Darializa Avila Chevalier | BernieCrats.com

Biography

Darializa Avila Chevalier was born in 1993 or 1994 and raised in Florida by parents who emigrated from the Dominican Republic. She is Afro-Latina and has lived in Harlem for nearly two decades, where she has spent her career as a community organizer and legal advocate. She earned her BA from Columbia University and is currently a doctoral candidate in sociology at the City University of New York.

Her organizing work has been rooted in the most urgent justice struggles of her community. As an organizer with Families for Freedom, she worked to free Abdikadir Mohamed, a Somali immigrant held in ICE detention for 18 months under President Trump's Muslim ban — a victory that shaped her commitment to immigrant rights. She also helped lead the successful campaign to remove the Central Park statue of J. Marion Sims, a 19th-century surgeon who performed experimental operations on enslaved Black women. She currently serves as an Investigator at Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem, supporting New Yorkers targeted by the criminal legal system.

A Columbia alumna, Avila Chevalier was also involved in the 2023–24 campus encampment protesting the war in Gaza and has been a member of UAW Local 2110. At 32 years old, she is one of the youngest members of the incoming class of Congress. She defeated five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat — chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — on June 23, 2026, with 49.4% of the vote in New York's 13th Congressional District, which covers Harlem, Upper Manhattan, and parts of the Bronx.

2026 House Campaign

Avila Chevalier ran to the left of five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in one of the most stunning upsets of the 2026 cycle. Endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, Justice Democrats, and the NYC-DSA, she built a grassroots campaign focused on affordable housing, immigrant rights, anti-war politics, and economic justice — refusing corporate PAC money or real estate developer donations.

The race attracted national attention as part of the broader Mamdani wave sweeping New York City's Democratic primaries. Avila Chevalier won with 49.4% of the vote to Espaillat's 46%, a margin of roughly 3 points — the tightest of the three Mamdani victories on June 23 but no less significant for it. Espaillat, 71, had held the seat since 2017 and was considered a progressive incumbent in his own right.

The 13th District covers Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood, and parts of the West Bronx — a working-class, majority-Latinx and Black district where housing costs, immigration enforcement, and disinvestment are the defining issues. Avila Chevalier has pledged to fight for dignified affordable housing, free college, the Green New Deal, abolishing ICE, and the Block the Bombs Act to ban U.S. weapons sales to Israel.