The New Yorker Radio Hour - Julián Castro Is Not Afraid

Episode Date: April 26, 2019

In a crowded Democratic field, the candidate Julián Castro is eager to stand out. One way he’s tried to do that is by taking on the issue of immigration—a favorite topic of President Donald Trump, and one that’s important to his base. In a wide-ranging conversation with the New Yorker editor David Remnick, Castro lays out his plan. And Taylor Mac, a performance artist and playwright who made a name for himself in New York City’s downtown theater scene, makes the leap to Broadway. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. President Trump, we all know, sees immigration as one of his winning issues. He's more than willing to make extreme threats like closing the border entirely if it makes him look tough. One reason the issue works so well for him is that the Democrats tend to avoid it entirely. there really isn't a coherent view of immigration in the Democratic Party, and most candidates in the race now barely bring it up, except to object to what Trump does. But at least one Democratic candidate is eager to talk about immigration.

Julian Castro served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration. But he also is former mayor of San Antonio in Texas, right near the border, and he wants to change the terms of the presidential debate entirely. Castro has suggested that entering the United States without papers should no longer be a federal crime. I spoke to Julian Castro last week, and I asked him why he thought focusing on immigration policy was precisely the way to be Donald Trump. There are different reasons that I've chosen to focus early on and rolled out as my first policy plan on immigration. Number one, that's close to my heart. You know, my family story is an American, an immigrant's American dream story.

I grew up with a grandmother that had come over from Mexico when she was seven. She worked as a maid, a cook, and a babysitter, raised my mom as a single parent. My mom became the first one to graduate from high school, go on to college. My brother, Joaquin, and I were able to go to college, to law school, to become the first in our family to become professionals as lawyers. And you're the son of real activists, of political activists. Yeah, so my mother and father were involved, mostly my mom, but my dad for a little while, involved in the old Chicano movement, the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, to the late 1960s and early 70s. My mother was a hellraiser when she was young. She had started off in the young Democrats, and then part of the Rossum of the party that was a third party that at the time said that neither the Democrats nor Republicans are really sufficiently serving the needs of the Mexican American community in Texas and the Southwest.

so they formed their own party. And by the time my brother and I were growing up, you know, her activism was sort of tamping down, but we still grew up being taken to rallies and speeches and different organizational meetings. And so we grew up around this sense that participating in the democratic process was a good thing. Well, as you watch President Trump behave as he does

in the question of immigration, as you listen to his rhetoric on the question, question of immigration. Let me ask you this. Is Donald Trump a racist? I think he behaves like a racist. What's the difference? I don't think there is a difference. In terms of the impact. Yeah, I believe that, yeah, that he has been racist. Sure. And how do you go about defeating that? Because I must tell you, he is, it behaves as if he is absolutely convinced that this kind of rhetoric of division on immigration,

is a winner for him maybe more than any other issue. I wanted to go straight to what this president has considered his bread and butter issue. This is how he stokes division. This is how he stokes fear and paranoia. This is what he's counting on in terms of an issue to win a narrow electoral college victory. And so I've released a People First immigration plan that represents a completely different vision, you know, and we can get into it. Well, what's at the core of it? Well, at the core of it is that we should treat people with compassion and not cruelty.

and stop treating people like criminals, and instead treat border crossing like we used to, which is a civil violation, reduce the backlog of people who are waiting for some sort of adjudication in our immigration legal process. You know, somebody deserves a hearing. They get their hearing, whether they're claiming asylum or they're here undocumented,

and we can make decisions so people are not waiting years and years in limbo in the United States, that we create a pathway to citizens, for people who are undocumented who are here, the 10 to 11 million people, not only dreamers, but also their parents and other undocumented individuals who have not committed a serious crime. Also, that we take a long-term smart view. Why would a mom come here with her six-year-old infant from Honduras or El Salvador or Guatemala?

