{"id":252998,"date":"2025-11-09T12:02:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-09T12:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/252998\/"},"modified":"2025-11-09T12:02:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-09T12:02:08","slug":"how-mamdani-is-defying-immigrant-expectations-by-embracing-his-identity-his-boldness-resonates-zohran-mamdani","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/252998\/","title":{"rendered":"How Mamdani is defying immigrant expectations by embracing his identity: \u2018His boldness resonates\u2019 | Zohran Mamdani"},"content":{"rendered":"

Across the country, Donald Trump\u2019s crackdown on immigrants has shaken neighbourhoods, torn apart families and engendered a sense of panic among communities. But in New York, on Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani<\/a>, the first Muslim mayor of New York, and an immigrant from Uganda, chose to underline his identity. \u201cNew York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant,\u201d he told an ecstatic crowd at Paramount theater in Brooklyn.<\/p>\n

The son of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother, he was born in Kampala, raised in Queens, and identifies as a democratic socialist. Almost every aspect of Mamdani\u2019s identity had been an issue of contention during the election. Earlier this week, the Center for Study of Organized Hate published a report highlighting the surge in Islamophobic comments online between July and October, most of which labelled Mamdani as an extremist or terrorist.<\/p>\n

Two days before the election, a Super Pac supporting Andrew Cuomo had run an ad depicting Mamdani in front of the Twin Towers crashing down on 9\/11. Earlier, it had artificially thickened and enlarged Mamdani\u2019s beard to make him appear more menacing on a flyer circulated around the city. Towards the end of October, a tearful Mamdani had addressed these accusations in a moving speech in the Bronx. He vowed that as an immigrant, and especially as a Muslim: \u201cI will no longer be in the shadows.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Tuesday night in Brooklyn, he drove that point home: \u201cI am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Minhaj Khan, who works with the Indian American Muslim Council of North America, a New Jersey organisation that focuses on the tri-state area, told me what \u201cZohran offers is something different than any other Muslim candidate who fought an election anywhere in the United States: he took a pretty bold stand against the ill that is spoken about Islam and Muslims in this country and his boldness actually resonates a lot with the community right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the way that he is not diminishing his identity and all the parts of his experience that have driven him to be pushing his affordability platform is huge,\u201d said Alina Shen, the organising director of CAAAV Voice, the sibling organisation of Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, which played a crucial part in engaging South Asian residents of the city in Mamdani\u2019s campaign. \u201cI think it\u2019s part of what made him stand out as a political candidate, that he\u2019s not changing who he actually is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mamdani also started his victory speech by quoting Eugene Debs, the American socialist who was the son of French immigrants, and borrowed the hopefulness for a new dawn in New York<\/a> City from Jawaharlal Nehru\u2019s famous address to Indians on the eve of the country\u2019s independence: \u201cA moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zohran Mamdani stands on stage with his wife Rama Duwaji, his father, Mahmood Mamdani, and mother, Mira Nair. Photograph: Yuki Iwamura\/AP<\/p>\n

Khan, who moved to the US from India in the 1990s, said he was \u201cproud\u201d to hear Mamdani quoting Nehru from the podium. \u201cNehru was a man who brought everyone together,\u201d Khan told me. \u201cAt the time of partition, it was a very vicious environment in India, and in that moment, Nehru stood up as a secular leader, brought people together.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Khan\u2019s eyes, Mamdani offers something similar: \u201cZohran\u2019s campaign has shown how you can bring together Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Christians in this highly divisive time in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s own parents are both children of the Nehruvian age of Indian democracy, steeped in the ideas of pluralism.<\/p>\n

His father Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of colonialism and a professor at Columbia University, was born to Gujarati Muslim parents in Mumbai. But he grew up in Kampala, Uganda, and first came to the United States on a scholarship to study at the University of Pittsburgh and became involved in the civil rights movement; he was among the students arrested for travelling to Montgomery, Alabama, from northern universities during the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n

After finishing his master\u2019s at Tufts University, Mahmood moved back to Uganda, only to be expelled from his adopted country as part of Idi Amin\u2019s expulsion of the Indian diaspora, ending up at a refugee shelter behind the Kensington Palace in London. In the 1980s, Amin\u2019s successor, Milton Obote stripped Mahmood of his Ugandan citizenship for criticizing government policies. His status as a thinker and writer only rose, culminating in a tenured professorship at Columbia University, where he continues to work today.<\/p>\n

