New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has committed to updating the city’s official “Immigrant Enclaves” map — including adding Little Italy — after a wave of criticism from ethnic communities who say the map fails to honor their place in the city’s history.
The map currently highlights 30 neighborhood enclaves and is being featured as part of the city’s Neighborhood Passport campaign, a promotional effort connected to the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Mayor Mamdani explained that the map was originally created in 2023 by the previous administration and was never designed to represent all of New York City’s more than 200 ethnic communities. He noted that his administration had already added several neighborhoods to the map and intended to keep making updates.
“When we inherited it, we added a few additional neighborhoods. 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,” Mamdani said. He added that those future changes would include Little Italy.
The mayor’s announcement came one day after the City Council’s Italian Caucus — whose members are all Republicans — accused the Democratic mayor’s administration of “erasing” Italian Americans. The caucus called the map “incomplete at best and insulting at worst,” according to the New York Post.
Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella broadened the criticism, pointing out that the map also failed to include Jewish American communities in Brooklyn and Sri Lankan communities on Staten Island, among other groups.
“Ignorance is not a good ingredient for highlighting the sacrifices of so many who built this City and gave so much,” Fossella said in a written statement.
A spokesperson for former Mayor Eric Adams pushed back on Mamdani’s claim that the prior administration was to blame for the omissions, according to ABC New York.
The New York Post also reported that the Adams administration had previously recognized 27 immigrant communities through separate illustrated projects that spotlighted neighborhood businesses, religious sites, and cultural landmarks. The newspaper reported that the Mamdani administration replaced those detailed projects with a simplified citywide map that added three communities but stripped away much of the neighborhood-specific content. The new map was also reported to contain errors in its public transit information.
