Darializa Avila Chevalier Wants “Babies, Not Bombs”

AC: Yeah. He has been in Congress for almost 10 years. He has been in political office for almost 30. And things have not gotten easier for the folks here. We’ve had more and more Black Harlemites leave the city, more and more Dominicans uptown leave the city. And as people are really struggling to get by, the rent keeps going up. There are fewer and fewer resources to actually support folks through these really hard times.

I just ask folks, “Has your life gotten better in the last nine years of his leadership in Congress?” And overwhelmingly, the answer is no. And I knew going into this that the answer would be no, because that was my answer. My life has also gotten harder over the last 10 years.

JM: In what ways?

AC: The rent is getting untenable. I see more and more of my neighbors sleeping on the street. I see more people joining food pantry lines. I talk to elders, and their children are moving away because they want children and they can’t afford to raise them in the city.

I see more charter schools popping up and more public schools struggling to provide basic necessities for their students. I was working towards a career in academia before we launched this campaign, and I got priced out of that. I couldn’t afford to pay my rent while teaching multiple classes at CUNY because CUNY is so deeply underfunded.

I was stuck in a cycle where I could either decide to pay my rent and teach classes, or I could work on my dissertation and graduate and not have to pay tuition. And so it was just this race to the bottom in many ways, and I had to find work outside of that.

I love my job at the Neighborhood Defenders Service of Harlem as an investigator. But it wasn’t the career that I was working towards for many years.

JM: A lot of people in that situation would say, “I have to make some kind of change in my life.” They would not necessarily say, “I think I’m going to run for Congress.” It’s not the average decision that someone makes. So why was it the decision that you made?

It has been a journey, and it’s one that I’m really grateful for. But you’re right, this is not something that most people would do, and I myself actually hadn’t considered doing.

I was approached. I was asked to consider running. I knew that folks generally did not feel happy with the representation we had, and I knew that because I’ve been organizing in this district for over 14 years. I am someone who’s reached out to the congressman’s office multiple times, sometimes daily, and never got a meaningful response. And I knew that was the case for others. Also, over the last year, where I was knocking on doors for Zohran, that was also a constant theme—people would talk about how Cuomo was emblematic of the politics of the past, and then in the same breath, they would talk about Espaillat without me prompting it. And it became very clear that this was a widespread sentiment.

When Justice Democrats e-mailed me and asked me to consider [running], I met with them, and I asked, “Why me?”

JM: Had running been on your mind at all?

AC: What had been on my mind was believing that we really needed new representation. And I had actually connected with [Justice Democrats] many months prior, and I was like, “Hey, I just wanna flag this district for you. This district is ready for something different.” I went back to my organizing, went back to my work. I didn’t think much of it. And then they were like, “Hey, so you were actually nominated.” At first I thought it was a friend pranking me, but they wanted to meet. And they said to me, “We have an opportunity to run on principles that we care about with somebody who has already been very vocal about their principles.”

I said that accountability is important to me, and the fact that my views are out there, I think, is a form of accountability. Also, I had just seen an incredible example of how electoral politics could be used as a vehicle for bringing people into movement work.

I spent many weeks thinking about whether this is something that made sense for me to do. I would be having casual conversations with friends about the things that they were going through. As someone who is a sociologist, I kept hearing “this is a policy failure” in my head. And at a certain point, the question stopped being, “Should I run?” And it started being, how can I look at my community knowing that we have an opportunity to change the structural issues that are impacting their day-to-day lives and not take that opportunity?

JM: Fast-forward to now. I live in the district. And I came back to my house yesterday, and waiting in my mailbox was this big mailer from the Bold America PAC that has your face on it. [After this interview was conducted, it was reported that Bold America is being funded by AIPAC]. Your picture is superimposed on three words in giant letters, which are, pardon my French, “Fuck Kamala Harris.” [The quote comes from a since-deleted 2021 tweet; Avila Chevalier has apologized for the language she used in this and other tweets.]

