In this oral history report, Justice Castañeda, a University of Wisconsin-Madison
student, educator, and economic specialist shares insight on his background in social change
and how change is the only constant. Here we learn how his unique life experiences have
shaped who he is and how it has inspired him to make headway for change in the
community

Podcast by Mina Yildiz

Log of Oral History with Time Notes
Interview Session (October 17, 2022): Digital File Link
Introduction: The Collective Impact
00:00:00 – 00:00:33

Start of Oral History:
00:00:33 – 00:02:29
General Background & Icebreaker | 00:00:33 – 00:02:29
Justice Casteneda identifies with the He/Him series pronouns and is finishing his dissertation at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to start off the interview he shares a couple quotes that
have meaning to him:

1. “Life is too short for whole wheat pasta”
2. “The plan is nothing more than the most natural and normal point of demarcation; in
   many current trajectories. It's never meant to be followed, because the conditions under
   where a plan is made are never constant. And so, if you make a plan of success, beholden
   to conditions that were extant at the time of the plan being made you're inevitably setting
   yourself up for failure”

Upbringing and Background:
00:02:29 – 00:05:07

Family-Background | 00:02:29 – 00:05:07
Justice was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, with both of his parents being university
students at the time, but were unable to finish college. He spoke to how this family dynamic was
untraditional, and how he and his mom had taken a “low-income housing tour” bouncing around
and inhabiting respite shelters. Then his mother disappeared when he was 8-years old. He then
lived with his father for a couple years before moving out on his own when he was 13-years old.

Childhood Contribution to Current Life-Journey:

00:05:07 – 00:11:15

Question | 00:05:25
“Is there a part of your childhood that you feel the most grateful to have gone through and that
contributed to your current life journey?”
Response | 00:05:34 – 00:07:33
Justice shared that there is always a dichotomy, because he is here. There are always lessons to
be learned and he learned to deal with what he had to deal with. What was impactful to his life
was that his mother taught him how to read at a very young age (4-years old) and he became a
voracious reader. Although his father, however, wasn't wasn't particularly academically engaged
as a student, but was a MEChA [an esoteric Spanish Acronym that translates as the Chicano
Student Movement of Aztlan] and an a local musician who had a circle of artists and intellectuals

always around him and Justice felt very fortunate about being surrounded by the arts and
thinkers.
Question | 00:07:33
“Is there anything you regret having gone through, or wish there was something you've done
differently?”
Response | 00:07:42 – 00:08:49
Justice shared there was a lot of it. He's seen a lot of things as a young kid and did a lot of things
as an adolescent. He had witnessed horrific stuff that has impacted him severely. Going through
that was very hard, but it gave him a sense of who he needed to be on this planet; despite the pain
being very real and raw.
Key Moment | 00:07:49 – 00:07:55
“My childhood was not appropriate for children.”
Question | 00:08:49
“Do you think that the pain or the experiences you have been through helped change your
passions and interests in social change?”
Response | 00:09:02 – 00:11:16
Justice said in hindsight there was a lot of it when thinking about the people, the conditions, the
environment and how those reasons and root causes affected, shaped, and inputted his and his
families experiences. A lot of his friends from childhood are now dead or locked up in prison,
and looking back knew how things were going to shake out for them when looking at how things
were like for them in first and second grade. They never really had a fair shot as the interventions
where they looked for in spaces of education did not provide support and were nonexistent in
terms of what they needed. Therefore a lot of the work that he does now is fueled by that passion
to provide that support.

Education and Experience:
00:11:16 – 00:36:55

Question | 00:11:24
“Did you have a similar experience in the education system when growing up?”
Response | 00:11:32 – 00:15:05
Justice expressed how literacy engagement outside school is necessary, and one of the places we
see the most significant gaps in students to the extent they are exposed to reading are when they
are in school, so when looking at the supportive hours outside of school there are huge
disparities. However, by being exposed to literacy at a young age because his mother had taught

