Days before the midterms, the Democratic nominee for New York’s 13th District on organizing, the keffiyeh, and why you compromise on strategy, not principle.
**Photography by Brad Ogbanna for Everything is Political
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“I’m conceited, I got a reason…”
Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic nominee for New York’s 13th Congressional District, told me her current playlist includes Remy Ma’s “Conceited” (rightfully so), the first three songs off Beyoncé’s Renaissance, and a lot of Donna Summer. Three Black women who know a thing or two about being excellent at what they do. Naturally, I couldn’t write this profile without putting these artists on rotation myself.
When we met at Audubon Terrace in Upper Manhattan, the 32-year-old arrived with her usual work backpack and something she has been carrying around for nearly two years: a piece of Palestinian tatreez started during the 2024 Columbia University encampment. We sat on the steps of the terrace while Avila Chevalier walked me through the embroidery, working in motifs from Gaza, including one called “Road to Egypt.” It isn’t finished, and if it ever is, it will go to her mother.
**Photography by Brad Ogbanna for Everything is Political
**
Avila Chevalier also brought watercolor self-portraits painted by children she taught English to during a summer in Nablus in 2014. You can tell kids made them. There is something so light and joyful about the paintings, the opposite of the trauma those children endure. The students must be in their early twenties now, and although they have lost touch, she still wonders what became of them, including former students Alaa and Sami. A little Arabic stuck with her, too, and she has spent years trying to learn more.
Avila Chevalier is an organizer and CUNY doctoral student who in June unseated five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th Congressional District, which covers Upper Manhattan and part of the West Bronx. Backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America, the nominee is now the heavy favorite in a district that has never elected a Republican and, if she wins in November, will be the first woman to represent it. Ask her what her politics rest on and the answer is almost always a person, whether a neighbor or a canvasser. Community.
That lesson came to a young Darializa early, in a Dominican home in Florida where her mother was a caseworker, her father was a truck driver, and politics was the cost of “rent, groceries, gas going up” and “who was on benefits and who lost benefits.” When the car was low on gas on the way to school, “my mom was just like, let’s try to find change in the car.”
New York offered the same thing on a larger scale. Still, it is the only place, she says, “where I can be all parts of myself without making people bat an eyelash,” and where she feels “connected to other people” and to “other humans who make this city what it is.” People here do more than labor to survive: they do “the labor of organizing, of being in community, of putting together block parties and taking care of the old lady in 2B.” Running for office in Florida, I suggested, would have been a totally different campaign. “I would have been a very different person had I stayed, for sure.”
After two years of pushing her congressperson on Palestine and realizing he was not shifting, Avila Chevalier began knocking on doors for Mamdani. Running for office hadn’t crossed her mind.
“I started remembering that our people were with us,” she says. “The average person is with us.”
**Photography by Brad Ogbanna for Everything is Political
**
Her condition for running was that the campaign build a base and not just a candidacy, and many of the people of color who joined DSA recently joined in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. “You give people something to do,” she says. The promise to voters is a modest one:
“I’ll show up with my movement.”
Community is also her yardstick for when to bend and when not to, even after being called too radical by members of her own party, a word she says simply means “getting to the root of the issue.” When I asked how she plans to keep Congress from changing her more than she changes it, Avila Chevalier began by drawing a line.
“There’s a difference between compromising on principle and compromising on strategy,” she said. Banger.
“For me, my principles are about how we save human lives and how we preserve human dignity. That is always at the heart of any strategic decision I make.”
Then she pointed to her own campaign, to “running unapologetically on a Babies Not Bombs platform, wearing my keffiyeh proudly.” Plenty of people saw that as an ineffective strategy, while to her it showed what could work. “It was proving that you don’t have to compromise on your principle to have a strategy,” she said, and a moment later boiled it down to a single line: “In this instance, the strategy is the principle.” Another banger.
Earlier this month, an ICE officer shot Oscar Belgal, a Dominican immigrant DHS says has gang ties, in the neck as he sat in his car in Marble Hill with his 5-year-old son in the back seat. Avila Chevalier says an NYPD officer shoved her to the ground at the protest that followed, and the next day she called for Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to resign, a demand Mayor Mamdani has not met. Her job as the nominee, she says, is to make “demands that echo what our community is calling for,” though disagreeing with the mayor is just “us doing the different roles.”
This past September, Avila Chevalier was also arrested with dozens of others at a sit-in outside the United Nations protesting Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit. But protesting the institutions of power and working within them are two very different things.
In Congress, she will be one of 435 members working with laws that already exist. “There are plenty of limits to elected office,” she told me, and “I know the mayor is in a very different position.” Her primary win came in one of the safest Democratic districts in the country, which makes Congress the real test.
Avila Chevalier wants ICE abolished and not replaced, seeing no purpose in it other than “terrorizing our communities,” and the community she means includes everyone who lives here, whatever their papers say. I raised the way immigration enforcement silences speech, from the detention of Mahmoud Khalil to the search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington home this month by Homeland Security Investigations, an inquiry into her immigration history that Omar has called an attempt to “weaponize federal law enforcement.”
Rights, Avila Chevalier says, “apply to every single person on U.S. soil, regardless of status, regardless of who you are,” and there is, she argues, “a severe Palestine exception” to them.
“To borrow Mahmoud’s words, our rights are nothing but words on water.”
Outside of politics, Avila Chevalier takes another question very seriously: What would Sade wear if she were running for office? It comes up every time she goes shopping. Her taste runs to “an understated elegance but then something about them that’s weird or edgy or interesting,” which explains her love for Schiaparelli: “elegant, but it’s also weird and fun.”
**Photography by Brad Ogbanna for Everything is Political
**
A swearing-in look hasn’t made the list yet, there being little headspace for it, and the skincare routine is apparently even less elaborate: “truly nothing exciting,” just face wash and a retinol.
During the primary, Avila Chevalier lost an evil eye necklace, which she takes to mean “it took the evil with it.” The person who gave it to her replaced it with a hamsa, her good luck charm for the next chapter. Apparently, the first one did its job.
I finished writing this with Beyoncé’s “Alien Superstar” playing, as promised, and I suspect she’d approve. But for all the confidence of her campaign soundtrack, Avila Chevalier knows winning isn’t a solo endeavor.
“Nothing that is worth doing is done alone,” she told me. So get out and vote.
**Photography by Brad Ogbanna for Everything is Political
**