01 ISSUE IX
NOVEMBER 2025
NOVEMBER 2025
Porto Alegre to Astoria
Zohran Mamdani embodies a Global Left resurgence, seen earlier in Brazil, that links identity struggles with material fights for land, housing, and dignified life today.
By Tatiana Vargas-Maia
Zohran Mamdani's political campaign and mayoral victory in New York City are locally significant, but their true importance becomes apparent when placed in the context of a global conversation. Mamdani's model is compelling not just for its victories in the current US political climate, but as a synthesis of two global trends: a new diasporic politics that moves beyond simple representation to build an internationalist, class-focused perspective, and a “New Municipalism” strategy that sees the city as the primary arena for progressive change. This model, however, is not a new invention; rather, it is a powerful and creative synthesis of ideas that have been tested for decades, particularly in Brazil.
Image via FramePhoto/Folhapress.
What is critical is how Mamdani applies his multicultural, international, post-colonial worldview to his work as a housing counselor. When he saw working-class, immigrant families facing foreclosure, he didn't just see a market failure but an extractive relationship that could be understood as a form of internal colonialism: the city's wealth being extracted from its poorest people, just as a metropole extracts resources from a colony. The idea of internal colonialism is at the core of the language articulated by Brazil's Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). For decades, the MST has argued that the latifúndio system (the Brazilian version of plantations) is not just an economic problem but the living legacy of colonialism, an internal colonial system persisting long after the country's independence. The MST’s struggle, therefore, is fundamentally a fight against this modern colonial model. Mamdani's key innovation is to apply this classic, often rural, postcolonial critique directly to the urban landscape of New York.
Mamdani's campaign also exemplifies “New Municipalism,” a strategy that holds that national governments are often gridlocked. Therefore, the most strategic and winnable site for political battle is the city.
This idea evokes Brazil's concept of O Direito à Cidade (The Right to the City). While the most famous recent example is Ada Colau in Barcelona, Brazil offers an even earlier precedent: Porto Alegre in the 1990s. The Workers’ Party (PT) was built from the ground up in the 1970s and 80s in the peripheries of São Paulo, from neighborhood groups fighting for concrete urban needs. This energy was translated into a revolutionary public policy in Porto Alegre: “Participatory Budgeting,” a mechanism giving citizens direct, democratic control over the city's budget. We see echoes of this today with the Homeless Workers' Movement (MTST), led by Guilherme Boulos. The MTST doesn't just protest; it occupies empty, speculative buildings — a direct-action assertion of the “Right to the City.”.This raises the most important question: How do these two ideas — the post-colonial critique and the municipal strategy — work together? Mamdani's tactic is to use his identity as a bridge. As a South Asian, Muslim immigrant born in Uganda, he builds trust by speaking Urdu and Bengali, immediately pivoting that trust to universal, material issues. His most famous pre-election victory, organizing $450 million in debt relief for taxi drivers, was built on a class-based coalition rooted in this cultural identity. He links identity directly to material struggle, arguing that “adequate housing is a Muslim issue.”
This strategy, again, has deep roots in Brazil. Lula’s core identity was never just “a politician;” he was a metalúrgico (a metalworker) and a nordestino (a migrant from the poor Northeast). This identity was his bridge to a massive, working-class project. Similarly, the model of Marielle Franco, a murdered city councillor in Rio de Janeiro, was built on her identity as a mulher, negra, favelada (a Black woman from the favela). She argued that by fighting for her community, the most marginalized among Rio de Janeiro's citizenry, she was fighting for a more just city for everyone.
Mamdani's political rise in New York is not an isolated American story; it is a local chapter in a global book. His diasporic socialism provides the lens to see internal colonialism — a concept the Brazilian left has understood for generations. His “Fearless City” strategy is a New York version of O Direito à Cidade — one practiced for decades by the PT and the MTST. And Mamdani’s use of identity as a bridge to class-based, material politics is a similar strategy adopted by key leaders of the Brazilian left, such as Lula and Marielle. What we are seeing in New York now is the shape of a new 21st-century left. It is urban, grounded in territory, and it understands that the fight for identity cannot be separated from the material fight for land, housing, and the right to a dignified life.
Tatiana Vargas-Maia is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Her work focuses on the intersection of identities, ideologies, and international politics.