THE RISE OF AOC: Beginnings
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shook up American politics when she landed on the political scene -- and continues to shake it up. In part one of my in-depth report on her ascent, we look back at her origins
This week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, had the nation talking. And talking. And talking some more. Her intimate sharing of her egg-freezing journey was a reminder of how she, if not introduced, elevated and perfected a politics of personal vulnerability, built on direct, human connection to citizens. And her comment in a TV interview that “Woke 1 was crazy” triggered a firestorm of debate across the broad left. Is she right to distance herself from the rhetorical and tactical excesses of elements of the movement left? Is she abandoning the movement that made her? Is she forsaking the outside struggle for the inside game? Or is she doing some combination of things that isn’t quite legible to people, because it is built on a savvy understanding of how civics, attention, and power work now?
I spent a long time thinking about these questions and the congresswoman’s rise a few years ago. And I’ve gotten (rare!) permission from my publisher, Alfred Knopf, to share with you my in-depth portrait of the rise of AOC which was published in The Persuaders and was based on, among other things, several interviews with her.
We will publish it in five parts. Today is part one — the origin story.
The rise of AOC: Part 1: Origins
On a temperate October day in 2019, on a stage in New York City’s Queensbridge Park, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to the microphone.
“What’s up, New York Cit- eeeeeeeyyyy?” She wasn’t satisfied. “Let me ask you again: What’s up, New York Cit- eeeeeeeeeeyyyy?” She was wearing a dark power suit and one of the more fiery lipsticks in her arsenal that she sometimes referred to as war paint and that signaled to the colleagues who knew her best that she had big ambitions for the day. Facing Manhattan, with the borough of Queens, which she represented, at her back, and the Bronx, which she also represented and where she was born, to her right, she stood before a glistening sea of placards. Bernie. Bernie. Bernie.
“Last February,” she said, pointing across the East River, “I was working as a waitress in downtown Manhattan— at a taqueria. I worked shoulder to shoulder with undocumented workers, who often worked harder and hardest for the least amount of money. I was on my feet working twelve-hour days, with no structured breaks. I didn’t have health care. I wasn’t being paid a living wage. And I didn’t think that I deserved any of those things.”
Upon hearing these words, from out in the sea of placards, a man yelled, “I can relate!”
“Because that is the script that we tell working people here and all over this country,” Ocasio-Cortez continued, “that your inherent worth and value as a human being is dependent on an income that another person decided to underpay us. But what we’re here to do is to turn around that very basic logic.” And then she delivered a sentence that I, having heard many political endorsements, will not soon forget. “It wasn’t until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders,” she said, stopping mid-phrase here to take in the crowd and the roars, “that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being.”
She went on to catalog the virtues of the senator from Vermont. But it was that line that hung in the air and that helped me to see Sanders’s achievement even more clearly. She wasn’t saying Bernie had persuaded her into an ideology— at least not at the beginning. She wasn’t saying he had enlisted her in the battle for a particular policy. He had persuaded her that she was human, fully human. “I used to, frankly, abuse myself mentally about how I’m nothing,” she once said of those days before her political awakening, with those gross men hitting on her at the Flats Fix taqueria and her $200- a- month health insurance that came with an awful $8,000 deductible and no stairway to a better life in sight. “I realized that I need to choose myself,” she had said, “because if I don’t, I’m just going to waste away. I’m just going to give up.” Sanders’s 2016 campaign, for which she ended up volunteering, had given her a new way of looking at herself. And now here was the disciple, a few years after she learned his name, standing on that stage as perhaps the most significant new arrival in Congress in American history, rescuing his cause.
In the months that followed, with the wind of Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement at his back, Sanders would come back from the political dead, claiming victory in the first three contests. For the first time in Sanders’s pursuit of the presidency, he was the front-runner. And this development intensified the preexisting debates within the campaign: How could Sanders close the deal by going wider, calling in those who remained skeptical of his ideas but might come around?
