Illapa Sairitupac
I want to be a socialist rep downtown; I want to be a face of socialism down here.
We haven’t had a socialist legislator here in about a hundred years. We have some liberals, and we have folks who are conservative Dems in power, but that’s not good enough. I’m hoping that we can win this time to actualize socialist politics down here and show folks what can be done.
I am a Spanish speaker, a son of immigrants, and a queer person. And I think it’d be good to have that kind of tradition as well down here, as someone who’s very active, a real local organizer, who will be legislating alongside an amazing bloc of socialists up in Albany.
As for DSA’s role right now, we’ve got to keep growing, we’ve got to keep leveling up, we’ve got to keep expanding. It is the moment now to strike. We have a huge slate — we’ve never had a slate this big before, with a total of ten challengers. And we’d be remiss not to swing big this time.
Sairitupac says he wants to be a face of socialism in Lower Manhattan. (Courtesy of Roman Broszkowski)
We’ve got to keep growing our presence in Albany and working together. Even when we only had four or five legislators in Albany, they were still kicking ass. The minute that we got them in the state legislature, we started seeing things changing. That was a very stark realization for me to see that, oh, we can cause change. We work here locally to get them elected, and immediately we start seeing things change in Albany.
That’s the DSA difference: being fearless and espousing our socialist ideals and positions in a liberal world, where politicians are very fearful and hesitant and kind of twiddling their thumbs. That’s not good enough anymore; it never was.