AC: Yeah.

JM: I cannot escape the ads running against you. Did you ever imagine that it would get this ugly?

AC: I knew that they would come after me. I couldn’t know what form it would take. And I also could not have imagined the degree and the scale [of it]. It’s really reflective of the kind of politics that we’ve had for far too long—of divisiveness, of dehumanization, of cruelty in many ways.

I’ve been very intentional this entire campaign about making sure that I was criticizing Adriano on his policies, on his absence, on the impact that his performance as a congressman has had on our community. [I’ve had] no clear answer to any of the questions around his voting record, around the money he takes from special interests. No clear answer as to why he refuses to call it a genocide [in Gaza].

And yet he is engaging in a type of politics that is bringing people to my social media to call me a gorilla, to call me a rat, to call me trash. And they’re calling me Haitian, as though that were a bad thing. They’re questioning my Dominican heritage. He has turned this into a race about Dominican identity versus whatever he thinks I am, which is crazy. My parents are Dominican. My grandparents are Dominican. All eight of my great-grandparents are Dominican.

I now have to explain to folks, hey, I am Dominican. And also the way you are dehumanizing Haitian identity in a time where the Voting Rights Act is being gutted, in a context where the president of the United States has used incredibly racist and dehumanizing language against the first Black president of the United States—

JM: And against Haitians.

AC: Yeah, and against Haitians. It is so deeply anti-Black. And as someone who’s a very proudly Black woman, I think those things are all at play here.

JM: I don’t want to get into making you account for all of your tweets, but, for instance, your tweet about Kamala Harris—you’ve said that you regret saying the exact words that you said. But you were responding to her now pretty infamous warning to [potential migrants from] Latin America, saying, “Do not come.” Do you regret the sentiment behind the tweet—the objection to the Biden administration’s immigration policies? Or do you still stand by the feelings that you had, even if you don’t stand by the exact words that you used to express them?

AC: The tweet itself was really related to just feeling deeply frustrated and powerless, as someone who had no political power, with establishment politics that has gotten us to the moment that we’re in—where, for some reason, it’s OK for the language that my opponent is using against me to exist. Where he doesn’t have to answer to the policies that funded ICE, that allowed for fascism to rise, that made it so that we spend more of our tax dollars on war than on our own kids

I will apologize for the things that I need to take accountability for as many times as I need to for folks to know how sincere that is. But I have to wonder why it is that someone who had no power when I said those things, no institutional power, is being deeply dehumanized by over $5.5 million of spending against me, while my opponent has yet to answer any question of substance about the things that actually matter to the community here.

And I think as someone who has been organizing around immigration justice for so long, it still shatters my heart to think that so many people come to this country because of failed foreign policy that has destabilized their countries, and then our leadership treats them as though they were the problem. I think what we’re seeing right now is the difference between a campaign that wants to run on the issues, to deliver for communities, to make sure that we actually get the resources we need to lead dignified lives, and a campaign that is just interested in holding on to power, regardless of how ugly it gets and how dehumanizing it is for the other candidate.

JM: You’ve said that you oppose super PACs, that you would seek to abolish them if you got to Congress. You have millions of dollars being spent against you. You also have super PACs spending money on your behalf, though not as much money as Espaillat has. Do you wish that money were not being spent, or do you feel like, if this is the terrain on which the game is being played, then I’m glad someone is playing it on my behalf?

AC: I have been very clear about the role of money in politics and how it really disenfranchises people. It makes it so that people’s votes are devalued in the face of millions of dollars from corporations or special interest groups. And that’s why I said that we need to abolish [super PACS].

I don’t control what outside groups do. What I do control is my campaign, right? I’m very proud to have run a campaign where we’ve raised over a million dollars, where the average contribution was $66. Because what that tells me is that is what people are hungry for.