In most cases, it's because there's a tremendous danger over there. They can't find safety and they can't find opportunity. So I've proposed the equivalent of a 21st century Marshall Plan for Central America so that we can help build up safety and opportunity there and then get the benefit of not having, like we did last month, 92,000 people show up at our southern border. Now, one of your proposals is to repeal the law, which makes illegal entry in the United States a federal crime. Why do you see starting there as an essential first step? Because the mess that's been created, the chaos that's been created with family separation, this cruelty, a lot of the backlog that we have, a lot of the expense in the system, has developed after 2004. Before 2004, we used to, even though this law was on the books, we used to basically

treat this as a civil violation, a civil penalty. After 2004, we started using incarceration more and treating it as a crime. That's what's led to this mess with family detention, with separation, with the backlog that we have. So I believe that we can have a better system if we go back to treating it as a civil violation with enhanced monitoring of these families so that they show up for their court date. Now, any number of political leaders, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congressman from the Bronx and Queens, wants to ban ICE, wants to ban immigration and customs enforcement as an institution feels it's been so morally compromised that it's impossible to go on. I don't hear that from you. What do you want to do? I want to break it up and separate the enforcement part of it, put that back into mostly the Department of Justice, and then have Homeland Security Investigations, which is a separate unit of ICE, go on and do its investigations.

About a year or a year and a half ago, there were 19 people who work for ICE. The employees that said, look, this is not working. The setup of this department is not working. and I believe that enforcement would be better served if we actually break ICE apart and separate Homeland Security investigations from the other part of ICE. So the institution is not fundamentally broken in such a way. There aren't so many violations and documented cases of mistreatment by ICE that you think it's necessary to dissolve it. Well, I don't think it's necessary to do away with or we should do away with enforcement completely,

but I do think that we should reconstitute it, and that's part of my plan. I don't think that it should go on the way that it's been. I think that it needs to be changed from the way that agents are trained to, you know, administratively where it's located in the federal government. Now, if you get as far as a debate stage with President Trump, I guarantee you, I guarantee you that he's going to say you're for open borders, are you? I'm not. And nobody is talking about open borders. We have 654 miles of fencing. We have thousands of personnel.

We have guns. We have boats. We have planes. We have helicopters. We have security cameras all over the border. I'm talking about a system where people still are subject to deportation. So nobody's talking about open borders. But the thing is, David, as you know, it doesn't matter if I have a plan or another

Democrat has a plan. He's going to say we're all for open borders, just like they're going to call a socialist. It doesn't matter if you proposed. that we literally move to a socialist system or that some people get relief on student loans. They're going to say that it's socialism. Part of the reason that I've proposed this immigration plan and that it's so bold is because, number one,

I don't buy into the BS narrative that the people who are coming to the southern border represent a national security threat. Secondly, because... What does it represent? Desperation. And the beauty of this country that people still see this country

as a place of opportunity and safety. And that is beautiful in its own way. You know, my brother has this wonderful line that I wish I'd thought of, my brother, Joaquin, who's in Congress, that says that there's something a lot worse than the day when so many people want to come to this country, which is the day that nobody wants to come to this country.

And people around the world want to come to the United States. We need an orderly way to sort that out. What we don't need is kind of cruelty that this administration has engaged in. But the other reason that I put forward this bold immigration plan is that I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid of the president on this issue. I was in McAllen, Texas on the border on Father's Day of last year with a group of activists to protest his family separation policy and as depressing and dismay as it was to be

at this Ursula processing center where they were separating children from their families. It was uplifting to see that the activists that were there were white and black and of all different backgrounds, not only Latino. And it reminded me that we share common values and beliefs. And one of those is that treat people with basic respect. I'm betting fundamentally that in that head-to-head that we can win with that. Where are you on the impeachment question? Your brother sits in the House of Representatives. You're close, however competitive, but you're close.

There's a big question now. Nancy Pelosi says, let's just continue investigating. Impeachment might be counterproductive. And then there are people within the Democratic caucus who say, you know, what more evidence of obstruction of justice do we need than what we find in the Mueller report? Where are you on this? I believe that the predicate is there for impeachment, that the question is going to become this guy on these different occasions basically tried to obstruct justice.

The fact that he was Fredo and not Michael. You're referring to the Corley Islands. That's right. Fredo, meaning the dumb brother and not Michael. The fact that he was Frato, nobody respected him enough to carry out his orders versus somebody whose orders may have been carried out, like Richard Nixon. That does not absolve him of the fact that he tried to break the law, tried to obstruct justice. And so they're going to have to make a decision about whether we're going to uphold that rule of law and hold him accountable.

What are you hoping? I hope they do. You hope they impeach. I hope they hold them accountable, yeah. Now, I hate to skip from the high-mindedness of policy and the rest to the grittiness of politics, but I have to ask, it's obvious that you're not leading the pack at the moment, but we're many months away from these early primaries and caucuses. What is your path to victory?

