By Arit John | Photographs by Marco Storel
New York (CNN) — This August’s Dominican Heritage Reception at Gracie Mansion brought in a different crowd from years past.
Dozens of Dominican Americans, including activists more used to protesting than attending the event, mingled over trays of cheese empanadas and sancocho. Dressed in a butter yellow guayabera, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani took a moment to shout out the notable community members in the crowd. The longest, loudest applause went to Darializa Avila Chevalier, the 32-year-old democratic socialist who defeated the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in June’s Democratic primary.
Such friendly audiences, she knows, may become a rarity as she braces for Congress.
As the Democratic Party’s socialist summer comes to a close, Avila Chevalier has become one of the most polarizing — and potentially most influential — faces of an insurgency that has bested several congressional incumbents and left the party at a crossroads.
Ahead of the midterms, the party is now grappling with the power Avila Chevalier and at least four other democratic socialist nominees could have if Democrats take back the House in November. If House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries wins a single-digit majority, the incoming cohort and its allies on the left could have huge sway over his potential speakership and demand concessions on a host of progressive priorities.
Already, Avila Chevalier and her allies are discussing how they want to lead and how they plan to work together.
“Our movement has worked too hard for me to allow myself to be distracted,” Avila Chevalier told CNN. “We’ve been talking about how do we come in strong on day one, and really, meaningfully build a model of co-governance that gives power back to working people.”
Avila Chevalier, a community organizer and doctoral student who centered her campaign on uncompromising support for Palestinians and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has grown used to the noise surrounding her.
In the final weeks of her primary against Rep. Adriano Espaillat, much was made of her old tweets from a now-deleted account criticizing Democratic leaders and embracing far-left policies, as well as her attendance at a controversial rally in support of Palestinians the day after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Avila Chevalier has since become a fixture on Fox News, a target of President Donald Trump’s rallies, and a source of anxiety for House Democrats worried about being painted as socialists or communists by the GOP.
Progressives have urged party leadership to not fall into what they say is a familiar trap.
“Republicans are always encouraging us to divide ourselves,” said Rep. Summer Lee, a progressive Pennsylvania Democrat. “I also see a lot of people who are trying to make her a boogeyman, who are trying to make her a pariah, and I am trying, and I really want to fight back against that instinct.”
Similar dynamics played out after the 2018 midterms, when members of what became the “Squad” defeated longtime incumbents and quickly joined protests on Capitol Hill.
Some of those members, such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who did not endorse Avila Chevalier — have shown an ability to work within the caucus and across the aisle on key issues. Others, such as former Reps. Cori Bush of Missouri and Jamaal Bowman of New York, became better known for what they did outside the legislative process, leaving them vulnerable to successful primary challenges.
“It’s one thing to be noisy, it’s another thing to be intentional, and meaningful, and being able to deliver on the things you promise,” said Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist and longtime advisor to South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn.
Avila Chevalier is making the case that she’s an organizer who is focused on making her platform a reality. Her challenge now is reintroducing herself to the party establishment she just took on.
“I am very concerned with delivering,” she said. “I think folks will be, hopefully, pleasantly surprised about the fact that yes, I am really willing to talk to anybody, literally anybody, who wants to actually deliver for working people.”
The making of an organizer
Avila Chevalier grew up in Florida, with brief stints in New York and Venezuela. Though her maternal grandfather was part of the resistance against dictator Rafael Trujillo back in the Dominican Republic, her family talked about politics in terms of the cost of gas or cuts to benefits. She, however, showed an interest in social justice early on.
Mariangelly Abreu, a distant relative she calls a cousin and who grew up alongside her, said Avila Chevalier would encourage them to buy flowers from the sellers on street corners instead of the supermarket and make other intentional choices about where they spent their money.
“My cousin can be — and I say this with so much love — annoyingly persistent,” Abreu said. “She’s not someone who will just say, ‘Oh, well, that’s just how things are.’”
Avila Chevalier applied to Columbia University to find a way to New York. Part of the school’s appeal was that it was the “activist Ivy” and she soon joined the Black Student Organization and started organizing to end sexual assault on campus.
In her sophomore year, she came across a posting for a summer internship to teach English to Palestinians living in refugee camps in the West Bank. Her experience there, and the conditions she witnessed, helped shape the organizing work that would define her adult life and inspired her to convert to Islam.
