AOC and Her Suburbanite Upbringing Contrasts With Narratives – Since Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC, emerged ontp the national stage in 2018, she has portrayed herself as someone who grew up in a working-class home instead of a suburbanite.
She grew up in Yorktown, N.Y., a community located in Westchester County, about 40 miles north of New York City.
The town has a $143,000 media income, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. She has been accused of exaggerating how bad she had it growing up.
“My mom was a domestic worker – she cleaned houses to support our family. As a little girl, I grew up reading books on other people’s staircases. I did homework on other people’s dinner tables. Today, as a Congresswoman, I’m proud to cosponsor the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights,” AOC wrote on Twitter in 2019.
Her mother, Blanca Ocasio-Cortez, came from Puerto Rico. She had financial difficulties after Ocasio-Cortez’s father, Sergio Ocasio-Ramon, died from lung cancer in 2008 and worked as a waitress for a time after his passing to make ends meet, according to Marie Claire. She also worked as a housekeeper. Her father’s death left her mother with serious medical bills.
Ocasio-Cortez’s Father Owned a Business and Moved the Family to the Suburbs
Ocasio-Ramon owned Kirschenbaum & Ocasio-Roman Architects, PC, a firm that focused on home remodeling and renovations. He moved his family to Yorktown when Ocasio-Cortez was five, so his daughter could attend better schools. This detail usually is omitted in her official biography.
“It was clear to her, even then, that the zip code a child was born in determined much of their destiny,” Ocasio-Cortez’s official bio read.
Ocasio-Cortez was 19 when her father passed away, and she was a freshman at Boston University. She says she took out tens of thousands of dollars of student loans to afford the tuition, which hovers around $60,000 today. She was known as “Sandy Ocasio” at the time.
She interned in the office of Sen. Ted Kennedy while she was in college and volunteered on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Upon graduation from college in 2011, she founded Brook Avenue Press, a publishing house that seeks designers, artists, and writers from urban areas.
Defenders Say AOC Embodies American Dream
The congresswoman’s defenders say she embodies the American dream of upward social mobility.
“In reality, however, the upbringing Ocasio-Cortez is selling has always been a story about upward mobility purchased by leaving a disadvantaged neighborhood and the injustice facing those who lacked that opportunity,” Vox reporter Matthew Yglesias wrote in 2019. “In fact, it’s likely that no previous congressional candidate’s high school career has ever been subjected to as much scrutiny as Ocasio-Cortez. That’s in part simply because she’s very young and was in high school very recently. But she was also a noteworthy high school student who won a prestigious ISEF science fair prize in 2007 and consequently had an asteroid named after her.
“Since nothing about this is scandalous, opponents have taken to rummaging around more deeply into her childhood to prove she’s a faker.”
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
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