PR fail: Mamdani’s Boricua bungle

DEPARTMENT OF UNFORCED ERRORS: Mayor Zohran Mamdani held an annual Puerto Rican heritage event today at Gracie Mansion that underscored a growing tiff. The afternoon celebration was pared-down. Prominent leaders never received an invite or declined to attend. And Nuyoricans were initially told it wasn’t going to happen at all. Roughly 200 people milled about the ornate entertaining room in the mayor’s official residence on the Upper East Side. A smattering of elected officials past and present were there, among them state Sens. Gustavo Rivera and Kristen Gonzalez and former Council members Rafael Salamanca and Carlina Rivera. “New York City government has not done its part to serve Puerto Rican New Yorkers. Our City Hall is determined to change that,” Mamdani told the crowd, citing his administration’s plan to build municipal grocery stores in East Harlem and the Bronx. The vibe, however, was a bit off. In a matter of weeks, the mayor’s office has turned what’s normally a routine and low-stakes way of keeping in good stead with the Puerto Rican community into a self-inflicted political wound that comes as the democratic socialist tries more broadly to sweep out an old guard of Latino elected officials. “There are people who are still upset about this,” said Erica González, former executive editor of El Diario La Prensa, the oldest, largest Spanish-language daily newspaper in the country. “It’s begging the question about what the treatment of the Puerto Rican community is going to be.” Upon taking office, Mamdani created an outreach division called the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement, which seeks to replicate the success of the volunteer army that helped propel him to victory (and in the process provide a taxpayer-funded boost to Mamdani’s reelection campaign). As POLITICO previously reported, the office also absorbed — and de-prioritized — several longstanding outreach divisions that help plan and execute events like today’s Gracie Mansion fiesta. Earlier this mon