“It was an opportunity for me to really get clear on what my values are, on what it means to advocate for human dignity even when it’s politically hard, even when there is so much that is pushing you to stay silent on things,” she said.
Some of the highs and lows of her campaign trace back to that trip and the work in which she subsequently engaged. Avila Chevalier became an active member of Students for Justice in Palestine, and returned to Columbia as an alumna to support students as they took over part of the campus in 2024 to protest Israel’s military actions in Gaza. There she worked alongside Mahmoud Khalil, a fellow organizer who was later detained by the Trump administration for more than three months.
Avila Chevalier pointed to her West Bank experience to justify her presence at the October 8th rally, held in support of Gaza the day after Hamas attacked Israel, that featured speech and rhetoric praising the attack, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 250 more kidnapped. According to reports, pro-Palestinian protesters chanted “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “resistance is justified, when people are colonized.”
Soon after she returned to the US in 2014, Hamas militants kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers, triggering a military response from Israel that killed an estimated 2,251 Palestinians. Avila Chevalier said she feared a similar large-scale counter-response in 2023. An estimated 70,000 people have died in Gaza in the war after October 7th.
Asked if there’s anything she feels she needs to apologize for regarding the rally, Avila Chevalier said, “There are people who’ve expressed views in spaces like this who you don’t always agree with.” But she said she hoped those who attended pro-Israel rallies where some attendees have made inflammatory remarks would also reject those comments.
Avila Chevalier’s organizing and academic work on immigration has fueled her belief that ICE must be abolished and that all deportations are wrong. Before running for Congress, she worked with Families for Freedom to try to block deportations and spent three years attending deportation hearings and interviewing people caught up in the process as part of her PhD in sociology at the City University of New York.
Late last year, Avila Chevalier called her adviser, Professor David Brotherton, to say she was being recruited to challenge Espaillat and would be unlikely to complete her dissertation on time if she decided to run.
“I said, ‘No, I don’t think you probably are,’” he recalled telling her. “If it’s a question of making history or writing a dissertation, I would choose the former.”
A long shot primary challenge
Early last year, Avila Chevalier reached out to Justice Democrats, the same progressive group that recruited Ocasio-Cortez, to see if there was a window for someone to primary Espaillat.
Over his five terms in Congress — and several decades as a state legislator and local political leader — Espaillat had built up a formidable political presence in the district, including local officials he’d mentored known as the “Squadriano.” Avila Chevalier and other Espaillat critics argued the congressman was absent from the district.
A spokesperson for Espaillat pushed back on that assessment, noting his work on immigration cases, pandemic recovery and affordable housing. “Soon, campaigning and slogans have to give way to governing and leading,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Those early talks of a challenge lapsed until Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won the district in last year’s mayoral primary.
Last August, Geoff Simpson, Justice Democrats’ PAC director emailed her about running after local organizers recommended her. It took two and a half months of conversations to convince her to run, he said.
“People like to get plugged in at the end with like the TV ads and the messaging,” Simpson said. “But if you get the candidate recruitment piece wrong, none of that ends up mattering.”
Ahead of her launch, the group targeted two key and ambitious endorsements: the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, which was wading into congressional races for the first time, and Mamdani, who had been endorsed by Espaillat in the mayoral general election.
During an endorsement meeting earlier this year, NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo worried the group wouldn’t be able to both challenge Espaillat and back Assemblymember Claire Valdez in the open 7th Congressional District.
“I wasn’t sure if we would be able to meet the moment, and I’m really glad that members proved me wrong, and we did,” he told CNN.
In May, Mamdani backed Avila Chevalier.
His support drew attention to the race, as well as her record.
News outlets, including CNN, reported on tweets Avila Chevalier either personally wrote or reposted between 2018 and 2022 on a since-deleted account. Some — including a post that called on people to “become bad bitches” and “seize the means of production” — were written in the flippant, ironic tone favored by far-left online posters. But several made serious calls for defunding and abolishing the police and criticized Israel and Democratic politicians. After former Vice President Kamala Harris made a speech telling Central American migrants “do not come” to the United States, Avila Chevalier tweeted, “F**k Kamala Harris.”
Avila Chevalier said she’s grown since using that language and regrets her post history. In reflecting on the account, she said she was part of a generation that came of age online.
“We are the first generation to really be forming our sense of self and our political identities and our political worldviews in such a public way, and that inevitably means that we’re going to say things that we’ll eventually not agree with or feel cringe about or regret,” she said.
