The Power of Presence

by Joy Thomas Moore

  In the first few months, Eliza was late for school forty-eight times because her mom and her mom’s husband didn’t get her there on time. What they didn’t realize was that state law stipulates that three latenesses equals one absence. So Eliza was starting the school year with sixteen absences through no fault of her own. Because state law also stipulates that anything over sixteen absences means a student can’t advance to the next grade, no matter what the grades are, Gina met with the principal, and the principal made some unique fixes.

  We worked out a transportation arrangement whereby a different person at school picks her up and brings her back home every day. The janitor would rotate with the principal, or tutor, or math teacher, and that even included coverage when she had to stay after school for band rehearsals or other after-school activities. Eliza began getting the whole school experience because so many people cared.

  Gina said that she really began to appreciate how for single mothers and those who are surrogates, it sometimes takes a pride of caring strangers to make the biggest difference in the life of a child.

  Getting her into the proper school addressed one challenge. To help Eliza confront her learning challenges, Gina turned to another stranger.

  Even though I’m not a physician and all of that, I knew she didn’t have attention deficit disorder. What we learned was that she has what’s called auditory processing deficit. It simply means that as she was listening to someone convey information, her brain was processing the information in a less efficient way so kids in the classroom were moving along faster than she was and the teacher was certainly moving along faster than Eliza could comprehend.

  For all of fifth grade we had her working with the tutor after school three days a week.

  The next summer Gina brought both of the children to live with her in Baltimore. For her not to lose the ground she had gained with the tutor, Eliza continued her tutoring sessions over Skype. For the first ten minutes she would be so grouchy, Gina made her apologize to her tutor. Eventually, with some discipline, Eliza got into it. The next school year she not only closed the gap in reading and math, but made honor roll four straight semesters.

  Gina’s surrogate status deepened even further as both her sister and her sister’s husband were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to prison. Gina’s mom was designated the official guardian, and since then Gina has assumed responsibility for both the financial and emotional well-being of her niece and nephew.

  Gina is helping to create a new reality for Eliza and Shawn, much like Jim Casey was determined to do for foster children. Auntie, as she is called affectionately by the other kids in their neighborhood, is making sure they have the opportunities all kids should have. During holidays and vacations Gina exposes her niece and nephew to museums, festivals, amusement parks, just like any mom who is present for her children would do. And they are thriving. She knows there will be challenges when their parents get out of prison, but she’s ready to remain their advocate and surrogate whenever that time comes.

  LESSON FROM A LIONESS: Allow your heart to lead you to resourcefulness.

  Talking to the women I’ve met along my journey, I have discovered that most of us at some point question our resourcefulness. Whether it is on behalf of our own children or, in the case of Gina, for those children we advocate for, we forget our own power, our own influence, our own perspectives. But these are the building blocks of the presence that’s required to assist them.

  According to blogger Jennifer Young, in an article in Psychology Today online, being resourceful means that you are able to meet the needs of a situation and can develop the process you need to accomplish a task. If ever you doubt your resourcefulness, think about times in the past when you have been able to achieve a goal, and what it took to make that happen. Think about times when:

  Someone called on you for help. You are obviously wise and have experience and are trusted.

  You accomplished a superhuman feat. Look back on the deadline that was impossible to meet, the kid who just wouldn’t sleep, the virus that wouldn’t go away. You still made it through and lived to tell about it. Call upon those instances. You are able to do things others might have found impossible—and then do them all over again.

  You found resources where there seemed to be none. Gina looked beyond the confines of her niece’s public school to find what her niece needed. She didn’t take no for an answer. Let this serve as a reminder that where there is a will, there is a way; we just need to find it.

  You got help when others were turned down. Did you ever feel like a fool because you didn’t fight the cable bill spike but your neighbor did and won? We don’t want to feel like that when advocating for our kids. Relying on our inner resources will lead to our winning while others don’t—not because they’re losers, but because they don’t even try. Where there is a mom, there is a sneak attack, a better way. That Gina got help when others were being turned down is exactly why her niece and nephew are thriving.

  You rallied others to a cause. Gina’s pride is evident through her story. From her husband who first agreed to take in Eliza to the staff at the private school, Gina helped people see through the outer circumstances to nurture the inner spirit and gifts that lay within the children.

  We have a host of inner and outer resources. Our heart space holds inner resources that include creativity, intelligence, confidence, courage, and passion. Using those inner resources, we can gather our outer resources—people, money, or technology. When combined to create connectedness, we can accomplish anything!

  From the West Side to Washington: The Rosie Castro Story

  There is no better example for our children than the one we set before them every day.

