LOCH SHELDRAKE, NY — Public service and hip hop music aren’t often considered in the same breath.

Students at SUNY Sullivan got to talk about both issues with Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado during a campus visit on October 4.

Delgado served as the representative for NY-19, the congressional district that includes Sullivan County, from 2018 to his selection as lieutenant governor in 2022. He joined Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther for a number of stops in Sullivan County on October 4, with the two attending a meeting of Fallsburg’s seniors and greeting constituents at a Wallkill diner, in addition to their visit to SUNY Sullivan.

Information overload

One student at the SUNY Sullivan event asked Delgado what the most important skill was for college students to cultivate.

“One of the things that’s, I think, changed since I was in college is how much information you are inundated with every single day,” said Delgado. “It comes at you fast, and it’s coming at you from different angles, and it comes at you in clips, and soundbites, and headlines.”

That information can be distracting, and often isn’t tied to anything factual, Delgado said. He encouraged students to do the work of understanding what they cared about while they had the opportunity of college, and become better at blocking out information that distracted them from that passion.

The power of music

During introductions at the event, Delgado talked about his brief career as a rapper in Los Angeles: he tried to use hip hop to connect with people, he said.

Responding to those comments, a student talked about the connection that younger people had with music and art: “It’s not the music, per se, it’s the story behind it.” In particular, artists who talked about their mental health struggles through their music could serve as a point of connection for others going through those same struggles, the student said.

Delgado agreed: “Art, music in particular—especially hip hop—is really about… people [being] able to go inside themselves and share their own experiences, whether it is dealing with mental health, or whether it is having some kind of trauma they’ve had to endure when they were growing up, or whether it is dreams and aspirations that they might have.

“But it’s putting all that in art that makes it compelling” and helps others connect their own experiences to those of the artists, Delgado said.

Statewide connections

A student named Faye asked Delgado how he tried to balance the needs of the “weird-ass state” of New York, given the very different needs and wants of upstate residents versus residents of New York City.

The state is massive, Delgado said. His old congressional district included 11 counties, and covered a region that was complicated by people moving upstate from the city.

As Delgado sees it, the job of a lieutenant governor involved drawing connections between the issues different groups of people faced across the state. Farmers upstate are getting squeezed out by big agriculture, and telecommunications workers are getting squeezed out by big tech, but both problems—in Delgado’s view—stem from the underlying effect of the concentration of wealth and power in monopolies.

“It’s incumbent upon those of us in leadership to figure out how to connect those dots, and then prescribe policies that can address those concerns,” said Delgado.

Speaking with the River Reporter following the event, Faye said that Delgado had come off as a down-to-earth figure, and that she thought he’d connected well with the student body.