Attacks on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's working-class background reveal that in America, poor people are trapped by poverty and impossible double standards
What is her working career background?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Unveils The Ugly Truth About Being Poor In America | HuffPost
The Cons on this board have bashed her for being a waitress.
I doubt she was a waitress very long. How was her college paid for?
Here is her life story for you, since you are so interested...
Ocasio-Cortez was born in
The Bronx,
New York City, on October 13, 1989, to Blanca Ocasio-Cortez (
née Cortez) and Sergio Ocasio.
[15] Her father, an architect of Puerto Rican descent, was born in the Bronx, while her mother was born in
Puerto Rico.
[16][17] Until age five, Ocasio-Cortez lived with her family in an apartment in the neighborhood of
Parkchester.
[17] The family then moved to a house in
Yorktown Heights, a suburb in
Westchester County.
[17] Growing up, Ocasio-Cortez regularly visited her extended family in the Bronx.
[18]
Ocasio-Cortez attended
Yorktown High School, graduating in 2007,
[19] where she won second prize in the
Intel International Science and Engineering Fair with a
microbiology research project on the effect of
antioxidantson
C. elegans' lifespan.
[20] As a result, the
International Astronomical Union named a small asteroid after her:
23238 Ocasio-Cortez.
[21][22] In high school, she took part in the
National Hispanic Institute's Lorenzo de Zavala (LDZ) Youth Legislative Session. She later became the LDZ Secretary of State while she attended
Boston University. Ocasio-Cortez had a
John F. Lopez Fellowship.
[23] In 2008, while Ocasio-Cortez was a sophomore at Boston University, her father died of lung cancer.
[24][25] During college, she was an intern in the immigration office of U.S. Senator
Ted Kennedy.
[26] She graduated
cum laude from Boston University's
College of Arts and Sciences in 2011 with a bachelor's degree in
international relations and a minor in economics.
[23][27][28]
Ocasio-Cortez has described her background as working-class, and relates many of her political positions to it. When her father died
intestate of lung cancer in 2008,
[29] she became involved in a long
probate battle to settle his estate. She has said that the experience helped her learn "firsthand 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".
[30]
Early career[edit]
After college, Ocasio-Cortez moved back to the Bronx, while she worked as a bartender in Manhattan and as a waitress in a
taqueria. Her mother, meanwhile, cleaned houses and drove school buses. After her father's death, Ocasio-Cortez and her mother struggled to fight
foreclosure of their home.
[31][32] With financial backing from
Sunshine Bronx Business Incubator, she established a publishing firm, Brook Avenue Press, which specializes in children's literature that portrays the Bronx in a positive light.
[33] She worked as lead educational strategist at GAGEis, Inc.
[34] Ocasio-Cortez was also an educator at the nonprofit National Hispanic Institute,
[35] in which role she served as the Educational Director of the 2017 Northeast Collegiate World Series, where she participated in a panel on Latino leadership.
[23]
In the 2016
primary, Ocasio-Cortez worked as an organizer for
Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign.
[36] After the general election, she traveled across America by car, visiting places such as
Flint, Michigan, and
Standing Rock, and speaking to people affected by the human rights violations related to the
Flint water crisis and the
Dakota Access Pipeline.
[37] In an interview she recalled her visit to Standing Rock as a tipping point, saying that before that, she had felt that the only way to effectively run for office was if you had access to wealth, social influence, and power. But her visit to North Dakota, where she saw others "putting their whole lives and everything that they had on the line for the protection of their community", inspired her to begin to work for her own community.
[38]