harris County Democrat candidate, and the Teamster candidate. Incumbents, everybody voted for different parts of the coalition and that’s how it won.
Dr. Gutiérrez: So, is that when Graves
Mr. Castillo: That’s when Curtis Graves won.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Curtis Graves.
Mr. Castillo: Curtis Graves, Lauro Cruz, Barbara Jordan. There were, I don't remember the names, but these are all archived somewhere. But in any case, that was the first time that coalition politics were experienced by a lot of us.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Were you involved in that?
Mr. Castillo: And it worked. Yes.
Dr. Gutiérrez: What did you do there in that campaign?

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Mr. Castillo: In, in, in Lauro Cruz’s campaign, we put together the, the, the block, you know, the grass root work. These things were basically won at the most elemental level, door to door. There was no sophisticated mailing techniques. I know we did a lot of mailing. We, we organized a lot of people to take the voter registration lists and there were no computers so basically what we did was, was, was hand write most of the mailings that went out. We did a lot of phone banking, but of course, we had to do the telephone numbers out of the telephone book and a lot of it was passing out cards at the, at functions all throughout the district.
Dr. Gutiérrez: How about selling voter registrations? I mean, the day of the poll tax was, was there at that time.
Mr. Castillo: Yeah, yeah, we had to do, we had to do a lot of that. At that time, in 196..., I don't know what the 1960 census, I don't recall it basically, but I would think that in 1960, we may have had seventy eight thousand Hispanics in, in, in Houston and maybe twenty thousand in that district. It wasn't a lot of people and so the slate won because of the coalition. And the coalition is what carried the day. But yes, there was a lot of poll tax. We had voter registration drives and, and that was one of the things that, that we could do. In the Magnolia area, the, the Viva Kennedy Clubs or the PASO clubs with guys like Mr. Abel and Mr. George Garcia and all the old timers that worked in the Henry B. Gonzales campaigns.
Dr. Gutiérrez: I was going to ask you about that. Your father was involved with that or you were involved with that or do you remember it?
Mr. Castillo: I remember it vaguely, but my dad was involved as well as all these people that came together as Viva Kennedy Clubs later on. They

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were heavily involved in that. And I remember, I remember the campaign. I wasn't involved in it. I was still in high school, I believe. But it was very, very important in developing the capacity to, to do what we did in 1965 to elect Lauro. But a little bit before that in the, in the work that was done prior to that, in working with the, with the Young Democrats and working with the PASO group and working with the, once Lauro became the, the elected official, all of these people sort of gravitated together, all the pieces that had been working, not at odds, but working independently of each other, then became focused and so Lauro became sort of the, the seed that put together the, the whole political apparatus in Harris County. After that we did something that, that is again part of the history books. In, in 1965, in 1966 I believe, we, in the spring of 1966, in April or maybe May, we had a visit from a fellow by the name of Gene Nelson, Eugene Nelson, who came to tell us about all of the problems that they were having organizing farm workers in South Texas in the packing sheds and in the fields, the melon fields and the fact that the power structure down there was so fierce that people were literally being abused and jailed; and, otherwise denied their rights of, of assembly and petitioning the government and so we, I mean, we were greatly interested. We knew that he was a splinter off from the Cesar Chavez grape worker strike in California, but still this guy was doing a lot of good in Texas, in South Texas. So that, that Sunday, it was a Sunday, we thought it was very, very interesting, very interesting problem. So, we walked across the street. This, this meeting took place in our voter registration office on the corner of Seventy Sixth and Avenue L in Magnolia, across the street from Immaculate Heart

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of Mary Church. So I walked across the street because I had an idea and we brought the, the pastor over to sit in on the meeting for the last part of it. The pastor’s name was Antonio Gonzales, an Oblate priest. And so we decided that we were going to go pay a visit to, to the Valley, to Roma, to Pharr, to San Juan, to McAllen. And so we did. And, and we saw that the people there really were trying to organize but as long as it was all being done within their resources, it would never get anywhere because they had not only limited resources, but they didn’t have any leverage. And so we, we decided that bringing in some outside assets would probably help. So, we made several trips down there and together, working with their, with the leadership, we agreed to participate in the, in the Fourth of July March that they were having in 1966 from Roma, Texas to San Juan. So, the week before the Fourth of July we went down there and made preparations. And we had been going, we had been going there all along. And, so we took busloads of people with us to San Juan, I mean to, to Roma on that day, the weekend of the Fourth of July. And, so the, the, the farm workers who were there, their leaders, Antonio Orendain and all those people who were then in charge, began to march down Highway, I don't know, what is it? 101? No, it’s not 101.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Well, there is a stretch of 83.
Mr. Castillo: Yeah. Whatever it is, from, from Roma to San Juan and as it went along, of course people had nothing better to do, I suppose, they joined in and it was a good walk and of course the, the idea came in doing that walk that not only would we take people from outside the area, but that we would invite a Presbyterian or a Protestant minister to, to help Father Gonzales so it would be Protestants, Catholics, and,

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and there was a, a preacher there from the Texas Council of Churches and I don't remember his name.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Krueger?
Mr. Castillo: Krueger. Exactly.
Dr. Gutiérrez: And Novarro was the Protestant minister from here also?
Mr. Castillo: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Gutiérrez: James Novarro?
Mr. Castillo: James Novarro.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Now who were these other people? You said we took a bus load. Do you remember who else when with you?
Mr. Castillo: Oh yeah. I, I don't remember them, but there is a picture of the bus in, there was a book that was published by Tom Kreneck, subsidized, it’s in the library, subsidized by the, by the, by Southwestern Bell, and there is a picture of the bus in that picture and it shows all the people. It was Irene Castillo, my first wife, David Ortiz and his wife Dolly, Al Mata, Al Vasquez, just a bunch,...
Dr. Gutiérrez: Did Lauro Cruz go?
Mr. Castillo: Lauro was there. Yeah. And so strategizing all along, we thought well hell, what do we do when we get to San Juan? I mean, it kind of sputtered. And, and it was a bold idea to turn it around and just head north. I mean, what else could you lose? These people had nothing to do. And so we, we plotted to take that thing from San Juan and head out north to Kingsville, to Corpus, to all the little towns, Sinton, all the way to Floresville, to San Antonio, to New Braunfels and as it built up, one of the things that we thought, and we were still thinking this thing will never work if it depends on local resources. So, we made trips to Austin to talk to the students at the University of Texas

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and, and Lauro was, was doing most of the talking because he knew them all and Dr. George I. Sanchez and organized the students to take bus loads of students from UT and Austin to the Valley on the different weekends, wherever the march was and took students from St. Mary's and took students from, from here, University of Houston. And so this was providing the fuel to keep the thing going and part of the deal was that as these people walked, they needed shoes, they needed food, they needed medicines, they needed lodging. So, the other resource that we, that we brought in was the Catholic Church. We said the only common denominator along the route and among the people is the Catholic Church, so we visited with the Bishop, the Archbishop of Brownsville and, and I forget his name now, but it’s on the records. These records are in the Houston Public Library in the Castillo archives that Tom Kreneck put together. We got a, a letter from the Archbishop of San Ant..., of, of Brownsville to all his churches in his diocese to, to help feed and to house the, the farm workers march. And so every place that they went, the Church halls were open and there was food and there was places to stay and the same thing happened in San Antonio, I mean, in the, the dio..., I mean, the Archdiocese of Corpus Christi or the Diocese of Corpus Christi, and, of course, the Diocese of, of San Antonio. So, by the time it got to Corpus, it, it was a major cause. And, and by then the, the national labor groups, the UAW, the, the government employees, almost every national union by then recognized that this thing had momentum, so they participated by providing money and man power and organizational talent to these marchers. And I remember when we got to Corpus and we had this big rally in this field where the,

