• Interview by
• Roman Broszkowski

New York state’s preelection jockeying has seen a number of legislative seats unexpectedly open up, with cascading effects. Following incumbent state assembly member Grace Lee’s decision to vacate the Lower Manhattan–based Assembly District Sixty-Five to run for State Senate, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) tapped Illapa Sairitupac to run.

Formerly a candidate for the seat in 2022 and a recent NYC-DSA Electoral Working Group cochair, Sairitupac works as a housing organizer and has long been involved in the chapter’s ecosocialist organizing. Hoping to build on Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the district last year, and boosted by name recognition from his previous run, Sairitupac believes that this election might be DSA’s chance to finally win a Manhattan-based seat in the state legislature. (State Senator Kristen Gonzalez’s district includes a small slice of Manhattan but primarily covers areas of Queens and Brooklyn.)

Jacobin sat down with Sairitupac to discuss his second run for office, the housing and climate issues facing the district, and how his campaign fits into the Lower East Side’s socialist tradition.

Why do you think you’re a stronger candidate this time around than in 2022?

I’m familiar with so many folks, and thus voters, in this area now. A lot of folks remember me from four years ago, which is very interesting for us. I think it’s a huge — dare I say — leg up in a way this time around. I have cultivated and retained friendships and relationships with local electeds as well in the last couple of years, whereas as a first-time candidate, that was harder to create.

I have folks in the Rolodex now, people who are talking about endorsing me, who wouldn’t have endorsed me last time. It’s a much more streamlined process this time in many ways.

You were, until quite recently, the cochair of candidate recruitment for NYC-DSA. Can you explain what the process for candidate recruitment looks like in the chapter?

As cochairs, we were screening possible candidates, making lists, and looking at the terrain for this upcoming cycle, which I’m now a part of.

We were mapping out who would be good for this district, who would be good for this area — building off what the previous cochairs were doing but also recruiting new candidates. We looked at folks who were involved in any socialist organizing or labor or Palestine activism, people who were present in their communities, people who were unabashed about being socialist, people who were charismatic, and people who were natural leaders, who we thought would be a good DSA fit.

We also experienced the contrary, where we would find a person that we thought would be good, and then when we tried to recruit them, they would say, “No, no, no,” and they would turn us down. Because they understood that to run for office — there’s a gravity to it, a seriousness, and they didn’t want to do it. And we get it: it’s a huge ask. So we met with many candidates, and there were some races that didn’t materialize, because ultimately the candidate would decide not to do it.

How do you think that you fit into that larger strategy as a candidate?

I sincerely did not think I’d ever run again. I was kind of retired, actually. And this late [opening] was quite the shock for everyone. We didn’t think that the incumbent, Grace Lee, would leave the seat at this time. So it caused a domino effect; we had an opening.

As the other candidates started to emerge in this race, and as we ran the numbers and looked at how good this could be for us, I was asked to run again. I said no a few times, but then I decided, “Okay, let’s try this one more time.”

I think I’m stronger now. I can bring a lot to the table now that maybe I couldn’t have last time. And we have over three thousand positive IDs going into this race that we want to recapture. So it felt very viable.

But again, I took it very seriously. I really wanted to think about it, to think about who else might want to do this as a DSA member. And also, to be frank, to have run a very strong campaign last time and given it all to lose . . . it sucks. It’s not something you want to risk having to experience again.

But as I thought about it, as I talked with my comrades and other folks I trust in the neighborhood, I decided that this is winnable, that it’s much more favorable than last time. Last time, we competed against someone who had just run the previous cycle. She had already built her name recognition, which was hard to overcome. This time, we just feel stronger and better situated to win.

You are one of three DSA-endorsed candidates in Manhattan this cycle, along with state assembly candidates Conrad Blackburn and Darializa Avila Chevalier. Why do you think DSA has struggled to break through in Manhattan compared to Queens or Brooklyn?

Manhattan is tricky. There are enclaves in Manhattan that are conservative and not open to the idea of socialism. If we’re going to have a good shot at winning, it’s going to be downtown or uptown; it’s not going to be midtown. So we are going to keep cracking at it.

Conrad is an amazing organizer. I haven’t met Darializa, but she’s amazing as well. And regarding Lower Manhattan, it has a radical immigrant history. In the early 1900s, the Lower East Side was a hotbed for socialist politics, mostly arising from the harsh tenement conditions and low wages that radicalized the workers, many of them Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

This campaign is about showing that even one hundred years later, socialist politics can prevail in Lower Manhattan. I always say socialism in this country was born in this district, in the Lower East Side.

