Italian American Groups Now Speak as One, and NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani Is the Latest to Feel the Heat.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Friday that he would revise a city map of New York’s immigrant neighborhoods after facing days of criticism over an omission that incensed the Italian American community at large.
The map, published by the city, highlighted 30 neighborhoods across the five boroughs, including three separate Chinatowns as well as Little Bangladesh, Little Pakistan, Little Poland and Little Yemen. It did not include Little Italy, or any distinctly Irish or Jewish enclaves.
Under pressure, Mr. Mamdani said Little Italy and other long-recognized immigrant communities would be added to the list.
The map’s release, which coincided with an influx of international visitors to the city for World Cup matches, prompted swift criticism from Italian American organizations, as it was the latest sign of our community being edged out of NYC’s civic life.
The mayor sought to place the blame on his predecessor, Eric Adams.
“When we inherited the list, we added a few additional neighborhoods,” Mr. Mamdani said. “It’s clearly not an exhaustive list of the more than 200 ethnic communities that call our city home. We are going to be making additional changes in the future to reflect that.”
A spokesperson for Mr. Adams disputed that characterization, rejecting the suggestion that the former mayor was responsible for the omission.
A Well-Organized Response
For much of the past century, Italian American advocacy groups were a fractured lot, rarely uniting behind a common cause. That began to change 12 years ago, when Hon. Basil M. Russo was elected to lead the Italian Sons and Daughters of America (ISDA), and later, the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations (COPOMIAO), an umbrella group representing 77 groups nationwide.
Under Mr. Russo, longstanding rivalries and internal divisions gave way to a more coordinated response to what members viewed as recurring attacks, among them efforts to rename or remove Columbus Day observances and monuments, and what many in the community describe as a persistent marginalization in civic and cultural discourse.
Mr. Russo also built one of the largest Italian American social media networks in the country, a platform he has used to mobilize hundreds of thousands of Italian Americans in defense of the community’s culture, history and traditions.
Mr. Mamdani is only the latest official to encounter that mobilized response.
Much as he did during his own mayoral campaign, Italian American advocates increasingly rely on social media and nonprofit organizing to press their case, an approach that groups like the ISDA and COPOMIAO have refined into an advocacy operation that continues to amplify itself year after year.
“In our community, respect is very much a two-way street,” Mr. Russo said. “Too often, elected officials have marginalized our history and culture when it’s politically convenient. We’re pleased that Mr. Mamdani is seeking to reverse this blunder, and we believe he and politicians at large now understand that Italian Americans are strongly united in pursuing every avenue available to us to defend and uphold our heritage.”