Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thought she was going to die on January 6, 2021. In an Instagram livestream, the New York congresswoman described how she hid in her office bathroom as a violent mob broke into the Capitol in Washington, D.C. "Where is she?" a man kept shouting. When she came out of the bathroom, she saw that he was a Capitol police officer; he was looking at her "with a tremendous amount of anger and hostility," she said in the livestream.
Tensions had been rising in Washington since before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, in which Democratic candidate Joe Biden unseated the Republican incumbent, Donald Trump. Trump had long used social media to excite his supporters while refusing to condemn factions that included white nationalists and far-right conspiracy theorists. On that day in January, protests against the election results escalated. A mob of armed people invaded the Capitol building, smashing windows, looting, and vandalizing.
Active, impassioned, and candid
Ocasio-Cortez told the public radio show Latino USA that she needed therapy after that traumatic experience. One of the most progressive Democrats in Congress, in the last few years, she has become a political lightning rod for conservative men. In 2020, Florida Congressman Ted Yoho called Ocasio-Cortez a "f***ing bitch" in front of reporters. The following year, Congressman Paul Gosar shared a video in which an animated version of himself killed her with swords.
But Ocasio-Cortez - popularly known as "AOC" - believes in challenging her critics. She has risen to fame partly because of her active, impassioned, and candid social media presence. The priorities of her platform include climate change, health care, housing, community programs, and immigration reform.
In June 2018, the self-described democratic socialist became one of the most talked-about politicians in the U.S., after winning her election to the U.S. House of Representatives. A political outsider, she was elected in what People magazine described as a "now-legendary political upset."
Rising star of the Democrats
Ocasio-Cortez began campaigning while she was working as a bartender at a Mexican restaurant in New York's Union Square. Between shifts, she would change her clothes and set out to canvass New York's 14th congressional district. The district covers part of New York City's Bronx (where Ocasio-Cortez was born) and Queens boroughs. During her campaign, she advocated for tuition-free college and universal health care. The day after she won in 2018, she told television channel MSNBC: "Our campaign was focused on just a laser-focused message of economic, social, and racial dignity for working-class Americans, especially those in Queens and the Bronx. We were very clear about our message, very clear about our priorities."
When Ocasio-Cortez was sworn in, in January 2019, she was 29 years old - the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. She was one of two new Representatives elected for the Democrats who were members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest socialist organization in the U.S.
After they were elected, Ocasio-Cortez and three other new, young, progressive congresswomen - Ilhan Omar from Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley from Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib from Michigan - were often referred to by the media as "the Squad." A Fox News commentator described them as "the four horsewomen of the apocalypse," while a Twitter user posted a video of Ocasio-Cortez dancing in college. "Here is America's favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is," he wrote. In response, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted a video of herself dancing outside her new office.
"It's not an accident that, every cycle, the boogeyman of the Democrats is a woman," she told Vanity Fair. "A couple of cycles ago, it was Pelosi. Then it was Hillary, and now it's me."
Conservatives have called her a "bartender," intending it as an insult. But Ocasio-Cortez embraces her service-industry background with pride. "Many members of Congress were born into wealth, or they grew up around it," Ocasio-Cortez told Bon Appétit magazine. "How can you legislate a better life for working people if you've never been a working person?"
A childhood in New York
Ocasio-Cortez was born into a Puerto Rican family living in the Bronx, on October 13, 1989. Her father, Sergio, was an architect and her mother, Blanca, cleaned houses and drove a bus. Ocasio-Cortez has said on Twitter that it was through scrubbing toilets with her mother that she saw what income inequality looked like.
In high school, she dreamed of becoming a scientist. She used to commute to Manhattan to run experiments out of Mount Sinai Medical Center. In 2007, she took second place in the microbiology category at a science and engineering fair, and M.I.T. named an asteroid after her as a reward: the 23238 Ocasio-Cortez.
Meanwhile, her father had been diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer. The family almost lost their home paying for experimental trials, she told a Congressional hearing in 2019 about prescription drug prices. Sergio died while Ocasio-Cortez was attending Boston University, and she began bartending to support herself and her mother. "I don't think there's any way to overstate how close I was with my dad," she told Vanity Fair in 2020. "That sense of ambition to try things when the odds seem so unfavorable, that very, very much comes from my father. I didn't just lose my dad, I also lost myself."
At university, Ocasio-Cortez began by studying premed, but switched to economics after studying abroad. While working at a maternity clinic in Niger, Ocasio-Cortez had seen how a child's life, and death, were largely decided by where they were born. She returned to the U.S., interested in making policy to help working-class people of color in the Bronx, and graduated from Boston University in 2011 with a B.A. in international relations and economics.
Progressive politics
After graduating from college, Ocasio-Cortez campaigned in 2016 for Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont congressman who ran as the Democratic Party's presidential nominee.
Her left-wing politics have sometimes been at odds with members of her own party. In 2019, she and the Squad were critical of centrist and moderate Democrats who helped pass a Republican-led bill to fund the U.S.-Mexico border wall. In an interview with The New York Times, senior congresswoman Nancy Pelosi dismissed their criticism: "They're four people, and that's how many votes they got."
Some of Ocasio-Cortez's biggest pushes have been for taxing the wealthy and fighting climate change. She and other lawmakers have reintroduced the Green New Deal, a plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy. The resolution sketches goals that include jobs and job training programs in sustainable building, trail and bike infrastructure, rail expansion, and manufacturing. Ocasio-Cortez floated a 70 percent tax rate on ultra-rich top earners to help fund the projects.
More recently, Ocasio-Cortez has been vocal about protecting abortion rights. On the day in the summer of 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, Ocasio-Cortez was arrested while protesting outside the Supreme Court building. It's going to take men joining the cause to win back bodily autonomy, she told GQ magazine. "In this moment, it's really only going to be the vulnerability of men, and men talking to other men, that gives us the greatest hope of shifting things the fastest, soonest."
While some of her supporters hope that Ocasio-Cortez might one day make a bid for the presidency, the congresswoman herself has said it's unlikely because so many Americans "hate women." It's an opinion based on her personal experience with sexual assault, her first-hand accounts of misogyny in the U.S., and the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
Speaking candidly with journalist Wesley Lowery of GQ magazine in 2022, she reflected on her tenure so far, on what it's like to be dismissed by her own Democratic Party, and on how she relies on the people she's known the longest, before she became a political celebrity.
Despite what feels like a never-ending fight to change a system that has kept so many down and so few at the top, Ocasio-Cortez remains hopeful. "The world that we're fighting for is already here," she told Lowery. "It may not be all here … but it is undeniably here."