We examine the flavor structure of the trilinear superpotential couplings
which can result from embedding the Standard Model within D brane sectors in
Type IIB orientifold models, which are examples within the Type I string
framework. We find in general that the allowed flavor structures of the Yukawa
coupling matrices to leading order are given by basic variations on the
"democratic" texture ansatz. In certain interesting cases, the Yukawa couplings
have a novel structure in which a single right-handed fermion couples
democratically at leading order to three left-handed fermions. We discuss the
viability of such a ``single right-handed democracy'' in detail; remarkably,
even though there are large mixing angles in the u,d sectors separately, the
CKM mixing angles are small. The analysis demonstrates the ways in which the
Type I superstring framework can provide a rich setting for investigating novel
resolutions to the flavor puzzle.Comment: 23 pages, references adde