Oral History Interview of Alexes Castro

Title: Oral History Interview of Alexes Castro
Interviewee: Alexes Castro
Interviewer: Selena Piercy
Description: Alexes Castro of Sewanee, Tennessee was interviewed by Selena Piercy, a Sewanee student, on November 19, 2023, on Zoom. While their conversation was primarily on the Black Lives Matter Movement, other topics included discussing his upbringing in Houston, Texas and his experience attending a YES Prep Charter School . We hope that this conversation will assist scholars with a further understanding of race in the United States during the early twenty-first century. Please click on the link to see the full interview.
Transcript: 0:03 SELENA: Okay, this is Selena Pearcy from Sewanee, the University of the South. It is Sunday, November 19th, 2023. And would you care to introduce yourself?

0:21 ALEXES: Hello, I'm Alexes Castro. I'm a senior at Sewanee. I'm suspected to graduate this May as a history major.

0:33 SELENA: Awesome. And sorry, I had some technical difficulties. Where are you calling from?

0:42 ALEXES: Sewanee.

0:43 SELENA: Okay. Okay, awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Alexes, for being here. So we're just going to lay a little bit of groundwork with these questions, get into the groove. Where are you originally from?

0:59 ALEXES: Houston, Texas.

1:01 SELENA: Awesome. And how is living in Sewanee different from living in Houston?

1:10 ALEXES: For one is I'm very much a minority here because growing up at least most of my high school experience, majority of the students were either Hispanic, like me or black. Then we had Asian students. That was what the school was mostly of, majority of. And because of that I didn't feel, I felt connected with not just my culture, but just with everything in general. But whereas here in so it's predominantly a white serving institution and because of that have felt kind, I have felt kind of out of place.

2:08 SELENA: I'm sorry to hear that you're not feeling in place in Sewanee, but yeah, I'm sorry. I hope we find some good community eventually,

2:22 ALEXES: But I'm just saying at the beginning of my journey here.

2:27 SELENA: Oh, okay. Okay, gotcha.

2:29 ALEXES: Okay.

2:33 SELENA: You mentioned feeling a sense of community with the people at your high school in Houston. Where else did you find community when you were growing up?

2:48 ALEXES: For one, this is also one difference, I guess a cultural difference too of my last comment. I grew up in an extended family where at least from when I was zero to six years old, majority of my family lived in the same block and it was also kind of big too, so it just felt kind of nice. For example, I lived a few houses down the street from my elementary school and my grandparents and it was just kind of nice to, whenever I was bored with my parents, I would just run down the street and my grandmother, that's where a bunch of my cousins would hang out. That was our little hangout spot. So I didn't really grow up just in one family situation with older siblings or whatnot. I grew up with a mixed group of cousins that were younger and older.

4:01 SELENA: Yeah, that sounds pretty cool. It reminds me of that saying about how it takes a village to raise a child, but it sounds like you had a pretty tight village, but cool

4:18 ALEXES: Familial and that's one culture shock.

4:24 SELENA: Yeah. Yeah. And then I guess in the current day you said you found community. Now, would you care to tell me a little bit more about where you find community today?

4:41 ALEXES: For one is I try to put myself out there and what I mean by this is I have a community through, for one example, through my clubs. I'm a member of a lot of clubs like the MMA Club, the ola, which is the Hispanic Leadership Awareness Organization here on Sewanee. Then Young Democratic Socialists of America. All of these clubs I'm fairly active in, and that's just that fact alone I found one, not just one many communities like that.

5:26 SELENA: That is lovely. It sounds like you're involved in a little bit of everything. Pretty good portfolio.

5:35 ALEXES: Yeah. Then also too, that's mainly what I do now, but my freshman sophomore year I mainly volunteered every Saturday teaching English to immigrants. That recently moved to, I think it was Manchester, it changed depending on what week, but most of the time it's in Manchester.

6:05 SELENA: Wow, that's great. How did you get into doing that volunteer work?

6:12 ALEXES: Well, this is also, I guess another community. I'm a part of a scholarship here at Sewanee and specifically, yes, prep. And when I was a freshman, my scholarship was completely different than how it was now the seniors and even just the sophomores, they were all basically, every classmate before me also volunteered and things like that was very active, not even just in Sewanee community, but they were also active in Manchester and different things like that. So for me it was just kind of obvious that was the only models I had here. For me, it was kind of just obvious that I would volunteer.

