Who Speaks for Dominican New York?

Darializa Avila Chevalier’s primary victory in New York’s 13th District exposes the growing divide between an immigrant community and its activist heirs.

Courtesy Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Darializa Avila Chevalier has narrowly won the Democratic nomination in New York’s 13th Congressional District, and the result is rightly being read as a victory for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who endorsed her, lent her his organization, and broke an earlier promise to back her opponent, five-term Democratic incumbent Adriano Espaillat. And in a district this lopsidedly Democratic, winning the party’s nomination is usually tantamount to winning the seat.

But this contest is about more than Mamdani’s influence in such races. It was a primary fought in Upper Manhattan and the West Bronx, the largest center of Dominican political life in the United States, between two candidates of Dominican origin. The more revealing question is not about how Mamdani’s backing affected the outcome, but what Avila Chevalier’s victory tells us about the changing politics of race, ethnicity, and class within that community.

The man Avila Chevalier defeated is in many respects the embodiment of Dominican political ascent in New York. He came to the city as a child and for a time lived here without legal status; he won a seat in the State Assembly in the 1990s, advanced to the State Senate, and in 2016 succeeded the legendary Charles Rangel to become the first Dominican American elected to Congress, where he now chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Espaillat’s upward trajectory has mirrored that of the city’s Dominican population. Dominicans are now the largest Hispanic group in New York City, nearly 30 percent of the city’s Hispanic population, and more than 8 percent of all New Yorkers. In the 13th District they are more concentrated still: Dominicans make up close to 25 percent of the population. This is a story I know well—both as the son of a Dominican immigrant who came to New York City as a child and as a former resident of Upper Manhattan and the Bronx.

Avila Chevalier’s story is quite different from Espaillat’s. Hers is a story of an upwardly mobile Dominican gentrifier. Born and raised in Florida to Dominican parents, she moved to Upper Manhattan as a young woman to attend Columbia and stayed. She is now a doctoral candidate in sociology at the City University of New York, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and a community organizer who served as a field lead for Mamdani’s mayoral campaign before mounting her own.

Outspent by a wide margin, Chevalier ran well to Espaillat’s left on housing, policing, immigration, and the U.S. alliance with Israel, casting the incumbent as a captive of real-estate money and an insufficiently left-wing Democrat. Compared with Espaillat, with his deep roots in the district, she is a newcomer. But given the demographic and generational transformation under way in the 13th, that proved less of a liability than her critics expected.

The district is changing along two dimensions at once. The first is the one everyone notices. Affluent newcomers have moved into Washington Heights and Inwood, and with little new housing being built, their demand has pushed up rents. Many of these newcomers are white, but some, like Avila Chevalier, are people of color.

Between 2010 and 2020, the area was one of only two community districts in the city to lose population. More than 17,000 Hispanic residents left, and several thousand mostly white arrivals took their place. By the middle of the decade, the median white household there earned close to $80,000 a year, a CUNY study found, and the median Dominican household about $31,000. Many working-class Dominicans have been priced out of the district.

The second dimension along which the district seems to be changing runs within the Dominican community itself. As the immigrant generation ages, a younger cohort of Dominicans raised and educated in the United States has come up behind it that is more assimilated, less culturally conservative, and well to the left of their parents. Avila Chevalier belongs to this cohort, and in her the two dimensions meet. She is Dominican by ancestry, but she came to the neighborhood as the white newcomers did—as an educated transplant—and her worldview was formed at Columbia and in the activist left rather than in the striving immigrant world that produced Espaillat. The upwardly mobile Dominican gentrifier is the figure who complicates the relationship between ethnicity and rootedness. She shares the established community’s ethnic origins and the newcomers’ ideological sensibilities.

This dynamic is not entirely unfamiliar to me. As a young man born to a Dominican immigrant, my wife and I moved into an East Harlem apartment after I graduated from law school in Chicago. I was born and raised in the city, and my wife and I are both the children of immigrants from Latin America; but as up-and-coming professionals, each with advanced degrees, we were in many ways more like gentrifiers than the residents who had called the neighborhood home for decades. And we were not alone in that way.

It was into this stratified electorate that the defining controversy of the race arrived. In its final weeks, old social-media posts of Avila Chevalier’s resurfaced. In one, from 2018, she called for a “free and Black and unified Quisqueya,” invoking the indigenous Taíno name for the island that the Dominican Republic shares with Haiti. In others she described the Dominican flag as “violent” and dismissed Dominican nationalism as racist.

The reaction within the community was fierce. On the morning of June 23, the last day of voting in the primary election, she walked out of an interview on La Mega 97.9, the city’s most-listened-to Spanish-language station, when its hosts pressed her about the posts concerning the Dominican flag. Some questioned whether Avila Chevalier was authentically Dominican; others, by her own account, called her “Haitiana,” Spanish for Haitian, as a term of derision. A former Espaillat adviser made remarks about her that were widely condemned as racist and Islamophobic, and Mamdani publicly denounced the use of “Haitian” as a slur, describing the motives of those using the term as “anti-black.”

What, then, did the “Haitiana” attacks signify, and what might they reveal about the country’s largest Dominican community?

Begin with the Dominican community itself. Though overwhelmingly Democratic, it is anything but ideologically uniform. It contains the younger, more-progressive cohort formed in the city’s left-leaning institutions, and it contains an older, more culturally conservative cohort for whom Dominican national pride remains a serious commitment. To the latter, a candidate who calls their homeland’s flag “violent” and their patriotism a species of racism has not made an abstract academic argument. She has insulted something they hold dear.