One line of advice came from the actor John Cusack, a die-hard progressive who sometimes traveled with the campaign. Cusack felt Sanders should begin to sound more unifying, more like a general-election candidate. “His campaign needs to create a unit that is charged with outreach to groups who do NOT identify as progressive, but have strong views that are aligned with his,” Cusack wrote in an email to Sanders campaign officials. “EXPAND EXPAND EXPAND.”
Another line of advice came to be associated with Ocasio-Cortez. It had less to do with the framing and more to do with how the Sanders movement carried itself. The concern was about the candidate himself to an extent, but also the campaign and its most avid supporters online and in the physical world. Ocasio-Cortez was worried about the movement’s posture in the face of skeptics and potential converts (these being to Faiz Shakir’s way of thinking the same people). She, having been awakened and transformed by the movement a few years earlier, having felt the righteous anger that animated it, was, at the same time, worried that elements of the movement were potentially off-putting as well. The movement that had helped her discover her humanity was coming off to too many other people who didn’t have that same experience as hostile, judgmental, and unwelcoming. Clearly, the things that made some feel seen in their humanity and welcomed, as she had felt in encountering Sanders, could turn other people away. The deploring of injustice, the propulsive force of the movement, did not on its own create a sense of home for some, and at times the stridency could prevent it.
At first, she delivered this message privately, internally. I asked David Sirota—the former Sanders aide and someone very much associated with the strident, pugilistic, at times angry posture that Ocasio-Cortez was questioning— about her critique. “I think she was right that for millions of voters who aren’t paying attention to the internecine details of this policy or that policy, there can be, there should be, a more positive, open message and themes from the campaign. That was sound counsel,” he told me.
She had other advice, too. Shakir told me she was also adamant about the importance of building Black support for Sanders and the need for Sanders to change some of his ways to do that. “She gave some specific recommendations that we adhered to,” Shakir told me. “Her big thing was, how are you going to change your language to reflect that you’re hearing many of the newer kind of dynamics and voices of the movement?” Shakir told me Sanders trusted the advice and made an effort. But ultimately, he said, “he’s Bernie Sanders, and he knows the things that he knows quite well, and he feels comfortable talking about those things in certain ways at rallies that he feels like more people will access. He’s not somebody who plays with the rally speech well.”
But it was, as Shakir tells it, the question of posture that Ocasio-Cortez raised most fruitfully and that he took to heart. “She was a little worried about whether some of the Twitter demeanor of the constellation of people around us could be seen as antagonistic or off-putting. She was definitely somebody who worried about the perception that could create about who we are. Are we just angry all the time, or are we the people looking to aspirationally build a better future for people?”
One day, she made her case to Sanders directly, Shakir recalled. “She says to the senator, without naming any names, ‘Senator, I think that the way in which we should project this campaign is to give people the opportunity to see what values we’re about— a high-minded, aspirational, better society, an advanced society for all. And I don’t think that’s always reflected in the language of the campaign and you. So I think we should do our best to make everyone understand that this is the message that we want to send.’”
Shakir understood the advice, but it was harder to act on than he might have wished. For one thing, the anger and antagonism that many perceived in the Sanders movement were anger and antagonism justified by the systemic realities of the age and sentiments that were fuel for the working-class movement to change the country’s power equations. Take away the anger, and you might take away too much. It was anger rooted in the heart and identity of the candidate, who was not easily changed. It was also late in the game to make adjustments. “You pull one thread, and it can kind of disrupt the entire fabric of the campaign,” Shakir told me. And it was complicatedly political within the campaign. “I don’t have a mute button,” Shakir told me. “I don’t control everybody’s tweets.” He said the campaign’s more strident defenders had been brought in for a reason: Sanders, knowing the establishment he was up against, wanted people who could fight.
At some point, Shakir realized that what he could do was be a role model for the welcoming posture that Ocasio-Cortez was talking about. Until then, he had largely been behind the curtain. Late in 2019, he began to do livestreams of campaign updates: “If you go back and track what I was saying in those, one of the most oft-repeated things I would say is that we are a welcoming movement. We need to bring people in. We understand that everyone is on their journey, some people further along on that journey than others. And we need to give space and allow for people to basically be welcomed into it. I would use that phrase all the time: ‘a welcoming movement.’”
