New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech made a number of references to ethnic communities he zeroed in on throughout his marketing campaign.
“As we say in Steinway, ana minkom wa-ilaykom [I am from you and for you],” Mamdani informed supporters in New York City’s Brooklyn borough, repeating a line from a marketing campaign video revealed days previous to election night time, during which he focused Arab-American voters in a combination of the Syrian and Egyptian dialects of Arabic. Steinway is a Queens neighborhood identified for its giant communities of Egyptian, Levantine, and Moroccan immigrants.
The Mamdani marketing campaign had additionally uploaded movies during which he spoke Spanish and Hindustani, a protolanguage from which modern-day Hindi and Urdu are derived.
He later thanked his spouse Rama Duwaji — positioned to be the first Arab-American first girl of New York City — addressing her by the pet title hayati, Arabic for “my life.”
Mamdani will make historical past as New York City’s first Muslim mayor and the first South Asian to carry the workplace.