MOJITOS ’N’ POLITICOS

Say what you wanna say

And let the words fall out

Honestly, I wanna see you be brave.

—Sara Bareilles, “Brave”

After college, Alexandria started working as a bartender at Flats Fix, a taqueria in the heart of New York in Union Square and the East Village, because like most college grads who are mentally drained, financially depleted, and trying to get their heads back on straight, she knew that she just wasn’t inspired to go into a profession in economics yet. She could easily have gotten a cushy Wall Street job, but she later told Vogue, “I just physically couldn’t do it. I knew it would kill me on the inside. It’s not like I felt enlightened waiting tables, but I knew I couldn’t do the other thing.” She wanted to be in a profession where she could help people but still didn’t have a handle yet on how she’d do that with an economics degree.

She did know, girl, that she had to work—bartending, cleaning homes with her mom, whatever it took for their survival in New York and in the fight to keep their home. So she found herself at Flats Fix, doing something she enjoyed, flipping añejo old-fashioned, shots of Patrón, and Mayan mules and engaging with people in a different kind of sociology. *snap, snap*

At the bar, she was the friendly, kind bartender whom they called Sandy, and would spend the afternoon talking politics with the lunch crowd. She had volunteered on the Bernie Sanders campaign and now was perplexed about how the country could elect the wacky and potentially dangerous Donald Trump. She had heard about the protests by Native Americans at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, and she raised money at the bar for a road trip there. One taco regular, Scott Starrett, told Insider magazine that he lent her his camera to document the event.

As a bartender, she worked in an industry known for ten- to fifteen-hour shifts full of prep work, late-night cleanups, and catering to the demands of the customers, and she’d take just as much of the knowledge she learned there about hard work and the working class with her to Congress as what she learned in any economics class.

She told Insider, “I got really, really, really good at listening to people, and I got really good at understanding people’s needs, beyond just food and drink.”

The restaurant was founded on blue-collar labor hustle, too, having once been a tire shop where the owner’s wife would prepare delicious tacos in the back. It’s still there in NYC, a space the size of a four-car garage transformed by a twenty-five-foot mahogany bar and adorned with Mexican art inspired by the likes of Frida Kahlo, with skeletal masks shrouded in flowers. Surfboards, loud people, and posters, the room is full in every way, and Alexandria juggled her day-to-day life there and her new adventure as she entered politics.

Starting at the top of 2017, for about a year, her daily schedule would include racing between Flats Fix and the Bronx, an hour-long commute; talking to people who came through Flats Fix, serving them drinks, and showing them a good time; and then going over to talk to voters at the neighborhood grocery stores and churches. At one point she posted a picture of sizable holes in her shoes, damaged from the crazy amount of walking she’d been doing on a daily basis, through sun, snow, and sleet, sis.

In the middle of slow-smoked brisket tacos and Coronas, the beltway of Flats Fix is where AOC was schooled. She told Rolling Stone, “The thing that people don’t understand about restaurants is that they’re one of the most political environments. You’re shoulder-to-shoulder with immigrants. You’re at one of the nexuses of income inequality. Your hourly wage is even less than the minimum wage. You’re working for tips. You’re getting sexually harassed. You see how our food is processed and handled. You see how the prices of things change. It was a very galvanizing political experience for me.”

Alexandria had a view from inside the kitchen—largely populated by immigrants of Mexican descent, underpaid, surviving, and raising families on about $5 per hour plus tips (the tipped minimum wage went up in 2016). It was also yet another life experience for her that drove home the message that the politics really is personal. “Many members of Congress were born into wealth, or they grew up around it,” she later told Bon Appétit. “How can you legislate a better life for working people if you’ve never been a working person? Try living with the anxiety of not having health insurance for three years when your tooth starts to hurt. It’s this existential dread. I have that perspective. I [understand] what’s happening electorally because I have experienced it myself.”