  —Davin Whitehurst

  San Antonio’s West Side is a community of historical contrasts. It’s a story of a slaughterhouse, where daily runoff turned the streets a crimson red near a regal Catholic basilica, one of only sixty in the United States, where the faithful made daily pilgrimages; a story of boundaries encircling one of the nation’s first public housing communities as well as three Roman Catholic colleges; and one where day laborers, factory workers, and military personnel shared space with some of the city’s most vocal and successful community activists and government officials. And out of this eclectic environment emerged a single mother whose life, legacy, and progeny have and will continue to shape the future of San Antonio as well as the rest of the country for decades to come.

  Maria del Rosario Castro is simply known as Rosie. She is a longtime community activist and matriarch of an emerging and dynamic political dynasty. Nothing in her history would have predicted the life she now proudly claims.

  Her mom, Victoria, was a six-year-old orphaned Mexican immigrant who, along with her sister, came to the United States. Victoria quit school in the third grade, but she continued to teach herself to read and write in both Spanish and English. Rosie told me that her mother’s lifelong quest for literacy became the gift she passed on to her only daughter when Victoria became a single parent in her early thirties.

  I grew up in a house of two women, my guardian Maria Garcia and my mother, both of whom worked. I think that’s why even though my mother drilled in me the need to get my education, I’ve always worked. It’s the only example I really saw, mainly that women worked outside the home. My mother continued to clean homes and do babysitting and things like that. I went to Catholic school. My guardian worked for the Carmelite priests that ran the parish. She paid my tuition so I was able to go to the Little Flower School for twelve years.

  She was an excellent student so she had no problem getting scholarships to attend Our Lady of the Lake College. But she soon rejected her strict upbringing to become, for the first time in her life, a free spirit.

  While I was at the Lake, I was chomping at the bit to be on my own. But that’s not the way our traditional families work. You don’t get out on your own unless you’re married. I was kind of stuck, but I was very rebellious. I had bee
n twelve years in Catholic school. Now I’m in Catholic college, so I really was doing stuff like I was involved with the Young Democrats. That was not seen as a good thing at home because men did the politics, not women. My mother was afraid that I would get involved with other things too. This is the ’60s. At one point, I went off and stayed with a friend and basically I had called home to say, “I’m going to stay over here.” She said, “If you don’t come home now, you’re not coming home.” I never came back home.

  I was studying to become a teacher and what happened was that a friend of mine, Dr. Jose Cardenas, was working a project in Austin called the Southwest Migrant Project. The basis was that we would travel to where the migrants went, Michigan, Ohio, all those places. You were really supposed to get your master’s at the end of the project. The project didn’t quite make it, but by this time, I’d left home and was fending for myself. I hadn’t finished college, but I wound up sharing a house with another friend that had gone to Our Lady of the Lake, and I was teaching, but uncertified. That year, my salary was $4,600. I was very active in the Democratic Party and then later helped establish the Raza Unida Party.

  Smitten by the political bug, in 1971 Rosie ran for the San Antonio City Council. She lost. But a few years later, she was smitten with something else, love, but it came with multiple complications.

  I met Jesse Guzman. He, however, was still married. We didn’t live together yet, but when I got pregnant I was twenty-seven years old and on my own. My faith and desire to start a family dictated that I keep the baby, not knowing there were going to be two of them. As my stomach grew so did my need for support so my mom came to live with me after the twins were born. I was still living on the West Side, in the Edgewood School District. That’s where I was teaching. After Jesse got a divorce we started living together.

  This became Rosie’s first real grown-up example of her ever-so-Catholic mother providing unconditional support. Even though Rosie was pregnant by a man who was not her husband, her mother stood by her, despite the strained relationship the two had had in Rosie’s youth.

  On September 16, 1974, the twins were born, identical boys Julián and Joaquín Castro. They came early and were jaundiced but otherwise healthy. For several years, they functioned like a picture book nuclear family, mom, dad, children, and grandmother, there to lend a hand.

  Initially, it was scary because I wasn’t married, even though he was there. I needed to make sure that I could provide for the kids, so I always had a job during that intervening period. My mother was there and she really helped raise them because I couldn’t have worked without her being there to help take care of them.

  There was never a whole lot of money. I didn’t have a car. He had the car. After he left it became difficult in terms of groceries and we now had to use the bus all the time. It was a change. What I worried about most was how it would be for them to be without their dad. But I was determined to keep moving forward, for me but especially for them.

  Eventually the pressures of finances, family, and work life, as well as the political action activities of both Rosie and Jesse, took their toll. Jesse moved out for good when the twins were eight years old.