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where the Corpus Christi Buccaneers used to play ball. The first guy I met was Carlos Truan, who was an insurance salesman then for Metropolitan. I think he still sells insurance. But that was the first acquaintance I had in Corpus. And when we got to, to New Braunfels Governor Connally had send out a message to the Texas Rangers that nobody in that march would be allowed to enter the city limits of Austin, Texas. So, nobody gave a damn. So, they just kept walking. So, when they got to the city limits of, of Austin, Texas coming in from New Braunfels, they send out Wagonner Carr, John Connally, and the Speaker of the House, ..
Dr. Gutiérrez: Ben Barnes?
Mr. Castillo: Ben Barnes, that’s who that was.
Dr. Gutiérrez: But didn’t that meeting take place in San, San, New Braunfels?
Mr. Castillo: Yeah. Somewhere in there. I don't remember exactly where it was because that was, that was during the week and we weren't there during the week and, and you have seen this picture where Father Gonzales is holding up the Cross and these guys are going like this and everyone of those guys got his comeuppance. You know, it was like a major curse had been placed on them. But then the, it never struck us that when we got to, to, to, to Austin, as you remember that march with Congress Avenue all the way from probably Ben White was solid people all the way to the Capitol. But one of the things that happened was that we didn't realize that that was not a legislative year. The legislature didn't convene until the next January, so we said, "“Now what do we do?”" So, the idea then was that we would propose a vigil and there is four entrances, as you know, to the capitol, so we decided among, again the people that, that were

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marched all the way from the beginning, that we would have three shifts of two people at each entrance until the legislature convened and we had to have a cause. And of course, the cause was that we wanted a dollar twenty five minimum wage. And, so we figured how many people would visit the Capitol between July the Fourth or Labor Day when we got to Austin and the day that the legislature met and it was thousands and thousands of people. And so the, the vigil was put, was put up and people stayed and of course, when the legislature met, they did vote in a dollar twenty five minimum wage.
Dr. Gutiérrez: You say we, but, but actually who, who is really day to day working all these details out? Was it Lauro Cruz or was it Gene Nelson, was it John Castillo or who, who was actually doing all this?
Mr. Castillo: The day, the day to day trek to trek was, was Father Gonzales, James Novarro, David Ortiz, who stayed on that march. I think the AFL-CIO put him on the payroll. And, so what we did, we provided the, the, the resources because every, every day almost or every other day, we would get a list of things that they needed and where they would, we knew the, we knew the path, we knew the flight plan, so we had to provide. And some of these lists are available in, in those files. But you know, lady’s clothes, men’s clothes, men’s shoes, and, and I and the Harris County PASO group provided most of the material to keep the thing going in terms of the basic elements of Gonzales, Novarro, Ortiz, and, and, and the strategy. I guess by the time it got to Floresville, it had it’s own momentum and by then the international unions were pretty well coordinating the thing, but...
Dr. Gutiérrez: Where were you working at this time?

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Mr. Castillo: I was working for the Highway Department, so I had, I had access to phones and trucks and a lot of stuff. Copying machines. Yeah.
Dr. Gutiérrez: All right. Well, after that struggle and issue, what was the next big event?
Mr. Castillo: Well, the next big event was that, that, that, let me back up a little bit. When the march was in Flores...., on it’s way to Floresville, the, I think it was the San Antonio whatever, Express, they sent, they sent a reporter to the, to the march to find out, you know, just what they wanted. What was this all about, you know? And their slant was that there was this communist inspired march and I remember that day somewhere between Corpus and Floresville, the march had acquired a burro and they named the burro Dollar Twenty Five. And that day Novarro was there and Father Gonzales was there and Erasmo Andrade was there and somebody else was there. And I think and I can’t remember who it was, but the newspaper came up and they said, "“Well, you know, they tell us that you all are communists. And what do ya’ll have to say about that?”" And Father Gonzales said, "“Well, first of all I am a Catholic priest. And, and Catholics, Catholicism and Communism just don't work together. So I can’t be the Communist. And my brother here, James Novarro, he’s a Protestant minister. Communists are Atheists. So he can’t be,”" you know, "“a communist.”" Erasmo is a nice Catholic young man. He can’t be a communist. This damn burro must be the communist!” you know. So, it, some, I remember seeing that, that quote in the paper, but it was a fun time. But I think the legacy of that, of that march and, and what it did is not so much that it got done, because obviously it got done and it had a lot of more fathers than, than, than, you know, than were probably

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necessary. But the legacy of it is that it inspired people and it motivated people to do voter registrations and motivated people to organize and run for office and it motivated people to speak up and not be afraid to, to, to say what they, what they felt.
Dr. Gutiérrez: But it also exposed the Texas Rangers for what they were.
Mr. Castillo: They did. It did that too. And I think that the movimeinto (movement) in, in Crystal was, was a part of that awakening that people weren’t going to take it anymore.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Now which one? The ‘63 or the ‘69?
Mr. Castillo: The ‘69.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Because PASO was involved in the ‘63 event and ....
Mr. Castillo: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Gutiérrez: do you recall that at all?
Mr. Castillo: Yes, I do. I remember and I, I didn't go because it was so far away, but I remember that. But I remember that we also went to Del Rio when they had that, that difficulty. And I don't remember whether it was the school board or, or a city council controversy that, that there was nobody on the city council or nobody on the school board that were Mexicanos. But it, it had a lot of spin-offs that, that, that, that were self sustaining where they were. So, and I think that, that when all is said and done, that, that, that was probably the, the, one of the water shed events in, in Hispanic political organizing. But a lot of people came out of that. Carlos Truan ran for senate. Lauro Cruz ran for senate and lost, but other people followed him. And too many people that I don't know probably were affected and inspired by what happened.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Who followed Lauro Cruz?

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Mr. Castillo: When Lauro Cruz ran for the senate, Ben Reyes ran for the state representative. I ran his position, I ran his race in 1971. In 1971. Ben came back from Viet Nam in 1968. He was, he was nineteen. He was full of rage, full of, of rage, I guess is the word. And so we put him doing voter registration for Ralph Yarborough’s congressional race.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Who is we at this point?
Mr. Castillo: PASO.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK.
Mr. Castillo: PASO. PASO I, PASO you know. I was chairman of PASO at that time I believe. But in any case, I have always been involved in this, but I ran Ben’s campaign, got him to file after that. And I remember Ben asking, first of all he didn't know what a state representative was, and then when I told him, he said, "“Do you think I can do it?”" And I said, "“I think you are supremely qualified to do it.”" "“Well, how do I do it?”" And so I explained to him the primary process and how you run a campaign. And even on the last day before the filing deadline, about a couple of hours before the filing deadline, he said, "“I don't know if I want to do this.”" And I said, "“I will come pick you up and take you.”" So, we did. We picked him up and took him to file.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Why didn't you run?
Mr. Castillo: And he filed. Why didn't I run? I don't know. I think I was having more fun putting it together than, that I could do more things by putting together things than, than being tied down to one position. And so Ben ran and won in 1971. He became the youngest state legislator at twenty one years of age.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Where is Lionel Castillo at this point in time?