But there were also potentially real costs to meeting the conditions that would make some people feel welcome in the movement, feel seen in their humanity, and find in the movement a home. These costs posed complicated trade-offs of persuasion: Why should working-class people mad as hell about being shafted for decades graft a fake smile onto their cause? Doesn’t coalition-building invariably end up meaning compromised positions? Isn’t the desire to win over the middle
of the road why the middle always wins? Do you build a movement capable of smashing oligarchy by rallying your armies or by reaching out? Is it possible to be at once angry and generous? How do you make the cause exciting and warm and soul-stirring without descending into empty sentimentality? How do you construct a movement on the foundation of widespread frustration while offering voters something more inspiring than the sum of a million frustrations?
These were questions swirling around Sanders’s campaign when Ocasio-Cortez gave another speech, less noticed but no less significant, a few months after the endorsement—after Sanders’s winning streak had come to an end in South Carolina, which went for Joe Biden, but with the contest still up in the air. She had campaigned for Sanders on and off in the preceding months, but had been more absent from the trail than some expected, leading to speculative headlines. But now here she was in Michigan, on the cusp of its primary, and she delivered a somewhat different- sounding message that seemed to reflect the advice she had been giving on the inside, now made public.
“We are here because we have been separated from each other,” she said. “As sister Rashida Tlaib here in Michigan says, ‘We are not divided; we are disconnected.’ That is, at its core, our problem today. And that means that the antithesis of that is to connect, to fight for someone you don’t know, to love our neighbor, to bring people into the cause. To listen, to adapt, to open a posture of acceptance. That is what we must do in order to win on Tuesday.”
It was brief, subtle, but carefully worded advice. If the movement was determined to combat the disconnection and alienation and brutality of America in the age of capital, it had to embody, to be, the opposite of those things. It had not only to argue for a politics of love and solidarity but also to incarnate it with a sense of welcome and home and humanity. And that persuasive approach demanded new behaviors from the movement.
Not long after the speech, I asked Ocasio-Cortez what lurked underneath those words.
“Granted, I don’t think the progressive movement overall is like this,” she told me, “but I do think that a very loud and small sector of the movement can be like this; as we know, very loud but small populations and communities can have an enormous amount of sway because they are loud.” She was referring to a certain type of progressive who came off as uncompromising, who, to paraphrase the journalist Michael Kinsley, was more interested in finding heretics than converts.
“It’s not about giving up your principles,” she continued, “and it’s not about changing your positions, but it is about opening up your posture. Because if we’re just about finger wagging and nagging and shaming people into positions—sometimes that needs to be done in our politics. Sometimes—a lot of times—politicians and pundits deserve to be shamed. But it’s not the only thing that we can do. And it’s not the only tool that we have. And sometimes the most persuasive way that I find to bring people into the fold is what my mentor called ‘the golden gate of retreat.’ You create a path for someone that perhaps started out a conversation disagreeing with you.”
Yet even as Ocasio-Cortez gave this advice, she wasn’t teaching what she had mastered so much as voicing what she herself was grappling with at that moment. It was the spring of 2020 when she shared these reflections with me, and there was a special poignancy in her advice to Sanders and the movement, about the open posture and the spirit of grace and the golden gate of retreat and a sense of welcome, because at times she seemed to be speaking to herself, too.
All her life, as far back as she could remember, she had cultivated that spirit of openness and outreach. She was an organizer who knew you had to meet people where they are and pitch the same thing fifteen different ways to eleven different people. And then lightning had struck. In a way no person on this earth could ever plan for, she had landed on the world’s stage, and landed in a particular way that bore a real but fractional resemblance to the person she knew herself to be. Suddenly someone who would probably strike you in a first encounter as quiet and shy was, in the public imagination, queen of the strident, duchess of the doctrinaire, countess of the clapback and callout. This picture of her was based on very real things about her; at the same time, it wasn’t her. But you don’t always get to choose where you’re standing and what you’re wearing when the lightning strikes. And so when Ocasio-Cortez spoke to Sanders and his armies, she was also, and quite consciously, speaking to herself, asking herself and others if it was possible to change big things by summoning in yourself the humility, patience, and openheartedness to move individual human beings.