him how to read and being surrounded by the intellectual type by his father it paid him a huge
dividends. The institution of education was never foregin to him or absent from his psyche as his
paternal grandmother (who was one of the first Mexican-Americans on record in the state of
Racine, Wisconsin) had a Masters Degree in Education Policy at University of
Wisconsin-Whitewater. He thinks about it a lot as at that time the likelihood of women being
accepted or accessing higher education was very slim. But here we have a Mexican-American
woman who is not only going to college but also getting an advanced degree; with all nine of her
kids then stepping foot on a college campus after her. He thinks that in itself is a unique type of
privilege even though he wasn't able to operationalize it much later in his life.
Key Moment | 00:15:30 – 00:15:35
“The economic rent to do well in your core-curriculum.”
Response | 00:16:10 – 00:18:48
Justice always did well in elementary school even when going through a lot of stuff at home.
However, he started dropping off in middle school and by the time he was living on his own he
only ended up going to a month or two of seventh grade and barely graduated high school. When
talking with educators or administrators that were around him as a kid, he was politically
engaged and was very aware of who he was politically and about a lot of things that were
happening. Throughout highschool he was the youngest person involved with something called
the Multicultural Teen Council. In the council they did presentations in highschools around
southern Wisconsin around things like intteracial dating, racisim, LBTQIA+, safe-sex
relationships. A lot of the things he saw being problematic about the city and county then are still
here now.
Key Moment | 00:18:58 – 00:19:03
“I feel like time is the eternal recurrence of the same”
Question | 00:19:41
“From there what was your education background once you identified your political passions?”
Response | 00:19:52 – 00:21:08
After high school Justice began attending Madison College even though he was not ready and
got Ds and Fs. He explained how so much of school is having the conditions, mindset, or having
structure of focus to be able to do it and a lot of comes down to the hierarchy of needs and if you
have the needs to be able to engage in school to get a return of the time in that space. And at that
time he not that position in having access to those basic needs.
Key Moment | 00:20:07 – 00:20:09
“Nothing is wasted in terms of experience.”

Response | 00:21:25 – 00:21:08
He worked in construction then as a shoe metal worker for a couple years, then roofing. At that
point that's when his friends started getting killed, and a lot of people around him went to prison.
He then found himself at the recruitment office at 20 years old. While there is a professional and
personal component in the military, by learning how to be an adult a sense of infrastructure to
build professional skills and intangibles. The Marine Corp thought how to self govern and
govern other people and was also very much a school. There were always trained assessments
and evaluations and gave him space to develop how to learn.
Key Moment | 00:22:22 – 00:22:26
“I don't know what compelled me completely to get out of here, but I just knew I had to get out
of here.”
Response | 00:27:26 – 00:32:42
In the military he had access to needs and paid education. He knew he needed to get a degree and
started taking classes again. When he got his first A and it quickly grew from there and started
taking all the classes he could and got his associates—Justice compared it to the Matrix, where
the guy slowed down and could see everything clearly. At this point he knew he needed to hone
it in and focus on the next step. He got out of the military and got his Undergraduate Degree of
Urban Planning and Studies with a Minor in Educational Policy from the University of
California, San-Diego with a 3.9 GPA while teaching english and algebra in a project-based
learning highschool. Justice had a mentor-advisor who asked him about graduate school; he said
had never thought about it until then so when he started applying it was a very surreal
experience. Justice got his Masters Degree Educational Policy and Organizational Leadership at
Stanford University, and Urban Studies and Planning with a focus in housing and economic
policy, economic development, and industrial relations at MIT. Justice was additionally accepted
at other universities such as Brown, NYU, Columbia, and Harvard.
Key Moment | 00:32:42 – 00:32:47
“For me, the areas I struggled in school, generally speaking, are where I learned the most”
Response | 00:34:40 – 00:36:55
Justice was hired by a Think Tank in Oakland, California called Policy Link to work on what is
now called the My Brother's Keeper Initiative at the White House. At the Obama Administration,
he was on a team that did a lot of figuring out how to lift up what works, and were trying to do
some things that address the educational and economic outcomes of boys and men of color and
what that would look like. He was also working at a middle school at this time and received a
post-graduate fellowship at the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco
where he could focus on the clinical and nuanced parts of stress and how it affects the
immunoregulatory function and cognitive development in adolescence, decifire how stress and

trauma impacts learning and growth and how to mitigate it. Justice then had the opportunity to
move back to Madison to work at Common Wealth Development and finish his PHD at
UW-Madison.