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Mr. Castillo: Lionel Castillo, in 1969, had just gotten back from the University of Pennsylvania where he had gotten his degree in community organization. And at that time, Brown versus Board of Education had, had been decided and so the Houston Independent School District was under court order to desegregate. And so the response from the Houston Independent School District was that it paired Blacks and Hispanics together and called it desegregation. And so they kept their white schools. So, that didn't set too well with the Hispanic community, with PASO, with the leadership at that time, and so what Hispanics did, they called a general boycott. There was a severe demonstration at the HISD board meeting. At that time, the Raza Unida was, ‘69, in it’s heyday and so they pulled, they pulled an act up. Act, you know. And they provided a lot of momentum to make people decide that, you know, we are not going to buy this. And so parents called a general boycott of the Houston Independent School District and started pulling their kids out of the schools. Of course, that, that hurt their ADA [average daily attendance] revenues. So what PASO did, we put together a group called the Mexican American Education Council and Lionel became the executive director of it and what Lionel did, he recruited a lot of teachers who were qualified as teachers to hold home school classes in churches and in buildings and so we pulled out, I would think about ten thousand kids, out of HISD and held them out for over a year. When finally HISD relented and agreed to, to undo and really do, do segregation by, by, at that time they did a lot of bussing, but they also opened up all, all white schools to, to other races. And so the Mexican American Education Council is where Lionel cut his teeth in

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Houston. And, so in 1970 he ran for city controller for the city of Houston and won. And then Ben Reyes won in 1971. And, so at that point, we had two Hispanics sitting in the highest elected offices in, in the city.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Who organized Lionel Castillo’s race in ‘70?
Mr. Castillo: I did.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Well, why didn't you run for that one?
Mr. Castillo: Well, because it was more fun to put things together than to be ....
Dr. Gutiérrez: Now, back then we, the poll tax is out of the way, you have got it wide open now, you’ve got success, you’ve got...
Mr. Castillo: Yeah.
Dr. Gutiérrez: ....some patronage from Lauro Cruz and some others...
Mr. Castillo: Yeah.
Dr. Gutiérrez: ...in the beginning, but how did you put that campaign together? What did you all do; how did you win?
Mr. Castillo: Well, the win was sort of by, by, by a lot of factors. One of the factors was that the, the incumbent, a fellow by the name of Roy Oaks, who had to have been like sixty eight years old, had had a major stroke and so Lionel knew that and so he organized his campaign around the fact that, that, that here was a young person who had some, obviously some community organization skills to win. He got the attention of some of the, a few of the liberal elements in the community, Harris Democrats, the old coalition, as a matter of fact. Harris County Council of Organization, the Teamsters, Harris County Democrats, AFL-CIO, and PASO, and so, and now the Mexican American Education Council and so when Lionel ran, it was at the height of this "“we won this”" desegregation thing. But the, the health

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of the incumbent was a big factor. The weekend before the, the race, the race is on, election is on a Tuesday, they had a news conference in which the incumbent was, had a press conference, and the man had had a stroke. He couldn't speak. He had two people holding him up by the elbows and that was the, the killer deal and Lionel won sixty five, thirty five or something like that. And it was the first city wide race won by a, a Hispanic.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Now, when you say we won the desegregation fight, what did you mean; what happened?
Mr. Castillo: The, the school district had to open up the schools to, to true desegregation, not pairing Hispanics and Blacks. And the, the Hispanic community went to court, I believe, and, and had a court order ordering true desegregation, not just Hispanics and, and, and, and Blacks.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Did Lionel’s election to the city open up new opportunities?
Mr. Castillo: Yeah.
Dr. Gutiérrez: If so, which ones? What, what happened?
Mr. Castillo: When Lionel came into office, there was a young man going to school at Texas Southern University by the name of Frumencio Reyes and Lionel hired him as an intern. One of the things that Frumencio Reyes did was that he analyzed all the large land parcels in the city to see if they were paying their fair share of the taxes and they discovered that the River Oaks Country Club was paying no taxes because it was, it was classified as agricultural land and so they did a lot of that. And so it was sort of a, of a, of a political reform time in Houston and Louie Welch was the mayor then and he didn't like that worth a, a damn. But what, what Lionel’s position at city council or

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at city hall did was it had opened up a lot of opportunities to let the air in and let public scrutiny in to the operations of the city. And so you had Lionel hiring Frumencio and then Lionel hired a lot of Latinos in the controller’s office who then began to look at how contracts are let. The controller has the power to stop a contract, not because he has a vote on it, but because he has to certify that the funds are available to enter into this contract. So, that by withholding a signature he could stop a contract. So, when he asked for things to be reconsidered, a lot of times they did. And so a lot of that, a lot of what he did was, was indirect, but it had a very direct benefit to a lot of people and a lot of companies in, in this town.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Who were some of the other bright people he picked up?
Mr. Castillo: He brought in, in, and you know, unprepared as I am, but a lot of the, a lot of the people who came in were young people like Richard Vara, who in 1974, thereabouts. For example, were volunteers who came to intern in the office and, and got an exposure to government. But Richard Vara, for example, we sent him to go watch over at the Harris County Democratic party office one election season to see if, who was filing for what. And so we called him about an hour before the deadline and we said, "“Well, is everybody filed?”" He said, "“Well, everybody is filed except there is a position here for Justice of the Peace in Precinct 6. Nobody has filed for it.”" And we said, "“Well Richard, how much does it take to file?”" He said, "“Well, I asked and it’s fifty bucks.”" So, we said, "“Well wait about forty five minutes and then go file.”" And he said, "“I don't have fifty bucks.”" So, I said, "“Well look around and find some friends and get you fifty bucks.”" To make a long story short, Richard Vara waited until five minutes

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before the filing deadline, put down his fifty dollars, got elected, unopposed, the first time around to Justice of the Peace position and has run unopposed until the last time.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Which is what year?
Mr. Castillo: Two years ago. ‘90, ‘92. Four years ago. Richard Vara got elected Justice of the Peace because nobody else filed.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Were you all involved in party politics during all this time? Or what is your first recollection that you got involved in Democratic party politics? Precinct conventions, delegates, state conventions.
Mr. Castillo: Party politics were, were, were, you know, we participated. We went to the, to the, let me back up. When Lauro Cruz ran in 1965, there may have been three Hispanic precinct judges in Harris County. One was Frank Partida in Precinct 65, Precinct 64. One was, I am tempted to say Al Mata in Precinct 75 and maybe one other one just by guesstimate. But I wouldn't know who that was. So, there weren't any Hispanic precinct judges. And so we had no leverage in the Harris County Democratic Executive Committee because as you know policies are made by the Executive Committee members and if you don't have any precinct judges, you don’t have any leverage. And so we went to conventions and consistently got overwhelmed basically by, by, even by the Harris County Democrats who were our friends in the coalition, but wouldn't let us participate in the power, wouldn't share in the power when it came to countywide politics. And, so the Billie Carr’s ran us out as many times as the other guys ran us out of conventions. They would get run out by, by the conservative conservatives and we could, we would get run out. You know what they say? It rolls downhill. And, so we were at the

