Who can call themselves a ‘New Yorker’?

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — Jennifer Lopez, a popular entertainer whose main residence is in Los Angeles, appeared on the internet talk show “Subway Takes” last week, sitting on a New York City subway train, to offer her opinion about geographical identity. “You have to be born in New York to be a New Yorker,” Lopez proclaimed.

The show’s host, Kareem Rahma — born in Egypt, raised in Minnesota, resident of New York for 14 years — asked whether living in the city for 50 years would be enough to lay claim to the title of New Yorker. “I have to say no,” Lopez replied. “You live in New York. You take on characteristics of New Yorkers, probably, by that time. You have a New York sensibility.”

Lopez was born and raised in the Bronx, and she built her celebrity identity around a hit song about being from the borough. When Rahma interjected that he also paid New York taxes, Lopez held firm. “When you’re born in New York is when you’re really a New Yorker,” she concluded.

What makes someone a New Yorker? J.Lo’s parameters exclude a number of seemingly quintessential New Yorkers: Mayor Zohran Mamdani, born in Kampala, Uganda; director and Knicks superfan Spike Lee, born in Atlanta; writer Fran Lebowitz, born in Morristown, New Jersey; “it girl” and actress Chloë Sevigny, born in Springfield, Massachusetts; artist Andy Warhol, born in Pittsburgh. The birthplace criterion also shuts out key figures of the Harlem Renaissance — including Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Louis Armstrong — who were born in the American South and moved to New York as part of the Great Migration.

In a city that’s simultaneously international and comically provincial, with an identity deeply intertwined with immigration, the question of who can claim the demonym makes for heated debate. Lopez’s assertion inspired a litany of objections from natives, newcomers and longtime residents (even some decidedly non–New Yorkers): What about the immigrant kid who grew up riding the subways? Are the city’s Bangladeshi cab drivers and Yemeni bodega owners not New Yorkers? Was this restrictive definition not akin to the nativist rhetoric coming from the right? What about the oft-cited 10-year rule?

Others supported the spirit of J.Lo’s claim, with amendments: Someone born in the city but raised elsewhere is not a New Yorker; someone who arrived from another country as a child and grew up in one of the five boroughs is; immigrants who settled in New York as adults also count by some measures, but “transplants” from other parts of the United States definitely do not.

The original residents of the territory currently being argued about called themselves the Lenape, and the area they lived in — encompassing the Lower Hudson to the Delaware Bay — was Lenapehoking, which roughly translates to “the land of the common people.” Dutch traders “purchased” the land, in a transaction whose terms are a matter of dispute, and started calling it New Amsterdam and, for a brief period during a power struggle with the English, New Orange.

When English settlers seized the land in the late 17th century, they renamed it New York, in honor of King James II, who was then the Duke of York, and who had never resided in the territory at all. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the earliest use of “New Yorker” for an inhabitant to 1738, when Benjamin Franklin employed the term in his “Poor Richard’s Almanack.” The variant “New Yorkian” appeared in some US newspapers beginning in the 1800s, and continues to make rare appearances in publications today, but “New Yorker” became the preferred term. In 1925, journalists Harold Ross (born in Aspen, Colorado) and Jane Grant (born in Joplin, Missouri) founded a magazine called “The New Yorker” — notably, all but one of the publication’s editors-in-chief have been born outside of New York.

In a city of nine million people, it’s perhaps no surprise that New Yorkers can’t seem to agree on a standard definition. Here, some self-proclaimed New Yorkers weigh in.

What makes a New Yorker?

“I would never tell anybody who’d been here for longer than 10 years that they’re not a New Yorker,” said Xochitl Gonzalez, a Brooklyn native whose latest novel, “Last Night in Brooklyn,” is set against the backdrop of gentrification, “but I wouldn’t include them when I think about people that are New Yorkers.”

That classification, for Gonzalez, is reserved for people either born and raised in the city or who arrived at a young age. As for the so-called 10-year rule, she maintains that a college experience in New York doesn’t count towards the total.

Others chalk it up to a certain attitude. As Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson wrote in an email, “To be a true New Yorker, you have to know how to move through our streets with confidence, have a favorite neighborhood bodega, shop local in your community, explore places and boroughs beyond your neighborhood, know how to navigate our city`s public transportation, attend at least one sporting event in support of one of our iconic teams (Go Knicks/Go Yankees!), and be genuinely invested in the success of our city and its people.”

