Julien Segura was fresh off volunteering for the campaign of insurgent New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, when he launched his own run for State Assembly.
After Tuesday night, when the results of the state primaries begin to come in, the 29-year-old progressive will find out if he will join the ranks of local New York politicians.
For the last five years, Segura, a lifelong resident of Sugar Hill in Harlem, a predominantly Latino-Caribbean area in Upper Manhattan, had been working on progressive political campaigns. This included volunteering for Andrew Yang’s New York City mayoral campaign, giving him a close-up view of city politics. As a teenager, he was involved in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement against economic inequality.
He is part of a growing trend of young candidates who believe their youth and cultural backgrounds can be an asset in politics, long an arena largely for well-connected older men. On his father’s side he is Spanish from Algeria, and on his mother’s side he is Armenian from Lebanon, where he still has family.
“What really got me into it was my own identity as an Armenian and wanting to have a fair shake,” said Segura.
“[Sugar Hill] is an area that’s not very loved. I didn’t want my community to be gentrified to the point where my neighbours couldn’t live here anymore. It’s depressing that it’s this predictable,” he said, referring to his diverse district that is largely working class and where people often struggle to stay in their neighbourhoods due to the city’s rising housing costs.
In this race to represent New York’s Assembly District 71, he is trying for a second time to unseat incumbent Al Taylor, who has held his seat for nearly a decade.
Taylor, who has held office since 2017, has been criticised for voting against LGBTQ+ rights legislation, one of several areas where Segura saw an opening to bring in updated policies. Segura first ran against him in 2024, garnering nearly 30 percent of the vote, giving Taylor one of his few serious challenges while in office.
Neither candidate has been endorsed by Mamdani, possibly because they both helped with his mayoral race.
For his campaign, Segura has assembled a team of around 20 volunteers and 15 staffers, this time with the momentum of Mamdani’s campaign behind them. Their support has been grassroots, without the donations of corporate political action committees (PACs).
They have refused support from the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other large donors, a position that has essentially become a litmus test for progressives in the Democratic Party.
His campaign manager, Damien Cavallo, told TNA that their grassroots campaigning has made Segura something of a local celebrity among ordinary residents.
“We’re building a cross-cultural coalition,” he said. “We’re bringing in people who aren’t normally politically active. We’re taking in people who were off the books and bringing them on board.”
Like many other progressive candidates, Segura became drawn to politics when working in his own community and learning about what needed to be fixed. For him, that happened when visiting homes while working on data collection for the 2020 census.
“It showed me how poorly structured things were,” Segura said. “I realised the housing situation in my community was among the worst in the city. It was my call to action.”
Segura has seen the effects of the cost-of-living crisis on his neighbourhood, with many people leaving Manhattan for the suburbs. Sugar Hill and surrounding areas are particularly vulnerable to gentrification given their location and population of working-class residents, many of whom can’t afford to stay where they grew up due to New York’s high housing prices.
He has used the word “displacement” to describe people leaving their original neighbourhoods due to rising costs, often a term for those displaced by war, but increasingly used to describe intense gentrification.
Though he doesn’t share the same background as many people in his district, he shares a concern for keeping it diverse and building bridges.
One of his main interests has been interfaith organising, which was sparked by attacks on the local Sikh community in the years following the 9/11 attacks. Through their conversations, he found commonalities with his own family’s history of persecution, namely the 1915 Armenian genocide, which is still not recognised by some major countries. In 1984, thousands of Sikhs in India experienced mob violence following the assassination of then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
“I realised their community is similar to my own. Their genocide is also not recognized,” he said.
On his campaign website, he notes New York politicians from different backgrounds and generations who have given him hope – Bernie Sanders, the de facto leader of progressive politics, as well as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani, himself part of the South Asian diaspora. The New York mayor has started what many of his supporters call the “Mamdani effect” of young progressive insurgents taking on the Democratic establishment.
“The area has been primed by Zohran,” said Segura. “If I’ve just voted for a 30-year-old for mayor, why not a 30-year-old for assembly? Once the psychological boundaries have shifted, it’s hard to shift them back.”
