Meet Darializa Avila Chevalier

Darializa is a working-class Afro-Latina who has been organizing in upper Manhattan for a fairer, more equitable, and more affordable New York City since she was a teenager.

Darializa was raised in a working class family. Her father is a truck driver. Her single mom is a case worker. 

Her mom struggled to make ends meet and to find a place where she’d have enough support to raise Darializa. They moved back to the Dominican Republic, where Darializa lived for the first year and a half of her life, and throughout Florida. Darializa even lived with her grandma in Venezuela while her mom tried to find her footing. 

Fourteen years ago, Darializa moved uptown to attend Columbia University. She has been here ever since.

In the years since, Darializa has successfully fought ICE to release immigrants that were illegally detained, and to reunite families separated by ICE. Now, as s a PhD student at CUNY, she studies how the U.S. immigration system criminalizes Black immigrants from Latin America.

While working at Families for Freedom, she helped free Abdikar Mohamed, a U.S. permanent resident from Somalia, from ICE detention. Abdikar was detained for one and a half years due to Trump’s 2017 “Muslim ban.” 

When ICE kidnapped her friend Mahmoud Khalil outside his Columbia University apartment in 2025, Darializa got to work. She publicly advocated for his support, participated in protests outside Trump Tower, and arranged support for Mahmoud at court.

As an investigator at a public defenders office in Harlem, Darializa provides legal aid to victims of police brutality. She travels across the district to support  families on the worst day of their lives, and to collect evidence to keep innocent New Yorkers out of jail.

Her work has taken her to many NYCHA developments: she knows firsthand how federal disinvestment in public housing has left thousands of Black and brown New Yorkers to live in unsafe and run-down apartments.

Darializa is also an educator who has taught college courses at CUNY Lehman, Columbia, and NYU. While teaching sociology at CUNY Lehman, she noticed many Lehman students entered college without being able to read at the level they’d need to be successful. 

Part of this had to do with the conditions many of her working-class students faced at home: they missed class because their apartment flooded, or because they needed to pick up a shift at work. In other cases, it was  because our elected officials have failed to fund and protect public education, from pre-K to college. 

This is why Darializa will fight to invest our tax dollars in programs that support children and their families, instead of spend billions to bomb foreign countries.

She is an active member of her union, UAW Local 2325, and proud to be endorsed by UAW Region 9A. She is also a proud member of the NYC Democratic Socialists of America. 

Darializa’s campaign is 100% powered by the people: she will never take money from corporate PACs. Unlike Adriano Espaillat, she won’t take a dime from AIPAC or corporate real estate. Her leadership is accountable to working people, and rooted in a belief that a better world is possible for uptown and the Bronx.