‘City of immigrants’: Who is Nithya Raman, the Los Angeles mayor-elect?

Nithya Raman has been projected to win Los Angeles’s mayoral race, making her the city’s first Asian-American mayor and adding a progressive, immigrant voice to leadership in the United States’ second-largest city. Her victory also means that Los Angeles, New York and London will be led by people of South Asian descent.

Born in India, Raman moved to the US at six, studied at Harvard and MIT, and later worked on urban governance and homelessness before entering politics. She won a Los Angeles City Council seat in 2019 as the first Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidate elected to the council. Her mayoral campaign centred on affordable housing, homelessness and immigrant protections, after she entered the race late and challenged incumbent Karen Bass.