Mamdani Caves on Little Italy After IACRL-Led Backlash; NJ Leaders Say He 'Yearns to Rewrite History'
IACRL’s New Jersey co-chairs accuse the mayor of trying to “rewrite history” after City Hall’s immigrant enclave guide omitted Little Italy.
Middletown - New Jersey leaders of the Italian American Civil Rights League are joining a growing backlash against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani after his administration’s official map of the city’s immigrant enclaves left out Little Italy — the Manhattan neighborhood widely regarded as the original template for every “Little” community that followed.
The “New York City Immigrant Enclaves” guide, produced by the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs as part of the city’s Neighborhood Passport tourism campaign tied to the 2026 FIFA World Cup, highlights 30 neighborhoods across the five boroughs — from Koreatown in Manhattan to Little Pakistan in Brooklyn and Little Yemen in the Bronx. Little Italy did not make the list. Neither did any historically Irish or Jewish neighborhoods, an omission that drew separate criticism from Irish American and Jewish leaders.
For the league’s New Jersey chapter, the omission was no accident.
“Italian Americans helped to build this great nation with no greater contribution than NYC and NJ,” said Tony Fiore, co-chair of the IACRL of New Jersey, told CJN.
“We have and will always be proud of that work and proud to be an American. Zohran Mamdani is a prototypical communist that yearns to rewrite history rather than to respect it. No matter how hard he tries, there will always be a Little Italy and there will always be proud and patriotic Italians ready to help America build for the next 250 years.”
Jacqueline Tobacco, the chapter’s other co-chair, said the mayor had underestimated the community he passed over.
“We know Mamdani likes to rewrite history, but he is no match for a galvanized Italian community,” Tobacco told CJN.
“Our people escaped fascism and legally emigrated from Italy, assimilated into the cultural melting pot while maintaining our family traditions and values for generations. We built NYC and we will be here to continue to fight for America, for freedom and liberty and for our children and grandchildren to achieve their American dreams. We will never bend to socialism or communism or cede our way of life to Mamdani’s radical socialist vision.”
The controversy erupted this week after the map circulated widely on social media, with critics noting that City Hall found room for Little Palestine, Little Yemen and Little Guyana while omitting the neighborhood that, according to the Library of Congress, anchored a wave of more than four million Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States between the 1880s and 1924 — roughly a third of whom settled in New York City.
IACRL National President Michael Crispi, who first called the omission “cultural erasure,” tells CJN the league has been flooded with support since it challenged the mayor.
“The Italian American Civil Rights League has seen a national outpouring of support since we challenged Zohran over his new ‘immigrant enclave map,’” Crispi said. “Millions of New Yorkers, New Jerseyans, and people from across the nation have a connection to New York City in some way, shape, or form. Whether Italian, Irish, Greek, or Jewish, these communities helped build New York City into what it is today. Yet Zohran has shown he has little interest in acknowledging the contributions of the people who actually built this great city.”
“The immigrants who came to New York in the early 1900s dug the subways, built the Empire State Building, worked tirelessly, endured intense discrimination, and never made excuses because they believed the ultimate prize was becoming part of America,” Crispi continued. “They believed in the American Dream and gave up everything to pursue it.”
Crispi said the map released this week “is filled with countries that, in our view, fundamentally represent the opposite values: entitlement, demands for reparations, disorder, and an embrace of communism,” calling the mayor’s selective acknowledgment “no accident” and “the continuation of a dangerous trend.”
“The Italian American Civil Rights League will remain on the front lines in New York, New Jersey, and across the nation to protect Italian American heritage while celebrating all the communities, of every race and ethnicity, whose hard work, sacrifice, and belief in America helped make this country the greatest nation in the world,” he said.
Facing mounting criticism, Mamdani addressed the map at an unrelated press conference Friday, saying it was created under the prior administration and would be revised.
“This map was initially created by the prior administration in 2023, and when we inherited it, we added a few additional neighborhoods,” the mayor said. “It’s clearly not an exhaustive list of the more than 200 ethnic communities that call our city home, and we’re going to be making additional changes in the future to reflect that, and that includes Little Italy.”
A City Hall spokesperson had earlier defended the guide as a tourism tool highlighting “neighborhoods in New York City that have substantial foreign-born populations,” not a comprehensive inventory of every ethnic or religious community, and noted that Little Odessa, which appears on the map, has a substantial Jewish population.
The league has said the map dispute is part of a pattern, pointing to what it describes as the administration’s denial of a permit for its Unity Day 2026 event. Mamdani’s relationship with the Italian American community has been strained since a 2020 social media post resurfaced during last year’s mayoral race showing him gesturing at a Christopher Columbus statue in Queens with the caption “Take it down.”
The league has called on the mayor to update the map, issue a public apology to Italian Americans, and include Little Italy and other historic Italian American neighborhoods in future city heritage projects.
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Was the Mayor’s enclave guide for the purpose of naming areas of more recent immigration? If so, the Italian enclaves have been around since the early 20th Century, and the natives are American citizens, not Italian immigrants. Is there clarity on the chosen enclaves as to why they were chosen?
Italian Americans should not have complained. Why is the map so important to them, especially since it was Mamdani's creation? He probably did it intentionally to rile them up, and he accomplished what he set out to.