  At some point, I had gone back to school for my master’s. I had finished the BA through a program at Edgewood when I was teaching. Then I had the opportunity to apply for funds that had been put out for a master’s degree in urban studies at University of Texas, San Antonio. I got it. Then to complete the master’s, you had to do an internship. I applied for one with the city and I got selected for human resources through personnel. They kept me after I graduated and it provided the stability I needed to take care of the boys. It wasn’t a great salary but at least we got insurance. Eventually I found a house for us to rent right across the street from my cousin Teri, who had four kids. Now Julián and Joaquín could have constant contact with their cousins, connecting to them so they could do homework together and just plain have fun under watchful eyes. It also provided me with additional backup while I continued my education and community work.

  I could really relate to the sense of security Rosie felt when she found that house close to family. When my parents and Dad’s siblings immigrated to the United States from Jamaica, they all either lived together or found housing close to each other. As cousins, we loved it. We had a ball together and always felt secure and connected with each other, and knew if our own parents weren’t around, we could always turn to our aunts and uncles. When I became a single mom, like Rosie, I could always rely on my mom or Wes’s mother to help out with the kids. But Rosie’s work with the broader community sensitized her to the need to get the boys engaged with community sooner rather than later, instead of always relying on relatives to keep them. There is enormous value in exposing our children to our work and our passions. Julián and Joaquín shared Rosie’s world, and as Julián would say years later, “My mother is probably the biggest reason that my brother and I are in public service. Growing up, she would take us to a lot of rallies and organizational meetings and other things that are very boring for eight-, nine-, ten-year-olds.”

  When you’re a single parent, as you well know, you have to take them everywhere if you want to stay connected. Before they were born, I was an active community organizer with the Young Democrats and then Raza Unida. As they grew up, I would take them to meetings. During elections, I would always take them with me both into the booth to see me vote, but also we worked outside the poll giving out flyers. We worked several different campaigns. If you’re going to maintain both work and then outside work, volunteerism, or any of the organizing, you’d never see them. They were always with me. But I made sure it wasn’t a one-way street. I also had to find time to make sure that I could get them to sports stuff and their own activities so that it’s not all about, “Hey, you got to be doing what I’m doing.” I would take them on the bus to karate, or basketball, or any number of things they were involved with.

  But then her mother was diagnosed with diabetes and Rosie became part of what is known as the “Sandwich Generation.” Her mom had been such a big help when the kids were growing up but now she needed Rosie to get her to the doctor, try to keep her on a diet, and make sure she took her medication. On the other hand, her boys were growing up and had their own special needs.

  I never felt burdened by what we did because the boys were very focused and self-motivated. I tried to instill that in them from when they were very young. I’d say, “Look, every single one of us has a job. My job is to go to work and make sure that we have income for you to eat, enough clothes, and all that. Your grandma’s job is to help take care of you. Your job is to go to school and get good grades.” I always reinforced that so they really felt that was their only job. They wouldn’t clean their room but as long as they were doing well, and connected to their purpose, I cut them a little slack.

  Another thing that I think helped them focus on college from when they were very little was when one of their godparents was traveling and they’d ask what to give [the boys] for Christmas. I responded to give them a sweatshirt or something with a college name on it. And I said this to everyone who asked what they needed. So from a very young age college was always in their sights, and I kept them connected to the value of education. And they were very fortunate that education was how they were recognized in high school, at Stanford and later at Harvard Law School.

  Following graduation both Julián and Joaquín began working at law firms, but it didn’t take long before Rosie’s tutelage in community action and public service connected them to their own passions to make life better for others. Joaquín began his public service in the Texas House of Representatives. A decade later he was elected to the newly drawn 35th Congressional District from Texas, where he still serves today. Julián served in the San Antonio City Council. He was twenty-six when he was elected, making him the youngest city council member ever elected. He represented District 7, a precinct in his mother’s beloved West Side. He lost his first bid for may
or but won the second time around in 2009. He easily won reelection his next two terms. In 2014 Julián accepted President Obama’s invitation to join his cabinet as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

  There is no debate between Julián and Joaquín about the influence their grandmother and mother have had on them. In delivering the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2012 (where he was introduced by his brother), Julián delivered one of the most memorable tributes ever given a grandmother and mother on such a public stage:

  “In the end, the American Dream is not a sprint, or even a marathon, but a relay. Our families don’t always cross the finish line in the span of one generation. But each generation passes on to the next the fruits of their labor… My grandmother never owned a house. She cleaned other people’s houses so she could afford to rent her own. But she saw her daughter become the first in her family to graduate from college. And my mother fought hard for civil rights so that instead of a mop, I could hold this microphone.”