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NEW YORK (RNS) — In the late 1980s, Spanish Harlem became the center of New York’s Hispanic Muslim community, which coalesced around the Alianza Islámica, once the country’s largest Latino Muslim organization. Now, decades later, New York’s 13th congressional district — spanning Spanish Harlem, the Bronx and Upper Manhattan — is sending Darializa Avila Chevalier, the first Latina Muslim representative in the country’s history, to Congress.
A left-wing organizer, Avila Chevalier’s spiritual trajectory echoes the history of New York’s Latino Muslim activists.
“She can be seen as part of a new generation or a new wave of younger Latino or Latinx Muslims in the United States who are kind of picking up on that legacy and taking it in a new direction, given the United States’ current political moment,” said Ken Chitwood, author of “Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism Among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam” (2025).
Last week, the 33-year-old first-time candidate easily won her congressional race following a campaign focused on affordability and halting U.S. aid to Israel. In June, Avila Chevalier, who was endorsed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America, unseated AIPAC-endorsed incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., in the Democratic primary. Avila Chevalier supports a one-state solution and was criticized during her campaign for attending a Times Square pro-Palestinian rally the day after the Oct. 7 , 2023 Hamas attacks — an event described by organizers as in solidarity with an “unprecedented liberation struggle” — making her one of the most far-left incoming congresspeople on Israel and Palestine. She joins several other newly elected progressive candidates who campaigned on changing the U.S.-Israel relationship and will also be among a record seven Muslims in the new legislature.
A Ph.D. candidate in sociology at City University of New York, Avila Chevalier is the daughter of Dominican immigrants and converted to Islam three years ago, though she fasted during Ramadan for four years before that. She was inspired by the Muslim faith of fellow social justice organizers, she told congregants at a Shiah Islamic center in Queens in March.
“It was seeing all of my friends who were showing up to organize, who are Muslim, were showing up in the space with the grace and love and passion that they had in these spaces of social justice, that really pushed me to join the faith,” she said at the Islamic center.
In July, Avila Chevalier told journalist Peter Beinart that her Muslim faith greatly influenced her politics. “One of the things that pushed me to convert was thinking about how Allah introduced Himself to us, as the most gracious and the most merciful,” she said. “And to think about what does it look like and to lead my politics through that lens, through one that centers the grace and mercy that all humans need and frankly deserve is how I centered my vision for how I move through the world and how I engage with other people.”
Avila Chevalier did not respond to RNS’ interview requests.
In converting, Avila Chevalier joined a growing demographic among American Muslims: 9% of American Muslims identified as Latino in 2020, compared to 5% in 2017, according to the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. Pockets of the community have developed around Houston — home to the IslamInSpanish Centro Islamico, the country’s only Latino Muslim mosque — Florida and New York.
Though the community steadily grew in recent decades, its history traces back to the 1920s, against the backdrop of Black nationalist Muslim organizing in New York, like the Nation of Islam and the Five-Percent Nation, Chitwood said.
“When I tell people I’m an Afro Latina Muslim, everyone is just like, ‘Yes, of course you are. You’re a New Yorker. Like, I wouldn’t expect anything else,’” Avila Chevalier said in a video with Asad Dandia, historian for the Borough of Brooklyn, noting how her conversion path was a distinctly New York story.
Like her, founders of the Alianza Islámica found Islam through political organizing. The group emerged out of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican civil rights movement founded in the 1960s. The Alianza tackled issues of poverty and gang violence, and was one of the only mosques to perform janazah, or Islamic funeral prayers, for people who died from AIDS, according to Chitwood.
Maia Villalba, a Chinese-Cuban Muslim convert who recently curated the “One Ummah, One Barrio: Alianza Islámica and the Legacy of Muslim Nuyorican Revolution” exhibition with CUNY’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies, said the organization distinguished itself by addressing issues affecting Hispanic New Yorkers. “They decided to create this Islamic Latino organization because they didn’t have any other spaces where they could be proudly holding these simultaneous identities,” she told RNS.
Dandia, whose New York Narratives walking tour company includes stops in front of the former headquarters of the Alianza Islámica, now a barbershop, noted that the congresswoman-elect placed herself in this legacy.
“She sees herself as a direct inheritor of that longstanding Black Latino Muslim organizing history of the neighborhood,” he told RNS.
Avila Chevalier’s path to Islam, by way of pro-Palestinian organizing, follows patterns observed among other Hispanic converts to Islam, Chitwood said.
At Columbia University, Avila Chevalier was a member of the Student Justice for Palestine chapter and co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which demanded the university divest from investments related to Israel. In 2014, she spent two months living in the West Bank, where she taught English to schoolchildren in Nablus. She has said that experience shaped her positions on Israel and the Palestinian territories. In spring 2024, Avila Chevalier was among activists leading the pro-Palestinian student encampments at Columbia.
“Hers is a familiar story,” Chitwood said. “When people get involved, like non-Muslim Latinx people get involved in Palestinian justice movements, they see that faith and political organizing are not separate. … They’re tied together, and so their commitment to justice becomes a pathway to conversion.”
On Jan. 3, 2027, Avila Chevalier will have the opportunity to be sworn in to Congress on a Quran. In the March video with Dandia, the congresswoman-elect jokingly responded “Inshallah,” or “God willing,” to whether she would use the same copy Mamdani was sworn in on in December 2025. The 19th-century Quran copy, from Ottoman Syria, also holds significant history in New York’s Afro-Latin history as it belonged to Black Puerto Rican scholar Arturo Schomburg.