The celebrated filmmaker Mira Nair, Zohran\u2019s mother, was born in Orissa, on the other side of the subcontinent from Mumbai, in a family of high-ranking bureaucrats. While in her teens, she turned down a full scholarship to Cambridge University \u2013 the scars of British colonialism were still fresh in the Indian psyche \u2013 and instead went to attend Harvard. She spent her summers in New York city among the artists and writers, developing an affinity for theater and films. Her first forays into filmmaking explored the lives of residents of Old Delhi, an Indian newspaper dealer in New York, and strippers and street-children of Mumbai.<\/p>\n

I think that Zohran\u2019s platform … is about shifting the terrain of power in this countryIrene Hsu<\/p>\n

It was while researching her second feature film, Mississippi Masala, which follows the lives of Ugandan Indians displaced by Idi Amin, that Nair first met Mahmood, as part of her research. In 1991, the same year the film was released, the couple got married, and had a son: Zohran Kwame Mamdani, who got his middle name in honour of Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary who became the country\u2019s first president.<\/p>\n

Zohran spent the first five years of his life in Kampala, living in a bungalow overlooking Lake Victoria, where part of Mississippi Masala was shot. In a 2002 profile of Nair in The New Yorker, he was introduced as \u201cNair\u2019s talkative doe-eyed son, Zohran, who exudes the charm of the well-loved, [and] is known by dozens of coinages, including Z, Zoru, Fadoose, and Nonstop Mamdani\u201d.<\/p>\n

Like his father, Zohran lived an itinerant childhood. After his father moved to New York in a faculty apartment close to Columbia University, Zohran, leaving behind Kampala, was enrolled in the private Bank Street School in Manhattan. Evenings were spent in Riverside Park. At home, dinner guests included Columbia scholars like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, close friends of his father. For high school he went to a selective public school in the Bronx, and attended college in Maine, graduating in Africana Studies in 2014.<\/p>\n

Zohran\u2019s first meaningful brush with the desperation among the city\u2019s working-class families came during his work as a foreclosure prevention and housing counsellor in Queens. During the 2016 presidential election, he was inspired by the campaign of Bernie Sanders, which focused on costs-of-living, affordability and healthcare. Those same issues would go on to become the bedrock of his mayoral campaign. At a town hall in Brooklyn with Sanders this September, Zohran said it was Sanders\u2019s campaign that first exposed him to the language of democratic socialism. During his term as the representative of New York\u2019s 36th state assembly district, his most notable work was with the taxi drivers in the city.<\/p>\n

At a time when immigrants around the country are feeling increasingly threatened under the Trump administration, as masked agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stalk the streets of American cities, harassing, arresting and deporting immigrants, Zohran\u2019s campaign has cultivated a sense of hope among the community.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re not afraid of the money or the establishment anymoreFaidra Tzedakis<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are an organization made up of immigrants,\u201d Irene Hsu, communications and media manager at CAAAV, said. \u201cThe people who work with us, they\u2019re cooks, they\u2019re restaurant workers, they\u2019re cab drivers, they\u2019re home care workers, they\u2019re students, they\u2019re teachers, they\u2019re parents, they\u2019re elderly folks who have retired from working jobs as construction workers. It\u2019s all these people who really run the city. And I think that Zohran\u2019s platform, which is their own platform, is about shifting the terrain of power in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Tuesday night, as the results started to trickle in, Faidra Tzedakis, who moved to New York from Greece in 2014, went to a watch party organised by the Democratic Socialists of America in Astoria, Queens. Tzedakis became a permanent resident during the summer and has been grappling with what that means.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe previous generation had the American Dream of this nice big house with a fence, and a stable nine-to-five job and that, kind of, has died,\u201d said Tzedakis, who grew up amid the economic crisis in Greece. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t really exist anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think this campaign just proves that immigrants and younger people and educated people have a voice, and there\u2019s hope: like we can change things,\u201d she said. \u201cSo I think that the new dream is that we would live in a world where our leaders speak up and stand up for reproductive rights, against genocides, against Islamophobia and antisemitism, and do their best to protect marginalized groups like undocumented immigrants.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not afraid of the money or the establishment anymore,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd we can create a world that is just more accepting, and, yeah, loving.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Across the country, Donald Trump\u2019s crackdown on immigrants has shaken neighbourhoods, torn apart families and engendered a sense…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":252999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-252998","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}