by Michaela Wang ’21, Feature Section Editor

The youngest woman ever to serve in US Congress, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been deemed the poster child of a new political generation. Her 53-word political musings are retweeted and lauded by activists of the NA Community. But while many recognize her for grilling big bank tech CEOs until they quiver, or as a punching bag for conservative pundits, Ocasio-Cortez remains one of the most infamous yet least-understood women in office. This is the life of “Sandy” Ocasio-Cortez, before the initials A.O.C. dominated the House floor.

On October 13, 1989, Ocasio-Cortez was born into a tight-knit, working-class family in the New York City Borough of the Bronx. Her mother, a Puerto Rican native, cleaned houses; her father, a second generation Puerto Rican Bronxite, owned a small architecture company. Driven to provide her and her brother higher-quality education, the Ocasio-Cortez family moved out of the Parkchester section of the Bronx to the more affluent Westchester County suburb of Yorktown Heights when she was 5. As a result, Ocasio-Cortez spent most of her childhood wavering between the Bronx and Yorktown, an experience that taught her “how ZIP code determines destiny,” as she explained in a 2019 TIME interview. 

Ocasio-Cortez has garnered wide support from young people because her story isn’t a quintessential rags-to-riches tale, but a common middle class experience. An NA senior states, “I see many similarities between AOC and my background. I commute from a more urban area to this suburb, and I also come from a lower-income family to a school populated by more affluent classmates. The differences in opportunities are stark.”

Like many immigrant children, Ocasio-Cortez took advantage of an education her parents lacked. Her 2007 high school microbiology project on roundworms won second place at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. While in high school, she earned a spot in the National Hispanic Institute’s Lorenzo de Zavala Youth Legislative Session, crafting policies to advance the Latino community. On top of school, she often accompanied her mother when she cleaned houses.  

While a student at Boston University, Ocasio-Cortez interned for US Senator Ted Kennedy and campaigned for Bernie Sanders as a college student. Ocasio-Cortez cultivated a passion for grassroots campaigning.

She says in a Time interview, “I had done grassroots organizing before, but Sanders’ race was one of my first times where I crossed that bridge from grassroots community organizing to electoral organizing.” Whether knocking on the wire-bound doors of the Bronx and Queens on Sunday mornings, or speaking in her native tongue to connect with a broader demographic, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saw the humanness in politics. Whether large or small scale campaigns, government representatives were supposed to understand, empathize with, and represent the people.

Despite these chances at a prosperous career, the death of her father plunged the family into financial trouble, so Ocasio-Cortez moved back to the Bronx after graduating college to help her mother fight foreclosure of their home. It was also during this time that the 2008 recession began to ravage the economy, so Ocasio-Cortez’s anticipated job at an educational nonprofit was coupled with a bartending gig. However, as her student loan debts piled and the recession strained her family’s savings, she let go of her nonprofit aspirations and tended bar full-time. Most of her peers also were balancing two or three jobs to make ends meet.

“Spoiler alert,” Ocasio-Cortez confesses, “the gig economy is about not giving people full-time jobs. So it should be no secret why millennials want to decouple your insurance status from your employment status.”

Ultimately, Ocasio-Cortez used her middle-class struggles as fuel for her 2019 congressional campaign. While the government should protect its people against establishments, the government in many cases was the establishment: white, well-connected, wealthy men––like former NY Congressman Joe Crowley, who didn’t even live in NY––who failed to understand and fully support the lives of the people within their communities. 

“There’s always this talk about division within the Democratic Party, ideological differences,” Ocasio-Cortez explains. “But I actually think they’re generational differences. Because the America we grew up in is nothing like the America our parents or our grandparents grew up in.”

AOC gathered overwhelming support from millennials, who, like her, were “children of the recession”––as coined by Waleed Shahid of Justice Democrats, an American progressive political action committee that spearheaded her 2019 campaign. Shahid states “there’s an overwhelming sense that the economic and political system in our country is rigged.” 

Now, moving into her second term, AOC sits among these “rigged” politicians, fearlessly challenging the precedent of who can run America.