There is nothing abstract about Avila Chevalier’s convictions either. She has built her adult life around opposition to Israel. A 2014 internship in the West Bank radicalized her, by her own account, and she came home convinced that American policing, American deportation, and the Israeli occupation were expressions of a single system. At Columbia she joined Students for Justice in Palestine and helped found its campaign to make the university divest from Israel; as an alumna she returned to help lead the 2024 encampment. On October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, she was in Times Square at a rally that hailed the slaughter as “resistance.” Her central charge against Espaillat, the first formerly undocumented member of Congress, was that he accepts money from AIPAC. Even within the Democratic Socialists of America, some call her a “Palestine ultra.”

Her conversion to Islam likely grew out of this same milieu. Raised in a largely Catholic family with little religious practice of her own, she began fasting during Ramadan alongside her activist friends and, after several years, embraced the faith. That her commitment to the Palestinian cause came before her conversion to the religion, and not the other way around, is worth noting. For her, as for a growing cohort of young organizers, the faith likely serves chiefly as a badge of solidarity—an emblem of resistance to the West. Her politics look past the country her parents left to the oppressed of the wider world, with Gaza at the center. This is the worldview that has come to be known as Third Worldism: a view that sorts the world into the oppressed and their oppressors, treats the West and Israel as the wellsprings of the world’s injustice, and makes the Palestinian cause the axis around which every other struggle is made to turn. Avila Chevalier speaks the language of Third Worldism fluently. Yet the issue that came to define the closing weeks of her primary was not Gaza but a conflict closer to her family’s origins: the long and sometimes-bitter relationship between the two nations that share the island of Hispaniola.

That relationship, however, does not follow the Third-Worldist script. Dominicans won their independence in 1844 not from a European empire but from Haiti, which had occupied the eastern half of the island since 1822. The two countries’ fortunes have diverged sharply since. But the cause is not racial hierarchy. Haiti, having never escaped the cycle of dictatorship, coups, and now gang rule that has left it among the poorest and most violent nations in the hemisphere, has seen its people flee by the hundreds of thousands. By contrast, the Dominican Republic, for all its corruption and inequality, has built a relatively stable state and one of the faster-growing economies in Latin America. Many of those Haitians have crossed the border in search of work and safety, and many Dominicans have objected on grounds Americans will find familiar: that people arriving without authorization depress wages and bring customs at odds with their own. One may think those objections are mistaken, but to treat them as nothing more than bigotry is to misunderstand the politics entirely. The reflex that recodes every reservation about migration as racism is itself a hallmark of the Third-Worldist framework Avila Chevalier carried into the race.

Seen in this light, the “Haitiana” attacks come into focus. They are ugly, and one need not pretend that every voter who used the word did so innocently. But as a phenomenon they may reflect a race-neutral nationalism more than the colorism the charge of racism brings to mind, particularly for those who view race and racism through a North American lens. Consider that a large share of Dominicans are themselves of visible African descent; complexion does not predict where a given Dominican stands on Haiti, migration, or national identity. The word polices a national boundary, not a racial one. What the episode ultimately exposes is not a community divided by color but a collision between the rooted nationalism of a long-established immigrant population and the Third-Worldism of a socialist newcomer who regards such nationalism as a parochialism to be transcended.

Why, then, would a candidate stake her campaign on the charge of racism in a community where it made so little sense? The political scientist Anna Mikkelborg, writing last year in the American Political Science Review, supplies part of the answer. Voters have generally preferred representatives who share their race, a tendency that still describes much of the behavior of voters of color. Among white Democrats, Mikkelborg shows, it has reversed. Over the past decade, as their racial attitudes moved sharply left in what some call the “Great Awokening,” white Democrats have grown more approving of politicians of color than of comparable white ones, and a rising number of majority-white districts have sent black representatives to Congress as a result. Avila Chevalier’s racism charge may have been misleading, but it may also have helped position her as the candidate with the stronger claim to a marginalized identity, despite the nationality she shares with Espaillat.

The college-educated progressives reshaping the 13th District are the kind of voters Mikkelborg’s work describes—the ones most responsive to a candidate who frames herself as a victim of racism and her opponents as its perpetrators. When both contenders are Dominican, ethnic kinship cannot decide the race, and the advantage tilts toward whoever speaks most fluently in the idiom of identity and injustice. In branding her critics racists, Avila Chevalier was defending herself. She was also, wittingly or not, courting the voters most inclined to reward her for it.

The returns bear this out. Avila Chevalier ran up overwhelming margins in the precincts around Columbia, where she went to school, and lost the heart of the “Little Dominican Republic.” She appears to have galvanized young, native-born voters; Espaillat could not turn out enough Dominican Americans to hold them off. Her anti-American politics, in other words, played better with the white college-educated newcomers some would call gentrifiers than with the immigrants whose district this has long been.

This is the shape of the new ethnic politics. The old assumption that an immigrant community votes for its own, and rewards the candidate who most resembles it, is breaking down. The immigrant who built a career on becoming American has given way to the American-born activist who rejects American patriotism in favor of militant Third-Worldism.

It is worth noting that immigrants remain among the most patriotic of Americans, while national pride has fallen fastest among the native-born young. A 2024 survey from the Public Religion Research Institute found that only 51 percent of Americans now say they are very or extremely proud of their country, down from more than 80 percent a little over a decade ago, with the entire decline concentrated among Democrats. The estrangement Avila Chevalier gives voice to was not imported from the Dominican Republic. It was acquired in the elite universities and educated-class social movements of the country she now seeks to represent.

Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the 2022 book, Criminal (In)Justice.