THE INTERCEPT
Julia Salazar a candidate for the New York state Senate, was standing outside a barbershop in her North Brooklyn neighborhood one recent afternoon, when a barber looked up and saw her through the window. Squinting through the glass, he pointed to a “Salazar for Senate” sign on the wall of the shop, gestured in her direction, and mouthed, “That’s you?” She smiled. “That’s me.”
The 27-year-old community organizer has become a recognizable name and face in the neighborhood thanks to an aggressive ground game in her challenge to eight-term incumbent Democratic state Sen. Martin Dilan. Salazar and scores of volunteers have blanketed the district collecting signatures to get her name on the ballot for the September 13 primary. Salazar, her campaign told The Intercept, plans to submit many times more than the requisite 1,000 signatures from registered Democrats in the district by the July 9 filing deadline.
Dilan, a vestige of the corrupt patronage machine of former Brooklyn Democratic boss Vito Lopez, has held the North Brooklyn seat since Salazar, a working-class Colombian immigrant, was 11 years old.
Interest in Salazar’s insurgent campaign spiked last week when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another millennial Latina, shook the political world by trouncing Queens Democratic Party boss Rep. Joe Crowley in a congressional primary. As news of Ocasio-Cortez’s upset spread, Salazar tweeted, “This is the most inspiring campaign victory I have ever witnessed.” Over the past few months, Ocasio-Cortez and Salazar have shared stages, knocked doors together, and endorsed each others’ campaigns. “Alexandria, mi hermana, mi heroína,” Salazar wrote on election night, “I am so grateful to be in this movement with you.”
Saturday morning, Ocasio-Cortez emailed her supporters encouraging them to sign up to petition for Salazar and a few other progressive women candidates. “I can’t think of a better place to start the fight for progressives like us than helping get Julia Salizar [sic], Zephyr Teachout and Cynthia Nixon on the ballot!” she wrote. (Nixon, who’s challenging Gov. Andrew Cuomo, also endorsed Salazar this week.) “When nobody else would endorse us or cover our race, these three women broke ranks and endorsed Ocasio 2018. Now it’s time to stand by them.”
Ocasio-Cortez followed up with a tweet on Monday, encouraging her followers to help gather signatures on Salazar’s behalf: “@SalazarSenate18 isn’t the next me, she’s the first HER.”
A win by Salazar would help solidify the gains made by Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated, but did not vanquish, the party machines. The similarities between the candidates are more than superficial. Both are committed socialists endorsed by Democratic Socialists of America. Both support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a once-fringe rallying cry that has seeped into mainstream liberal discourse in recent weeks. Both were raised by working-class parents and threw themselves into community organizing as teenagers. And, tragically, both endured the deaths of their fathers before their 20th birthdays. Most of all, Salazar and Ocasio-Cortez represent a new generation of young, diverse, unapologetically radical women poised to take over the Democratic Party.
The night of Ocasio-Cortez’s win, Salazar, who was at the victory party, felt the earth shift beneath her feet. “At first, I was shocked,” she told me last week. “I’m less shocked now. When you do this kind of work, you’re constantly managing expectations. You have a grander vision, but on a daily basis, you’re just putting one foot in front of the other. That night, I realized we can do so much more. We can win.”
(Progressive challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is joined by New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon at her victory party in the Bronx after upsetting incumbent Democratic Rep. Joseph Crowley on June 26, 2018 in New York City.)
I met Salazar the day after Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning victory, a few minutes before a North Brooklyn DSA meeting in Bushwick. (I, too, am a DSA member.) She and her comrades were feeling some political whiplash, as the euphoria of Ocasio-Cortez’s win gave way to the Supreme Court’s anti-union Janus ruling and the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, which raised the prospect of another Donald Trump appointee on the bench. Nonetheless, there was a sense of cautious hopefulness in the air. A socialist — one of their own — was a shoo-in for Congress.
Young activists buzzed around the meeting space, putting out pizza boxes and filling up jugs of water. All of them stopped to say hello to Salazar. Escaping the fanfare, we made our way to a quiet alleyway behind the building, beside an overfilled recycling bin. As I turned on my recorder, it started to sprinkle.
“I guess this as good as we’re gonna get,” Salazar said with a smile, projecting toughness despite her small and wiry frame. A tattoo of an airplane on her inner bicep honors her late father, a cargo pilot who loved to fly. Unlike her Bronx counterpart — whose fierce eloquence and toothy grin have charmed the liberal media sphere since her win last Tuesday — Salazar is soft-spoken, an introvert. It took her many years to overcome her shyness. “If community organizing was like learning basic swimming skills,” she told me, “then running for office is like being thrown into the middle of the ocean during a storm.”
And yet, there’s a quiet urgency in Salazar’s tone. She chooses her words carefully, and there’s never any doubt that she means every single one of them. “I’ve worked with Julia for years on racial justice fights in New York,” said Bianca Cunningham, NYC-DSA co-chair and founder of DSA’s Afro-Socialist Caucus. “People immediately respond to her humility and resilience. It’s obvious that she is a fighting person, a person with clear values.”
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