New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech made several references to ethnic communities he zeroed in on during his campaign.
“As we say in Steinway, ana minkom wa-ilaykom [I am from you and for you],” Mamdani told supporters in New York City’s Brooklyn borough, repeating a line from a campaign video published days prior to election night, in which he targeted Arab-American voters in a mix of the Syrian and Egyptian dialects of Arabic. Steinway is a Queens neighborhood known for its large communities of Egyptian, Levantine, and Moroccan immigrants.
The Mamdani campaign had also uploaded videos in which he spoke Spanish and Hindustani, a protolanguage from which modern-day Hindi and Urdu are derived.
He later thanked his wife Rama Duwaji — positioned to be the first Arab-American first lady of New York City — addressing her by the pet name hayati, Arabic for “my life.”
Mamdani will make history as New York City’s first Muslim mayor and the first South Asian to hold the office.