America
Harish Jajoo bids to be Sugarland's (Texas) first South Asian mayor
Washington, Sep 11
An Indian-American engineer
is making a bid to become the first South Asian mayor of Sugar Land in
the US state of Texas, a media report said.
Harish Jajoo, who has
been a Sugar Land City Council member since 2011, has lived in the
city, which has 35 percent Asian population, since 1985 after migrating
first to Canada and then the US.
Jajoo, who is one of two
Indian-Americans on the six-person city council, will face colleague Joe
Zimmerman -- and possibly others who have not declared yet -- in the
2016 election to replace mayor James Thompson, houstonchronicle.com
reported on Thursday.
"I look different, I talk different, maybe I
eat different... But my values for the city are no less than the next
person," Jajoo was quoted as saying.
He said he knows that eventually a South Asian will be mayor of the city. But stressed that he was "not looking for that label".
Founded
as a sugar plantation in the mid 1800s and incorporated in 1959, Sugar
Land is located in Fort Bend county, some 30 km southwest of Houston.
The
county's Asian population has grown more quickly than any other group,
according to a 2013 report by Stephen Klineberg, sociology professor at
Rice University, about Houston's increasing diversity, and his colleague
Jie Wu.
Between 2015 and 2040, the population of voting age
Asian-Americans is expected to grow by 80 percent while the population
of Asian Americans in general is expected to grow by 74 percent,
according to a study by Paul Ong and Elena Ong of the University of
California, Los Angeles' Centre for the Study of Inequality and the
Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies.