How Latin American Literature Helped Zohran Mamdani Win New York

Zohran Mamdani at the Resist Fascism Rally in Bryant Park on Oct 27th 2024 | Picture Credits: Bingjiefu He/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in the New York City mayoral election became a global sensation. He is a charismatic speaker, but his popularity, in the United States and beyond, cannot be attributed only to charisma. There is something else in what Mamdani communicated, something not exclusive to politics: his approach to representation.

Representation, genuine representation, usually finds its crowd in any field. But there is a condition: representation needs to speak the language of those being represented and center them. One example of this came from the artist Bad Bunny, whose latest album, DeBí TiRaR MáS FOToS, caused a buzz. More than a buzz; anyone who recognized the white plastic chairs on the album cover wanted to give it a listen. And those who listened relived memories and engaged in a conversation about the gentrification of Puerto Rico and the loss of home and heritage.

Zohran Mamdani did a similar thing. But, instead of white plastic chairs, it was little symbols strewn throughout his campaign. Little markers that some picked up on. It was a moment of “If you know, you know.”

Representation

When it comes to representing the unrepresented, one of the pioneering movements came from South American authors.

A few decades ago, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez wrote the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel was peculiar to some, but for others it was reality reinterpreted in a language that mirrored postcolonial existence. Though not the first entry into the magical realism genre – first published in 1967, while magical realism had been in South American literary consciousness since the early 1920s – García Márquez’s novel has since become the poster child for the genre.

They could either conform to the European canon and drown their voices in a sea of colonizers’ words, or they could create their own canon; one which made them visible; one which had space for native myths, native stories, native men and native woman, and native tongues.

The usage of magical realism, its invention in the first place, served the very purpose of representation. This purpose was born out of the reality that the Europeans had created a literary canon that represented only them. And as Elleke Boehmer has written in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, this canon “embodied the imperialists’ point of view,” and affirmed European superiority over others.

But South American authors had stories to tell, too. They could either conform to the European canon and drown their voices in a sea of colonizers’ words, or they could create their own canon; one which made them visible; one which had space for native myths, native stories, native men and native women, and native tongues.

García Márquez put it very succinctly in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.” In other words, to talk about a people who were pushed to the margins, it was first necessary to create a space that centered the marginalized. Magical realism authors created a genre that rejected the minimization of South American, and later Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African peoples into mere dehumanized objects.

Position

Zohran Mamdani’s approach to representation follows a similar logic to that of magical realism authors. It is a far cry from the washed-down, mainstream understanding of representation, in which representation is boiled down to the same skin tone or similar culture – a type of representation that Hollywood loves to push. It is a shift from the rhetoric found in many political campaigns, in which politicians try to communicate understanding and empathy but often come across as pandering – Hillary Clinton talking about youth unemployment and following it up with an odd reference to the mobile game Pokémon GO comes to mind here.

Mamdani’s campaign made good use of symbols. And not just symbols, but shared experiences that communicated a shared identity and shared worries. In one video, which amassed over 4 million likes across Instagram and TikTok, he pokes fun at the racism that warns of an Islamic takeover in New York and conflates bandanas that his campaign handed out to supporters with hijabs. This method of trying to spread fear isn’t a new one, it is deeply rooted in the West’s colonial history – what scholar Edward Said labeled Orientalism. As Said has argued, the depiction of Muslims as a source of danger and irrational menace – to create the fear that they will take over – is a common tactic and is present throughout colonial texts.

Mamdani’s way of handling it is all tongue-in-cheek, but discourse that villainizes Muslims, Middle Easterners, and others is all too real and used all too often. It is a fear that is elicited by anything remotely Middle Eastern; something that many are already familiar with, as this viral tote bag with the writing “This text has no other purpose than to terrify those who are afraid of the Arabic language” shows.

Mamdani’s method of handling it is also interesting. Rather than downplaying the racist dehumanizing rhetoric or pushing back and giving a serious lecture about how unacceptable it is to still have this type of talk in 2025 – or another meaningless statement – what he does is what magical realism authors often do: highlight the bad, put it into proper context, and amplify its absurdity within that context.

The use of humor to show the ridiculousness of the statement is somewhat reminiscent of how García Márquez wrote about the absurd reality of U.S. neo-imperialism in South America: In the novel, after Colombian workers fight a long legal battle against U.S. corporations for workers’ rights, the U.S. lawyers – an extension of the system that stripped the workers of their rights in the first place – turn to the judge and argue that the men standing in front of them do not actually exist, and therefore they cannot be granted any legal rights. In other words, they literally dehumanize them. In a book full of magic, this non-magical absurdity stands as the most outlandish moment.

Another interesting facet of Mamdani’s approach to representation tackles the positions of center vs margins. To explain: postcolonial scholars have argued that the West recognizes itself as an active subject and places itself in the center of every narrative, making others passive objects and placing them on the margins; hence, “marginalized”. So, any attempt at real representation must center the marginalized.

To do this, Mamdani focused on issues that are integral to the experience of the marginalized: the working class, immigrants and asylum seekers, the LGBT+ community, and the politically disenfranchised. Given that many of these groups struggle with economic hardships, Mamdani focused on economic solutions that centered on marginalized peoples’ needs – again, a strong form of representation, taking social conditions, as well as cultural considerations, into account.

Existence

There is an interesting thread of similarities between art and political movements that aim to give voice to those who have had their voice taken from them. In both cases, issues of memory and history are central, as the question of a culture’s identity and existence is often brought up as a way to delegitimize and erase any form of representation.

The author Salman Rushdie – known for his magical realism works – once highlighted how integral memory and history are by asking Edward Said, “Do you exist? And if so, what proof do you have?”

Gabriel García Márquez also made note of this. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of the many calamities that his characters endure is the disease of forgetting, which becomes widespread in the aftermath of the occupation of the land, its resources, and its people. As a result of the incurable amnesia, the characters make the same mistakes over and over across generations, until they lose their political will, culture, and ties to the land.

History and memory sit at the heart of representation, and without it a people’s existence is brought into question; and without existing, as the lawyers in García Márquez’s novel argue, one cannot have any rights nor any agency. This was the case during Europe’s colonial age, during the Cold War, when the world was divided between two Eurocentric powers, and it remains so today, too. 

His approach, mirroring magical realist novels – stories that deal with the complicated hybrid nature of identity and the history behind them – is no coincidence; it’s rooted in the collective memory that shapes the postcolonial world

Zohran Mamdani is not blind to these truths. His father, a writer and African Studies scholar, his mother, a renowned filmmaker, and his wife, an illustrator, are artists who have talked and covered the realities imposed by colonial and postcolonial experiences. His own personal history, the many cultures and places – born in Uganda and raised in South Africa and the United States – have shaped him and the way he views the world. The mosaic of his identity is a helpful factor in his aversion to dichromatic perspectives and his ability to handle the political complexities of social and cultural existence.

His approach, mirroring magical realist novels – stories that deal with the complicated hybrid nature of identity and the history behind them – is no coincidence; it’s rooted in the collective memory that shapes the postcolonial world. However, also worth remembering is that Mamdani is a politician. He should not be valorized nor glorified, but he should be given credit. His politics may not please all, but the way he has worked so far is how representation is most effective. Whether through art or politics, or both, now, as global politics enter a new age, real representation remains key to political agency.