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downhill end, so we always got runned over. But in, I am tempted to say that it was in 1978 or so, Ben was still a, was still a state representative, maybe it was ‘76. It was ‘76 because it was the year that Jimmy Carter got nominated, elected. We went to the, to the state Democratic Executive, we went to the Democratic party convention. It was in Austin, Texas and by that time we had already picked up maybe ten Hispanic precinct judges. Mr. George Hernandez in Precinct 9, Alice Aguirre in Precinct 10, Olga Gallegos in Precinct 65. We had ten people. David Ortiz in Precinct 107, Al Mata in 75, so there were still a, a handful of Latino precinct judges. But enough to where we now knew about precinct conventions, to where we participated and got to be elected delegates to the ‘75 convention, I guess it was, because the conventions are in even numbered years, so it was the ‘76 convention, I suppose. Is it? Yeah, ‘76 convention. And so we decided that we had enough and so we challenged Calvin Guest for the state Democratic chair and Lionel Castillo challenged, was the challenger. And what we did, again this is PASO, our group, our little group, Rick Hernandez was here. He, he had come along pretty good. We had people like Marc Campos, we had a lot of young Turks back then and so we laid out a game plan. We would go to the Democratic convention and take it over. I mean, we were, we were going to become the chair. And so we took a bus, we took several buses, but we took like mobile homes and one of them was our command center. And we had about twenty people who were going to go to the convention. Some were delegates, but some were not delegates. We didn't have enough delegates, but we knew that there were delegates from San Antonio and the Valley and

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West Texas. We didn't have any. You got to remember that even in 1970 Houston only had a hundred and seventy eight thousand Mexicanos, men, women, and children, probably half of those were of voting age and probably half of those were registered to vote and half of those probably voted and became eligible to be delegates, so it was very, very small leverage. But we went to Austin, Texas and what we did was that we, we learned the, from Rick, because Rick was working close to the Democratic party in Austin. Somehow he got connected, we got him connected, he got connected to the Carter campaign and so we knew the, the floor plans, we knew the agendas, we knew exactly how it was going to run. You know, when you go to state conventions, you do a lot of waiting and you wonder what are we waiting for? Well, what you are waiting for is that all the deals are being cut in the back rooms in the different committees. You know, who is going to be the delegate, who’s going to be the member of this committee and that committee, and you are just thinking well, they forget that we are here. But this time we knew the agenda, we knew where everybody was meeting, we knew the floor plan, we knew the entrances and the exits, and then we found a very good printer in Austin, Texas who printed us fake badges. Delegates, press, staff, and we, we invaded the convention. We had, we had command central. We had radios, we had the central dispatch, you know, central radio in, in the vans, and so we knew where everybody was; we knew what delegation was meeting where; and so we were getting pledges from Lionel all over the caucuses that afternoon on a Friday until somebody in the convention se dio trucha (picked up on this) and they got the DPS to challenge everybody that was on the

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floor that had a radio. But by that time, we had already covered everybody.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Now the DPS, Department of Public Safety?
Mr. Castillo: Yeah, yeah. The Texas Rangers basically. Yeah. And so they didn't get all of us, but they got a lot, a lot of our folks.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Well, that had to be Dolph Briscoe, no?
Mr. Castillo: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was Dolph Briscoe, yeah. And so what happened was that by that time it was very iffy that Calvin Guest was going to get any Mexicano votes for chair and, and if you will remember, that was at a time when, you know, Dolph Briscoe being a very conservative Democrat was, was not exactly, although he later on turned out to be a nice guy, he wasn’t very friendly then because we were talking about sharing power. And as it turned out, Calvin Guess and the, and the party apparatus created the position of state party treasurer at that convention and unanimously elected Lionel Castillo to be the treasurer of the Democratic party.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Now, do you think things would have turned out different if you all had organized and pre-planned this and contacted the delegates earlier or was the whole strategy to hit them without their knowing?
Mr. Castillo: Hit them without them knowing because the word would have gotten back. Because you got to remember that the people that planned the conventions are usually the people that are, that are the in crowd and they probably had allegiances to Calvin Guess and Dolph Briscoe and all that, whereas, whereas the delegates that go to the convention, they don't know the movidas (tricks), you know. They just are manipulated, so the, the game plan was not for us to manipulate them,

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but for us to have access to them without having to go to intermediaries.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Now at the same time the Raza Unida party is now a political party.
Mr. Castillo: Yes.
Dr. Gutiérrez: And they are challenging and there are candidates are running here against some of the people that, that are in office or, or wanting to be in office. What do you remember about that and, and within your group of, of, I guess, the, the Castillo apparatus here, what were your views about this group and their issues and what they were doing?
Mr. Castillo: Well you know, unfortunately we, we didn't have a lot of, a lot of, I would say direct or first hand information. It was all by hearsay, you know, what the newspapers said about Raza Unida party, what news. We were, we were, I think we, in many instances, fell victims to the same misinformation that, that, that we claimed we were victims of, you know. In other words, if the, if the newspapers said well, the Raza Unida people are a bunch of communists, you know, the newspaper said it, you know. Gotta be some truth to it. And so, you know, and maybe a lot of it had to deal with the fact that we had been, I say we, let’s say the people that had been working in politics in Harris County, had been working on this, on this trajectory that was too far along to switch trajectories and, and switch to a third party. So, we had to win within the, the, the trajectory that we had chosen. And, so when, for example, Ben Reyes ran in 1971, Maria Jimenez ran against him. And she was a member of the Raza Unida party, as I remember. And several other people ran, but unfortunately, there were, there were, there were not enough people trained in political organizing at that time. You know, right now there are more chiefs

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than there are Indians, but at that time there was a lack of chiefs and a lack of Indians. And, and so there was, it was not, they were not very well defined Raza Unida campaigns, you know.
Dr. Gutiérrez: As an idea of, of challenging the Democratic party, which is exactly what, what you all were doing,
Mr. Castillo: Yeah,
Dr. Gutiérrez: uh,...
Mr. Castillo: But we were doing it within the party because we felt like, like that was, like I say, the trajectory that we had followed and, and basically that’s what we were, were married to, you know. And there wasn’t anybody marrying into us other than that's the path that we had chosen. We didn't beat Calvin Guest, but we began to get concessions that basically became recognized as a political force at conventions and in fact, in 1976, so I must be talking about the convention before in ‘74, that’s what it was. In ‘74 because in ‘76 when Jimmy Carter ran, that’s why Rick Hernandez became a factor in Jimmy Carter’s campaign, because of the reputation that we had earned as a group in ‘74. Because in ‘76 from the experience that we had in ‘74, we learned that indeed there is a lot of lack of information among the delegates to a convention and they wait and they are just cannon fodder, so what we decided to do in ‘76 was to actually organize them, get a list from the party, because now you remember Lionel is the treasurer of the party, so we can get lists of the delegates and we can communicate directly with the delegates and we can set up caucuses within the delegates. And we called that first caucus the Mexican American Democratic Caucus. And the MAD caucus became a recognized caucus of the party just like the labor caucus and