Why do you think that the Lower East Side is ready for a DSA representative?

Zohran [Mamdani] overperformed here, but also, I did a lot of door-knocking for my campaign, for Zohran’s campaign, and for my job, and I see a lot of hunger for this kind of politics — for housing rights, for leftist ideals. We’re seeing it now in my campaign again and in the interactions we’re having with the petitioning — and that people remember me from four years ago, which is always a nice surprise.

I think the moment is now. And are we going to win the whole district? Probably not. Are we hoping to win a lot of the district, so we can win the election? Yes. And that entails being out there and making good on our previous campaigns, whether it be Zohran’s or mine or Tax the Rich or my housing rights organizing.

You’ve spoken about housing rights both in this campaign and your previous campaign. Very few politicians and elected officials in New York, and elsewhere in the country, are renters, and we’ve seen a push for more renter-focused politics. Why do you think it’s important to have elected officials who are renters?

It’s a lived experience. It gives us an innate solidarity and recognition — a familiarity — with the circumstances of our neighbors. . . . The housing movement has shown me so many folks who are like me in different ways and also immigrants who are going through housing issues as well in the Lower East Side.

Housing is a really important issue that I would be a champion on. Every single day I’m fighting bad landlords in different ways in this neighborhood; I’m probably on their lists as an enemy. I look forward to them sending out mailers against me when the time is right, probably in June or so, as they did last time.

Given this moment, when DSA is on the rise and now contesting more races at once than it has before, what do you see as your role in pushing forward the socialist project in general? And how do you view DSA’s role as an organization in pushing forward that project in New York state?

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.

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.

Ecosocialism is a big part of your campaign and who you are as an organizer. In your previous campaign, you spoke about the flood risk in Lower Manhattan and the effect that Hurricane Sandy and other storms have had. And in the last four years, climate change has gotten worse.

I always say as an indigenous person, fighting for Pachamama, Mother Earth, was kind of the catalyst or the origin for me in terms of my climate movement work, my climate organizing.

Lower Manhattan is always on the front lines for extreme weather due to climate change. If we don’t do things properly, we’ll be underwater in a hundred years. It’s a grave thing that I think about a lot. Which is why when I first joined DSA, the Ecosocialist Working Group was one of first groups I gravitated toward because it had a bill it was pushing [the Build Public Renewables Act] — it had amazing ideas in it and it was winnable. That was my home for the first several years in my journey.

We have to get off fossil fuels, we have to get off National Grid and ConEdison. I don’t know why we’re still using these dirty fossil fuels. I don’t know why there are these generators in working-class neighborhoods, which give kids and folks who live around there asthma. It’s a sick system. We need the New York Power Authority to build and operate new renewable energy, to achieve 70 percent renewable energy by 2030 and 100 percent zero-emission energy by 2040. It’s very ambitious, but it’s doable.

I have talked to so many neighbors about their concerns about being on the waterfront. There’s a new flood wall/park system being built down here called the East Side Coastal Resiliency project. I’ve been visiting the park; it’s pretty state of the art, and we’re hoping that this holds and this meets the moment. But it can’t be just that, right? It has to be legislation to give us clean power, clean energy — to mandate that all state-owned properties be brought on to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030. And also a just transition for workers, requiring the projects to operate under collective bargaining in these new green-power jobs.

In your previous campaign, you mentioned that you opposed the borough-based jail plan. Do you still oppose that? And if so, do you have a proposal or plan for closing down Rikers and reallocating beds?

They’re building a jail in Chinatown in my district, and I was pretty open about opposing that. We lost that fight. So at this point, I would say if it could at least be humane, if we could at least mitigate the harm, that’s super important. I know that Rikers has been a real issue for years — inmates being abused on so many different levels — and we’ve got to figure out a way to close it.

As a mental health social worker, I was working with many folks who were going through the system, in and out, and seeing how these are folks that slipped through the cracks. We need to have more mental health care. And we have to champion the working class that often is populating these jails and these prisons, and find a more equitable way to address [crime and public safety]. The fact that [punishment] is being monetized, the fact that these folks are doing labor [to generate money for the state], is completely contrary to my vision as a socialist.