The race to replace City Councilman Ruben Díaz Sr., a controversial Democrat who’s served in local politics for two decades, is a crowded one with eight candidates vying to fill the open seat in the Bronx’s 18th district.

Díaz, 78, announced that he would not seek re-election to a second term shortly after his unsuccessful bid for Congress in 2020. 

The outgoing councilman’s career in elected office has been punctuated by incendiary rhetoric against the LGBTQ community and against abortion. In 2012, the pentecostal minister invoked Hitler as a pro-choice advocate in his argument against a state bill that would strengthen abortion laws. And in 2019, he was stripped of his chairmanship of a committee created to provide oversight of for-hire vehicles after he said the City Council was “controlled by the homosexual community.”

The Democratic candidates in the race are Amanda Farías, Michael Beltzer and William Moore — all of whom also ran for the seat in 2017, along with first-timers William Rivera, Darlene Jackson, Eliú Lara, Mohammed Mujumder and Mirza Rashid. A major theme among the candidates is a departure from the approach of Díaz.  

“He's been missing in action between getting elected and then being divisive and being removed from his committee,” Farías said. “He not only lost representation for all of our livery and taxi drivers in the city and in our community, but he also lost our negotiation, someone at City Hall that can really ensure that we're getting invested in through the city budget and working with the mayor.”

Farías has had a long history in area politics — serving as a state committeewoman, working at City Hall and also on President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. She was seen as a serious contender to Díaz when she ran in 2017 and placed second in the primary with nearly 21% of the vote.

“I think people have seen that I wasn't someone that ran for office for self gain,” said Farías, who has lived in the Bronx her whole life. “And then when I didn't come in successfully the first time, I didn't disappear. I kept doing the work on the ground.”

Local political observers see Farías as a stark departure from Díaz, not only because of her progressive politics, but also because she’s a woman nearly 50 years his junior. She has a strong labor backing that includes endorsements from the city’s most powerful unions: DC37, the United Federation of Teachers, SEIU Local 1199 and SEIU Local 32BJ. She’s also endorsed by the Bronx Democratic Party.  

Her contrast from Díaz is something she thinks will serve as a strength this election.

“Folks in the community realize how many things were exacerbated and made worse because of the pandemic,” she said. “They realized that this recycling of seats and giving people another shot, another position, can no longer work for them.”

Though Díaz hasn’t made an official endorsement in the race, William Rivera, a former member of the FDNY and current Community Board 9 district manager, is considered by some of his opponents to be the candidate Díaz wants to win.

Díaz was seen at Rivera’s campaign announcement, but Rivera says that doesn’t mean anything. 

“If somebody wants to come to an event, I can’t tell them not to come to the door,” he said.

Rivera dismissed efforts by his opponents to tie him to Díaz, adding that he doesn’t share the current councilman’s stance on many social issues. It’s something he’s had to answer for on the campaign trail. 

“I get that question [from voters],” he said. “They like what they're hearing and they say, ‘What's your stance on this?’ I’m a very progressive candidate in terms of my council member who was very controversial.”

But candidates like Farías think campaign event attendance isn’t something to be dismissed. 

“[Rivera] deliberately has people there because he wants people to know who's his associations, whether or not that's going to bode well,” she said. 

The fine line a candidate like Rivera walks between distancing himself from Díaz, while still not completely disavowing his support, doesn’t come as a surprise considering Díaz’s victory in 2017. In that election, he won the primary with 42% of the vote and the general election with 78% of the vote.

But political expert Michael Benjamin, a former Bronx assemblyman and a current editor of the New York Post’s editorial page, also stresses that support for Díaz doesn’t necessarily mean that the district should be easily classified as right-leaning.

“It’s not as conservative as the reverend personally was,” Benjamin said. “Democrats in the Bronx are by and large progressive. It's just by degrees. Do you want a left-leaning Bernie Sanders socialist progressive or do you want a run-of-the-mill, liberal, moderate Democrat?”

The Bronx’s 18th district includes the Soundview, Castle Hill, Parkchester, Clason Point and Harding Park neighborhoods, and is predominantly Latino, but there’s also a significant Black population as well as a South Asian and Bangladeshi community. 

For Mohammed Mujumder, the issues of homelessness, education and affordable housing are top priorities.

“I have a lot of stake in this district,” said Mujumder, who has served on Community Board 9 for the past 11 years. “My business [is here], my children born here, grow up here. Both of them graduated from law school and they're still here.”

Michael Beltzer, much like Farías, is another candidate who’s developed name recognition in the district. Since his run for the council seat four years ago, the advocate and member of Community Education Council 8 has continued to organize around issues such as ranked-choice voting, transit and a food program for a local senior center.

“A lot of the things that I saw were an issue back then are still issues today,” said Beltzer, who has also served on Bronx Community Board 9. 

He points to land use and rezoning policies as a major issue he’d work on if elected to the City Council. 

Darlene Jackson, a former nonprofit worker and advocate in the foster care system, said fixing what she considers missteps of the incumbent is a major priority.

“We have no voice,” she said. “There's nobody fighting for this district at all on the committee level — anything that pertains to education, housing, health care, our economic recovery.”

But it’s not just a shift in rhetoric many say they’d like to change. One of the major critiques from candidates has been the inaccessibility of Díaz as councilman.

“His office is all the way in Zerega,” Jackson said. “I took a trip out there once he got elected and I'm, like, ‘This is so out of sight — who's gonna come out here?’”

Making the office more accessible is also one of the ways in which Beltzer said he would be different from the outgoing councilman. 

“Right now the office is in one of the least accessible parts of the district so that would be a first change — having people in the community feel like the office is working for them,” said Beltzer, who used to work as an analyst in the city comptroller’s office. “There has just been a sense that only certain constituencies are served by the elected officials here.”

While the candidates promise a different type of leadership — one that at the very least doesn’t inflame a Democratic base — a mere physical presence may make a big difference.

“He really has just disappeared,” Farías said of Díaz.