What Gives Me the Right? Alex Alex for Boston's Mayor

Who Decides When We Get to Lead?

Where do I –a gay, illegal 24 year old who’s never had a real job– find the audacity to run for mayor and expect people to support/entertain my delusions?

I’ll tell you, but you’ll have to forgive me for bragging

I wholeheartedly believe I can lead the city as mayor because I am competent; l am qualified and tested; I am not afraid of hard work; I am intellectually rigorous; I position joy as a legitimate and moral political goal.

First, the legal status issue. I am a naturalized citizen(Faneuil Hall 2023), a registered voter of the City of Boston. I meet the bare minimum requirements to enter this race (woo!).

I call myself an Illegal because that's how I spent my first eight years in this country. It’s the political reality a kid had to come to terms with. I call myself an Illegal to force y’all to think about a toddler crossing the desert, too young to remember the peril or the home it took from him.

earliest picture I have of me, few months after arriving in Boston

I want y’all to think about the 11 year old illegal who, after being hit by a car, ran away because his first thought wasn’t “am I hurt”, it was “I can’t let the cops find out and deport my family”.

I became a permanent resident at 12, through a partnership between The Steppingstone Foundation and Ropes & Gray. They argued that the nation would do me and itself a disservice if I were sent back to Mexico. My status was legalized before I finished the 6th grade. My presence in this country hinges on the recognition that I was an asset worth keeping while I was still in middle school.

Field-Tested Since the Age of 6

Despite being only 24, my nearly 2 decades-long professional resume demonstrates my competency in the range of skills required for the position. I have been bridging gaps left by institutional, social, and governing failures since I was in kindergarten.

My knowledge of Boston does not come from an abstracted, intellectualized-policy perspective, or a disconnected, paternalistic-charity angle. I know Boston through a deeply engaged life with its schools, programs, and infrastructure.

Kindergarten: I was the English-Spanish interpreter for my teachers and classmates’ parents. I stepped up without being asked, seeing a need in their struggle to communicate. I bought my siblings ice cream with the $10 my teachers gifted me as thanks at the end of the year.

My mother unloaded most (paperwork and bureaucracy included)household chores onto me by the time I was 11; I filled out and filed forms for schools and medical records; I did the family’s weekly load of laundry; I scrubbed, swept and mopped the apartment; I tutored my siblings and cousins; I went from East Boston to Chelsea to buy groceries, managing the budget; I took the T to drop off paperwork at consulates, to go to extra school, to pick up my brothers, and to run errands for my mother.

I went to 3 different schools in the 2nd grade. My brother’s teachers at the Samuel Adams Elementary School told my mother he would have to repeat the 1st grade because they would not be able to bring him up to grade level. Over 2 grueling months, not only did I bring him to level, he passed the grade as one of the strongest readers in the class.

The next year, I started at the William M. Blackstone Elementary School. When Boston Ballet came to scout, I was selected for their program. I dropped out because I was too insecure, too exposed in the tights that accentuated my rolls in front of a wall of mirrors. I finished the 3rd and 4th grades at the Blackstone, where I tried my first persimmon, where I spent 2 hours every week diving 12 feet to the bottom of its pool, challenging myself and friends.

I know the value of city programs that support kids.

The principal at the time posted MCAS scores on a wall of the main office. For those two years, my name towered over the previous reigning champs. That did not make me very popular. My 4th grade teacher asked why I was disrupting the class. “I don't know. I'm bored. Sorry”. She went above and beyond to push me to apply to the Steppingstone Foundation. I didn’t want to do it because it meant two summers of 6 weeks of school, on top of a year of extra class on Wednesdays and a full day on Saturday.

Against Steppingstone’s counseling, my mother enrolled me at Excel Academy Charter School for the 5th grade. We were so late in applying that I should not have won the lottery meant to keep enrollment fair. But after I went to Orient Heights to take their test, I was offered a place. Of all the school’s I went to, I hated Excel the most. The rules, the performance, the pointless demeaning nature –I rebelled as much as I could at a place where the principal checks the color of your socks every morning before you're allowed into the building.

Thanks to my mother’s abuse and brushes with institutions like these, I know the danger of tyranny and unchecked power.

Even through my thinly veiled distaste, I was awarded one of the two student of the year awards. I really wanted the science one. A teacher from Excel told me, while I interviewed him for my memoir 10 years after the fact, that he used me as a barometer. If I got a question wrong, he took that to mean he hadn’t explained the subject matter well enough. Another told me he didn’t call on me until he had exhausted all other options because he knew I would get the class where it needed to go.

