If you know me, you know I love my city. And this November, I love my city more than I ever have. On Tuesday, Zohran Kwame Mamdani — an immigrant, Indian, Muslim, socialist — won the role of the next mayor of New York City.

And there is absolutely nothing that is more New York than that.

Growing up in New York, the first thing I learned was loving humans. Every day, you stumble upon the goodness of humanity healing the same hurting within it. Empathy is ingrained into your world perception solely off of the commute you take filled with stories of lives you share 20 minutes with daily.

When our beloved high school security guard Richie passed away while trying to break up a gun fight in the subway, our community petitioned together to rename the street after him. When a stressed, stroller-pushing mother’s paper bags fell apart one weekday evening on the subway, the entire train came together silently to collect her groceries from the floor and help repack her bags.

New York is impromptu bachata in the rich orange light of the sunset. It is the man with kind eyes and a soft accent who operates the dosa cart in Washington Square Park. It is the aunties and uncles who set up lawn chairs on the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes and conversing in their mother tongue because the air outside is fresher than in their apartments upstairs. It is the white-bearded man who plucks the guzheng in Central Park.

And as Mamdani preached, holding his voice steady and strong in his victory speech, “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant.”

Mamdani’s platform was rooted in creating a more affordable and inclusive city, from emphasizing a future of free and fast busses, freezing rent for the two million New Yorkers in rent-stabilized housing, and “Trump-Proofing” New York City by expelling United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement from all city facilities and increasing legal support. He films reels in kurtas and suits, speaking Hindi, Arabic, Bengali. He is a man of the people.

In the past few months immigrants across the country have been stripped of hope. From the Supreme Court’s justification for the use of racial profiling by ICE to the various restrictions on visas and immigration, the growing sentiment for immigrants is that they are no longer wanted here.

Mamdani’s overwhelming support, not just within New York but across the world, has made it outrageously clear that immigrants are in fact needed in this country. The stories they tell and the spaces they create define our country.

Mamdani speaks for the millions of Americans practicing joyful resistance when they came together to stand by immigrants and those oppressed by the current administration for the No Kings Protests. “In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light,” said Mamdani during his speech. 

New York, even preceding Mamdani’s victory, has always been a light of joyful resistance. My childhood was composed of frequenting the same immigrant owned South Indian restaurant on Lexington, dim sum place in Chinatown and Ethiopian eatery in Harlem. I was lucky enough to grow up in a city where my parent’s accents went unquestioned, a city where you hear a new language on every block.

New York is beautifully represented by Mamdani. It is the kind of place where in the face of staunch, hateful authoritarianism, there is a smiling brown man who befriends his bodega owner and goes on 15-day hunger strikes with taxi drivers, who will lead the greatest city in the world, and the most important one in the United States of America.

The minute his victory was announced, I ran out of the newsroom to call my father, a man 15 years older than Mamdani, with politics not entirely similar to his, who followed his campaign with a passion. Tears flowing down my face, he congratulated me. What I would’ve told him, if I was able to speak without breaking down further, was thank you.

If it wasn’t for my parents’ commitment to this country, despite their homesickness that has weathered out the years and the 7,000-mile separation from their families, I wouldn’t have known love in the New York way. Their refusal to move into the suburbs when many of their friends did, their long debated decision to become citizens and their effort to create a true home for us in Manhattan made way for Mamdani’s victory.

Immigrant parents like them are the reason that people like Mamdani and his supporters exist. Their unwavering faith and love for the city is the reason why “the dreams we’ve dreamt together, become the agenda we deliver together.” This city has always been ours, and it will always be ours.