Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Biography

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or AOC (October 13, 1989) is an American politician and activist of Puerto Rican ascendance. She is a member of the Democratic Party and in 2019, she was elected a congressman for the 14th district of New York defeating Joseph Crowley. Ocasio-Cortez is part of the new wave of women in American politics: she on the left, feminist, defender of the LGBTI + collective, the Green New Deal, and daughter of immigrants.

 

Ocasio-Cortez was born in New York on October 13, 1989. Daughter of Puerto Rican Blanca Cortez and New Yorker Sergio Ocasio, she lived in the Bronx before the family moved to Yorktown Heights in Westchester County. She attended Yorktown High School and upon graduation, she entered Boston University, where she studied Economics and International Relations. She was then a fellow at Senator Ted Kennedy’s immigration office. After finishing college in 2011, she returned to the Bronx and got a job as an educational director. However, the economic crisis affected her family, so she was forced to also work as a waitress, taking shifts of more than ten hours, to help her mother. By then, Ocasio’s father had already died (due to cancer) and her mother was working as a cleaner. In 2012, she founded the Brook Avenue Press children’s bookstore, which was in operation until 2017.

 

Ocasio-Cortez entered politics in 2016 as the organizer of Bernie Sanders’ New York campaign in the Democratic primary. Once the elections were over, she traveled all over the United States, visiting places like Flint (Michigan), where she spoke about the problem of contamination to drinking water; and the Standing Rock Native Reservation. Ocasio-Cortez was one of the activists who protested against the pipeline that threatened native property. Progressive and left-wing, in May 2017 Ocasio-Cortez would run for the first time as a candidate for the New York primaries. Although she never thought of lassoing, her campaign was widely accepted by the public. Such was the success of her campaign that she was elected over the famous Democratic leader Joseph Crowley. It was a milestone, she was young and inexperienced, but with the support of a new generation, she managed to defeat the candidate with the most experience and recognition of the campaign.

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Congresswoman in New York. Alexandria was elected a congressman for the 14th congressional district of New York in November 2018. She took office in January 2019. Among her proposals are: improving and expanding Medicare, promoting free public education, creating more accessible sources of employment, reforming the judicial system, fight for better measures against climate change (Green New Deal) and gun control and abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

 

“Women like men aren’t supposed to run for office. I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family (…) My name is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I’m an educator, an organizer, a working class New Yorker ”

(Ocasio-Cortez fragment of her campaign video) Alexandria, along with other women of Hispanic, Indian, and Jamaican ascendance present themselves as the new face of American politics, perhaps heralding a change and opening the way to sustainable, accessible, and feminist progress.

She starred in the Netflix documentary Knock Down The House.