“It’s different types of people, but it’s the idea that you got to keep an open mind, you got to be able to fit in, you got to be able to open yourself to other cultures, being willing to say you’re going to take a ride from a cab driver,” said Kuber Sancho-Persad, a taxi worker who grew up in the Bronx and now lives in Queens. He added, “You also have to be willing to ride the subway.”

Jaeki Cho, whose web series “Righteous Eats” highlights small New York restaurants, was born in South Korea, came to the US at age 9 and grew up in Queens. He defines a New Yorker as someone who has made an imprint on the place: “What kind of contributions have you made to the city? Are you an active member of the community? Have you built something here? Do you raise a family here? Are you contributing to the culture here?”

“I would say a New Yorker is anyone who lives in New York City and sees themselves in the story of New York,” says Asad Dandia, a Brooklyn native who is the borough’s official historian. “Whether you’re born and raised here or whether you moved here, whether you’ve been here since birth or since breakfast, if you see yourself as part of the city, part of its culture, part of its tapestry, you are a New Yorker.”

Dandia finds the distinction between immigrants and transplants to be arbitrary. “A lot of so-called transplants are moving here because of vulnerabilities that they might face elsewhere, especially if they’re queer or especially if they’re living in a place that’s hostile to them, like their small towns,” he says. “For them, New York is as much a refuge as it is for an immigrant moving here from the global South.”

New York City Councilmember Chi Ossé, a born and raised third-generation Brooklynite, says a New Yorker is “anyone who adds to the culture of New York and makes New York as best and as beautiful as it can be.”

For Joe Baker, co-founder and executive director of the Lenape Center, New Yorker status is a secondary concern. “You can be a New Yorker. You can call yourself whatever,” he says. “Everyone is a visitor to our ancestral lands.”

What is the ‘New Yorker’ conversation really about?

Before J.Lo issued her opinion on who qualifies as a real New Yorker, a similar dispute happened this year around changes at New York’s storied hip-hop radio station Hot 97.

After native the Kid Mero, born Joel Martinez in the Bronx, took over as Hot 97’s new morning host, the rapper Noreaga, a fellow New York native, remarked that it was “the first time in a long time that New York radio sounds like New York.” Some considered it a dig at the previous hosts, who all grew up outside of the city. One of them, Peter Rosenberg, trotted out his New York bona fides as a defense. “Did more to put on for New York underground rap than any New Yorker on the fm airwaves since Kay Slay. And I still gotta catch these strays cuz I didn’t go to high school in New York,” he wrote on X.

Mero had his own thoughts on what defined a New Yorker. “Did you go to school here? Elementary school, junior high school, high school,” he said in a segment on the show. “That is the training ground for being a New Yorker.”

But the Hot 97 dustup, Gonzalez noted, garnered less widespread attention than J.Lo’s “Subway Takes” remarks — something she attributed to differences in the shows’ audiences. Hot 97 is an institution among native New Yorkers, she said, while “Subway Takes” seems to draw in more transplants.

To Gonzalez and other city natives, the “New Yorker” title confers a kind of street cred — an implicit acknowledgement that today’s New York, with its rideshare and food delivery apps and record low crime rates, is a markedly different place than the gritty environment of decades past. “As the city changes, when people try to co-opt an identity that other people feel was hard earned through experiences, it feels like an invalidation of that experience, on top of the process of changing a place,” she says.

Ossé adds: “I don’t think someone’s a New Yorker when they come here and try to take New York away from what it is, whether it’s silencing block parties or shutting down certain businesses that are iconic.”

Frustrations and resentments about the city’s housing and affordability crises also underlie conversations about who is a “real” New Yorker — an immigrant, in this light, can be a marginalized working-class person seeking a better life, while an American-born transplant is a a privileged professional who treats the city as their personal playground.

Eric Adams played on those ideas during his successful 2020 mayoral run in a speech in Harlem on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Speaking about displacement brought on by gentrification, he said to a cheering crowd, “Go back to Iowa. You go back to Ohio. New York City belongs to the people that was here and made New York City what it is. And I know. I’m a New Yorker.”

Despite his pronouncement, questions about whether Adams really lived in New York dogged his mayoral campaign. Though he owned a four-unit townhouse apartment building in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant and told the press the basement unit was his home, New Yorkers widely suspected that he instead lived in a co-op in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.