In 1938, the MetLife corporation bought a 129-acre tract of land in the Bronx that was owned by the Catholic Church and used as the site of an orphanage where more than twenty-five hundred children lived in wait. It was destined to become the largest condominium development on earth, with some twelve thousand units, built on the concept of a “city within a city”— a place, as a local website puts it, “where one can shop, work and live without ever having to step foot outside.” The development straddled two different Bronx neighborhoods, Park Versailles and Westchester Heights. Which is how it got the real-estate-branding portmanteau of Parkchester.
The development was open only to white people at first, from 1940 to 1968. The president of MetLife was quoted as saying, “Negroes and whites do not mix. Perhaps they will, in one hundred years, but they do not now.” In 1968, the city ordered the development integrated. Coincidence or not, that was the year MetLife decided to sell. It sold the development to a real-estate magnate named Harry Helmsley, who at first continued to run Parkchester as a sea of rentals but later converted the units into condominiums. He and his wife, Leona, were later found to have engaged in financial shenanigans involving their vast business empire. While Harry was ruled unfit to stand trial, Leona did in the summer of 1989. On August 30, she was convicted on 33 charges, including tax-fraud conspiracy, tax evasion, and filing erroneous returns. She received a sentence of sixteen years, which was later reduced to four. She was eventually released after 19 months. (She received help with her appeals from a cunning young lawyer by the name of Alan Dershowitz.) The iconic moment in Helmsley’s trial came when a former housekeeper recalled hearing Helmsley say, “We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.”
Two months after Leona’s conviction, a young couple living in the Parkchester complex—an architect named Sergio Ocasio and his wife, Blanca Iris Ocasio, who, as it happens, would also work as a taxpaying housekeeper—welcomed a daughter. They named her Alexandria, which, translated from the Greek, means “defender of humankind.”
Blanca was an evangelical Christian, born in Puerto Rico, who cleaned houses to help the family’s finances. Sergio owned a small practice in architecture, remodeling, and landscaping. He had grown up in the Bronx during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, when the borough was said to be burning. As the journalist Joe Flood later wrote, “Seven different census tracts in The Bronx lost more than 97% of their buildings to fire and abandonment between 1970 and 1980; 44 tracts (out of 289 in the borough) lost more than 50%.” At the time, the prevailing narrative was that the fires were mostly the result of arson—landlords taking advantage of insurance or tenants taking advantage of welfare. But, as Flood reported in his book The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City—and Determined the Future of Cities, arson turned out to explain a small fraction of the blazes. The actual problem, Flood argued, was the new vogue for business thinking in public affairs: private-sector technocrats from the Rand Corporation advised the city to close firehouses and curb inspections, all in the name of “efficiency.” While many blamed “hoodlums,” Flood writes, they gave a pass to the “whiz-kid consultants with plans to save the city through technology.” Amid the wreckage of burned-out buildings they left in their wake, Sergio Ocasio “wanted to be one of the people that helped put the buildings back up,” Alexandria, or Sandy, as she was known as a child, later said. Sandy had a younger brother named Gabriel, who one day would nominate her for Congress.
As a congresswoman, Ocasio-Cortez told a moving story about her father. Around age five, she had talked her way into joining him and two of his friends on a road trip to Florida. “Three burly men and a five-year-old in a sedan,” she told David Remnick of The New Yorker. “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.’ ” Years later, when she returned to the scene as a new congresswoman, she recalled, “I thought about that. I feel like it’s supposed to belong to us. Not all of it belongs to all of us. Not yet. But that’s the whole point of going to Congress, isn’t it?”