Any candidate has to have, in his or her mind, a way of seeing the field winnowing, and you emerging, as realistic as you are. What is that path? My path is, of course, I'm going to focus a lot on these early states, especially that first state of Iowa. I believe that I can do well in Iowa and then go and do well, especially a state like Nevada, which is the third state. And then right after...

New Hampshire doesn't look good. Well, it can. We're going to spend a lot of time there, too. But I've gotten the strongest reaction in Nevada. I'm just curious. For a politician, what does that mean the strongest reaction? You're doing a lot of retail politics. You're going into diners and all kinds of small halls and people's homes.

What does that mean a strong reaction as opposed to, uh-oh, I'm in trouble? You can just tell by the reaction of the crowd. And, you know, anybody – and I would imagine it's not just in politics, right? What does bad feel like? Describe for me what bad feels like. Man, there is a range of bad, right? A range of bad from people walking out of the room while you're talking to not really paying attention. Oh, does that happen?

You're talking and then people are hitting the door? Not very often. But sometimes... That's got a sting. You know, sometimes you can tell that you've hit on an issue that somebody really disagrees with. Tell me for an instance of that. I've noticed sometimes that, yeah, I'm very blunt about this issue of police brutality. And that's sensitive.

And I have, yeah, I think I've noticed on two or three occasions that that, that, you know, one or two people right after that will sometimes, I don't know if it's directly related to that, but, you know, have basically, you know, had enough of what I'm saying. So be it. I mean, I continue to do it because I believe what I'm talking about and the path that we need to take as a nation. But, you know, the overwhelming majority of folks that are there are there because they're interested in hearing from me or from whichever candidate that they're there to listen to.

But on balance in Iowa and Nevada, so far I can tell that the reaction is the strongest. Now, if this narrative doesn't end with a victory, sometimes younger politicians run to run again or they run for something else. You decided not to run for statewide office. Is that a possibility in the future? I'm not even going to think about that right now. Let me give you the typical politician's response, David. And I'll do my typical role of the eyes as the typical reporter. We can play the part right here.

Fair enough. Y'all can't see this, but we'll play the part. Yeah, I mean, I believe that I can win. You know, I'm not the frontrunner now, but I wasn't born a frontrunner. I didn't grow up a front runner. I'm going out there and doing what families across the country do and what my family did, which is to work hard, to scrap, to do everything that I can do to be successful. and I believe that I can be.

And, you know, the voters are going to decide starting next year. Julian Castro, it's great to have you here again. Good luck to you. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Julian Castro. He's running for the Democratic nomination, and I'll be talking with more of the candidates.

Certainly there's enough to go around in the weeks to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick. There's a new show on Broadway right now, and it's called Gary, a sequel to Titus Andronicus. Now, extra credit if you got this already, but Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare's most obscure plays,

and it's possibly his worst. It's certainly his bloodiest. Titus Andronicus makes an episode of Game of Thrones look like an episode of Cheers. So why would anyone want to write a sequel to such a play? And why would anyone want to go see it? Good questions, and I'm not the man to answer them. But I'm going to let Michael Schulman,

who writes for the New Yorker, tackle it. Gary, a sequel to Titus Andronicus, is a new work by a performer named Taylor Mack. Taylor is a playwright and drag queen, a performance artist, and what I would call an avant-garde maximalist. If you think about downtown experimental theater, you might picture a single person in black on a stool, on a bare stage. But Taylor puts on extravaganzas.

He's best known for his show, a 24-decade history of popular music, which takes 24 hours to perform, and it has costume after lavish costume and tells the story of two and a half centuries of American history, but with Taylor's own kind of radical queer twist. Taylor has been a darling of the downtown theater scene for a long time, but what's different about Gary is that even though it has that same subversive, zany, eccentric, sensibility, it's on Broadway.

It's an absurdist comedy that picks up where Shakespeare's very gruesome tragedy leaves off. So the play starts, the curtain rises, and we see a Roman banquet hall with just a huge pile of dead bodies, just as many as you guys could fit on the stage. And then Nathan... Way more than died in the play, Didas Andronicus. Right. And then Nathan Lane walks out in clown makeup and... His character's name is Gary, surprise, surprise.