6:58 SELENA: Awesome. Well that sounds like a great experience and it's very important work. So kudos to you for that. And you are clearly a Sewanee student. How did you get to be a Sewanee student? What was the journey to becoming

7:23 ALEXES: The high school? I'm specifically from Yes, prep. It's different from a regular high school in a sense. It's primarily focused on getting the students to graduate and go to university, four year university. Because of that, they kind of try to get students and to getting into clusters in different universities across the us. So if we were to go there, we won't be alone. And at least in my experience, the Yes prep program or my high school really helped me on that regard. I have friends that went to public universities. I guess I should also make that distinction. These clusters will mainly be in private liberal arts across the US and I would just talk to my friends that did go to public schools and they would tell me they would feel very isolated just because they didn't off the bat, they didn't have people to now, whereas for me, just my example, I would say my funness day I had here at SOI was my perspective visit.
8:53 I was, and I just came and just the people here in my scholarship group, they helped me so much through them. I already knew sophomores, juniors, seniors, even before I was a freshman. I knew the future sophomores that were freshmen my senior year even before they were sophomores. So that was kind of nice. Just that night it kind of fixed the worry that I had, which was I wouldn't find a community, but just in my perspective visit through my upperclassmen and my scholarship group, they already made me realize how easy it's to find a community, which is just to put yourself out there and they helped me a lot with that.

9:48 SELENA: Awesome. Yeah, that definitely is not a journey I think a lot of people at SOI have taken, so it's really cool that we can get that insight from you. I guess moving on, who inspires you?

10:14 ALEXES: I guess for me it's kind of like a couple people. For one is my parents just because all the effort they're putting into me my time here at wan, which is kind of a given that they'd be, they're very inspirational. Anytime I feel down, I would just call them and things like that and always broadening up my mood. Then some other people that I find very inspirational is, I'm trying to remember Michael Peri, he's like a political philosopher on the left. He's very inspirational just because I would see a lot of his lectures, specifically the Histography and his arguments or historiography kind of helped me come terms with something that I'm dealing with in my thesis and what I feel like just in general that I'm dealing with in terms of my passion in history, which is a lot of the subjects I want to write about aren't that well documented, but through a lot of his lectures, specifically the historiography section where he explains his defense, he argues that the truth is there, but it's just kind of like you just have to mirror it. You just have to see, you just have to notice the things that the quiet parts of just one sentence. Just one sentence doesn't mean something. It implies biases of the writer and things like that. And that kind of helped me because the topic that I'm writing on my thesis, I'm finding it very hard to find primary sources in the sense that really the only primary sources I can get my hands on are the same primary sources that the books I'm reading on site.
12:34 And that's why I have to be able to see the biases and see how I can interpret the same data in different ways.

12:44 SELENA: Yeah. Well, awesome. Sounds like a couple cool people in your life. That's awesome. And then the next question we have is what traveling have you done? It doesn't have to be international, but it can also be,

13:06 ALEXES: Well, I would say I have pretty much traveled through one third of the US states. I'm not familiar with all of 'em, but just because the few states I am familiar, we just have to cross so many states just to get there. And for example, a family in California, Michigan, Washington, and things like that all over the us. So in order to visit, we just take that big family road trips, things like that. I traveled to Canada to the Niagara Falls. I mainly regularly travel to Mexico though to visit my parents' hometown.

14:01 SELENA: Awesome. Where is their hometown?

14:08 ALEXES: Cool. And the town is

14:12 SELENA: Awesome.

14:14 ALEXES: It's a village in the mountains.

14:18 SELENA: That sounds like a lot of fun. What is it like to go visit their hometown in Mexico?

14:29 ALEXES: It's like a 360, the exact opposite of the US
14:37 Out there. It's just way more of a community, way more friendlier. And not only that, everyday life is just less older, but I generally, sure, other than my economic opportunities here in the us, my cousins that in a similar position as me, and what I mean by also college educated, they just deal with less stress even though it's similar things like engineers for example and things like that where teachers and things like that. Generally they tell me very stressful, least stressful. And the few ones that actually for a while came to the us, they thought, oh, it's better for my career if I just go north. But they specifically tell me, no, it's not worth it. The stress and the social. They said they didn't have a social life over here in the US because it was all about work. Whereas in Mexico it's the complete opposite.

15:53 SELENA: Yeah.

15:57 ALEXES: Cool.

15:59 SELENA: Cool. Do you have any plans to go back and visit anytime soon?

