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Alexandria was born in the Bronx to two working-class parents. Her father was a small business owner from the South Bronx. Her mother was born in Puerto Rico—growing up around a large family near Arecibo. Her mother cleaned homes and everyone pitched in on the family business.
From an early age, Alexandria grew up with a deep understanding of income inequality. She ended up attending public school in Yorktown—40 minutes north of her birthplace. As a result, much of her early life was spent in transit between her tight-knit extended family in the Bronx and her daily student life. It was clear to her, even then, that the zip code a child was born in determined much of their destiny. The 40-minute drive represented a vastly different quality of available schooling, economic opportunity, and health outcomes.
Alexandria went on to study at Boston University, where she earned degrees in Economics and International Relations. While there, she worked for the late Sen. Kennedy handling foreign affairs and immigration casework for constituent families.
After studying, Ocasio-Cortez returned to the Bronx and began to pursue work in the areas that had impacted her own family growing up: education and community organizing. As an Educational Director, she worked with promising high school youth to expand their skill-sets in community leadership and social enterprise. She also piloted projects to help improve skills in childhood literacy in young children and writing for middle-schoolers in the Bronx.
As the markets crashed in 2008, Alexandria's father passed away from cancer. He was only 48 years old. Her family was suddenly thrown into crisis—having lost its primary source of income in the middle of a recession. As the financial reality caught up to her family, Alexandria found herself working two jobs and 18-hour shifts in restaurants to help her family keep their home.
That experience put Alexandria on the other side of laws and policy, as she went from reviewing economic outcomes to having first-hand experiences with families struggling to maintain decent housing, healthcare, and immigration status. That dual experience has given her a much deeper understanding of how policies impact our families beyond the white papers. It’s one thing to write healthcare policy—it’s an entirely other matter to have to deal with healthcare, housing, and education systems ourselves. That advocacy has called Alexandria to engage with families across the country—from the South Bronx to Flint, Michigan and Standing Rock.
NY-14 is one of the most progressive districts in America, but you wouldn’t think it from our current representation, which routinely works to deregulate Wall Street banks, and rules in favor of the luxury developers pricing out our families. Our current incumbent doesn't even live in New York, and resides full-time in Virginia.
Alexandria decided that the Bronx and Queens could do better. We can champion improved and expanded Medicare-for-All, a Federal Jobs Guarantee, tuition-free college and criminal justice reform. If any community that can elect a representative to lead on these issues, it’s NY-14.
When Alexandria first started this campaign, she knew that in order for us to change our Congress, we had to change how business is done in New York. She had to run a campaign with integrity and turn away from lobbyists. NY-14 has one of the lower voter turnouts in the nation - but that isn’t because voters are uneducated; it’s because after generations of backroom dealing, we haven’t felt that our vote truly mattered. Ocasio2018 is changing that.
We began this whole campaign with the mission of bringing together a broad coalition of groups and communities to listen to their needs and give everyone an open and transparent seat at the table, where all are truly welcome to share their perspectives and organize power. It’s the only ethical way to run in NY-14, one of the most diverse communities in the United States. Here we are homeowners and renters; we live in dense urban areas and peninsular communities. We speak over 100 languages, encompass many different religions, and have two different baseball teams, each with their own rabid fan bases. If it’s any community that can show America how to get along and champion working class values, it’s us.
The proof is in our results. Alexandria’s historic candidacy has already made history. In April, hundreds of Ocasio2018 supporters came together in a 100% volunteer led, no-corporate money effort to collect thousands of signatures. In doing so, they triggered the first NY-14 primary in almost a generation. Ocasio2018 has created a cascade of firsts: Alexandria the first NY-14 Democratic challenger in a generation; the first NY-14 candidate to run without any lobbyist money in modern history; and the first woman of color to *ever* run in NY-14 (a district that’s 70% people of color).
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Historic Win and the Future of the Democratic Party
Oct 11, 2018 5 years agoThis is the summer in which the Presidency of Donald Trump has begun to cohere. Disdain for voting rights, for women's rights, for the protection of the environment, and for our alliances abroad is becoming American policy. There is nothing Trump will not do or say to flaunt his primacy. Not long ago, at a tense G-7 gathering in Quebec, he reportedly tossed a couple of Starburst candies at the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, and told her, “Don't say I never give you anything.” By then, Merkel and the other Western allies had grown accustomed to the President's contempt and his preference for autocrats, and so the moment passed as unremarkable, another paragraph in the story of the Trump era. There are many ways to wallow in the everyday devolution. Prolonged viewing of MSNBC is a highly rated option. There are even various means of escape to recommend. The Yankees are awfully exciting this year, and Season 2 of “glow” is strong. In the meantime, where can the outraged and the dispirited turn for a glimmer of hope? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is twenty-eight. She was born in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx and lives there now, in a modest one-bedroom apartment. Parkchester was originally a planned community conceived by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and was for decades segregated, predominantly Irish and Italian. Today, it's largely African-American, Hispanic, and South Asian. Ocasio-Cortez comes from a Puerto Rican family in which the parents' self-sacrifice has been rewarded by their daughter's earnest striving, and, now, a historic achievement. Come November, Ocasio-Cortez is almost certain to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. As recently as ten months ago, she was waiting tables at a taco place near Union Square called Flats Fix. On June 26th, she pulled off a political upset in the Democratic primary for the Fourteenth Congressional District, soundly defeating the incumbent, Joseph Crowley, the most powerful politician in Queens County and the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives. In the general election this fall, Ocasio-Cortez will face Anthony Pappas, a professor at the Peter J. Tobin College of Business. Pappas's platform appears to center on tax cuts and an obsession with the legal ramifications of his unpleasant divorce, many years ago. It is unlikely that those concerns will be widely shared by voters of the Fourteenth District, which takes in parts of the eastern Bronx and northwest Queens and votes almost uniformly Democratic. (In an oddity of New York election laws, Crowley, who was also the Working Families Party candidate, will remain on that party's line in November, but his spokesperson said that “this is a total non-thing,” emphasizing that Crowley is a Democrat, endorses Ocasio-Cortez, and “is totally supporting her. She is going to be a member of Congress.”) Ocasio-Cortez has natural presence. She is also well mannered, disciplined, shrewd, and self-possessed. When I asked her if Pappas has a chance, she smiled but would not bite. Ocasio-Cortez lives around the corner from her favorite restaurant, Taqueria Tlaxcalli, on Starling Avenue. We met there for dinner on a steambath Sunday night just after her victory. The surrounding commercial area is among the most eclectic in the borough: it includes a sari emporium, the Al-Aqsa Restaurant, Bangla Bazaar, the Chang Li Supermarket, halal grocery stores, Iglesia Bautista Fundamental del Bronx, Crown Fried Chicken, the Asian Driving School, and Jerry's Pizzeria. When Ocasio-Cortez arrived, the owner greeted her as a local celebrity. In an instant, people crowded around. She is quick to shake hands, hug, hold a constituent's shoulder. When kids come near, she kneels and talks on their level. Everyone wanted to tell her their reaction to her win, their shock and delight. “Thank you so much!” she told one after the other. These kinds of encounters were happening to her everywhere she went. At a pizza parlor in Grand Central, her waiter nearly swooned. Since the primary, she's been fielding calls of congratulation “from everyone you can name,” including her ideological lodestar, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, who, she said, “seemed to come from a mentoring place.” We sat down at a table near the window. She allowed that she was getting worn down. “You're speaking to me when I am still emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and logistically processing all of this,” she said. “The whole thing's got me knocked a little flat.” (New Yorker) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/23/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-historic-win-and-the-future-of-the-democratic-party
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