THE TENETS OF SERGIO

You are the sunshine of my life

That’s why I’ll always be around.

—Stevie Wonder, “You Are the Sunshine of My Life”

As you probably know by now, when our Boricua, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was born, her family resided in the Parkchester area of the Bronx. (Boricua means “Brave and Noble Lord.” Boriken or Boriquín are the indigenous names from which Boricua ascended on the island of Puerto Rico. Many, many years ago before the Spanish came along with their trickery and conquered, the Boricuas ruled. *wink* Queenhood is in our Boricua’s blood.)

There are many fantastical tales of wonder and enchantment that originated in the Bronx during the 1980s and ’90s: How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Gloria Estefan, and that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but it is Sergio Ocasio-Roman, Alexandria the Great’s father, who begins this story in Parkchester.

Parkchester at one time was a large school that housed orphaned and troubled boys. In 1938, during the height of the Great Depression, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, then one of the biggest corporations in America, decided to diversify by investing in real estate. They built Parkchester, one of the first self-contained communities for working-class families who needed to purchase affordable property. Met Life, like many manufacturing companies at the time, built company towns. In order to make working for these companies attractive and accessible, corporations built whole towns that had housing and all the amenities people would need. It was whites-only at the time and also became a haven for WWII vets seeking a way and means for their families in return for their service to the nation. Despite change and the passage of time, it was still considered one of the most successful housing developments in New York.

This area would eventually become the neighborhood where Sergio was born on November 24, 1959, to parents Sergio Ocasio and Thamar Neirida Ocasio, who hailed from the Caribbean-blue sea of Puerto Rico.

From the time that Sergio was eleven years old to when he was twenty-one, the Bronx lost 97 percent of its buildings to fire. Bronx residents were blamed for the debacle, but actually, because property values had begun to fall, landlords found they could not sell their buildings for a profit, so they began to set their buildings on fire to collect the insurance, often in the millions of dollars. It was one of the defining periods of Sergio’s life.

“I was born to a dad who was born in the South Bronx while the Bronx was burning, while landlords were committing arson to their own buildings,” AOC recalled in an interview with Vogue magazine. “He grew up as a kid with five people in a one-bedroom apartment.”

Over time, due to urban wizardry, Parkchester transformed from a moderate-income community, built to give opportunity to those seeking to own property, to a place that welcomed a more diverse community, too. And with that, a great “white flight” ensued. There began an exodus of more affluent white owners, and as economic stability declined in the South Bronx, violence and tension rose to its peak, leaving the remaining brown residents with crooked landlords and less safety.

Yet the flowers still bloomed in Parkchester.

Growing up in the Bronx in the 1960s as a Puerto Rican man with an outgrown mane and healthy mustache, Sergio was an ambitious, politically conscious young man who could both run a business during the week and roast a pig in a pit on the weekends. He loved to fish. Best of all, he used his intelligence and know-how to pull his family forward at every opportunity.

Over the course of Sergio’s youth, the Puerto Rican population of New York grew to hundreds of thousands of people. Nearly 80 percent of the Hispanic community in New York was Puerto Rican between 1970 and the early 1990s.

It’s notable that Sergio Ocasio decided to become an architect, and there must have been something about the redbrick village of Parkchester that made him want to contribute. He set up his company right there in Parkchester. Kirschenbaum Ocasio-Roman Architects PC was operated out of a six-hundred-foot ground-level apartment on Archer Road. He shared the space with his business partner and six employees. Not only did they specialize in building and inspection services, they offered landscaping, lawn maintenance, engineering services, and more for Parkchester’s South and North divisions. Managers and developers of low-income housing in the Bronx and Westchester County, such as Promesa, a social services company, would also commission Sergio’s firm.

The media has attacked and criticized Queen AOC for stating that she and her family were poor. Oh, please! A consulting service of $65 per hour can afford you a business and a home but doesn’t scream “rich”! There are many working people with homes and businesses in this nation who are only a paycheck away from “poor.” Alexandria once said, “If we can acknowledge how many Americans are actually in poverty, I think that we can start to address some of the more systemic issues in our economy.”

It was on a business trip to Puerto Rico where Sergio met the beautiful and marvelous Blanca Cortez, la madre de Alexandria. According to AOC, Blanca and her family lived in poverty in Puerto Rico, and she spent much of her life raising her siblings while her own mother worked. The two were a handsome pair—Sergio’s height and dark features met Blanca’s petite and fair ones, and they were married in a church in Puerto Rico and then moved to the Bronx.

In 1986, Sergio bought their 725-square-foot home on Unionport Road in Parkchester, and they started a family. Their first child, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, came along on October 13, 1989. A few years later, a son was born, Gabriel. He calls himself “the proudest brother in the world.”

Sergio was a visionary. He saw that safe and secure housing was an issue that defined the lives of the community of the South Bronx, so he’d started his architectural firm. Blanca was committed to a better life for her young family, and she helped with the household by balancing secretarial and cleaning work. Sergio and Blanca weren’t rich; they were survivors.

