Eric Garcetti Bio
Eric Michael Garcetti (born February 4, 1971) is an American politician and diplomat who most recently served as the United States Ambassador to India from 2023 to 2025. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 42nd mayor of Los Angeles from 2013 to 2022 and was previously president of the Los Angeles City Council. Before entering national service, he was an academic who taught diplomacy and international affairs, and he is also a photographer, jazz pianist, and composer.
Early Life and Background
Eric Michael Garcetti was born on February 4, 1971, in Los Angeles, and grew up in the Encino neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley. He is the son of Sukey Roth and Gil Garcetti, the former Los Angeles County District Attorney. His paternal grandfather, Salvador Garcetti, was born in Parral, Chihuahua, Mexico, and was brought to the United States as a child after his father, Massimo “Max” Garcetti, an Italian immigrant to Mexico, was murdered during the Mexican Revolution.
Garcetti attended Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles for his secondary education. He went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University, and later studied at The Queen’s College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. He also undertook doctoral studies at the London School of Economics, which he did not complete.
Path to US Politics
Before running for office, Garcetti taught international affairs at the University of Southern California and served as an assistant professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College, where he focused on ethnic conflict, nationalism, and non-violent action. He served on the California board of Human Rights Watch and remains a member of the Inter-American Dialogue.
He entered elected politics in 2001 when he won a seat on the Los Angeles City Council representing the 13th District, narrowly defeating former council member Michael Woo. He was re-elected in 2005 without opposition and again in 2009 with seventy-two percent of the vote. From 2006 to 2012, he served as City Council President, a role in which he championed open government through regular “office hours” with constituents and a Constituent Bill of Rights that tracked public concerns through a computerized case management system.
Eric Garcetti Career
Early Career (2001–2012)
During his time on the Los Angeles City Council, Garcetti authored Proposition O in 2004, a stormwater cleanup bond approved by more than seventy-six percent of voters and at the time the largest clean-water bond in the United States. He co-founded the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust and authored two of the nation’s most ambitious municipal green-building ordinances, requiring city buildings and large commercial structures to meet LEED certification standards.
As Council President from 2006 to 2012, Garcetti helped create a one-hundred-million-dollar housing trust fund and championed revitalization efforts in Hollywood. He supported reforms to the city business tax and developed programs such as the Neighborhood Leadership Institute and the Uniting Neighborhoods to Abolish Graffiti initiative, which he reported reduced graffiti in his district by more than seventy-eight percent over four years.
Breakthrough (2013)
With incumbent Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa barred by term limits, Garcetti declared his candidacy for mayor on September 8, 2011. In the March 5, 2013 primary, he finished among the top two candidates and advanced to a runoff against City Controller Wendy Greuel. Backed by the Los Angeles Teachers Union and other labor groups, Garcetti won the May 21, 2013 runoff with fifty-three point nine percent of the vote.
He was inaugurated on July 1, 2013, becoming the forty-second mayor of Los Angeles, the city’s first elected Jewish mayor, and at age forty-two the youngest mayor in more than a century. His first year in office included proposing an eight-point-one-billion-dollar budget that closed a two-hundred-forty-two-million-dollar gap while protecting core services.
Democratic Era (2013–2022)
Throughout his two terms as mayor, Garcetti pursued a dual approach described as progressive and pragmatic, blending liberal policy goals with libertarian-style reforms. He championed a gradual increase in the city’s minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour, signed into law in 2015 as part of the Fight for 15 movement, and pushed for an expansion of California’s film production tax credit. In 2014, he launched a veterans’ employment initiative that exceeded its goal of ten thousand jobs by 2017, and he worked with Los Angeles County to address veteran homelessness.
Garcetti made climate action a signature issue, co-founding the Mayors National Climate Action Agenda in 2014 and chairing the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group from 2019 to 2021. He launched the Los Angeles Green New Deal in 2019, signed a 2019 ordinance banning the sale and manufacture of new fur products, and championed Measure M in 2016, a half-cent sales tax for transit expansion that passed with seventy-point-one-five percent of the vote. He also led Los Angeles’s successful bid for the 2028 Summer Olympics and created the Twenty-eight by ’28 initiative to accelerate transit projects ahead of the Games.
Notable Events and Milestones
Among his signature achievements, Garcetti presided over Los Angeles’s selection as host of the 2028 Summer Olympics after the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2024 Games to Paris. His administration also oversaw a one-hundred-fifty-million-dollar reduction in the Los Angeles Police Department’s budget in 2020 following community-led advocacy, and he founded Mayors Organized for Reparations and Equity (MORE) in June 2021 to pilot local reparations programs.
Eric Garcetti Career Wins
Eric Garcetti’s electoral record includes three Los Angeles City Council victories in the 13th District, a mayoral win in 2013, and a commanding mayoral re-election in 2017, along with his later confirmation as United States Ambassador to India in 2023.
Mayoral Election Highlights
Garcetti first won the mayoralty on May 21, 2013, defeating City Controller Wendy Greuel with fifty-three point nine percent of the vote in a runoff. He was re-elected on March 7, 2017, with eighty-one point four percent of the vote, avoiding a runoff despite a relatively low twenty-percent turnout. Because of a shift in the city’s election calendar, his second term lasted five years and six months.
Other Wins and Achievements
His most significant policy victories include the passage of Proposition O in 2004, the adoption of Measure M in 2016, the signing of Los Angeles’s minimum-wage increase to fifteen dollars in 2015, and his role in securing the 2028 Summer Olympics for Los Angeles.
Eric Garcetti Family
Family Background and Political Lineage
Garcetti is the son of Gil Garcetti, who served as Los Angeles County District Attorney, and Sukey Roth. His paternal grandfather, Salvador Garcetti, was born in Parral, Chihuahua, Mexico, and was brought to the United States as a child after the death of his father, Massimo “Max” Garcetti, during the Mexican Revolution. His sister, Dana Garcetti-Boldt, is a former Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who now serves as an advisor to Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn.
Personal Life
On January 4, 2009, Garcetti married his longtime girlfriend, Amy Elaine Wakeland, a fellow Rhodes Scholar he met while studying at Oxford. The couple has one daughter, Maya Juanita, whom they adopted, and Garcetti and his wife have also fostered seven children. Before becoming mayor, the family lived in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Garcetti is also a photographer, jazz pianist, and composer, and he served as a lieutenant in the United States Navy Reserve Information Dominance Corps from 2005 to 2013.