Alumni Spotlight: Joel Fajardo, Mayor of San Fernando
Many college students have jobs. For some, it’s waiting tables or perhaps working in the campus bookstore. Joel Fajardo (Pardee ’05) went in a different direction.
“I’d been working in the real estate industry since high school, and I’d do cold calling and recruiting from my dorm room and sell on holidays,” said Fajardo. “It was something I was good at, something I really liked to do.”
Another thing Fajardo liked was politics. While majoring in International Relations at what is now the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, he served on the BU student senate as a two-term chair. He even chose his major based on his desire to give his political knowledge an international edge.
“I felt when I arrived at BU I had an adequate background in American politics, and I wanted to go beyond what I currently knew,” Fajardo said. “I loved the professors and classes in International Relations, as well as my concentration in Latin American studies. It was a fantastic collective experience, which gave me a chance to learn from so many different student and professor perspectives.”
Since graduating, Fajardo has put those perspectives to good use. They inform his work every day as he serves as the trailblazing mayor of the city of San Fernando, a vibrant and occasionally challenging community outside Los Angeles.
“I moved to San Fernando in December 2011, and back then the community had a lot of challenges. The city had been financially mismanaged for a long time, and there was a citizen movement to recall members of the city council,” Fajardo said. “When the movement succeeded, around a year later, a few people in town suggested I run for city council. So that’s what I decided to do.”
Fajardo was elected to the city council in 2012, and was selected as mayor in March 2015. The city council chooses a mayor among the council every 12 months.
In the four months since, Fajardo has been part of a number of firsts for the city of San Fernando. He is their first openly gay mayor, and has dedicated himself to initiatives to support the highly traditional and Catholic city’s LGBT population.
“The biggest challenge I’ve taken on is addressing the city’s decade of financial mismanagement and balancing the budget,” Fajardo said. “We’ve also taken on minimum wage increases and election reform, and right now I’m working with my colleagues to fight a portion of the California high-speed rail plan that would divide the city in half with a 20-foot wall and destroy us economically. There have been a lot of challenges.”
For Fajardo, tackling those challenges has been a chance to implement the lessons he learned at the Pardee School.
“The Pardee School gave me a profound understanding of economic inequality and social justice both on a local and global scale,” Fajardo said. “Those lessons still inspire me today as I work hard to bring opportunity and prosperity to my constituents.”