From the earliest days, Ocasio-Cortez’s life was defined by the straddling of worlds, being at once on the inside and on the outside, at once alienated and at home in both positions. And one of those straddlings began around that same age of five, when she and her mother half uprooted from the Bronx for a two-bedroom house in the tranquil suburb of Yorktown Heights, less than an hour’s drive to the north of the Bronx, in Westchester County. The Bronx is one of the poorest counties in the country. Westchester County is among the richest. But it wasn’t a dramatic change of fortune that propelled the move. Rather, Ocasio-Cortez’s parents were concerned about the quality of education their daughter could receive in the Bronx, and so they called in resources from across the family, hitting up aunts, grandparents, and other relatives, to scrape together a down payment on a home in a place with good public schools.
Sergio stayed behind in the Bronx, where his renovation and remodeling work was rooted. Blanca and Sandy spent the weekdays in the suburbs, the daughter going to school and becoming by her own account a nerd consumed by science, her bedroom decorated in a jungle theme with a monkey adorning the wall. Her mother polished their neighbors’ kitchen counters and scrubbed their toilets to get by. Often, they would return to the Bronx on the weekends, where Sandy would melt back into the mix of cousins and friends who didn’t have the escape hatch to mobility she did. Before she became a famed critic of inequity at a national scale, she encountered inequity between cousins—a “gaping maw,” as she has put it, in which she had the upper lip. Her cousins’ lives had the constant, whirring stress of insecurity. In later years, Ocasio-Cortez would anchor the story of her convictions in her time as a bartender, understanding, as she did better than most, the necessity of narrative simplification. But those convictions were shaped equally by those seasons of her life when she was on top relative to others and experienced the survivor’s guilt of opportunity.
“This very regular drive between Westchester County, this small town Yorktown, and the Bronx, to where my cousins were, where we were being essentially raised as siblings, was really formative, because I would always see the difference between my school and their school, my air and their air,” she later reflected in a public conversation with the writer Ta- Nehisi Coates. “And I recognize that the only thing, the only difference, between their outcomes and my outcomes was a forty-minute drive. Because we were born in the same place. It was just this one decision that my parents were able to make at a very young age that changed such a wide scope of the trajectory of our lives.”
If she would end up with advanced powers of speaking to those at the bottom about what goes on at the top, and of speaking to those at the top about the plight of those at the bottom, and speaking without apology or fear in either circumstance, it was perhaps because she grew up toggling between social orders herself, being brown and relatively poor in a white and affluent world one day, the lucky suburban prima the next.
Some remember Ocasio-Cortez as being precociously political. Her mother told a reporter, “There was nobody who could shut her up. I saw the political tendencies since she was very, very young.” There is a story of how she was so aghast at the dirty, dead, frogless pond outside her middle school that she showed up at a town board meeting to petition for an aerator machine. “It was the first time that I realized that there’s a world outside of school that I could change,” she later told a reporter. (For the record, aerator: denied.) Her family, she has said, wasn’t overtly political—“they weren’t in the streets, they weren’t activists”—but their relatives were always in and out for coffee, talking about the world. And her parents were generous in the way that people who themselves rely on generosity can be. “I always kind of called them informal or unrecognized community organizers,” she told Coates, “because they would always find the people in need in our community. They would always have them over for dinner, but they were never politically active in the way that we think of people being politically active.”
In later years, she would speak of a leftist politics that grew out of experience more than theory. “It’s not like I grew up reading Noam Chomsky,” she told a reporter. “I grew up scrubbing toilets with my mother.”
If she was relatively fortunate among her cousins on weekends, on weekdays she was an outsider of an altogether di9erent kind, a “brown girl” in a white town who “didn’t have crimped hair like the rest of the ’90s kids,” as her brother, Gabriel, put it once, a girl from the Bronx, no longer in the Bronx, whose house “wasn’t ever going to be the sleep-over house,” he said.
One summer day, I spoke to Ocasio-Cortez about those early years in Yorktown. She told me she had only as an adult begun to understand the dualities and toggling that defined that time.
