This TED Talk features organizer and entrepreneur Rana Abdel Hamid recorded live at TED Salon,

up for debate 2019.

So my story starts on July 4th, 1992, the day my mother followed her college sweetheart to

New York City from Egypt.

As fireworks exploded behind the skyline, my father looked at my mother jokingly and said,

Look, Habibti, Americans are celebrating your arrival.

Unfortunately, it didn't feel much like a celebration when growing up, my mother and I would wander past Queens into New York City streets,

and my mother with her hijab and long, flowy dresses would tighten her hand around my small fingers

as she stood up against weathered comments like,

go back to where you came from, learn English, stupid immigrant.

These words were meant to make us feel unsafe,

insecure in our own neighborhoods, in our own skin.

But it was these same streets that made me fall in love with New York.

Queens is one of the most diverse places in the world,

with immigrant parents holding stories that always start with something between three and

$15 in a pocket, a voyage across a vast sea, and a cash-only hustle sheltering families in jam-packed

busted apartments. And it was these same families that worked so hard to make sure that we had safe micro-communities,

we as immigrant children, to feel affirmed and loved in our identities.

But it was mostly the women.

And these women are the reason why, regardless of these statements that my mom

faced, she remained unapologetic. And these women were some of the most powerful women I have

ever met in my entire life. I mean, they had networks for everything. They had rotations for who

...