And he was the clown in Titus Andronicus, and Shakespeare uses a clown, meaning an every man. And in my play, Gary calls himself an every man who's a nobody else. And I just decided that his job was actually to be a clown. And he has about 13 lines in Titus Andronicus. He comes in for a little comic relief, and then they send him off to be hung, hanged. And in my play, he escapes that hanging by getting himself a cleaning job to clean up the coup that has just happened.

And the concept is that the coup, of course, didn't just happen in this contained little banquet room. When a coup happens, there's much more slaughter than just one room. And so the streets, of course, have all these casualties. And they're trying to bring in all the dead bodies from the streets and clean them up and get the empire ready for the inauguration they're holding in the morning. Yeah, and there's a very elaborate protocol that he has to go through with his cleaning coworker. Yeah. They have to process these bodies in a really gross way.

Yeah. Well, of course, you have to clean them, and it's disgusting, and they've got to do the dirty work. You know, so how do you clean a dead body? I did the research on how you would clean a dead body. Did you? Yeah, at that time and now and just kind of worked it in. What did you find out? Well, you have to, I mean, you have to get all the juices out of them, basically.

You know, there's this element of, I wanted to make it as disgusting as it could be and still not, and still have people listen to the play. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's tons of scatological humor and kind of gross out humor. Yeah, you know, you say tons, but let me just say this. It's been a real interesting thing to see that one, scatological, joke can dominate 20 minutes of a play, even if the other 20 minutes is all in verse and poetry. It's fascinating. Well, there's also a corpse who pees into Nathan Lane's eye, so stuff like that tends to stick with you.

That's a choice the actor made. Oh, really? I like it. I think it's funny. You ever think you don't want to do the job you've been assigned? No point in that. Just seems if this is the kind of thing you've got to do on the regular. You might not be living your best life.

Or what, you think I've got a choice? The options just open up to any you want them. Just seeing some folk get to do the fun jobs. And other folk got a duty. Not fun jobs. Way of the world. So best get to it. And so as much as the play grew out of Titus andronic,

it also grew out of this crazy sequence of events that happened to you a couple years ago. Can you just describe what that was? Yeah. Well, I made a 24-hour concert called a 24-decade history of popular music, and it was one of the more wonderful experiences of my life. And then right after that, I had to fly to California and do hospice work for my mom who was dying. And then the election happened, and then two days later she died. And I hadn't really had to deal with a dead body since the early 90s with the AIDS epidemic. So it'd been a while, so it kind of brought back some of that stuff. And then I went to Mexico for a couple of weeks just to decompress, and I was jogging on the beach and a corpse washed up onto the shore. It was a tourist

who had drowned. And so it was the second dead body in so many weeks that I'd seen. And I just decided that I needed to put all of those feelings. I didn't know why I was feeling, what I was feeling, when I was feeling it. So I just squish them all into a play. Can I just back up to the corpse that wash out from the beach? Because, I mean, when you saw that, what actually went through your mind? You're just on the beach in Mexico. I'm sure it's beautiful, and you see a dead body. I mean, what was your reaction in the moment? Well, I mean, it's not, it was not pretty, you know, a body that's drowned and been in the ocean for a while is not a pretty sight. So that was sad. I was also concerned about it because the tide was kind of coming out. And I thought the body was going to

get sucked out again. So I thought, do I need to do something? But luckily, there were other people that kind of came up shortly after and called the authorities to take care of it and stuff. But I guess I was just, I just was sad. I just felt so sad for that person. And, just sad for the state of the world, really. I just really just sat down on the beach and just built sad. Yeah. It almost seems like you and these other people were the cleanup crew. You know, if there's a dead body, someone has to do something with it.

So Gary has a line toward the end of the play. He says, cleaning is immoral. And that really stood out to me. I was wondering, do you feel like we do that too much as a society? Do we clean too much? Do we, you know, look past the ugliness or cover up what, you know, the grossness? Yeah, I mean, cleaning is immoral. It sounds like a clickbait title.

You know, it's not really a, it's, it goes on to explain. It's not just that. It's that we're not cleaning and we're not really cleaning. We're just kind of brushing everything under the surface and acting like it's clean. So we're not really doing the hard work to end systemic racism and classism and all of the isms. And, you know, I mean, we're really. we're just trying to do the bare minimum so that we can get by and make it look nice for the people who are basically in charge

so that they can continue to be in charge. So there's not really a point to the play. It's more exploring considerations about how to clean and who's responsible for the cleaning and how can we be better cleaners and how to cope in a world of chaos is one of the big themes. of the play.

