Breitbart | Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party’s rising socialist
star, describes herself as “a girl from the Bronx” to project a
working-class image. However, this claim is only half true – to borrow a
phrase from the left-wing website PolitiFact.
“Well, you know, the president is from Queens, and with all due
respect — half of my district is from Queens — I don’t think he knows
how to deal with a girl from the Bronx,” Ocasio-Cortez said this week on
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
She similarly told the Washington Post:
“I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family — mother from Puerto
Rico, dad from the South Bronx. I was born in a place where your Zip
code determines your destiny.”
The congressional candidate, who pulled off an upset win
against high-ranking establishment Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY), was indeed
born in New York City’s Bronx borough. She currently lives there, too.
So what’s the issue? For most of her formative years, Ocasio-Cortez
was actually raised in one of the United States’ wealthiest counties.
Around the age of five, Alexandria’s architect father Sergio Ocasio
moved the family from the “planned community” of Parkchester in the
Bronx to a home in Yorktown Heights, a wealthy suburb in Westchester
County. The New York Times describes her childhood home as “a modest two-bedroom house on a quiet street.” In a 1999 profile of the area, when Ocasio-Cortez would have been ten years old, the Times lauded Yorktown Heights’ “diversity of housing in a scenic setting” – complete with two golf courses.
The paper quoted Linda Cooper, the town supervisor, describing
Yorktown as ”a folksy area where people can come, kick off their shoes,
wander around, sit in a cafe, listen to a concert in the park, or go to
the theater.”