16:08 ALEXES: Well, I might have to get an extension on my thesis just because of my health problems that I'm dealing with. But if I don't have to get an extension on that thesis, I think I might be able to go to Mexico regardless of my health conditions. I'm still trying to finish my thesis on the same due date. And I usually visit Mexico every other year, ever since I came to college.

16:47 SELENA: Cool. Well, I hope you get to go visit and all of those things are resolved. Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing about your background. Now we're going to move into the questions related to the Black Lives Matter movement. Our first question is how do you receive the news?

17:12 ALEXES: The news, I mainly, I forgot the add-on, but I mainly, I have this add-on on my Gmail that just sends me the headlines of every news article. Then it just gives me the option to click the link and things like that. And I just generally, well, I get my news in two different ways. The first way is I usually watch media to actually know what's going on. I use non mainstream media, but to know what's the popular narrative of whatever given side on the US media, I do feel like there's different sides. I just watch them, not because I believe in them, but just to know what the general American populace as a whole, you see. Yeah.

18:19 SELENA: Awesome. And sorry, you said non-mainstream media is how you, okay. Would you care to talk more about what all that entails?

18:34 ALEXES: Yeah, mainly it's democracy Now. Have you ever heard of them?

18:41 SELENA: I have not

18:43 ALEXES: How Jazeera, but I'll give Vera as an asterisk in the sense I generally believe they're reliable on everything they report. Unless it's Qatari and related to their interests, then that's the only time they're really biased. But even then their biases is not as bad as I feel like the general US side of the media, but that's why I added an asterisk. The only news outlet that I regularly receive news from that has really open biases.

19:28 SELENA: Okay, cool. And what is your experience using social media?

19:38 ALEXES: For one, if I could live my life without it, I would in a sense, because
19:53 For example, right now I sort of need social media, even though I don't post too much on any social medias I have, I sort of need 'em just to spread information or about events and things like that for one of my many clubs, just so people would know I have to have an Instagram or Snapchat to post a couple of days before or the day of. And also to just Gmail in general, like soi, EDU. But I will say I'm just like everybody else. I just spend too much time just scrolling sometimes. Sometimes just have to limit myself three hours a day.

20:52 SELENA: I'm also prone to a little doom scroll session every once in a while. So I feel you on that one.

21:00 ALEXES: Now with finals coming up. I got to follow that rule more.

21:07 SELENA: I know I got to lock in, but, okay, cool. How did you first encounter the Black Lives Matter movement?

21:20 ALEXES: Well, at least for me, I feel like I sort of encountered the precursors of it, at least when I was more active in high school and things like that. Just by me organizing and organizing my high school and specifically my high school is kind of hard to actually organize and in a meaningful way because my high school would crack down on people that try to organize protests or things like that. They would suspend the organizers that was planning it. Then they would say then later the day of if you do do it, you will get suspended along with them and things like that. So it was kind of very hard to do any organizing. But we did have one organization star, which was, I'm trying to remember the acronym because it's been a while since I graduated, but it was student and teachers for refugees in Houston, but it just started by, it's kind of sad, but there's been so many crises in the US at least since I've been growing up that I forget what specific refugee wave or year it happened, but they got announced about not a hundred, but 10,000 refugees will be assigned to the greater Houston area.
23:10 And there's a lot of backlash in the Greater Houston vicinity. But as a community, it was also teachers involved, but mostly it was students we decided to organize and specifically once they tried to crack down on it, we sort of actually stood our ground. We were like, oh, well this is kind of a good cause. And at least at that point, my high school's name, yes, actually stood for something which was Youth Engagement Service. Towards the end of my high school, it stopped being an acronym and it was just yes. But at that point, community engagement was still a value that they said they had, and because of that, we used that against them to allow us to have this organization. And anything related organizing wise came from this group and usually happened under this group. It was kind of the only safe place, but even then, not too much could happen. But the few moments that there was buildup to it, it usually happened because they would organize under the guise of STAR and things like that.

24:44:00 SELENA: Cool. Okay. Awesome. And it sounds like you had a pretty active role in organizing protests and I guess encouraging people to let their voice be heard. So what is your opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement? I think just generally

25:15:00 ALEXES: For one, I agree with everything. Like its principles and things like that. I don't think it's controversial at all. Yeah, that's mainly it because I guess just because I was a little bit more involved in my community growing up, I sort of just, regardless of whatever event that immediately led to the foundation of the Black Lives Matter movement, I would've developed that thought process naturally because at least in Houston, it's very much easily easy to see examples of environmental racism and things like that. So I didn't need to have something tragic to happen far away from me because just in my background itself, I was suffering not from similar things, from the same system. And from a young age I saw that. And I think Black Lives Matter does a good job nationwide, like an umbrella. I think that's what it does really good. It allows people to organize nationwide.

