The term “sexist” wasn’t often used at the time, Debbie Jaramillo said, but speaking to her detractors in the mid-1990s, when she served as the mayor of Santa Fe, she “sure as hell could have said, ‘What you are is a bunch of sexists.’ ”
“They could not stand, a lot of them, the fact that a woman was in charge,” she said.
“I felt it every day, and it wasn’t easy,” she added. “I had to be stronger and louder than most, otherwise they weren’t going to listen, because I was a woman, and women didn’t belong in those kind of positions.”
Still, Jaramillo said she didn’t let it bother her: “I had the support of the community, and that’s all that mattered.”
Jaramillo was elected in 1994 in what was widely viewed as an upset win against front-runner Peso Chavez, becoming Santa Fe’s 39th mayor.
As recounted in the documentary This Town Is Not For Sale!: The 1994 Santa Fe Mayoral Election, the campaign was a battle between those concerned about the impact of pro-growth policies on locals being priced out of the city and those who wanted to harness the potential of tourism and development. Jaramillo fell strongly in the former camp, running a populist campaign focused on the needs of locals at a time when the city was rapidly gentrifying and becoming both a tourism and second-home destination.
She put it more bluntly herself: “I was not a whore for the business community.”
More than 25 years after Jaramillo left office — she came in third in a 1998 bid for reelection after a volatile first term — she remains the city’s sole female mayor.
New Mexican archive photo
Now 73, Jaramillo said many of the things she warned would happen to Santa Fe, including unaffordable home prices pushing out the Hispanic population and a yawning class divide, have come to pass.
“This is not Santa Fe for the people,” she said. “This is Santa Fe for the rich.”
Age has not blunted her willingness to say exactly what she means, and during a wide-ranging conversation she used a number of words unprintable in a family newspaper: “They used to write ‘expletive, expletive, expletive,’ ” she recalled of old interviews with a laugh.
One thing came through loud and clear: Jaramillo is proud of her history-making term in office, including her determination to stand for exactly what she believed in, even if it made her unpopular with “the boys.”
She’s more cynical about the track record of other female politicians, saying she doesn’t see a willingness from many to truly be different than the men who preceded them in office.
“They tried to tell me that I had shattered the ceiling, whatever that [expletive] was about women’s lib,” she said. “And I said, ‘Yeah, maybe we’ve come a long way, but we have a long way to go.’ ”
Jaramillo during her time in office said she was branded as the “angry Hispanic woman,” a perception she said was fueled by news media, including The New Mexican.
She had a hand in many initiatives that made a mark on the city, including the Santa Fe Railyard District, the Tierra Contenta master plan community, the Santa Fe Business Incubator and the city’s first zoning ordinance calling for areas to be set aside for homes for lower-income people.
Jaramillo said a lot of the issues plaguing Santa Fe and other municipalities today, including the housing crisis, were being discussed in the ’80s and ’90s, a time when the city’s median home price was closer to $200,000 than $600,000.
“I and many others said, ‘This is what’s going to happen if we don’t take control of the situation,’ ” she said. “And it did.”
Her most recent previous interview was with the Santa Fe Reporter in 2018, which ran with the headline, “Was Debbie Right?”
Jaramillo said she didn’t think many of the things she pointed out while mayor were particularly prescient.
“I don’t think I’m a prophet, but I grew up here,” she said. “You’d have to be blind not to see what was happening in the town.”
The Reporter interview ran several months into former Mayor Alan Webber’s first term. Jaramillo said she had limited interaction with Webber, also a controversial figure in city politics.
She said she did not closely follow news around the destruction of the Soldiers’ Monument — the 33-foot-tall, more than 150-year-old obelisk on the Plaza toppled by protesters in 2020, several months after Webber called for its removal — but described it as part of a larger issue of the downtown area becoming emptied of local people and traditions.
Jaramillo had few good things to say about other politicians, from former Mayor Larry Delgado, who defeated her in 1998 (he “ran on my issues”), to President Donald Trump (“that orange-faced idiot”).
“I haven’t seen anyone who stands for anything but themselves both locally all the way up to the disgusting national level,” she said.
But she noted she has supported some previous female council candidates.
Jaramillo said she’s unimpressed by many other women in politics, pointing to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, former Gov. Susana Martinez and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
“I think, they don’t get it,” she said. “Women don’t have to be like the men want to be. If you stand for something, just say it. … If the boys don’t like it, so what?”
Santa Fe’s heated 1994 mayoral campaign drew about 18,700 people to the polls — more than the 18,389 who voted in the 2021 mayoral election, according to the New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office. And the city had tens of thousands fewer residents two decades ago. About 24,700 people cast ballots for mayor in 2025.
Jaramillo sat out the 2021 mayoral election between Webber, then-Councilor JoAnne Vigil Coppler and Alexis Martinez Johnson but did vote in last year’s eight-way mayoral race.
She declined to say who her first choice was, though she said it wasn’t victor Michael Garcia.
Garcia’s political trajectory in some ways mirrors Jaramillo’s: Both were councilors who became mayor during their second term, and both at times were the only people voting against proposals supported by the rest of the council.
After then-Mayor Sam Pick chose not to run for reelection, the 1994 field was flooded with candidates, culminating in a 12-way race. A similar situation emerged in 2025 without incumbent Webber, leading Garcia to face off against seven others.
A native Santa Fean like Jaramillo, Garcia ran a campaign focused on the community and garnered the support of many who felt like Santa Fe had lost its way under the previous administration.
“There is a lot of cleanup to be done,” Jaramillo told supporters during a raucous election night victory party at La Fonda, a sentiment similar to what Garcia has told residents in the months since winning election about the amount of work that lies ahead for his administration.
The similarities didn’t appear to move Jaramillo, who said she doesn’t have a clear sense of what Garcia stands for and criticized his decision to express support for a Senate bill that would put new restrictions on gun sales in New Mexico.
Any advice for the new mayor?
“Stick to home,” she said. “I don’t care what color they are, but take care of the people who want to call Santa Fe home and be a part of it.”
After a long conversation with a reporter, she called back unprompted to make a few final points.
Despite her frustrations with Santa Fe, she said both old-timers and more recent arrivals “deserve what’s happening in this town.”
To those who tell her the city needs her back, she said, “Where were you in ’98?”