Call it performance art. Call it protest. Call it a long shot cry for attention. But whatever you call 24-year-old Alex Alex’s bare-bones campaign for Boston mayor, it was the most interesting thing on the debate stage last week — and yes, Josh Kraft was there, too.
The venue was Suffolk University’s Modern Theatre in downtown Boston, where Mayor Michelle Wu and Kraft — her main challenger, a nonprofit executive and son of billionaire Patriots owner Robert Kraft — squared off for the first time in this year’s mayoral race. Domingos DaRosa, a fiery community activist and small-business owner who’s fast becoming a perennial candidate for citywide office, rounded out the panel of contenders.
As expected, Wu was polished, sharp, and unsparing in her critiques of Kraft: “This is a city that cannot be bought,” she said in her opening remarks. Meanwhile, Kraft came across as overly cautious, vague, and out of his depth, calling for a “pause” on bike lanes and generic “new sources of income” for the city. He may have the money to run for mayor, but judging by his debate performance, he forgot to buy an actual plan.
Then there was Alex — no tailored suit, no entourage, no name recognition. The formerly undocumented immigrant only decided to run for office last month and won’t even make the ballot; the deadline to submit the required 3,000 certified signatures from registered Boston voters is May 20. As of Monday morning, he’d only collected around 150.
And yet, Alex, for all his inexperience and rough edges, seems clear-eyed about the odds. “I don’t really have the delusion that I’m gonna win the race for mayor, but I know that my ideas are gonna get out there. I know that people are gonna see there’s value in them,” he told me over the weekend at a coffee shop in Roslindale, where he’d biked from his place in Uphams Corner.
So why run at all?
Before I get to that, it’s worth learning who Alex is, including the story behind his undeniably odd name. He was born Alex Palacios Santos in Oaxaca, Mexico, to a single mother who left for the United States when he was just 8 months old. When Alex was 3, his aunt brought him illegally through the US-Mexico border to reunite with his mother in Boston.
“My mother was abusive my whole life,” Alex said. “There were a few weeks where I couldn’t leave my room.”
Despite the instability at home, Alex stood out academically. After attending two public elementary schools in Boston, he landed at Excel Academy, a charter school in East Boston, for fifth grade. Around that time, he was connected to Steppingstone, an education nonprofit that helped him transfer to Milton Academy on financial aid. Through Steppingstone, Alex also secured pro bono legal assistance and eventually obtained permanent resident status.
At 16, he left home and has been estranged from his mom ever since, he said.
Sorting his legal status “helped him feel settled, because there was so much that’s unsettled in his life,” said Josh Fischel, a former Steppingstone program associate who met Alex about 15 years ago and remains a mentor today. “He denies this, but I have a strong memory of him always carrying a dictionary around. Not because he needed to translate stuff. He just wanted to know what bigger words meant.”
Fischel, now an English teacher in Acton-Boxborough, was surprised when Alex told him he’s running for mayor. “Did I try and talk him out of it? Sure.” Fischel was worried that Alex would come across like “a bit of a crank” at the debate. “But he sounded more prepared than the billionaire’s son.” Alex, Fischel told me, “was not born to stay in his lane. If he’s interested in doing something, he’s just going to do it, damn the consequences.”
Alex attended college at New York University and majored in critical systems studies, an academic field perhaps fitting for someone who’s interested in dismantling inefficiencies and spotlighting structural injustice from the ground up. Big, ambitious goals for any public servant, let alone a 24-year-old long shot candidate.
“I’ve faced so many issues that people my age and people older than me would not have faced,” Alex said. “I’m also trying to gain experience.” He said he’s applied to multiple jobs at City Hall with no luck, including a youth outreach coordinator position and a climate innovation analyst role, “looking at the city’s infrastructure and making sure that it’s more responsive to the realities of ecological collapse,” he said.
At the forum, Alex shined when he shared his perspective as a struggling young person in Boston, a story that contradicted the rosy picture Wu painted of the city. “What Mayor Wu was saying was a picture of Boston that was just not true for me” in terms of successes and opportunities. “I work in retail, like a lot of people my age, because that’s just the only jobs you can find,” Alex said. When I asked him about the biggest issue the city faces he was quick to say housing, or lack thereof. It’s hardly a novel answer, but it’s not an inaccurate one either.
Where Alex starts to lose the room is when the conversation veers into lofty rhetoric and sweeping, sometimes implausible ideas, like his belief in the need for a new Constitution (as noted on his Instagram page). “He’s so smart and agile and personable,” Fischel told me. But “I want people to learn about him more slowly on increasingly bigger stages instead of the very biggest first.”
As for his last name, Alex said he changed it when he became a US citizen in 2023. He’d thought deeply about how neither of his last names reflected any part of him, but he also didn’t feel it was right to appropriate an Indigenous name without the connection. “People don’t see me as Black. People don’t really see me as Native. They just see me as a question mark,” Alex said. So, he doubled down on the one thing he could claim fully: himself.
Gimmicky? Maybe. But also revealing — it’s a symbol of someone who’s still in search of an identity, political or not. After our interview and before starting his work shift at a fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant, Alex biked to Franklin Park Zoo to clean up garbage, something Fischel told me Alex does regularly. (A politician picking up Boston’s trash? Who does that remind you of?)
Sure, he’s not going to be your next mayor. But in a race filled with polish, money, and manufactured messaging and barbs, maybe we needed someone like Alex Alex to make us look twice.
Marcela García is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at marcela.garcia@globe.com. Follow her on X @marcela_elisa and on Instagram @marcela_elisa.