Avila Chevalier said it was painful to see her deleted tweets become a distraction from the issues she wanted to highlight. At the same time, she said it wasn’t lost on her that the words of a 20-something with no political power were being dissected while “we have folks who have been in political power for almost as long as I’ve been alive, or longer, who have passed policy that have cost people their lives.”
“That is at the heart of the problem that we’ve had for so long, is that accountability feels unreachable in our political system,” she said.
The road to 218
It’s not clear how the House Democratic Caucus will respond to Avila Chevalier or the other Justice Democrats and DSA-aligned candidates who won blue district primaries this cycle, but early indicators suggest a mix of wariness, defiance and, in some cases, cautious optimism.
Publicly, party leadership has congratulated them. But moderate Democrats are also making a point of spurning socialism to reduce the sting of Republican attacks.
Jeffries said earlier this month on NBC’s Meet the Press that he rejects the national Democratic Socialists of America agenda, wants to reform but not abolish ICE and no longer supports Medicare for All after previously co-sponsoring the bill. But he acknowledged the party will have a “broad caucus” in January.
The challenge for Avila Chevalier is that, as of now, there is a perception that she is more of an activist than a coalition builder.
The difference is activism is about calling attention to an issue, said Ilona Duverge, Avila Chevalier’s campaign manager. “An organizer,” she said, “is going to think of ‘What are the steps, what is the path that I need to forge in order to actually meet my goal?’”
Avila Chevalier has three top priorities, what she described on the campaign trail as housing for all, “babies not bombs,” and abolishing ICE. Among the 13 bills she’s promised to cosponsor on her first day of Congress is Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez’s Block the Bombs Act, which would stop the unconditional transfer of offensive military weapons to Israel. She’ll also back the Green New Deal, Medicare for All Act, and legislation to boost unions and raise the federal minimum wage.
Ramirez said she’s been vocal with leadership about making sure Avila Chevalier as well as the other far-left primary winners feel welcome in DC. She described the New York candidate as someone who asks questions, “genuinely wants to grow, wants to learn” and wants to fight for the district.
“She also understands she can’t come here and spend 20 years here before she can deliver,” Ramirez said.
The likely incoming members are also still figuring out how they’ll wield their influence in what could be a very narrow House Democratic majority.
“The most important thing is that we’re getting into the habit of calling each other when we have questions,” said Valdez, the Democratic nominee for the 7th District who is also backed by Mamdani, the DSA and Justice Democrats. “We’re still figuring out what the demands will be.”
In the meantime, the nominees have been focused on building up their support in their districts. For Avila Chevalier, that’s meant meet-and-greets and community events.
Earlier this month she joined New York state Sen. Gustavo Rivera to hand out backpacks and school supplies to a long line of families that wrapped around a park in the South Bronx, a part of the district that heavily favored the incumbent. Rivera, who didn’t endorse in the primary but said he voted for Avila Chevalier, introduced the Democratic nominee to constituents as they went through the line, often in Spanish.
“There’s many people, many voters as well as electeds in this part of the district, that had a longstanding relationship with Congressmember Espaillat,” Rivera told CNN in an interview at the event. “That ship has sailed. She actually won the seat. Now it’s her job to actually do this type of work.”
Sometimes that has forced her to confront voters whose views are far from her own. During her interview with CNN, Avila Chevalier was flagged down by a group of voters sitting in Marcus Garvey Park. The Democratic nominee struck up a conversation with Monique Wyche, a restaurant employee and small business owner who grew up in Harlem.
When Wyche brought up the Iran War, Avila Chevalier argued that the money spent on it could have gone towards universal childcare. When the topic turned to immigration, Wyche said that while ICE’s actions were “sick,” she was concerned about migrants not paying taxes, a claim Avila Chevalier quickly refuted.
“Actually, they do get taxed,” Avila Chevalier said. “I think that narrative actually benefits corporations, and so they don’t pay taxes.”
The two went back and forth for nearly 10 minutes, with Wyche calling on Avila Chevalier to work with both Republicans and Democrats while also charting her own path in Congress.
That is what Avila Chevalier says she signed up for — having hard conversations with people to make sense of the world and bridge the gap between what exists and what could be – and what she hopes to bring to Congress next year.
“Organizing is about meeting people where they’re at,” she said. “It is deeply unsexy work.”
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