On Nov. 3, Todd Gloria, Tlingit, was elected mayor of San Diego, the nation’s eighth-largest and California’s second-largest city.
Gloria, 42, is the first openly gay and the first person of color to be elected as San Diego’s mayor, as well as the first Native American and Filipino-American mayor elected in a U.S. city of over 1 million people, according to the Los Angeles Times.
He was born in San Diego. In a 2009 interview he said he’s Native American, Filipino and “a little bit of Dutch and Puerto Rican.” In 2018, representatives of the 30,000 citizens of the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, which has headquarters in Juneau, Alaska, adopted a resolution honoring Gloria for his leadership.
His Tlingit ancestors are from Klukwan and Haines, Alaska. His grandfather, Louis J. Gloria of Juneau, Alaska then El Centro, California, served on the board of the Alaska Native corporation for southeast Alaska, Sealaska, from 1979 to 1988, when the for-profit company went from being in the red to having assets in the tens of millions of dollars.
When asked how his ethnicity shapes him, Gloria said, “I think certainly being part Native American and being very sensitive to issues of sovereignty and things of that nature is probably something that someone else wouldn’t necessarily bring to the table. And a real understanding, because I think unfortunately for Native Americans the understanding of them is fairly superficial and unfortunately cartoonish. The depth of that is far more complex.”
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