“The world inside of our home, when I opened the door and got home from school, was completely different from the world of my classroom and the world of just the broader town and culture that I grew up in,” she told me. “And so I wasn’t conscious of the fact that I was learning to navigate all of these wildly different worlds.” Her mom was working much of the time, and her father “was struggling the majority of time that I was growing up, and so the person who took care of me growing up was my grandmother.” Her grandmother’s father had been a medicine man back in Puerto Rico, which left a family “penchant,” as Ocasio-Cortez put it, for gardening—herbs, cures, veggies. “I would go home, and she would set down all of these green peas for me to unpack.”
Ocasio-Cortez spoke mostly Spanish at home in those days and then English out in the world. She had actually spoken no English until entering school. “We moved to this white neighborhood, and then my parents were like, ‘All right, she’s going to learn in preschool.’ And so I literally showed up to preschool not speaking a word of English, and that was my introduction to this dual world.”
I half-joked that that abruptness sounded similar to her early days in Congress in 2019.
“Yeah, it pretty much feels very similar, culturally and all of that,” she said. “First of all, when you’re in that experience as a young child and you literally don’t speak the language, you become hyper-attuned to people’s disposition, to try to glean meaning from how they’re feeling, where they are, without words. That was actually a skill that I really developed, to a wild degree, when I was waitressing. Because waitresses and bartenders, their job—our job—is to look across the room and read people’s faces and figure out who’s feeling what, who’s having a good time, who’s not having a good time, who looks like they need help. And so 90 percent of this work isn’t even verbal.
“I struggled so much as a child to be heard and to be recognized,” she continued. “They tried to hold me back in the second grade and get me to repeat the second grade, because these little things started adding up: I was left-handed; English was my second language.” Her parents fought for her not to be held back. She was put in remedial classes. It wasn’t until she took her first state test a few grades later that she scored in the ninety-ninth percentile “across the board in every single category,” she recalled. The calls to hold her back went silent.
“I had to really learn how to advocate for myself,” she said. “It took me a really, really, really long time to realize that these basic challenges to be heard and to be believed were not challenges that my parents had.” The parents at home didn’t see the cowed girl at school whom no one listened to. The kids and teachers at school didn’t see the confident, opinionated child whom Blanca saw. No one saw Ocasio-Cortez in her complicated fullness, across these walls. “For more affluent kids or white kids, it’s a much more seamless transition between home, get on a school bus, school, and come back,” she told me. “And for me, it was like all of these different worlds. And trying to be myself in all of these different worlds required me to learn those kinds of communication skills.”
Had she felt like the same self in each of those spaces, or like a different person in each one, a character playing a role?
“I don’t know if I necessarily was conscious of being different in different worlds, but I remember feeling kind of misunderstood,” she said. “I remember having this feeling of like, ‘They don’t get it in school.’ ” Everyone in the books they read was white. Most characters on the TV shows she watched were white. “Everyone else’s experiences were reflected, uplifted, affirmed in the books they read, in the curriculum that we had, in the examples that were used in texts, in the things that we spell—all of it, it’s so pervasive.” She couldn’t shake a feeling that “people just didn’t understand experiences like mine.”
This was one difference with her hero Bernie Sanders. He was less concerned than she was about being understood. He was interested in the content of the case he was making against the system, and less so in how that case was reaching people, drawing them in or turning them away. It was why he had done less than he could have to heed her advice to make sure that people were receiving the transmissions of his movement of love, rather than being content that he was transmitting it. But that self-confidence in not worrying about being misunderstood was not a luxury Ocasio-Cortez had felt. She wanted to be understood. His was the persuasive approach of If you say it and say it again and again, they will come. Hers was that of the brown girl in the white town who wanted to be seen and recognized and was willing to try this way and that way and the other way to reach you until she was, though without compromising her stance.