Excel even tried to convince Steppingstone to not go through with my application to private schools for the 6th grade. They obviously told Excel no. The whole point –of my taking the Blue line from Orient Heights to Ruggles to catch the bus to Boston Latin Academy for two extra hours of schooling on Wednesdays– was to get me into the elite bastions of Massachusetts.

Negotiating Coalitions, Navigating Bureaucracy

The founders of Milton Academy never intended for someone like me to befoul their hallowed halls. The liberal administration that admitted me did not understand the full context of what they had gotten themselves into. Just like I wasn’t prepared for the world that would shape the next seven years of my life —simultaneously beyond my reach and a lifeline when I was homeless at 16.

My advisor had been hired as the Director of Multiculturalism (or some other similar nonsense title) that same year. She had to ask the administration how they expected me and another Steppingstone alumnus to get to school. They said it wasn’t really their concern, the other kids figured it out on their own. Their parents chartered buses to campus independently of the school. She had to hold Milton’s hand through the process of understanding how much effort we put into getting to the bus stop alone; they had hired her without understanding why she was there. Eventually, the headmaster of the Lower and Middle School stepped up to pay $4,000 every year for three years so that we could ride the bus.

A few weeks into the 6th grade, the football team got back to school after the last bus to Boston had left. I waited until all the adults were distracted to start walking the mile to the Milton Trolley station. I walked past giant houses, entertaining envious thoughts. I got home to a punishment; my mother could not believe I made her lose face. At school, I was reprimanded, for posing a liability risk. How what I had done was any different or worse than longer commutes I’d already taken on the T, no one could explain.

Out of my depth, a perpetual outsider, surrounded by kids whose lives were inaccessible material and social realities, I refused to back down. To disappear, to become unnoticeable, to lose my intellectual edge to the fear of inadequacy was to die. My mother continued to neglect my academics, and where most would slack or lose focus, I pushed myself. I took Latin throughout middle school, expanding to French and Ancient Greek during high school.

I struggled to find a place at Milton. I never did find a place. Again, I was never meant to access that world. So I decided to challenge it, make it grapple with the question of why I was there at all. In the 8th grade, the 7th grade social studies teacher invited me to present my story to her class. It was the first time I spoke about being an illegal in a space carved out for me. I sanitized it of my mother’s abuse, the loneliness, the anguish. It was as close to the typical feel-good immigrant narrative I ever got.

Ms. Charon invited me back year after year. Each time I presented, I became more conscious of my own story. How I held myself, the language I used, the themes I highlighted –this was probably these kids' first experience with immigration outside of news sound bites. I still have the letters they have written me, reflecting on the experience.

The rest of my high school shenanigans would fill a novel (hint, be on the lookout for my memoir, Illegal), but to summarize: I started boarding in high school, orchestrating my escape from my mother. I ignited protests that shut classes down for a week as a sophomore, and broke dorm rules, mostly being off campus and stealing.

I began to understand that the adults around me recognized my contributions to discussions in ways they didn’t other adults’. And I learned that the school held me at an arm's length, even as I showed clear signs of distress like 40 pound weight cycles, plummeting grades, and general irritability. Giving me the help I needed would open Milton to liability suits. We reached a shaky understanding: a coordinate response would not be coming; my rule breaking would go largely unaddressed.

I survived because individuals, despite owing me nothing, gave what they could. Teachers, friends, strangers, my aunt.

I didn’t go to my high school graduation. I was not proud of what I had done during my time at Milton. I was mad at the school for failing me. I didn’t want my mother’s and father’s absences, in the crowd of hundreds of proud parents, to remind me of yet another way I was different. I moved out of the dorm a day early, skipping out on senior celebrations. I spent the summer before college working at the Starbucks inside the Star Market opposite the Prudential Tower.

The Not-Real Jobs I’ve Had

I walked three miles to work and back, down Mass Ave. I had not yet re-discovered biking. I walked faster and was more reliable than the circuitous bus routes. When I was scheduled to close, I began collecting the food Starbucks demanded we toss out. I finished closing by 8:30, after Mass and Cass got busy, and distributed the pastries on my way home.

Starbucks said they didn’t donate the food because they were liable if someone got sick or had a reaction. I knew they meant they didn’t want their product to be seen in vagrant, homeless hands. It would shatter the illusion of luxury and exclusivity they sell. Cruelty is the point. I wish I could’ve given out the sandwiches, something with protein instead of all the sugar, but they would have flagged me for heating/cooking them. You do what you can in the moment and learn for future revolution.