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the women’s caucus and we got designation of, of so many at large seats in the national conventions and to the different committees of the convention. And so ‘74 was kind of like the year that, that, that Democrats at convention, Hispanic Democrats made a statement. In, in ‘76 is when you began to reap the benefits of that recognition.
Dr. Gutiérrez: What were the delegates and the power brokers that are coming from the Valley or San Antonio or El Paso or Corpus saying about all of this? Are they joining you or were they committed to other agendas?
Mr. Castillo: They, they at first, they at first had been, I think it was convenient to both because I think that at that time, the like Leo J. Leo in La Joya and the, even then the Callejo’s in Dallas and the, the, the people in San Antonio had been working, trying to work with the party and get concessions from a position, from an inferior position with no, with no real leverage. Of course, they had leverages because they had a lot of, a lot of voters, but still that didn't really get you anywhere because they were going to get those voters around you or behind your back and so you really were at, whatever they gave you was by their grace. But by organizing delegates, now you were negotiating from a position of power and so they liked that. The power brokers liked that. They liked that.
Dr. Gutiérrez: All right. Well, what was the conscious decision made to form Mexican American Democrats, not now in the party structure, but as a vehicle to try to stop the erosion of voters and allegiances going away from the Democrats to the Raza Unida group?
Mr. Castillo: Well, in 19..., in 1976, when the first MAD convention, statewide convention was held at the, at the party convention, the, prior to that, between ‘74 and ‘76, we had met Gonzalo Barrientos, Moya, myself,

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Joe Bernal, Bambi Cardenas, all those people to craft a constitution for the organization and lay some plans and, and lay some strategies and so you know, that’s what made it pay off in ‘76.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Who’s idea was that to begin with?
Mr. Castillo: The caucus or MAD?
Dr. Gutiérrez: MAD.
Mr. Castillo: The MAD Caucus?
Dr. Gutiérrez: Well, as an organization.
Mr. Castillo: As an organization, it, it was basically, the people that were meeting on it were, were Gonzalo, myself, Moya, Bernal, Matt,
Dr. Gutiérrez: Garcia?
Mr. Castillo: Matt Garcia, those people.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Was Rick Hernandez and Marc Campos and them involved?
Mr. Castillo: Rick, Rich, yeah, Rick Hernandez is involved because now he’s, he’s, he’s gotten to be the, the, he worked for me at a group called Opportunities Industrialization Centers and so that was how he had the time to do all this, so it’s, it’s all together basically.
Dr. Gutiérrez: What’s Marc Campos doing at this time?
Mr. Castillo: Well, Marc and I don't remember the exact year, but Marc at the time of, of when the legislature met in ‘71, ‘73, and ‘75, Marc was, was one of the, one of the worker bees, I guess, in, in the local politics, like we all were.
Dr. Gutiérrez: What’s Ben Reyes doing at this time?
Mr. Castillo: Ben’s in the legislature in ‘71 and so he’s part of this, but, but Ben was not a, a, an elected, was not a party, he’s a party official by virtue of his office, but he was not into the, the mechanics of, he

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participated, but he wasn’t in the, in the, the day to day work of putting this together.
Dr. Gutiérrez: What has happened to Lauro Cruz by now?
Mr. Castillo: Lauro Cruz went to work for the governor’s office, went to work for Dolph Briscoe, as you remember. And, and so Marc, we didn't have time to, to, to attend these legislatures, you know, when they were in session, so the group got together and they asked Marc to go monitor, he was our lobbyist, to go monitor the legislature.
Dr. Gutiérrez: And who is we?
Mr. Castillo: This is again the PASO group. This is the Al Vasquezes, David Ortiz, Lionel Castillo, myself, Memo Villarreal, just the guys from the, from, from the political structure in this, in this city.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Did you all have another name because PASO is no longer viable by, by the Seventies? That, that's already over with a long time before that.
Mr. Castillo: We were still meeting. We were still meeting up until about ‘77. ‘78 was the last time.
Dr. Gutiérrez: As PASO?
Mr. Castillo: Yeah. In 1978 we had a dinner for, for Senator Kennedy here as the last PASO event we had. Yeah. In fact, I just put up the files for it the other day. I was cleaning, I rebuilt my little office at home and I had these files going back to ‘71 on events that we did and I noticed that the last checkbook that I had for PASO was in ‘78.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK.
Mr. Castillo: Anyway, so Marc went to monitor the legislature and, and so he, he became sort of the expert and, and he got his own momentum going so he becomes a player over the years in political consulting. When

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Marc White got elected governor, Marc White hired him as a, as an executive assistant and so that, that was Marc’s. Marc’s contribution is that he was our eyes and ears in the legislature during the Seventies.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Well you, you have been quite analytical about what went on at the state conventions. Did you ever participate in national conventions, this Houston PASO group?
Mr. Castillo: Well, I think that some of us have been in national conventions in the, probably in the Jimmy Carter campaign was the first conventions that most of us went to as a, as part of the efforts of the group. I am sure that other people over the years have been to conventions, but in the, for example in ‘76, I was a delegate to the, or was it ‘78? I was in, it was in ‘76. I was, I was a delegate, I was a member of the nominations committee at the national convention and so Frumencio Reyes was a delegate and my wife was a delegate, so we had people being delegates at national conventions.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Now, you are married to Mary Castillo by now?
Mr. Castillo: Yes. ‘64.
Dr. Gutiérrez: When did you divorce Irene?
Mr. Castillo: ‘60, ‘60, I am sorry. ‘68.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK.
Mr. Castillo: ‘68. So you know, over the years we have been participating. Like when, when there is no incumbent, we have, from my office, three people are delegates to the national convention in Chicago.
Dr. Gutiérrez: This time around?
Mr. Castillo: Yeah. This time around. Just, they learned.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Well, no somebody gets the, the tickets, the vouchers, the slots.

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Mr. Castillo: No. They, they learn. And so we, we, we, we have been successful in that. But there was an, an unpleasantness that happened within MAD as you know. And so now the, the, the designated group is Tejano Democrats and this last convention in, in, in May was the, or June, whenever it was, in June, was the, the first time that they gained recognition as the designated Hispanic caucus because of the problems in transitioning from one MAD chairman to the next.
Dr. Gutiérrez: You know, there has been fighting in MAD before between leaders.
Mr. Castillo: Yeah.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Why do you think this one is fundamental and why do you think it led to formation of a new group?
Mr. Castillo: Well, I think there was a, from my understanding of it, is that there was a, a basic reluctance to, to give up the presidency or the chairmanship of MAD when the constitution called for a succession and it was just that. Plain and simple. I ain’t giving it up. Went to court. I ain’t giving it up. Court ordered it, ordered the succession and the transfer of assets. Didn't happen. And you come to a point where you don't any choice. And so you look at the, at the leadership makeup of Tejano Democrats and you basically have all the apparatus from the prior MAD just shifted over to Tejano Democrats. The Bernal, Callejo, Bambi Cardenas, and Leo J. Leo’s, and Kennard’s from El Paso, you name it, they are all over here now. And so that’s why it has the recognition.
Dr. Gutiérrez: There were women involved in party politics about this same time. the Judy Zaffirini’s, the Alica Chacon’s.
Mr. Castillo: Yes, yes. Exactly.