26:44:00 SELENA: Okay, awesome. And I'm curious about the community of Houston or your closer community and their reaction to Black Lives Matter. It sounds like your high school was not very supportive, but you did find

27:10:00 ALEXES: People who

27:10:00 SELENA: Were.

27:12:00 ALEXES: My high school, it was mainly conservative, and I wasn't even, like, I will say there wasn't that many people like me in the sense outspoken, because after a while people would just start being scared to continue on speaking and things like that, criticize the school and things like that. But I dunno, I found ways to game the system through my experiences. And one thing that I did was I founded the journalism club for a good while. I was just known as that person that would just cover international events and specifically on women's issues because majority of my readers were women. And I noticed that, and I just noticing that audience, I thought I should cover issues that students or teachers in my high school probably wouldn't know.

28:39:00 SELENA: Awesome. Which generation was most affected by the Black Lives Matter movement?

29:03:00 ALEXES: I would have to say at least the older generations, mainly because I feel like, at least in my experience, the people that are more likely to have negative opinions about black people just in general beliefs and things like that, at least my experiences tended to be older. I feel like my generation, or at least the younger generations we're more likely to have a diverse set of friend groups. So I think that just makes it less likely for the younger generations to be as not be, but hold bigoted beliefs and things like that. And that's why I think Black Lives Matter specifically has helped older American generation to actually see a different side of the argument.

30:23:00 SELENA: Awesome. How has Black Lives Matter impacted your life?

30:35:00 ALEXES: Well, it's impacted me a lot because I have been at a few Black Lives Matter protests. Actually. When the major protests were going on, I did go not frequently, but semi-frequently, mainly because of the risks involved. But even before Black Lives Matter, specifically in my high school, I was already calling out racism directed towards our black students just because I was like, Hey, most of the schools, mainly minorities, majority of the teachers were white. I was like, that's not okay. But then even if you look at it, most of the students were Hispanic background and I was like, Hispanics, here are the majority. Then from there, there's different subsets, and I was like, black students, Asian students, they all suffer because of that.
32:03:00 And to a lesser extent, it was also with Hispanic students too, because in general the administration didn't really take seriously those kind of racial issues. But black students did receive the most heavy, the most blunt effects of it. I specifically remember in seventh grade, we weren't taking the end of the year, which is star, but we were taking something that was specifically for us. There was an exam already in seventh grade that was in college level. It was already a college exam, and they just wanted to see how prepared we were for college. And there was pretty much the entire year, that's what we were worried about instead of star. But this specific exam that we took during the break, one of the students, he was just really nervous, just he didn't prepared and he was kind of nervous. He was asking for advice because our proctor at that time was social studies, which that was the exam we took. And the teacher would be like, oh no, sorry, I can't help you, but you need to quiet down. Then he just went back to giving out instructions. But my friend never didn't listen to it. I could see it. He was just nervous. I think he was having, he was just nervous, and because that the teacher got really annoyed and he said, I forget the exact same phrase, but he said something like, oh, you're stupider than I think Peanut Gallery.
34:12:00 And I did not know what that was. And also none of my other friends, we knew what that was, but when that moment happened, we sort of knew the attempt of it. We sort of saw he was just lashing out and it felt like he had a slur, but he didn't. But later on, once I got back home, it's apparently this menstrual phrase, they used to say the 1920s, that's how, I guess you can say racist. This one specific teacher was, and it was, even though I told and we spread it around, if you weren't in that room, you don't remember to this day.
35:09:00 And because of that, just for example, I went to a graduation party for one of my alums that came here too also, yes, prep my high school then here. Then once she graduated here, I went to a graduation party and I actually ran into him at that party. And for me, at least for me, I always had that racist view of him, but my friend didn't. And when I told her, I was like, Hey, why did you invite him? And she was like, oh no. I was like, oh no, he would never be racist. Things like that. Then I was like, oh, because she wasn't there. And also too, she wasn't black. I'm pretty sure this teacher held these views about everybody, but he was more likely to blurt it out towards my fellow black students. And it felt bad just because I would tell the administration things like that. They'd be like, oh, we investigate. But just because he was one of the older teachers with years under his belt, nothing really happened to him.

36:24:00 SELENA: That sounds like a pretty negative experience,

36:30:00 ALEXES: And that's why Black Lives Matter at least helped out now because less likely to happen with the current high school, it's not as bad, but it's gotten better. And I very much think it's because of the attention brought on Black Lives Matter by Black Lives Matter.