When I talk about Mass and Cass, I don’t frame the people in crisis as failures of single individuals or administrations. I see them as victims of an intentionally dysfunctional system, people I have more in common with than I do with the rest of “civilized society”. I see a sibling trauma, unmet need; we are separated only by a network of aid and opportunity that allowed me to move beyond my collapsing world.

Candidates who tell you they’ll fix the problem without overhauling housing, labor, food access, and mental health services aren't looking to fix the problem. They're looking to eliminate people, or move them elsewhere.

My first year of college was interrupted by Covid. When I returned to NYC the next year, I took an internship with Legal Services NYC. The bulk of my work focused on Emergency Rental Assistance Program applications. ERAP was the federal program rolled out to help keep people housed as the economy shut down. I interviewed applicants, walked them through applications, created know-your-rights info sheets, and followed up with clients to ensure they had all the documents necessary to get approved.

My own homelessness had revealed the insanity of a society that refuses to ensure the basics of survival despite material overabundance and truly sinful levels of waste. This internship got me close and personal with the inefficiency and stupidity of bureaucracy. Rather than giving that money to applicants directly, or handing them a check or card that could be used exclusively for rent, the money had to go to landlords; they had to agree to receive the federal funds. Why would they reject the back pay rent money? To evict tenants, plaster a new layer of white paint, and upsell the apartments to a desperate market.

I also worked at an Italian specialty pasta shop on W. Houston(How-ston) St. It was generally a good job, but you can only handle being racially harassed so many times before you leave. A man berated my older coworker who dared ask him if he needed a bag. When I told him to leave her alone, he said nadie te pregunto mono negro – no one asked you black monkey. I told him to be careful, being so close to meeting god. The owners did not ban him, did not ask for an apology, and when he did it a second time, I knew I was better than this. All service and retail workers are, and yet, this idiocy is normalized.

I spent a summer working for NYC’s Department of Sanitation, as a community outreach intern. I spoke with hundreds of businesses, helping them come to compliance with sanitation laws before enforcement or fines. I worked dozens of tabling and touch-a-truck events, handing out information to city residents and letting kids climb into the muraled sanitation trucks. In August I spoke with thousands of Queens residents about the new borough-wide compost collection rollout. My Spanish improved dramatically from use.

I took charge of our intern team, handling the added responsibility of coordinating between groups, splitting terrain and tasks, and ensuring work was completed before we went home, without extra pay. And I also made note of what did not work about this compost rollout. I interviewed and volunteered at a composting plant to understand how we can capture the 100 billion pounds of food Americans waste every year.

Instead of individual trash, recycling, and compost bins that every residence places out on the street, Boston can consolidate collection to 2-5 bins per block. This model solves: the repetitive strain of lifting trash into trucks; the rats that chew through plastic; the wind that blows garbage out and all over the streets. I spend my time working on fixing issues like these for the next generation systems I hope to implement in Boston.

The summer after graduating, getting no responses to hundreds of applications I sent out, I worked as a contractor’s assistant for a friend here in Boston. I lowered the foundations of a house, used a jack hammer, drills, power washer, and operated a hand auger. I carried in thousands of pounds of mortar and concrete mix, and carried out thousands of pounds of concrete and dirt we had drilled off the floor. I helped replace decaying wood on a second floor deck and lay the foundations for a patio.

I quit after 10 weeks because I wasn't going to remain friends with the contractor if I continued; he said I lasted twice as long as he expected. I have done the manual labor it takes to build and maintain this city. I know what protections workers need, and how the city can show them its appreciation (things like temp-controlled stations for crews out in rain, cold, heat).

In the fall 2023 to winter 2024, I worked in Arlington as an after school teacher. It was the most fun job I had. The kids reminded me that children have a passion for learning that our education systems destroy. I learned how to motivate obstinate kids, how to redirect disruptive energy, and led a few days of the February Break camp. Two weeks into this job, I texted my advisors –turned lifelong friends– that the snark and button-pushing was payback for my crimes.

I biked 12 miles there and back from Dorchester everyday. When I didn't have my bike, I took the Red line to Alewife and ran 3 miles along the Minuteman Trail to get to the school. I have always been reliable, dependable, and committed to executing the roles I play wherever I go.

2 years out of college, this past winter, I had to find a second part-time job: an undergraduate internship with the Conservation Law Foundation. Thank god it was paid. I performed numerous research tasks for litigation, like collecting and analyzing data on pipeline explosions. I pored through hundreds of FOIA documents, picking out details to strengthen our cases. When various teams got busy with litigation, I took charge of CLF’s comments on the 2026 MSGP, performing comparative analysis with the previous version to identify backsliding standards and measures. I was then given the responsibility of drafting the bulk of the comment.

