Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

(born 1989)

“We’ve got people, they’ve got money.”

Years in political office: 2018–present

Position: New York member of US House of Representatives, 2018–present

Party affiliation: Democrat

Hometown: New York City

Top causes: universal health care, education costs, environmental issues, and immigration justice

Life Story

In the mid-1990s, Puerto Rican house cleaner Blanca Ocasio-Cortez and architectural firm owner Sergio Ocasio were convinced that their two kids would thrive if they had access to top-notch education. The couple moved north, away from their home and family in the Bronx, to a wealthy town in Westchester County, New York, where their kids were among the only people of color at school. From an early age, their daughter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was a “dorky kid.” The woman who would later be known by her initials, AOC, loved science and, early on, dreamed of becoming an obstetrician-gynecologist.

Her dad passed away from lung cancer during her college years, and Ocasio-Cortez says his last words to her were, “Hey, make me proud.” Determined to do just that, she moved back to New York City, where she worked at an education nonprofit by day and bartended at night to cover her student loans and health insurance. When Senator Bernie Sanders first ran for president in 2015–2016, she saw herself and her community reflected in his discourse. She too was frustrated that she and her peers had to work more than one job to make a living, that they didn’t have affordable health insurance—that the economic cards were stacked against her generation.

Feeling confused and saddened by the presidential victory of Donald Trump in November, Ocasio-Cortez took off with a group of friends to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North and South Dakota, where the Native residents were facing off against developers who wanted to build an oil pipeline through the reservation. The community’s resistance was “transformational” for AOC, and when she received a phone call from Brand New Congress, an organization supporting unconventional challengers within the Democratic Party, her ears perked up. With their support, she decided to run for the House of Representatives against the Queens borough’s Democratic boss and two-decade incumbent, Joe Crowley.

To keep Crowley from taking the race seriously, Ocasio-Cortez’s team ran her campaign under the radar. In underestimating the massive outreach that AOC was carrying out in Queens and the Bronx, Crowley fatefully misjudged his opponent. When they finally faced off, he was ill-prepared and overconfident that his track record was impervious to critique.

Ocasio-Cortez defeated Crowley by earning 57 percent of the vote. She went on to easily beat her Republican opponent in the general election. She wore red lipstick and gold hoop earrings to her congressional swearing-in ceremony as a tribute to Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor (page 162), who had been cautioned against sporting her trademark red nails for her own 2009 confirmation hearings. AOC says that “women like me aren’t supposed to run for office—or win,” a reminder that women of color are still fighting for acceptance and respect on the political stage.

What’s on Her Agenda

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born in 1989, two years after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (page 154) won her first election to the House of Representatives. The way that fellow politicians and much of the media perceive AOC is definitely influenced by her youth. She has been blasted for being too showy, too social media–oriented, and too unwilling to compromise. But even if she is young, Ocasio-Cortez has been eager to address her legislative concerns.

Among her top priorities when she joined Congress was the Green New Deal, a proposal designed to create jobs and cut back on planet-harming industrial emissions. The name is based on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, a jobs plan to end sky-high unemployment rates during the Great Depression (1929–1942). The Green New Deal proposes projects that would build green energy networks and other sustainable technology.

Another goal that has set her apart from many other Democrats has been her unchanging stance on abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Ocasio-Cortez was elected during a moment when images of caged children in ICE’s detention centers were surfacing, proof of the agency’s policy on separating refugee families arriving in the country.

This woman from the Bronx often seems unfazed when faced with political challenges that might cause more seasoned politicians to flinch, such as fighting ageism and questioning entrenched governmental agencies. But sometimes the political beliefs that got AOC elected—ending ICE, winning health care for all, and battling climate change—present their own challenges. The same policies that endeared her to her own constituency and gave her political power have made her threatening in the eyes of conservatives, as well as Democratic peers who believe she is too radical.

Awesome Achievements

• This here is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
• An MIT lab named an asteroid after her when she came in second place at a science competition as a high school senior. (Night sky enthusiasts, look for 23238 Ocasio-Cortez.)
• In her twenties, AOC founded a children’s book publishing company to give kids more stories that take place in communities like the Bronx.
• The politician inspired a comic book called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Freshman Force, which features parodic takes on her congressional adventures in Washington, DC, including one story where her political environment is reimagined as a wrestling ring.

Quotables

“Just like catcalling, I don’t owe a response to unsolicited requests from men with bad intentions. And also like catcalling, for some reason they feel entitled to one.”

“No American should be too poor to live.”

“I don’t think that we can compromise on transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy. We cannot compromise on saving our planet. We can’t compromise on saving kids. . . . We have to do these things. If we want to do them in different ways, that’s fine. But we can’t not do them.”

“For so long, people have thought of climate-change legislation as saving polar bears, but they don’t think of the pipes in Flint. They don’t think of the air in the Bronx. They don’t think of coal miners getting cancer in West Virginia.”

“The fundamental question, in the beginning, is, ‘Why you?’ The reason ‘why’ was ’cause, nobody else would. So literally anybody could, right? Because the alternative is no one.”