In the 30-plus years since she was first elected to Congress, Rep. Nydia Velázquez has had twin missions, representing New York’s 7th District and her native Puerto Rico — pushing legislation for the island’s self-determination and protesting the U.S. Navy’s presence there.
With the U.S. territory’s lopsided relationship with Washington — it has a single non-voting member in the House, and its residents cannot vote in presidential elections despite being U.S. citizens — Velázquez is Puerto Rico’s unofficial ambassador, speaking out for the island’s 3.3 million residents.
The overarching theme of the race to succeed “La Luchadora,” who is retiring at the end of the year, has been a proxy war between the Democratic party’s insurgent left flank — led by Mayor Zohran Mamdani — and establishment progressives. But Puerto Rico is taking center stage — even though none of the three leading candidates are Puerto Rican.
On Monday, Velázquez’ chosen successor, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, plans to unveil a detailed six-page policy platform tackling some of the most pressing issues in Puerto Rico, from supporting a referendum on the island’s status to repealing century-old federal trade laws that drive up the costs of goods and services there.
He also supports abolishing the fiscal oversight board, authorized under a 2016 federal law, that has essentially run the territory’s finances and many of its day-to-day operations for the last decade.
“We need to move Puerto Rico to a place where we could see it thrive versus what’s happening now, with the deterioration of the island because of imperialism,” said Reynoso.
Velázquez, who worked with Reynoso to craft his Puerto Rico platform, said she has the “assurance that he has a good grasp of the issues that are important to us and that we need to tackle in Congress.”
“Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States,” Velázquez told THE CITY. “Congress has total jurisdiction over Puerto Rico, so it is the responsibility — the moral obligation — of any member of Congress to also tackle the issues of Puerto Rico, because we, the Congress, own Puerto Rico.”
In a phone interview with THE CITY, Reynoso said it was the Puerto Rican community in Williamsburg’s Los Sures section that embraced his parents when they immigrated in the 1970’s from the Dominican Republic, helping them and other Latino immigrants adjust to lNew York. He said he does not take lightly the “responsibility” of carrying on the area’s Puerto Rican legacy.
Reynoso and his chief rival, Assemblymember Claire Valdez of Queens, have highlighted Puerto Rico in their campaign platforms since launching their bids to replace Velázquez, the first Puerto Rican woman elected to the House of Representatives.
Another candidate, Queens Councilmember Julie Won, intends to roll out a full foreign policy platform this week that will include Puerto Rico issues, her campaign said.
The Puerto Rican seat?
But neither candidate has Puerto Rican roots — Reynoso was born in Brooklyn to Dominican parents and Valdez is of Mexican and Native American descent — a reflection of the state of the district in 2026. For decades, New York’s 7th congressional district was considered solidly Puerto Rican, but forces ranging from redistricting to gentrification and time-worn demographic shifts have cut up the district and diluted Puerto Ricans’ presence in it.
The district “is no longer a Puerto Rican district, and it hasn’t been for quite a bit of time,” said Eli Valentin, an expert on Latino politics in New York, adding that it has experienced “more demographic changes than perhaps anywhere else in the city in the last 15 or 20 years.”
The three leading candidates’ near identical ideological overlap — they both support abolishing ICE, universal healthcare and universal childcare, for example — also extends to Puerto Rico.
Like Reynoso, Valdez and Won support self-determination for Puerto Rico. In an interview with THE CITY, Valdez described Velázquez’s retirement as a “real loss” for the Puerto Rican community and said it is important for them to have a voice in Congress — on issues beyond its political status, too.
“We need to make sure that people on the island have real dignity and equity, real Medicaid parity, and that the energy grid is reliable and the energy is affordable,” she said.
Velázquez was elected in an upset in 1992, after the district was controversially redrawn in order to create a new majority Latino district bringing together Puerto Ricans from lower Manhattan and in Brooklyn, from Williamsburg to Sunset Park; the district was known as the “bullwinkle” due to its unusual shape.
At the time, Puerto Ricans were underrepresented in New York and in Congress, said Juan Cartagena, a lecturer at Columbia Law School who was involved in the fight to create and preserve the district.
As the district’s Puerto Rican population waned in the following decades, Velázquez continued pushing on Puerto Rican issues — alongside former Rep. Luis Gutiérrez of Chicago — while embracing other hot-button issues, immigration in particular.
The final blow to the district’s Puerto Rican bonafides came earlier this decade, when Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Red Hook and Sunset Park were swallowed up by the 10th district, represented by Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman.
Velázquez’s retirement leaves two more New York House members with Puerto Rican roots — Ritchie Torres and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of The Bronx.
Torres’ 15th district holds a historic and demographic edge over Ocasio-Cortez, though he and Velázquez are far apart on the issue of Puerto Rican self-determination. As a young woman, Velázquez supported independence, but she moderated her position as she entered public service, and in 2021 introduced legislation with Ocasio-Cortez to lay the groundwork for a binding referendum to allow Puerto Ricans to vote for independence, statehood or continuing as a U.S. territory. (Torres, meanwhile, is bullish on Puerto Rico becoming the 51st state.)
There are around 670,000 Puerto Ricans across New York City, according to a 2025 analysis of the 2020 American Community Survey by THE CITY and Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism. The South Bronx and certain neighborhoods along the borough’s northeast, from Castle Hill to Throggs Neck in Ocasio-Cortez’s district, are some of the most densely populated by Puerto Ricans today.
Velázquez has taken Ocasio-Cortez under her wing since her election in 2018, pushing the progressive star to get more involved on issues affecting the island. In 2024, they both endorsed Juan Dalmau, who ran with the island’s pro-independence party, for governor.
After Velázquez retires, only time will tell whether Torres, Ocasio-Cortez, or whomever prevails in the 7th district will carry her mantle on Puerto Rico issues. But having a leader who builds lasting relationships with the diaspora community and leaders on the island matters much more than token representation, said Councilmember Alexa Avilés, who represents Sunset Park.
The Reynoso-Valdez race is one of the most closely-watched of this heated midterm cycle, presenting a rare open seat after Velázquez announced in November that she would retire after 17 terms in the House. Along with Rep. Jerrold Nadler of Manhattan, who is also retiring, Velázquez is one of the longest-serving members of Congress in New York City today.
Ideological Twins
Velázquez’s district sits at the epicenter of what some political observers have dubbed the “Commie Corridor” — a Democratic Socialists of America stronghold that, if Valdez is elected, would give the movement a coveted trifecta of democratic socialist officials at the local, state and federal level.
That proxy war has been at the heart of a race where the leading candidates are, ideologically, almost identical.
Velázquez, an early supporter of Mamdani’s 2025 bid for mayor, publicly rebuked him after he endorsed Valdez before Velázquez had chosen a successor; she quickly endorsed Reynoso and has been a leading force in his race ever since.
Reynoso, a two-term Council member before his election as Brooklyn borough president in 2021, held the lead in a January poll — the only public poll of the race to date — and is endorsed by major unions and the Working Families Party.
Valdez, meanwhile, is backed by the same left-leaning coalition, led by the DSA and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, that propelled Mamdani to victory. And though Reynoso has more cash on hand than Valdez or Won, he was outraised by both of them in the first quarter of the year.
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