Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress in November 2018. At the age of 28 years, the young Democratic socialist beat Joe Crowley who held the position for ten terms in the congressional primary. She had won the party primaries on June 26, 2008, before proceeding to win the General Elections in November. Her triumph became a significant hope to many liberals since, besides being her first time to run for office, she was a socialist with Perto Rican roots. Cortez came to public life as a Democratic socialist. Her fame increased when she joined Bernie Sanders’s campaign team in 2016 as an organizer for the Democratic presidential candidate. Her primary campaign tools for the Congress position included abolishing the ICE, tuition-free college, bringing reforms to the criminal justice system, universal healthcare.
According to her, the campaigns focused on the economic, social, and racial dignity of the working class in the United States, especially those who resided in Queens and the Bronx. In February 2019, Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts introduced the “Green New Deal (Kurtzleben, 2019).” The proposal aimed to help the United States switch to renewable sources, and promote the campaign to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The move is one of her significant ideas she brought to Congress since her election into office.
Background
Ocasio-Cortez is a daughter to a working-class Puerto Rican family in the Bronx, New York. She schooled at Yorktown High School. At the age of 17, she managed to get enough loans and scholarship to Boston University. In the first week of her Sophomore year, her father died of cancer with a death wish to make him proud (Biography, 2019). She studied economic and international relations and worked part-time to survive. Ocasio-Cortez believes that returning to the Bronx after school was the turning point of her life. As a single mother, Ocasio-Cortez’s mother worked as a cleaner, and the school bus driver and the family lived in poverty. They had got into massive debts, and the house faced a foreclosure. The experience prompted her to put her career ambitions on hold and get a job. Working as a waitress and bartender, she experienced sexual harassment, which she claims was a hard but formative experience. Her mother sold the house they lived in moved to Florida, where she works as a secretary.
Contributions to Social Work
Ocasio-Cortez is a socialist who has featured in various actions that demand the rights of citizens. A few weeks after President Trump won the Presidential elections, she drove to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation to participate in the Lakota Sioux’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. She also joined with Yalitza Aparicio, a Mexican breakout star, and has vowed to organize activism activities that advocate for the rights of domestic workers globally. According to her, fighting for the rights of domestic workers does not only help give better working conditions for the women but also improves the living standards of the women’s children. Her contributions to social work can also be witnessed in the proposition she has presented and advocated for in the Congress of making a policy that would see college students go to school for free. She also advocates for Medicare for all to improve healthcare delivery in the United States and make healthcare accessible and affordable. Ocasio-Cortez also organized the Latinx youth in the Bronx and across the United States. She also served as an Educational Director with the National Hispanic Institute from where she assists and encourages young people in the community to dream and participate in community leadership. Even after her election, she continues the working class people in corporate interests and advocates for social, economic, and environmental justice.
Ocasio-Cortez is a social worker who embraces the core values of service in various ways. After returning home when the family was in poverty, she postponed her career plans and looked for small-paying jobs to support her family. She worked as a waitress and as a bartender to help her mother, who worked several jobs, including cleaning for people and driving a school bus to help raise their family. During the presidential elections, she worked as a volunteer organizer in the Bernie Sanders campaigns.
The legislator has also proved to embrace the core values of social justice with her activism projects. For instance, she was part of the Dakota Access pipeline demonstrations in 2016. She has also been fighting for economic, social, and racial justice in various platforms where she emphasizes the need for the status quo in the US. Her campaign slogans are also a show of social justice reformer as she refers to factors like a living wage guarantee, immigrant rights, and the single-payer health system.
Furthermore, she has proved to be a person of dignity and values the worth of a person. She has shown the importance of human relations by working with different people in her activism and also demonstrated that she upholds dignity and competence. Her struggles both in the school and after school point to a competent individual while her ability to mobilize fundraisers for her campaigns are evidence of her belief on the importance of human relations. Her competence is also seen where she competed and won against Crowley, who was considered an influential Democrat and who chaired the party in Queens County. Besides, Crowley had never lost for ten consecutive terms. She also challenges the implementation of policies that only favors wealthy Americans while sidelining the working class. In one of her tweets in the social media, she posted New Rule: anyone that was cool with the GOP inventing $2 trillion out of thin air for freebies for people with yachts that have tiny yachts inside doesn’t get to demand how we pay for people who need chemotherapy treatments (Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (n.d.)).” The message was in relation to the issue that rich people were passing legislation on matters affecting the poor, yet they understood very little about the issues.
Ocasio-Cortez challenges oppression and priviledge in many ways, including participating in activism that leads to the suffering of the poor. For instance, she traveled from New York to Dakota in early 2016 to take part in the Standing Rock protests. The natives had organized a demonstration to oppose the construction of a crude oil pipeline that they feared was a threat to the sacred native lands and could also contaminate their water supply from the Missouri River. She has publicly condemned the action by the public that had impacted negatively on the economic conditions of the working class. Currently, she is pushing for a college-free policy that would help children of the working class to access college education more easily (How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Learned to Play by Washington’s Rules, 2019). She is also advocating for reforms in the healthcare system to ensure that the cost of healthcare is shared among all taxpayers and thus relieve the healthcare burden from the working class.
Ocasio-Cortez embraces a considerable level of professionalism both in the public and private life. She proves to be responsible when she states that she had to work as a bartender to provide for her family. She also shows responsibility by helping the Latynx youth prepare for college life. Her ability to conduct door to door campaigns for Bernie Sanders was also an indication that she is mature and trustworthy. Ocasio-Cortez shows flexibility and good interpersonal relations cooperating with Clinton’s campaigns as Democrat despite being Bernie Sanders’s campaigner.
Ocasio-Cortez has proved to be a force to reckon in the United States politics and a representative of the people. At a young age, she has written history as the youngest woman in Congress. Besides, she has made headlines in the entire country coming second, only to President Trump. Her success story serves as an inspiration to me just as much as she is to many young people in the United States. She has proven the ability to overcome barriers in pursuit of ambitions by winning elections regardless of her young age and financial position. Her activism to bring justice to the working class and fight against racial discrimination also point to a leader worth emulating. Ocasio-Cortez is among the few leaders who have fought for the rights of the working class and campaigns for the real issues that affect Americans.