Mayor of San Antonio, Hero of the Democratic National Convention

The mayor of San Antonio, Texas, has been chosen to give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, where Obama will accept the nomination for the November election. Julian Castro will occupy the same role that the president held eight years ago: the role that propelled him into national politics.

Castro, described as “the Hispanic Obama” in a write-up in The New York Times Magazine in 2010, announced his appointment on Tuesday through a video shown on Univision and published on the convention’s official site. “I know I’ve got some big shoes to fill,” the mayor said in the recording. “We’ve come so far over the last three and a half years thanks to President Obama’s leadership, and I know he’s not done yet. We’ve got a lot more work to do.”

The Democratic mayor has strong support in San Antonio, a city of 1.3 million where Hispanics have made up 65 percent of population growth in the last decade. Castro was elected in 2011 with 83 percent of the vote, quite an achievement in a predominantly Republican state.

In a clear attempt to attract Hispanic voters and to acknowledge some of its most important political figures, the Democratic Party chose to host its convention in the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, where the Latino population has multiplied in recent years. Furthermore, the mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, will be the chairman of the meeting. For three days, Democratic Party leaders will outline policy initiatives before officially naming Obama the presidential candidate.

The placing of Hispanic politicians in such important positions in the convention is a sign of the Democratic Party’s plans to draw a clear contrast between its politics and those of Republicans. For the last two years, Republicans have been strongly associated with anti-immigration laws in Arizona. Although a majority of Hispanic voters support President Obama, he can’t afford to lose votes in the Latino communities in decisive states like Florida, Ohio and Virginia, which could decide the outcome of the election.

Texas is one of the Republican strongholds and will likely go to Romney, but the growing Hispanic population and the power of millions of Hispanic voters who have not yet registered to vote could narrow the gap between the two candidates in the next three months. The demographic changes in Texas led Obama to say at a recent event that Texas is not yet a battleground state, “although that’s going to be changing soon.”

This change will also depend on the rise of figures like Castro, one of the most popular Hispanic politicians and who, at age 37, could soon make the leap to national politics. In his speech, Castro himself noted the parallel between his trajectory and Obama’s after being chosen to play the same role in the Convention. “I remember watching his speech in 2004 and being inspired. When Obama talked about the audacity of hope, I thought back to my mother saying that if you didn’t like the way things were, you could dare to change them. I thought, my mother would like this guy.”

Democrats are confident that the Republicans’ immigration policies, a key issue for Hispanics, will discourage them from voting for Romney. The Republican candidate insists that Obama’s economic policies have had especially grave consequences for the Hispanic population. But Castro disagrees. “He brought economy back from the brink, rescued the auto industry while Mitt Romney argued that we should let Detroit go bankrupt, and he created 4.4 million private sector jobs over 28 consecutive months of job creation,” he said in the announcement.