ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ

As part of their Queens of the Resistance series, Jones and Trotman offer an admiring look at the unexpected political career of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (b. 1989), a “trailblazer” who won election to Congress in 2018 representing New York’s 14th District.

“I was born in a place where your zip code determines your destiny,” Ocasio-Cortez says, referring to the Parkchester neighborhood where her father, an architect, and Puerto Rican–born mother had settled. When she was young, the family moved to Yorktown Heights, in Westchester, so she and her brother could attend better schools, and the young Alexandria found herself a minority among nearly all-white classmates. Excelling in science, she set her sights on a career in medicine, majoring in pre-med at Boston University. But after a semester abroad in Niger, where she witnessed shocking poverty, she changed her major to economics and international relations and later took an internship with Ted Kennedy, which served as “her first real-life brush with national politics.” Participating in a protest against a proposed oil pipeline at Standing Rock proved “spiritually transformative,” she said. That fight against government and corporate forces taught her a lesson about change, and she gravitated to Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president in 2016. The progressive organizations Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats tapped her to run against longtime representative Joe Crowley in the 2018 midterms. Her Puerto Rican heritage and working-class experience (cleaning homes, tending bar) earned voters’ respect, and, to her astonishment, she won. Ocasio-Cortez quickly took the spotlight, promoting the Green New Deal and speaking out about racial, economic, and immigration injustices. “Well-behaved women rarely make history,” she believes. “Justice is about making sure that being polite is not the same thing as being quiet. In fact, the most righteous thing you can do is shake the table.”

A lively overview of a woman working to shape the nation's future.