Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born on October 13, 1989, in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx, New York City. Her father, Sergio Ocasio-Roman, was born in the Bronx to a Puerto Rican family and became an architect; her mother, Blanca Ocasio-Cortez (née Cortés Rivera), was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Arecibo. She has a younger brother, Gabriel. The family lived in an apartment in Parkchester until Ocasio-Cortez was five, when they moved to a small house in suburban Yorktown Heights. According to Ocasio-Cortez, her parents pooled their savings to buy the home so that their children could attend better public schools; her mother worked as a house cleaner and school bus driver.

Ocasio-Cortez attended Yorktown High School, graduating in 2007. She placed second in the microbiology category of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2007 with a research project testing the effects of antioxidants on the lifespan of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. In high school, she participated in the National Hispanic Institute's Lorenzo de Zavala Youth Legislative Session. Her first job was as a hostess at an Irish pub in Westchester County. After graduating from high school, she served as an LDZ Secretary of State while attending Boston University. She was also a John F. Lopez Intern.

Her father died of lung cancer in 2008, during her second year of college, and she became involved in a lengthy probate dispute over his estate. She said the experience taught her "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". During college, Ocasio-Cortez interned in the Boston office of U.S. senator Ted Kennedy, working on foreign affairs and immigration issues. She said that, as the office's only Spanish speaker, she handled calls from Spanish-speaking constituents. Ocasio-Cortez graduated cum laude from Boston University in 2011 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, double-majoring in international relations and economics.

After college, Ocasio-Cortez moved back to the Bronx, where she worked as a bartender and waitress to help her mother avoid foreclosure on their family home. She later launched Brook Avenue Press, a publishing venture intended to produce books portraying the Bronx favorably. …

Before running for Congress, Ocasio-Cortez worked as an organizer for the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign. After the election, she traveled across the U.S. by car, visiting places such as Flint, Michigan, and the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, and speaking to people affected by the Flint water crisis and the Dakota Access Pipeline. In an interview, she recalled her December 2016 visit to Standing Rock as a tipping point, saying that until then she had believed that the only way to run for office effectively was to have 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. One day after she visited North Dakota, she received a call from Brand New Congress, which was recruiting progressive candidates (her brother had nominated her soon after Election Day 2016). Ocasio-Cortez said she was first exposed to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) when a friend brought her to a local meeting in Washington Heights. She has credited Jabari Brisport's unsuccessful City Council campaign with restoring her belief in electoral politics, in running as a socialist candidate, and in the DSA as an organization.

Ocasio-Cortez began her campaign in April 2017 while waiting tables and tending bar at Flats Fix, a taqueria in New York City's Union Square. "For 80 percent of this campaign, I operated out of a paper grocery bag hidden behind that bar", she told Bon Appétit. She was the first person since 2004 to challenge Joe Crowley, the Democratic Caucus Chair, in the primary. She faced a financial disadvantage, saying, "You can't really beat big money with more money. You have to beat them with a totally different game." Ocasio-Cortez's campaign undertook grassroots mobilization and did not take donations from corporations. Her campaign posters were said to have been inspired by "revolutionary posters and visuals from the past".

The candidates' only face-to-face encounter during the campaign occurred on a local political talk show, Inside City Hall, on June 15. The format was a joint interview conducted by Errol Louis, which NY1 characterized as a debate. A debate in the Bronx was scheduled for June 18, but Crowley did not participate. He sent former New York City Council member Annabel Palma in his place.

Ocasio-Cortez was endorsed by progressive and civil-rights organizations such as MoveOn and Democracy for America. Governor Andrew Cuomo endorsed Crowley, as did both of New York's U.S. senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, multiple U.S. representatives, various local elected officials and trade unions, and groups such as the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, the Working Families Party, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, among others. California representative Ro Khanna, who, like Ocasio-Cortez, was backed by Justice Democrats, initially endorsed Crowley but later endorsed Ocasio-Cortez in an unusual dual endorsement.

On June 26, 2018, Ocasio-Cortez received 56.7% of the vote (16,898) to Crowley's 43.3% (12,880). The result immediately attracted nationwide attention and was widely described as an upset, including by Time, CNN, The New York Times, and The Guardian. She was outspent by a margin of 18 to 1 ($1.5 million to $83,000) but was endorsed by some influential groups on the party's left. …

Ocasio-Cortez has been described as progressive, left-wing, left-wing populist, and far-left.

"I believe that in a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live."

Ocasio-Cortez has rejected state socialism, calling it "undemocratic" and "easily corrupted", and has argued from a liberal socialist framework in support of unionization and worker cooperatives. She has argued that free-market economies and democratic socialism are compatible, citing cooperatives as a model.

Ocasio-Cortez supports raising the marginal tax rate on top income earners to fund the implementation of her policy goals. She was among the 46 House Democrats who voted against final passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. Ocasio-Cortez has called for reducing defense spending. In December 2022, she was the only House Democrat to vote against an omnibus spending package because it increased funding for defense and federal agencies that oversee immigration.

In late 2020, Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib proposed a public banking bill to encourage creation of state and local public banks by giving them access to facilities from the Federal Reserve and setting national guidelines on public banking. In April 2021, Ocasio-Cortez announced a bill that she and three senators had introduced to implement postal banking pilot programs in rural and low-income urban neighborhoods where millions of households cannot access or afford standard banking services.

Ocasio-Cortez has been a vocal supporter of labor rights, including a $15 hourly federal minimum wage. In May 2019, she returned to bartending at the Queensboro Restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens, to promote the Raise the Wage Act, which would increase the minimum hourly wage for restaurant servers and other tipped workers from $2.13 to $15. Speaking to restaurant workers, customers, and reporters, she criticized an exemption in the U.S. …

After the death of Ocasio-Cortez's father in 2008, her mother and grandmother moved to Florida due to financial hardship. She still has family in Puerto Rico, where her grandfather lived in a nursing home before he died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Ocasio-Cortez has said that "to be Puerto Rican is to be the descendant of ... African Moors [and] slaves, Taino Indians, Spanish colonizers, Jewish refugees, and likely others. We are all of these things and something else all at once—we are Boricua." She has said that her family has Sephardic Jewish ancestry.

Ocasio-Cortez is a Catholic. She discussed her faith and its impact on her life and her campaign for criminal justice reform in a 2018 article she wrote for America, the magazine of the Jesuit order in the United States.

Ocasio-Cortez began dating Riley Roberts while they were both attending Boston University. They broke up after graduating, but later rekindled their relationship. Roberts moved to New York City to be with her and the couple lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Parkchester, the Bronx. In January 2020, they acquired a French Bulldog named Deco, after the Art Deco movement. Ocasio-Cortez and Roberts became engaged in Puerto Rico in April 2022. The couple ended their engagement in 2024.

In May 2025, it was reported that Ocasio-Cortez lived in East Elmhurst, Queens. In August 2026, she announced that she intended to freeze her eggs and began documenting the process on Instagram to educate women about their reproductive options.

Based on her 2018 financial disclosure, OpenSecrets estimated that Ocasio-Cortez had a net worth of no more than $30,000, placing her among the least wealthy members of the 116th Congress.

In February 2021, Ocasio-Cortez said that earlier in her life she had been sexually assaulted. In 2022, she elaborated that, when she was 22 or 23, she had been raped by a man she was dating at the time and that the assault had been "pivotal" in leading her to run for office, though she did not realize that at the time. She said she did not report the assault to police and that the man later denied raping her when she confronted him about the incident.

In February 2021, Ocasio-Cortez recounted her experience of the January 6 United States Capitol attack in an Instagram Live broadcast. …