Way to go, Mayor Pete! Half-American, half-Maltese US Presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg is well into his campaign trail at the moment, but what has people intrigued is his surname and heritage. He is seen discussing all this in a “candidate café special” where voters sit down with the candidate for a chat.
One voter was very curious about Pete’s genealogy, asking him about his roots. “My father immigrated to the US from Malta, which is one of the smallest countries in the world. If you draw a line from Sicily to Tunisia it will go through Malta,” he explains. “The funny thing is over there, [Buttigieg] is like Smith, it’s one of the most common names. So much so, I wouldn’t be the first president Buttigieg in the world! There was a president Buttigieg in Malta who was next door neighbours with my family Buttigieg and they weren’t even related.” Story of our lives!
He then goes into his surname’s (somewhat funny) meaning. “Tigieg means ‘chicken’ so it probably means 'owner of poultry' or 'lord of the poultry,' or something like that,” he quibs. “If you go over there and go in a crowded diner and say ‘Ey Buttigieg!’ a bunch of people would turn around.”
One other voter asked him about his travels to the island to which he admits he hasn’t been a while. “We used to go every couple of years. I don’t know if anybody here has had a chance to go, it is beautiful,” he remarks. “You actually see it a lot on TV because it can be made to look like Italy, Greece or the Middle East. A lot of Game of Thrones was filmed in Malta. A lot of times they sub it in as Jerusalem.”
Being a popular filming location, Malta has had quite a few sets here – and Pete actually wandered onto one of them! “Remember World War Z? The zombie movie? I literally wandered onto the set of World War Z in the scene of Jerusalem. Yeah, I’m looking around, I go into this neighbourhood, suddenly all the street signs change to Hebrew and there were these zombies walking around. There was a zombie smoking a cigarette, you know they were extras waiting for their turn.”
He discusses other things including the family values that his father, the late professor Joseph Buttigieg and his mother, Jennifer Anne Montgomery instilled in him, and coming out as “openly gay,” his faith, his wedding, his military career.
Watch the full café chat here: