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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,…