In high school, her life goal was to be an obstetrician-gynecologist. Excelling in science, she achieved second place in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. One of her teachers, Michael Blueglass, later told a reporter this story about the presentation of her research on how antioxidants can slow aging in roundworms: “One of the administrators wasn’t there at the beginning and came in after she started, and he said to the superintendent, ‘What company is she from?’ The superintendent said, ‘She’s a 17-year-old senior in our high school.’ She presented herself, verbally, visually, everything, as if she was a 30-year-old professional presenter businesswoman even though she was 17 years old.” In honor of her success in the Intel fair, a team of scientists that controlled naming rights to asteroids it had discovered named one after Ocasio-Cortez. “Somewhere between Mars and Jupiter floats 23238 Ocasio-Cortez,” Vanity Fair reported. Because of the enmity and apocalyptic fantasies the eventual congresswoman would come to inspire, the magazine felt compelled to add, “According to the experts who named it, there’s ‘zero chance’ it will destroy us.” Fresh out of high school, Ocasio-Cortez phone banked for a political candidate to whose rhetorical talents hers would one day be compared, who shared with her a shape-shifting youth and a hunger to be holistically understood in one’s teeming variety, and whose consensus style of politics she would seek to challenge: Barack Obama.
Cobbling together some scholarships and loans, Ocasio-Cortez entered Boston University in 2007. She got on to the premed track, with a plan to major in biochemistry. In the fall of her sophomore year, her father, Sergio, was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Sandy visited him in the hospital as he lay dying. “Make me proud,” he told her. He died days later, leaving no will and leaving behind a country tumbling into a financial crisis of generational proportions. “My mother was done,” she told a reporter years later. “My brother was lost. I took it hard, too, but I channeled it into my studies. That’s how I dealt with it. I was home for a week and went right back to school.” His words “Make me proud” stuck with her: “I took it very literally. My G.P.A. skyrocketed.”
But it was a giant loss of someone who had taught her to dream big. “I don’t think there’s any way to overstate how close I was with my dad,” she has said. “That sense of ambition to try things when the odds seem so unfavorable, that very, very much comes from my father.” She has said that, over and above losing him, she felt as though “I also lost myself.”
For her mother, back in the Bronx, it was grueling in its own way. The prospect of foreclosure descended. “We were really working on the classic American dream,” Ocasio-Cortez later told an interviewer, “and overnight it was all taken away. My mom was back to cleaning homes and driving school buses, to keep a roof over our heads.”
Back in college, friends noticed that Ocasio-Cortez had a laser-like new focus. She was no longer going to college just to cultivate her mind and widen her opportunities. She was now on a mission to save her family. And she was more determined than before to have immediate impact.
She drifted away from premed and into majoring in economics and international relations. She didn’t think her father’s passing changed who she was, she told Ta-Nehisi Coates, “but I think it really clarified a lot of things. Because having my father pass away at such a young age forced a lot of questions of mortality. What am I here for? He passed when he was forty-eight years old. And so it really forced me to grapple with questions of legacy and what is important, and what do I want to do with my life at eighteen? And so I really started to feel when I was kind of on this pre-medical route that it was going to take another twelve years for me to actually kind of serve as a doctor after your residency, after medical school, after undergrad. And even then it would be treating patients on a case-by-case basis. And I wanted to examine issues on a more macro scale.”
Her new interests were reflected in a discussion series where she became a fixture. Most Friday afternoons, students would gather on campus for “Coffee & Conversations” to discuss such topics as the merits of the Affordable Care Act. Among the regulars at these sessions was a student named Riley Roberts, who enjoyed playing devil’s advocate. He and Ocasio-Cortez forged a bond, and they remain a couple today. She also got her first real taste of Congress, volunteering for Senator Edward M. Kennedy. She helped field inquiries from people with immigration problems. And she spent a semester of her junior year abroad, in Niger, working in a maternity clinic. College complete, Ocasio-Cortez knew where she wanted to go. She could have gone many places, but she returned to the Bronx. She would come to call the next period of her life “the crucible.”
Anand, thank you (and your publisher) for sharing this story with us. Alexandria’s courage and empathy brings me to tears. The uplifting and importance of AOC’s story in today’s politics is inspiring and prophetic.
Thank you so much for this; I've always admired her. Am so interested in all of this, about her transiting between her cousins in the Bronx and going to school in the suburbs. Hmm, reading books where white people were, seeing movies with white people as the only characters.