Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also known as AOC, is an American politician serving as the U.S. representative for New York’s 14th congressional district since 2019. She is among the first female members of the Democratic Socialists of America elected to serve in Congress, along with Rashida Tlaib. She advocates a progressive platform that includes Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, the Green New Deal, and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

About Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in brief

Summary Alexandria Ocasio-CortezAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also known as AOC, is an American politician serving as the U.S. representative for New York’s 14th congressional district since 2019. She is among the first female members of the Democratic Socialists of America elected to serve in Congress, along with Rashida Tlaib. She advocates a progressive platform that includes Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, the Green New Deal, and abolishing U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She was previously an activist and worked as a waitress and bartender before running for Congress in 2018. Her father died of lung cancer in 2008 during her second year, and she became involved in a lengthy probate battle to settle his estate. She has said that the experience helped her learn how attorneys appointed by the court to administer an estate can enrich themselves at the expense of the families struggling to make sense of the bureaucracy. In a show of appreciation for her efforts, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory named a small asteroid after her: 23238 Ocacio-C Cortez. She graduated cum laude from Boston University in 2011 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in both international relations and economics. She later launched Brook Avenue Press, a now-defunct publishing firm that publishes books that portrayed the Bronx in a positive light. She also worked for the National Hispanic Institute and Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. She currently lives in the Bronx with her husband and two children. She plans to run for Congress again in the 2020 election, defeating Republican opponent John Cummings.

She will be the youngest member of Congress until 2021 when Madison Cawthorn was sworn in. She previously served as an intern for Senator Ted Kennedy in his section on foreign affairs and immigration issues. She attended college at Boston University, where she double-majored in international relations, graduating Cum laude in 2011. She had a John F. Lopez Fellowship and worked for Bernie Sanders during the 2016 primary election. She moved back to the Bronx to work as a bartender and bus driver to help her mother—a house cleaner and school cleaner—fight foreclosure. She went by the name of ‘Sandy’ in high school and college. She came in second in the microbiology category of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2007 with a research project on the effect of antioxidants on the lifespan of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. In high school, she took part in the NationalHispanic Institute’s Lorenzo de Zavala Youth Legislative Session. She later became the LDZ Secretary of State while she attended Boston University. Oc Alexandria was born into a Catholic family in the New York City borough of the Bronx on October 13, 1989, and has a younger brother named Gabriel. She lived with her family in an apartment in Parkchester until she was five, when the family moved to a house in suburban Yorktown Heights. She won the Democratic Party’s primary election on June 26, 2018. She defeated Republican opponent Anthony Pappas in the November 2018 general election.