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Dr. Gutiérrez: How did you all relate to, to them or women in politics? It looks like the Houston group is all men, no women, whatever?
Mr. Castillo: There’s women. There’s women. The, the, let me give you the, the, the, you got to understand the context of, of Hispanic politics in Harris County or Houston. And you know, these can be checked, but I would suspect that in 1970, there were maybe a hundred and seventy eight thousand Hispanics in Houston, Texas. Men, women, and children. In 1980, there were maybe two hundred and ninety eight thousand men, women, and children in Houston, Texas. In 1990, there is four hundred and twenty four thousand Hispanic men, women, and children. So, we have grown exponentially in population, but going back to the Seventies, which was the formative years of, of the political machinery, there were not enough people. You know, you are talking about basically a hundred and seventy eight thousand people in, in, in the area. If you divide that by two, it gives you eighty nine thousand people of, of voting age. And then you look at maybe half of those being registered to vote at best, so you are talking about what? Forty thousand and, and that’s citywide and maybe ten thousand participating in the actual process. So it doesn’t give you a lot of, a lot of person power to get involved. But there are, but there are people, there is a lot, probably half of our election judges are women and, and they are very vital members of the Democratic Executive Committee. Over the years in MAD, since 1976 and then PASO before that, you had women in, in key leadership roles. Right now for example, at the convention Mary Armendariz is one of our executive committee persons from our senatorial district. In terms of state representation, Diana Davila is

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one of our state representatives, Jessica Farrar is the other one. We have got three Hispanics; two of them are women. We only got one state senator, so we can’t help that. But in, in city council for example, we have one Hispanic at large. In county government, we have no judicial representatives because we got wiped out in the election two years ago, but women have participated and continue to participate. Herlinda Garcia is president of the Community College Board Of Trustees. Olga Gallego is a member of the school board of trustees. Ester Campos is a member of the school board of trustees. So, in terms of office holders, a great majority are women.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Let’s go back to, to Lionel Castillo gets recruited to become INS Commis... Commissioner. Strategically, tactically, was that a wise thing to do? Was that the beginning of the end of the machine that you all had put together?
Mr. Castillo: Well, it was not a, a good decision to make, but it was early in the Carter administration that he made that decision. I had a similar opportunity towards the end of the Carter administration. I had gotten an offer to be the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for revenue sharing. And I took a real introspective look at what the possibilities of the President getting reelected and saw that they weren’t very good. So, I decided to forgo that, that, that choice. But Lionel made that choice at the early part of the administration. And I think what they, what that did, it, it took him out of the trajectory, again, so to speak, that he was on. It is true that you can never really come home again. And, so when he was gone three years, when he came back a lot of people that, that had come up through the ranks didn't know

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who he was and so you lose your constituency, your lose your base, you lose your patronage for one. And so....
Dr. Gutiérrez: What went on behind the scenes here between you and, and Ben? Was there some competition as to the heir apparent to this legacy?
Mr. Castillo: No, not, not, not really. I think that, that when Lionel left and there was a, a replacement for controller, Kathy Whitmire became the controller. I ran for the position. But it is an at large position and then again, you don't have the, the, the edge that Lionel had when he was running against somebody that was walking dead basically. And so, she won handily. And, so there was no, there was no recapturing that position again. Lionel tried to recapture it when he came back and again it, it didn’t work. But at that time, Ben was the, the state representative until 1981 when we redistricted Harris, Houston City Council, which was another struggle. And that’s another story. But he ran for the position of city councilman and became the first Hispanic city council member on the Houston City Council. When he left the legislature Roman Martinez ran for his seat and won. When Roman was in the legislature, there was an opportunity as a result of the 1980 census to create a second Hispanic district and that was the district in the northwest part of the county, I am sorry, the southwest part of the county, southeast part of the county that Diana Davila won. And as a result of the 1990 census, there was an opportunity to fill the Hispanic district in the east part of the county which Gerard Torres won. So, there, there has never really been, at least between me and Ben or me and anybody else, any contentiousness about who is going to run. Certainly there has been challengers. People who rise up to challenge and, and run and don't win.

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Dr. Gutiérrez: Well, it seemed that there is a period here up to Lionel going to Washington where you are building, you are recruiting, opportunities are being created, leadership is being created, then that same group begins to fight with one another. You have splits with Al Luna, Victor Trevino.
Mr. Castillo: Oh. Well that, let me, let me back up to that. Let me back up to that. Al Luna ran for the position of, of state representative in District, I think it was 87. It was still called that. And, and Luna, Luna won and the, the untowardness came or the unpleasantness came not because Al Luna ran because everybody helped Al Luna to win, the unpleasantness came when, when Luna was in the legislature and, and Ben was in city council and the controversy arose, not as a result of them running against each other, but sort of a, a, a, I guess it was a question of primacy, you know. Who is the king of the hill? And, that they are two different spheres of influence. And, so they fairly ruined it for both. And, so it, it, I think it was more of a personal thing that was fed by, by other parties and actually a contentiousness for, a contention for power because they operate at different levels. I think Al Luna has acknowledged that after, after he, he got his law degree and went to practice law and nobody has a real explanation about what the pleitos (fights) was about, other than it was personality.
Dr. Gutiérrez: But there is other ones. Yourself and, and, and Victor Trevino.
Mr. Castillo: Well, I ran, I ran...
Dr. Gutiérrez: And Mario Gallegos and Roman Martinez. And you used to be all in the same group.
Mr. Castillo: When I ran, yeah. No. I ran, I ran for Trevino. Trevino was not part of the group. Trevino came out of nowhere. Trevino was a Houston

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police department police officer and he ran because the position was there.
Dr. Gutiérrez: I thought he was Al Luna’s protégé?
Mr. Castillo: Well, let me, let me back up to that.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK.
Mr. Castillo: When Al Luna ran in...
Dr. Gutiérrez: How much time do we have left?
Mr. Castillo: Well, I have to pick up my wife, but that’s OK. In, in, in 1978 the Harris County Commissioner’s Court was, was being challenged to redistrict itself because under the state constitution, Commissioner’s Courts are pretty uniform. They got five members and so there is no, no changing that. But there was a lot of pressure on the commissioner’s court to, to realign itself so that Mexicanos would have influence within one commissioner’s precinct. There was a commissioner by the name of Tom Bass who said, "“Look, ya’ll are never going to win this fight. Commissioner’s court is not going to give up power just so that they can give it to you. But here is what we can do. Why don’t we redistrict the constables and, and the justices of the peace?”" Under the makeup of the county, there can be as many constables and as many justices of the peace as you can, can create or want to create. So, the commissioner’s court, under Tom Bass’ patronage, prior to, prior to the change, each commissioner had one constable and one J. P. There is four commissioners so there were four constables and four J. Ps. They decided to double the number of constables and J. Ps. So, now you had eight constables and eight J. Ps. And that’s, that’s basically, no, there’s eight constables, there is eight constables and sixteen J. Ps. because they attached two justices