Since October 2024, I have filled the role of manager at my part-time job in Beacon Hill. The restaurant had just opened up, and after a week of seeing my work ethic, the owner offered me the role. He has said he only feels at rest leaving the shop when he knows I or one other coworker will be there. In this role, I have interviewed, selected, and trained new hires. I helped stabilize the personnel aspect of the restaurant, managing the schedule, creating documents for procedures, and reaching out to city hall and local businesses for partnerships.

I've sent out over 500 applications to “real” jobs. 60 alone to City Hall. My lack of experience isn't a lack of effort on my part. Do I not have a resume that shows I'm capable of more than part-time retail work? This issue is not unique to me; capitalism wastes so much human potential because realizing it threatens the entire premise of the system. Millennials have spent years being the most educated and underemployed generation this country has ever produced. My generation follows in their footsteps: a lifetime of sending out resumes from retail jobs.

Average rents in Boston exceed $3,000/month. At minimum wage, that's 50 hours of work every week, pre tax, pre utilities, necessities, bills, pre loans. The elites running society have the audacity to ask why people aren't starting families, why people don’t own homes, why people are fleeing Boston. Why should people in their mid 30s, with multiple roommates, stay in the city if it will not recognize them as essential to its function? If the people who service Boston cannot afford to live in it, the city has failed them.

Theoretical and Academic Record

We discussed antidepressants during one high school health class. The teacher asked us for our thoughts on their prescription and use. I listened as my classmates shared their opinions: they’re positive because they help fix chemical imbalances; I have been able to focus more on school and my life; I think it's dangerous to rely on these chemicals; I have seen some people get more imbalanced until they find the right combination years after starting.

Once everyone had shared, I provided my synthesis: We cannot ignore or discredit the biological, chemical impacts these drugs have. They help balance people out, and the stigma around them is needlessly cruel. We eat food to attain compounds we cannot make ourselves, why should doing the same to balance chemical signals be shameful? However, we cannot pretend like this band aid is anything more than a short-term solution. People aren't depressed because of chemical imbalances. They are depressed because elites openly destroy and poison our world. Our futures look bleak, what are our prospects? Professionals have been warning of multiple crises for years and nothing is offered except distractions telling us to consume more to fix ourselves.

I have performed this analysis my whole life, and made it the heart of my degree at NYU. I went to NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. I created my own degree: Critical Systems Studies.

Critical: I meticulously analyzed, critiqued, and offered alternative systems.

Critical Systems: The flow of information, resources, and labor that cannot fail, lest we plunge society into bloody chaos.

Systems Studies: I do not approach governing and education, or food and mental health as separate from each other. These are complex, interlaced systems that cannot be siloed and changed as if effects won’t ripple across all of society.

I took classes in all sorts of departments: economics, communications, history, public health, civics, political theory, etc. In all these classes, even in lectures of 100+, I made vital contributions. Not because I hogged air time, but because people in classes for their own majors often stayed silent, leaving the professors to talk to themselves.

In a political communications class, when the professor asked if the stunt Pelosi pulled at Trump's State of the Union was appropriate, I said I cared less about it than the insider trading she and much of Congress have brazenly engaged in for decades. I remained vocal throughout those four years that Democratic and Republican leadership have more in common with each other than the people they pander to with identity politics.

I took Italian and Japanese in my first few semesters. Italian was a breeze, given my background in Spanish, Latin, and French. Japanese was the most I ever struggled in a class, despite putting 10 times the effort compared to any other subject. I dropped Italian and minored in Japanese, knowing it would lower my GPA by .25. The challenge was crucial to future plans of global cooperation, and to avoid mental complacency.

In a public health class, I spoke openly about the eating disorders given to me by my mother. My frankness allowed others to share themselves, understanding that education is not meant to be abstract study. It is supposed to train us to analyze the production of our lives, so that we can intentionally shape our presents and futures.

I was a leading voice in my classes because I cared to take ownership over my education. As I sifted through the trauma of my childhood, I realized it was a direct outcome of the systems of abuse that control our lives. Maybe more acute and relentless in my life, but present in everyone’s life to some degree. Education, housing, food, government, trade; I understood that I could not let the machinations of education slot me into this failing, dying system. I needed to turn its resources to liberation, not solely personal, but national, global, beyond our species.