JM: We’re talking just as the deal between Iran and the United States has been unveiled. Some Democrats in Congress have been speaking out very firmly against it. If you were in Congress right now and a vote on whether to endorse the Iran deal came up, would you vote for it?

AC: I will be very frank that I have not had time to sit down with all of the details, but I’m always pushing for diplomacy. We have an instinct to run towards our war machine and to use it in really horrific ways, and what we really need is to make sure that we’re actually engaging in diplomacy and saving human lives. I would obviously have to think carefully about all the details of this agreement, but also consult with my community around this because at stake is human lives. And it’s not something that you vote on lightly.

This is such a deeply costly war in terms of human life, but it’s also costly in a financial sense, where poor people in this country are the ones paying the cost of this war. That doesn’t compare to the incredible loss that people elsewhere are facing, where their children are being slaughtered indiscriminately. But I don’t think anyone in this country would argue that they would prefer to see their tax dollars be spent on slaughtering kids abroad than on bettering the lives of their own children here.

JM: That leads very directly to Palestine. You’ve been organizing around Palestine for a very long time. You spent time in Palestine. You were an organizer with the encampments at Columbia. Why has Palestine been so important to you for so many years, and why do you think it matters so much in this campaign?

AC: I went to Palestine when I was 20 in 2014, and it was a deeply formative experience. The day after I came back, Israel began bombing Gaza. [Thousands of people] were slaughtered in that attack on Gaza. I remember scrolling through the photos and the names of the people who had been killed, and all I could do was sob. I’d just left a community that looks so much like the people whose faces I was looking at.

That was the same summer that Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. And I remember seeing the tweets from people in Gaza telling folks in Ferguson how to deal with tear gas. The tear gas canisters, both in Gaza and in Ferguson, all said, “Made in the USA.” [It made me realize], oh, these are not similar systems; these are the same system. And the older I got, the more I organized, the more and more I saw the direct connection between the oppression that happens there and the oppression that happens here.

One of the things that I was really excited to be able to say to people on this campaign was “babies, not bombs.” I want to lead with the value of life, lead with the things that everyone in our society benefits from when we take care of our babies. I wanted to be able to articulate very succinctly that we could have a city that values our babies if we were not spending our resources on bombing babies abroad.

And to know that my opponent takes AIPAC money is something that, for a lot of people, is just disqualifying. It is [about] Palestine at the heart of it, but it’s also what it says about someone’s inability to stand up against something that is so blatantly horrific, someone who refuses to name a genocide. Can you trust someone who won’t even say that word to fight for you on the most basic of issues? If I can’t trust you to not take money from the real estate developers that are pricing us out of the city, how can I trust you to fight for me to be able to stay in the city? If I can’t trust that you’re not taking money from the CEOs of corporate hospitals that forced nurses on a six-week strike in one of the coldest winters we’ve ever lived through, then how can I trust that you’re gonna fight for my healthcare? Are you willing to fight for human life and dignity, or are you not?

JM: If you get into Congress, you’ll be joining this growing faction of left-wing members. But within that, there are different ways that people have chosen to do that job. You have AOC, who has become more of a power player within the party. And then you have someone like Rashida Tlaib, who is not trying to play that inside game in the same way. Which of those lanes do you envision yourself following if you have envisioned that at all?

AC: I’m an organizer, and that’s really all I want to be. I want to do that in the House because I think that for us to actually deliver for our community, we have to be willing to organize together. That requires us to think strategically about all the various roles that need to be played to be able to deliver, right? And I think that requires us to really come together as a bloc and be willing to be organized. As an organizer, I always tell people, “Organize me into something bigger,” because we need to be able to build something much bigger than any one representative in Congress and much bigger than any seat.

I’m always prepared to stand up for the right thing. I’m always willing to challenge power when it’s necessary, and I deeply believe that can only happen when we do it by making decisions with community. Because all of these roles are important, but they need to be done in a way that brings our larger goal forward.

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