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of the peace to each constable district. So, that gave us more opportunities. So, they were newly created. There were no incumbents to, to four of the, of the constables and eight of the justices of the peace. And so, when these position became vacant, we worked for the appointment of Raul Martinez as the first Hispanic constable in the newly created constable Precinct 6 position.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Let me just interrupt and ask you who was pressuring Bass to do this or who is, who is leading this fight?
Mr. Castillo: The same group, the same coalition.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK. That coalition. That single coalition includes the labor unions and it includes the, the Blacks?
Mr. Castillo: Yeah. Yeah, because they would get constables too.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK. All right.
Mr. Castillo: Yeah. And so, and so Raul Martinez became the constable and Richard Vara got elected by default and Armando Rodriguez got elected. And that’s been, that’s been the arrangement all this time except that in 1987, Raul Martinez felt that he shouldn’t have run the time before because he was really in ill health. So he came to me and said, "“John,”" you know, "“I know that you don't want to do this, but I desperately need for you to run for constable because I am not going to run this next time. I don't know if I am going to make it to the end of, of this term. But you are the only person that I know.”" And he gave me the sales job. I said, "“Constable? I don't want to do it. I am not a peace officer. I am not a cop.”" "“You got to do it. This is about people, this is about serving people, this is about being kind to people, this is about being compassionate with people.”" And he says, and, and, and everybody else is just not that kind of person. So, I told him

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I would do it. So, I went to constable, I went to law enforcement school. I got certified as a Texas Peace Officer. I learned how to shoot. I learned criminal procedure. I learned the whole thing. And so, I ran. I decided to run. Well, here’s a brand new opportunity, so Victor decides to run. All right. Now up, up until now, there has been this controversy between Ben and Al Luna, OK, for whatever reason that was. OK. I think Ben visited Al Luna during, while Al was still in the legislature because Ben was getting tired of getting harassed by Al Luna and Marc Campos all this time.
Dr. Gutiérrez: And you really don’t know what was the foundation of that?
Mr. Castillo: I, I really don’t know what it was. Other than it was a feeling that Ben Reyes, you think you are so high and mighty, you know, and, and, and Ben told Al Luna, according to what Ben has told me several years ago, and he said, "“Al, show me what the problem is. If I have offended you in any way, I apologize. If I, if I have got anything you want, you can have it. If you want me to do anything for you, I will do it. But I don't know what’s at the bottom of this. Tell me what it is.”" And supposedly Luna told Ben, "“Ben, you have a position, you have power, you have a future, you have a family, you have a business; I don't have anything. I make seven thousand dollars a year. I don't have a, an education. I don't have anything. When this gig is over, what do I do?”"
Dr. Gutiérrez: So he wanted all of Ben’s, he wanted to be the boss?
Mr. Castillo: Yeah.
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK. Well, that’s, that’s a fundamental.
Mr. Castillo: And that’s what it was.
Dr. Gutiérrez: That’s an important goal.

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Mr. Castillo: So,....
Dr. Gutiérrez: Somebody’s got to be the boss.
Mr. Castillo: ....so, this controversy is alive and well. So what happens is that to challenge Ben, they line up with Victor, but I am guilty by association because what they said was that Ben had put me up to run. But Ben had absolutely nothing to do with this. In fact, he thought it was the most stupid idea I had ever come up with beside running for controller against Kathy Whitmire. He said, "“You are not a cop. You are going to shoot yourself,”" you know. I said, "“No, Ben. I learned how to shoot.”" And he would absolutely prohibit me from wearing a gun when I came to visit him at city hall. He said, "“You are going to drop that thing and sure as hell it’s going to hit me,”" you know. So, what happened was that they lined up against me. And I lost that first round by less than a hundred votes. So, we went into a runoff and I lost it by just a little bit more than that. A hundred and twelve votes or something like that. Later on I was to learn, I couldn't understand where Victor was coming up with his financing because obviously I had more money, I thought I did, have more capacity to raise money than he did. Well, Al Luna lent him, for the runoff, thirty five thousand dollars.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Where did Luna get that kind of money?
Mr. Castillo: From his campaign fund. And he tells me to this day, Victor Trevino has told him that was a contribution. "“I never asked you for a loan.”" Yeah. So, it wasn’t, again, it wasn’t one of those things where it’s buddy against buddy. It wasn’t my buddy Victor against me. It was Victor, very young and ambitious and, and capable, who happened to find a grudge that he could take advantage of.

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Dr. Gutiérrez: And the Gallegos, Roman fight. Ben bumping Roman saying, "“No, it’s mine. I am going to run.”"
Mr. Castillo: No, the, the, the Reyes, the Gallegos, Roman controversy was basically that, that when, when the, OK, you got to back up to the Gene Green, Ben Reyes race, which is the genesis of this whole thing. When Ben ran the first time against Gene Green, Mario was with Ben. Everybody was with Ben. And there were a few hard-core anti-Reyes people, like Mr. Olmos.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Or Frumencio?
Mr. Castillo: Or Frumencio.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Frumencio had split from the group.
Mr. Castillo: Yeah. He split from Ben, OK. And so what happened was that, that if you stop and analyze it, Ben had been in power or in office by then twenty years. Now, if you make, if you make ten people mad a month, at the end of a year, it’s a hundred and twenty folks, right? At the end of ten years, that’s twelve hundred folks, at the end of twenty years, that’s two thousand, four hundred folks and they have friends and spouses and, and, and that's the, the, the clump of people that, that he had working against him. So, when Ben ran against Green in 1992, Green had all of the NRA money. [National Rifle Association] The NRA spent more money on Gene Green than on any other incumbent or non incumbent Democrat running for congress. Secondly, in spite of the fact that Ben carried all of labor’s water in the legislature, they turned on him. And went for Green simply because he is Anglo. Let’s face it. That and the fact that John Whitmire, the senator from Senatorial District 15 has always been Green’s spear carrier. And so Whitmire used the power of his office

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to help Green get the party endorsement and the labor endorsement. So, Ben is running without as much money, without the labor endorsement, and without Green’s endorsement, I mean, without the party’s endorsement, the apparatus’ endorsement.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Well, there is still some other players. Al, Al, Leal is running in that and Sylvia Garcia was running in that.
Mr. Castillo: Yeah, but they were really minor players.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Well but still, there were....
Mr. Castillo: They got enough, they got enough votes to keep him from winning.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Right. That was going to be my point. If you added up these enemies.
Mr. Castillo: Well, those were the enemies except that they divided into camps for Leal, for....
Dr. Gutiérrez: OK.
Mr. Castillo: The women went for Sylvia, the, the other people went for Luna, and the other people went for whoever.
Dr. Gutiérrez: But he was in the runoff?
Mr. Castillo: Yeah. But Ben and Green got in the runoff...
Dr. Gutiérrez: Right.
Mr. Castillo: ...as a result of that.
Dr. Gutiérrez: And it couldn't be patched up?
Mr. Castillo: No.
Dr. Gutiérrez: The enemies?
Mr. Castillo: No, the, the women, the women, they had voted for Ben because, you got to remember in 197, in 1992, when he ran, there was the primary in March, there was a runoff in April, and there was a special election in July. There was a general election in November. There were four