NYU, even receiving many of my pointed critiques, recognized my efforts. Gallatin awarded me for interdisciplinary academic excellence. I hadn't known it was an award I could pursue. They nominated me as their candidate to speak at the all school graduation exercises. Of the four finalists, I understood why I wasn't selected as the speaker: hearing the institution’s complicity in abuse is not exactly great graduation speech material.

Leadership

While at NYU, I joined a leadership organization called Junior Chamber International. As the youngest member, before I'd been officially inducted, I already served on its board. Before I received any training, I taught English and Spanish to over 50 people, organized member appreciation events, and launched a project that cleaned 500 lbs of garbage from city parks and streets. I created a garden bed that produced abundant tomatoes, peppers, onions, squash, and herbs, with minimal input. I documented and shared the process, showing how I had saved months of compost and layered it into the soil as I constructed the bed.

February 2024, I left Boston on a 2,000 mile trip across the country. Some people travel to Europe or Mexico after graduation. Overachieving, delusional me thought I would be able to bike 100 miles for 100 days to cover the entire circumference of the country. The road humbled me. It tested my ability to plan and improvise, to reach out to people, to read my environments, to navigate the unknown with a goal in mind. I managed to see the eclipse in Austin, Texas.

This project was political and personal. Having just become a citizen after 20 years here, I needed to understand what America and being American mean. What is the nation’s identity stripped of the political circus and identity politics that has defined it since its beginning?

The Otis, Samuel Adams, the Blackstone, Let's Get Moving, Steppingstone, Milton Academy, C5 Crossroads for Kids, Camp Harbor View, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, NYU:

This exhausting list of leadership programs and institutions shows I have been prepared in numerous contexts by dozens of interests and people.

I have been training myself my entire conscious life. I never set a particular title as a goal —in fact, running for mayor wasn’t on my radar a few months ago. But as I traverse the city, noting its dysfunction, wondering why it can’t step forward, I realize I need to step up. In a month alone, I’ve stopped people smoking in moving subway cars, got rowdy children on school buses to settle down and sit, and cleaned 600 pounds of garbage around the city. What could have I achieved had the Wu administration hired me? Does the city want homegrown talent to move elsewhere? What potential can I help Boston unlock at its helm?

Ongoing Clean Up of the Dorchester Shores

My goal is liberation, advancement, bounty, compassion, cohesion. Boston is poised to lead a world that can see itself honestly, working to improve while celebrating its beauty.

I am a kid raised, shaped, trained by Boston, the intended product of its schools and programs. Mr. Kraft cannot relate to the basic realities of people fighting to stay alive in this system. Most of us can’t afford rent, much less a condo on a whim to enter the mayoral race. Mayor Wu is a dedicated civil servant, but she is not bridging critical gaps in transit, housing, and labor. Neither of them can claim to have been raised here, steeped in the physical and social fabric of Boston. Most critically, I do not have to answer to anyone besides the people of Boston.

If you ask Kraft the intention behind his work with organizations like the Boys & Girls Club, I imagine his mission is the same as Steppingstone’s, C5’s, or JCKF’s: to provide life changing experiences to children that will train them for leadership.

I am here today because dozens of institutions and individuals helped me advance through flawed systems. I was trained to recognize needs, to see how my talents can help others, and to lead, not through mandates, but through example. Do I, or any of the other kids who’ve gone through these programs, have to wait for establishments to tell us, “now you can lead your city”?

Boston is proud of its history: the catalyst for the revolution that would birth the country. I am here to tell you the revolution was never completed. The colonial elite replaced the British Crown, cascading through history to end up here. A nation that poisons the planet, itself, and its people in service of oligarchs. Peter Faneuil built the “cradle of liberty”, where I became a citizen, off of the abuse and torture of black people. It’s time we continue the work started 250 years ago, and reignite the smoldering embers.

However, I do not believe in the “raze and burn everything down” mentality. We only have so much time, so many resources. We need to operate within material and social constraints. I know what parts of the city work: it’s people. I know what can be made so much better: the systems holding us back, draining us. I know the sleeping potential hidden around many of its corners because I’ve come across them through a life of exploration.

I have lived on the margins, making do with scraps. My entire childhood was a crash course in valuable, applicable governing skills. I can generate bounty out of what already exists. I want all kids to see Boston as a reflection of themselves, a city they helped build. I want every adult to feel the tingling of youth when they step out onto Boston’s streets.

I will build a city that sees its residents and validates their existence.

Alex Αλεξ

アレックス Alex

For Boston’s Mayor

Joy is Revolution