Yeah. So just traveling back to your past a little bit, your early career doing monster drag. Yeah. Did you learn stuff from working in drag about interacting with the audience or anything that you carried over into playwriting? Sure. Yeah. So much so.

It's trickier. Well, what I learned from the audience is, that if something is threatening to take the story away from the storyteller, you have to incorporate that threatening thing into the story at all costs. Otherwise, you know, they take over the story. So, you know, I'd be performing in the clubs,

and I'd be singing on my ukulele, and it'd be a gay club, so people would be having sex. And so everyone's watching the couple have sex, and I'm trying to, you know, have them watch me and listen to my story, so then I have to kind of go over to the couple that are having sex

and sing with them in my ukulele. And so now they're my collaborator instead of my opposition. Right. Or my heckler. You know, that's how I deal with hecklers all the time. Is it just like make them my collaborator as best I can. My drag mother used to say to me, she got shot in the butt by some people that saw her walking down the street in drag.

And, you know, when I said those horrible people, she said, no, no, not horrible. They just wanted to be part of the show. So that's kind of how I think about it. Yeah. You grew up in Stockton, California. Can you just describe Stockton as you experience it, what your relationship with the town was? At the time, it was that I wanted to get out and escape and not be there anymore because I was getting beat up. I was harassed on a regular basis.

I had a very unhappy home life. And yet I had these wonderful friends that I met there, men who are still, they're my family at this point. And I just love them dearly. And so I can't complain about my life because it's pretty damn good. So I have to kind of honor stuff. Stockton in a way for helping to make whatever it is that I am and this life is and this art that I'm making. What were your early attempts at expressing who you were in Stockton?

I mean. Did you find artistic outlets? You know, when you're queer, just like walking down the street is an expression. You know, I had a feminine walk. So I was teased for my feminine walk. And then you had this profound experience as a teenager going to San Francisco and seeing, was it the AIDS walk? Can you just describe what happened? Yeah.

I guess I was 14. I hadn't met an out homosexual before. I'd met homosexuals, but they weren't out to me. And I used my paper route money because no one will give me money for the AIDS walk. And so we went to San Francisco. My friend Marcy was two years older so we could drive. and she had a car and we went to the AIDS walk and the first time I saw an out homosexual

as thousands all at the same time. So that's had a profound effect on my life and my work in terms of that to experience queer agency and queer pride and queer community en masse like that for the first time because everyone was dying because loved ones were dying.

And so that juxtaposition, but also, because they were building themselves because they were being torn apart. And so I think that's the kind of work that I've gravitated to making is something that recognizes our frailty and the oppression that is inflicted

on so many different kinds of people and to see if we can make something out of that that's stronger than the oppression and stronger than the frailty. You gave an interview to the New York Times recently where you said subtlety is a privilege. Can you unpack that a little bit? Sure. It's not that I don't use subtlety in my work.

I love subtlety. Gary has lots of subtlety in it. It's 24 decades has whole sections that are subtle. It's that it is a privilege that if you want to be subtle, then Larry Kramer is not subtle, right? All those AIDS activists had to fight. for our right to be alive. And there was, a clock was ticking. It wasn't just like some concept that,

oh, people are oppressing us and maybe in a hundred years they'll kill us. It was actually happening right then and there. So they didn't have time to write a play where people sit in a restaurant and talk about the waiter and maybe kind of pause a little bit and just kind of wonder and have something kind of underneath the surface

that's bubbling up. up and then, oh, it gets unleashed at the 11 o'clock scene or it never does and that's part of it. I mean, I find that work very interesting. I like a lot of that work. I love it, in fact, but I see it as, oh, you're exercising your privilege. Great. So that's all I'm saying. And great.

A theater is so wonderful and large and has so many different aspects to it that we can exercise our privilege as well and what a boring world if we didn't exercise some privilege. But it's also just nice to be aware that sometimes subtlety is confused with authenticity. And the only reason we think subtlety is authentic over an extravaganza is because of the Puritan dominance over expression. So that's how I feel about it. Taylor, thank you so much for coming in. Thank you for having me. Thanks for asking the fun questions. Taylor Mack, speaking with the New Yorker's Michael Schulman.

Mack's new play, Gary, a sequel to Titus Andronicus, is on Broadway. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Lexus Quadrato. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.