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elections for that congressional seat in that year because when the, when the runoff was held, all our polls and all our phone banking and the, and the, and the ranks did close. Very much. What happened was the results didn’t match the, the expected probabilities of Ben winning, so we couldn't understand it. So, we went back and analyzed, we looked at everybody that had voted in the runoff election, got their names and voter registration numbers, then we looked at everybody that had voted in the Republican primary in this congressional district, and we matched the two. And we found six hundred and fifty hits. Six hundred and fifty Republicans had crossed over from the Republican primary to vote in the Democratic runoff. So, we filed an election challenge and we did the leg work. Like I said, we identified every one of them. Then we had to serve them notice, all of them before the court and a lot of them didn’t know that they had to say who they voted for. They thought their ballot was secret. Well, it is except in a case of an election challenge and they admitted. I told, they said, we told the precinct judge that we had voted Republican, but we had gotten a phone call that told us it didn't matter what, what primary we voted on and they let them vote. They let them vote. And we proved, without a doubt, that there were enough, there were more than twice as many people illegally voted than the difference in the election loss. But the judge would not award the election to Ben. Ordered a special election in July and the only concession we got was that each election judge would get a list of Republicans that had voted in the Republican primary so that they couldn’t vote in the runoff. But Ben won that election.
Dr. Gutiérrez: So, he had to do it all over again.

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Mr. Castillo: In July. But each time there, there was more Hispanics voting in April than voted in March. And there were more Hispanics voting in July than voted in April.
Dr. Gutiérrez: They were voting for someone else?
Mr. Castillo: Well, Green got twenty percent of the, of the Hispanic vote in the end in July because there was his loyal Hispanic supporters like Mr. Olmos that turned out to vote.
Dr. Gutiérrez: All right. Well, I know that you have got to go. Let me just ask you one last and then maybe some other time we will do another interview.
Mr. Castillo: We didn't get very far.
Dr. Gutiérrez: I know. I know. You have finally ran now for city council.
Mr. Castillo: Yes.
Dr. Gutiérrez: How did that come about and why are you the candidate now in, and how did you win?
Mr. Castillo: Well, I ran for city council. Ben was term limited. He couldn't run again. So, there was a situation about who would run. Ben didn't want me to run. I don't know who he had in mind, but he didn't think I could win. I, I had run for controller before and lost. I had run for constable before and lost, you know, and so he figured well, you are going to lose again. Let’s get a fresh face, get some new blood. And I said well, since I have never been one to be told what to do, you know, I am going to run. And so about two or three years ago, I had set up my own lobbying outfit, did lobbying for people at city hall, the county. And, so I had an office at 1021 Main Street. And, so I really didn't need him or his blessings because I know how to run the thing. And so, I started raising money. I laid out my strategy and I figured

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out how much money I would need. I think the things that helped me was number one, I have good name recognition. I know how the city works. I know the issues. And I know how to organize. So, what I did was that I went to all of Ben’s opponents, all the people that had been against him for all these many years and sat down with the Mr. Olmos and his daughter and Carol Alvarado and all the other people and said, "Look, I am not Ben. Here is where I stand. If I get elected my policy is an open door. My policy is that I need for you to tell me because I only have four years, I only have six years at most to do this job. It is not an open ended position now. So, I need to know what I need to do so I can get it done quick inside of six years.”" And, so I consider the position that I hold and I consider myself simply to be a place holder because with term limits, the only people who actually have any power are the bureaucrats and the political action committees. The bureaucrats because they can hold up anything and the bureaucrats, and the political action committees because they know how the system works, they know how to use money, and they can get anything they want. And you are totally powerless, you know, because you don't have any, any way of knowing even what’s coming down. And so I got all of them to a person to endorse me. All the precinct judges, both pro Ben, anti-Ben, all endorsed me. I set about raising money. I raised a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
Dr. Gutiérrez: My goodness. That’s a lot of money.
Mr. Castillo: Yeah.
Dr. Gutiérrez: How much did you spend?
Mr. Castillo: A hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
Dr. Gutiérrez: Wow.

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Mr. Castillo: Well, a hundred and ten thousand. I spent a hundred and ten thousand dollars.
Dr. Gutiérrez: What did you spend it on?
Mr. Castillo: I spent about thirty thousand dollars of it on a very sophisticated phone bank operation where we canvassed voters on issues, tailored the campaign around those issues, then called them back, identified those, those that were affected. Did a couple of mailings. Went back and identified those that had been turned on by the issues. Kept up with them and then made another call to turn them out on election day. We spent another twenty thousand to thirty thousand on direct mail, on postage. We spent about sixteen thousand on graphics, yard signs, four by eight signs. And we spent about ten thousand dollars on election day voter mobilization. And then we spent...
Dr. Gutiérrez: No media?
Mr. Castillo: Huh?
Dr. Gutiérrez: No media?
Mr. Castillo: No.
Dr. Gutiérrez: No radio, no newspaper ads, no TV?
Mr. Castillo: No. That doesn't work. Over the years, I have found out and, and it has proven out to be true, that you got to have seven layers of organization to win. And if you have them, you pretty well can win anything. The only difference would be how well you have done those seven layers. And I start off by, by doing, and I mentioned one of the, I didn't mention one of the factors and that’s early vote. You can win ten percent of the vote you need with early votes.
Dr. Gutiérrez: At least.

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Mr. Castillo: At least. Yeah. So, one of the things that, one of the layers that you need is early vote. Another one of the things that you need is block walking. I mean, walk every door that you can because people remember and they will say, well I voted for him because he came by and asked me for to vote. Basically it. The other layer that we have is mail and maybe we will do three pieces of mail. The other thing that we have is yard signs because that indicates a commitment to the voter, I mean, to the candidate. And the other thing that we did is that we organized in each precinct, we organized a cell of supporters. Like in Mr. Olmos case, he was the cell leader, plus he had five or six people that were the core in that community, in that little precinct and they did the yard signs. When they went down, they went back and put them up. But somebody andaba con el chisme. (went about with gossip). Mr. Olmos went to visit, “Oyes que traes? (“Hey, what’s with you?) “Somebody told you wrong.” You put out the fires before they become wildfires. And they do the coffees and all that stuff so that, that’s one and three is four, five, six, and then the cell is, is seven. So, if you do seven layers and this, included in this cell, the weekend before the election, the precinct judge sends a letter, personal letter, to each of the people that normally vote in his elections. And that’s how you do it.
Dr. Gutiérrez: And that’s what you have, this is, this is the John Castillo formula, no?
Mr. Castillo: It worked.
Dr. Gutiérrez: And, and you, you’ve....
Mr. Castillo: That’s one, two, and five is..the seven.
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