The country where the world meets itself
A far-reaching conversation with the celebrated author Junot Díaz about the America he loves, and the ways it needs to change
Yesterday — ahead of Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory in New York City’s mayoral race — we talked live with the author, MacArthur Fellow, Pulitzer Prize winner, and MIT professor Junot Díaz, about Mamdani’s campaign and what kind of New York City — and United States — might arise now that he’s won.
We also talked about Mamdani’s success in pushing back against the “great silencing” of poor people and the working class that both left and right have done, and how to start a dialogue with people who want to be spoken to but instead find themselves judged. That, Díaz says, is the only way to start fixing what’s broken in America: the exterminationist fantasies of neoliberalism that infect left and right, the precarity that affects us all, and the militarization of our society as people struggle to protect themselves against an unsafe world. There’s also a lot to love in this country where, as he put it, the world meets itself — a place he meets with a veneration and love and commitment to criticism that one can call patriotism.
Below, for our supporting subscribers, we present a full edited transcript of our conversation.
Most of these times when I have someone across from me, we’re starting with some terrible shit that has gone on. That is the tenor of like 95 percent of my interviews right now. We start with just… some kind of nuclear explosion somewhere in our body politic, and then we go from there.
Today we’re not going to do that, because today is election day around the country, but in New York, a race that I know you’ve paid attention to and that intersects with so many of the themes that you’ve written about over the years, from immigration, migration, to social justice, to what it means for people to have a city where the dreams of regular people are centered rather than ground to dust. Talk to me about watching the Zohran Mamdani campaign, given all of your thousand interests and investments in it, even though you live in Massachusetts. Talk about your view of it and how you see this moment.
Well, man, first of all, it’s been remarkable and very exciting. And it’s one of those things when the campaign started out, it was just completely, it’s the thing that we all hoped for. And yet there it was, it arose, you know, and it couldn’t have come at a more perfect time.
And as you know, my family’s still in New York City. My family’s out to vote today and very excited that they’re on the right side. And, you know, it doesn’t always happen with our relatives.
And the other element for this, especially for someone like me who did a lot of on-the-ground organizing in New York for decades in that way, is this is someone who’s got a muscular ground game, you know. Mamdani doesn’t just have this mind and this heart and this vision. You know, youth is not a joke. Youth has got energy. You know, you cannot underestimate what it means to see someone like that with such a full horizon ahead of them and such different sensibilities.
And, you know, finally, for me, and I think it’s an important thing to say, is a lot of us have communities that are somewhat adjacent to ours and are not always visible to people. You know, this idea of a possessive investment in other people’s struggles.
And where I grew up in New Jersey, I grew up very closely with an Egyptian Muslim family. They were not just my neighbors. They were the people whose sons ate at my house the most. Besides Dominican food, I ate Egyptian food more than anything.
I grew up watching as the same way that they grew up watching the nightmares that unfolded for their family as they watched what happened with me. And we’re still close friends. We went to Rutgers together. You know, we talk every week. He’s a surgeon. He does work, volunteer work, and has just come back from being in Gaza. And so also what this campaign means for communities that might not be directly just me, but that are a part of what I would call my heartland. It’s just extraordinary.