How one Kampala-born New Yorker turned a neighborhood campaign into the city’s biggest immigrant milestone in decades
Magazine, The Immigrant Experience
Zohran Kwame Mamdani keeps an old yellow MetroCard in his wallet—the first one he bought after landing at JFK at age seven. He says the faded card reminds him that “arrivals are only half the job; the other half is learning to move.” Last night, on the narrow stoop of his mother’s former prop-storage apartment in Astoria, the 33-year-old state assemblymember announced that Andrew Cuomo had conceded the Democratic mayoral primary. The victory makes Mamdani the first Muslim and first South Asian immigrant to top a New York City mayoral ticket. nyassembly.gov
In national headlines the story is framed as progressive insurgency, but for many New Yorkers—nearly 38 percent of whom are foreign-born (nyc.gov)—the upset lands closer to home: an immigrant child who translated parent-teacher letters is now positioned to negotiate the city’s future.
Kampala courtyards, Queens winters
Mamdani’s childhood toggled between Kampala’s courtyard mango trees and the sharp wind that knifes across the East River in January. His mother, filmmaker Mira Nair, and father, scholar Mahmood Mamdani, settled the family in Astoria in 1998. Classmates stumbled over Zohran until a first-grade teacher wrote it phonetically on a sticky note and taped it to her desk. He saved that note beside the MetroCard. The lesson, he jokes, was that belonging can be practiced into existence.
As a teenager he recorded multilingual rap tracks under the name Young Cardamom, but politics replaced music on January 29, 2017, when President Trump’s first travel ban stranded families at JFK. Mamdani spent seven hours translating for Somali travelers. “That was the night politics walked off the TV and shook my elbow,” he later told friends.
A campaign measured in hunger strikes and $25 gifts
The next pivot came in 2021. Taxi-medallion debt had pushed nine immigrant drivers to suicide, and cabbie Augustine Tang recalls that the 29-year-old assemblymember joined their 15-day hunger strike without hesitation. “He sat, he shivered, he listened,” Tang says. The protest ended with a city-backed deal that cut loans to $170,000 and capped payments at $1,122 a month (cityandstateny.com)—proof, for many drivers, that local government could still hear them.
That reputation fueled Mamdani’s mayoral run: 20,000 donors averaging $80 versus Cuomo’s multimillion-dollar bankroll. The ranked-choice tally closed at 43.5 percent for Mamdani, enough for the ex-governor to concede.
Everyday ripples
Fatoumata Diallo, a Bangladeshi home-health aide who met Mamdani canvassing her high-rise after a night shift, says the win reorders who gets to imagine power. “If the mayor speaks three languages,” she asks, “why can’t my daughter aim for the city council?”
Sixteen-year-old Rania Hussein, a Syrian-American volunteer, tucked a handwritten note under campaign-office doors: “When people say ‘go back,’ I’ll answer, ‘My mayor came farther.’” Those quiet ripples matter in a city where immigrants supply 44 percent of the labor force and dominate sectors—health care, construction, and food service—that keep it breathing. cmsny.org
A matatu in Midtown
Mamdani likes to compare his coalition to a Ugandan matatu—the overstuffed minibus that somehow threads impossible traffic. “Loud, mixed, impossible to ignore, always finding a gap,” he told supporters on primary night. The metaphor fits a campaign whose top canvass languages were Spanish, Bangla, and Arabic and whose volunteers ranged from Bronx delivery cyclists to retired Manhattan doormen.
Collision course with Washington
The victory arrives as President Trump stumps for his “Big Beautiful Bill,” which would hire 10,000 additional deportation officers and aims to remove over one million people in a single year. time.com Former INS commissioner Doris Meissner warns the target is “a massive, massive increase” that could redirect ICE raids toward blue-state metros. Against that backdrop, Mamdani’s pledge to “Trump-proof” New York—rent freezes, fare-free buses, an ICE-resistant city ID, expanded legal-aid funding—sounds less like ideology than municipal self-defense.
Why this matters beyond the five boroughs
-
For immigrant families: Leadership from a naturalized citizen sworn in only seven years ago widens the imaginable horizon. Civic ambition feels closer when City Hall speaks with an accent.
-
For all New Yorkers: Data from the Mayor’s Office show immigrant New Yorkers pay roughly $30 billion in state and local taxes annually and account for more than a third of total wages. Stripping that labor or chilling it with fear would rattle the city’s fiscal spine. nyc.gov
-
For other sanctuary cities: New York often serves as a legal and policy laboratory. If Mamdani’s administration road-tests stronger privacy firewalls, affordable-housing protections, or universal childcare, Chicago or Los Angeles may replicate them.
-
For Washington: The upset complicates any simple narrative that nationwide enforcement enjoys uniform local backing. A city of 8.3 million just voted for the polar opposite.
A gentler question
What happens when the child of Kampala courtyards and Queens playgrounds is handed the keys to Gracie Mansion? The answer is unwritten. Rents remain brutal, infrastructure fragile, and politics rarely merciful. Yet the primary has already altered one sentence in the city’s self-portrait: immigrant New York is done being a mascot; it means to govern.
Crossing into dawn
The morning after his win, Mamdani walked the Queensboro Bridge alone, MetroCard pressed to his chest. Below, subway cars rattled west toward Manhattan—steel echoes of every immigrant commute. Halfway across, he paused, looked back at the borough that raised him, and whispered a fragment of Luganda his grandmother once sang: “Okujja ssi kuwera—okusigala mu nsi eno kye kisinga.”
Arriving is not enough—staying and shaping this nation matters more.
Your story matters—stay proud, stay grounded, and stay true.
#ImmigrantJourney #NYCPolitics #QueensRoots #SanctuaryCity #Mamdani2025 #ImmigrantsBuildAmerica