When Alexandria was five years old, the family made the big decision to move out of Parkchester, where generations of their family still remained, to Yorktown Heights, a suburb in Westchester County, in order to put the children in a better school system. They could only afford a small house in this prosperous community. It was a little white house, just two bedrooms; one would be for Sergio and his Blanca and the other for Alexandria and Gabriel. The new home was surrounded by trees and a lawn where flowers could be planted, and a driveway where Sergio could pull in after a long day’s work. It was quiet, it was safe. It was the American dream.

Sergio’s parents had pushed for his education, and now he’d do the same for their children. As AOC mentioned, she was raised in a time when your zip code determined your education, and it still does. In this case, it became a power move for Sergio to get his children out of Parkchester. Blanca was right: their kids deserved the best. He’d count pennies and make calls to his family to ask for a helping hand, if that’s what it took. In typical New York “rent party” style, Sergio’s aunts, uncles, and extended family chipped in to help. Getting the house was just one big push, but staying there would be a constant struggle. He summoned his Boricua bravery and challenged fate, determined to make a space where his children could thrive. Better schools and a good education was what he was betting on, along with an environment that was frankly less political and more . . . well, peaceful. Parkchester would forever be their home, it was their beginning, but it didn’t need to be the only place they knew.

Think about it: the first wave of Puerto Ricans settled in the United States in 1917, with successive waves to follow in the 1930s and beyond. It was a hustle, and the sacrifice was time, exhaustion, sweat, and bone-breaking labor in exchange for the grander future it would funnel to their families. It wasn’t about staying in the present, it was about the future. The language barrier made it impossible for many workers to compete for the better jobs. And the darker a person’s skin was, the harder it was to succeed. Doors of opportunity were tightly closed, and a true path ahead was shielded and made difficult.

They were wrestling with racial discrimination, severe poverty, and unemployment. By the time young Sergio was of age, there was a decline in Puerto Rican migration—many returned home to their native land, where they’d struggle with finances but not acceptance.

Puerto Ricans have long marshaled political movements to address civil rights for equal access to education, employment, citizenship rights, and electoral representation. Organizers like Gilberto Gerena Valentín and Manny Diaz were key in organizing the Puerto Rican participation in the March on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. Valentín and Irma Vidal Santaella helped to found the National Association for Puerto Rican Civil Rights, and Santaella went on to become the first Puerto Rican woman on the New York State Supreme Court.

They organized to support the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This was a crowning achievement of the Civil Rights movement, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting and outlawed many voter-suppression tactics like literacy tests. They also helped win mandates for the creation of bilingual ballots and other bilingual election materials that made multicultural representation possible at the ballot box for ethnic communities all over America. More than four thousand Puerto Ricans from New York worked in solidarity in 1968 with the Poor People’s Campaign, envisioned by Dr. King with the goal of demanding that Congress create an Economic Bill of Rights for the poor.

Women also participated in activism, as around the country they formed chapters of the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women. “My aunt and my uncle were just talking last Christmas,” Alexandria said in 2016, “about how they literally heard Malcolm X evangelizing on street corners. That is the institutional memory of my family and multigenerational New York families.” Puerto Rican immigrants came to New York, and many moved to an area just east of Harlem, often referred to as Spanish Harlem, and the two communities developed a synergy that was especially fervent in the late twentieth century.

The Puerto Ricans got it. They were seeking liberation themselves, and they had long seen a connection between their oppression and the oppression of other people of color throughout the Americas.

Due to Black and Puerto Rican activism to ensure access to the ballot box, in the 1970s, Herman Badillo was the first Puerto Rican elected to Congress. In 1992, Nydia Velázquez became the first woman of Puerto Rican descent to be elected to Congress. The sacrifices of those who were uncomfortable, disoriented, and made to feel like they did not belong have served their successors well; they held the ladders that women like AOC and Sonia Sotomayor continue to climb.

A few high-profile Puerto Rican fly girls have included: Nydia Velázquez; Antonia Pantoja, who in 1996 was the first Puerto Rican woman to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President Bill Clinton; and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who in 2009 became the first Latina appointed to the Supreme Court, by President Barack Obama.

Alexandria’s belief in justice is an extension of her dad’s belief in equality and brotherhood. She often shares the stories of when her dad invited workers from the local Dunkin’ Donuts to their home. “My dad used to say that he collected people. If you didn’t have a place to go to on Thanksgiving, you came to our place. We never had a table big enough to fit everyone, but we’d always have folding chairs. You’d make a plate, eat it out of your lap, and share stories.” If there would be turkey for his family, there would be turkey for all. And those lessons became a foundation and key principles of AOC’s. But her father wanted her to do more than strive; he also wanted her to dream.

Alexandria told The New Yorker about a fishing trip she went on with her dad and his buddies, and how he’d opened her eyes to the possibilities at five years old:

[There were] three burly men and a five-year-old in a sedan [on the trip] . . . One day, his buddies went to get a beer or something, and he took me to the reflecting pool of the Washington Monument. I put my toes in the water, and suddenly the goldfish started to nibble my toes. It was a beautiful day, the sun was out, totally clear. And my dad pointed to all of it—the reflecting pool, the monuments, the Capitol, and he said, “You know, this is our government. All of this belongs to us. It belongs to you.”

His inspiration made an impression upon her she would never forget. It made her feel that leadership was within her reach.