Social Change
00:37:18 – 1:01:13

Question | 00:19:41
“How would you define social change, what does it mean to you, and how do you see yourself a
part of it?”
Response | 00:37:38 – 00:39:34
Justice explained how everything is always changing, and the different types of change. He also
expressed how he thinks some people conflate with growth and evolution. Although they are not
antithetical to one another, but he doesn't think they are the same thing. By trying to make lives
better by making spaces that encourage growth and make places where people can fall in-love,
with whatever brings them love and happiness—the idea of love being a construct. To think
about what the infrastructure has to look like for someone to engage in absolute love; to him
that's the space where you see growth.
Key Moment | 00:37:37 – 00:37:38
“Change is a constant.”
Question | 00:39:37
“What are those emotions that are invoked when you are a part of these social movements or
what is that really fuels that passion for you”
Response | 00:39:50 – 00:42:51
Justice shares that a lot of it comes out from a place of pain, experiencing war and losing friends
it becomes consuming. He also explains how the current system of the United States is a
manifestation of war and how that applies in certain political contexts—and that pain is what
drives him.
Key Moment | 00:42:51 – 00:43:40
“Until war is over or until we are in that space where we made righteous retribution to the souls,
bodies, and lives of the dispossessed, I don't know what else to do today. As soon as we have
done all that I will figure it out and maybe go and design shoes or something.”
Question | 00:43:59

“As the Executive Director of Common Wealth Development, can you tell me a little about what
it is, your role in it, and how it came to be?”
Response | 00:44:14 – 00:48:50
Common Wealth Development mission is to support and preserve the vitality of neighborhoods
in the Madison Metropolitan area for healthy community and economic development, with
projects aimed at improving the housing and business climates through a people-first approach
centered on racial equity and community level health improvement. Justice expresses how much
of the work falls under the broader umbrella of violence prevention.
Key Moment 00:48:50 – 00:49:11
“I mean that's what we are as what we've always been. That's what we do. We are a violence
prevention initiative organization that addresses violence by the root cause and encourages the
presence and prevalence of love or space as a way to think of violence prevention over time.”
Response | 00:49:11 – 00:50:27
Justice explained his job as the Executive Director as being very administrative as you need to
represent the company or enterprise in a way that exists beyond you and anyone else there. It
asks you to kind of suspend your own personal things and recognize that you have to take care of
the people there. With limited resources you take care of the people there and manage limited
resources, the space, and its money in a way that is conducive or that allows for ongoing growth
for the organization's mission. It can be difficult as you have people with different ideas that you
want to support as much as possible, but you have to also realize that they're probably not going
to be there to see those ideas through fruition; and that's a problem you run into a lot in these
types of organizations.
Question | 00:50:50
“What advice do you have to anyone who aspires to change the community/world for the better
or your own goals and hopes for social change as a whole”
Key Moment | 00:51:51 – 00:51:37

1. “Follow your passion, be passionate”
2. “Fall in love a lot”
3. “Be wrong, be lazy, and be irrelevant. Be wrong and be alright with that”
   Response | 00:51:37 – 1:00:18
   Justice explains his last advice, by expressing how a lot of people spend a lot of their time trying
   to prove that they are right and end up being boring, safe, and what's done. He illustrates that this
   is a challenge we have right now because the grading system and the cost of education become
   impediments to actual learning. For example, in grad school people become so fixated on the

GPA that you're going to go towards the things that you're good at, and it's kind of conducive to
that. When really you should want folks to be testing and trying things out because that's where
you find growth. Justice then shared personal stories of how this concept applied to some of his
life experiences.
Key Moment | 1:00:32 – 1:01:13

1. “At the moment you're going to land, that's the only thing that's guaranteed.”
2. “Be good to the people you meet, you meet good people, make more people laugh, than
   you do cry. So much as you're able, approach every situation with the absence of self
   interest, and at the end of the day; if and when, gravity can't take care of the rest, you find
   a way to love them even if they can't take a joke.”
   End of Oral History
   1:01:13 – 1:01:51

Outro: WSUM, Student Radio
1:01:51- 1:02:01