36:57:00 SELENA: Wow, that's a good way to look at things. I think. That's great. How do you think the Black Lives Matter movement succeeded?

37:15:00 ALEXES: I think it succeeded by unabashedly just saying a narrative, like their narrative. Because at the end of the day, the mainstream narrative before Black Lives Matter was less likely to hold bearable views towards just like police brutality in general, those kinds of issues. But I feel like afterwards you're more likely to see different opinions on the mainstream narrative. And sometimes the Black Lives Matter narrative, certain points is the mainstream narrative. And I think that's a really good sign showing that gradually it will become a part of the mainstream narrative, and hopefully if it does that it becomes that that will bring more light on the issues that cause the movement to be formed in the first place to be solved.

38:27:00 SELENA: Yeah. Okay. Great. And then on the other end of that, how do you think that Black Lives Matter failed?

38:42:00 ALEXES: Well, I guess I wouldn't really call this a failure, but this is one problem I have is people don't realize Black Lives Matter is a movement than the organization is two different things, because at least in my experience, when people are criticizing Black Lives Matter, they're mainly just criticizing the institution. And for me, because I have been to a few protests and things like that, I don't see the actual Black Lives Matter institution itself have a big row in its protests. It's actually a little conglomerate of multiple little activist groups that together United for One big protest. And because I was actually on the ground, I actually saw that it's just multiple different groups. But a lot of times the criticisms are being levied towards the movement. It's just institution. And I think if you don't actually, you're more likely to know this if you've actually been on the grounds. But I don't think everybody has the chance to do that. And that's one fact that the news doesn't really talk about whenever they want to defend Black Lives Matter, they usually bring somebody connected to the institution. But reality, black Lives Matter is a grassroots organization.

40:29:00 SELENA: Awesome. How would you describe the current state of race relations in the United States?

40:49:00 ALEXES: I would say it's kind of complicated. It might sound contradictory, but I don't think there is a problem. It's all being artificially stoked. It's all just, I feel like different news groups trying to portray that there's actually problems between different racial groups, where in reality, for me, I see that as I like to see the big picture. For me, I don't see it as one racial group versus the other because the way I see it's we're all and things like that, we're all workers, things like that. And because of that, I think it's just easier for, well, I guess it's just probably be easy just to stick to the news, but I think it's just easier for news to get the higher ratings up by perpetuating these stereotypes and things like that. For example, stop Asian Hate Bill. That mainly just raised police funding in general. It didn't really help at all, but it mainly just gave more funding to the police. But whenever you're hearing news people covering it, they would always either play a Hispanic person or a black person beating up an elderly Asian person. Most of the time, at least this is what I saw, this is what I saw. Not just in C Nnn, but just Fox News and things like that. And NB, what's the other one? N-N-B-N-S.

42:54:00 SELENA: What is it?

42:55:00 ALEXES: It's like the pick three, cnn, Fox News,

42:59:00 SELENA: Ms. N,

43:00:00 ALEXES: Bbc. Yeah, NBC, that one. But if you actually luck on the hate crime statistics, the people that they're perpetrating Asian hate tend to be white people, but the news narrative doesn't paint that. And instead they just paint like it's between different minority groups.

43:26:00 SELENA: Yeah, that is a really, yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I like that take.

43:36:00 ALEXES: That's what I mean. It's like there is race issues, but I feel like it's all artificially stoked. It's just so we can not notice the bigger problems, I guess in a way offers an easy solution like oh, but in reality, the situation is more complex.

44:00:00 SELENA: Right, right. Alright, well we have made it to our final question. What do you think is the future of the Black Lives Matter movement?

44:17:00 ALEXES: I think the future will be, well, this might be helpful, might be too hopeful, but I think in the next 20 years, I think its goals will have been, to some extent, be legislative nationally. That's my hope at least. And maybe as an organization, it doesn't have to exist anymore, but I'm hoping it doesn't have to exist in the next 20 years. But we'll just have to wait and see. But I'm really hopeful that because I do see the US getting better in terms of just police brutality and just how almost every issue tends to affect black people more general than the average American citizen.

45:29:00 SELENA: All right. Is there anything else you would like to add that we didn't cover relating to the Black Lives Matter movement?

45:40:00 ALEXES: No.

45:42:00 SELENA: Alright. Well, thank you so much again, Alexes, for joining today.

Part of Alexes Castro