Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

I wake up every day, and I'm a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx. Every single day.

It was really my experience at Standing Rock that was pretty pivotal for me because I saw how corporations were literally militarizing themselves against American citizens so that they could kind of maximize their profit margins on fossil fuels.

Public schools in the late '80s and early '90s were a total mess... we felt that if I was going to have a good educational option in my life, I would have to go to a public school district that actually served its children.

I believe that every American should have stable, dignified housing; health care; education - that the most very basic needs to sustain modern life should be guaranteed in a moral society.

At Standing Rock, we experienced, first-hand, people coming together in their communities and trying to use the levers of representative democracy to try and say, 'We don't want this in our community; we don't want this in our backyard,' and corporations using their monetary influence to completely erode that process.

In terms of closing Rikers, we have to close Rikers, but we have to ensure that we're not just taking - that we're not continuing to incarcerate the same level of people. It doesn't do us much good if we close Rikers and then take that same amount of people and just distribute them to be incarcerated elsewhere.

We have a political culture of intimidation, of favoring, of patronage, and of fear, and that is no way for a community to be governed.

I think - I do think that we have to have a secure border. We need to make sure that people are, in fact, documented. But that doesn't mean that we threaten people's lives.

I knew that our community needed a very clear voice. and I think we deserved representation that rejected lobbyist funds and put our voters and our community first.

I'm used to people kind of knowing me in the community.

My mother cleaned homes and drove school buses, and when my family was on the brink of foreclosure... I started bartending and waitressing.

I wasn't born to a wealthy or powerful family - mother from Puerto Rico, dad from the South Bronx.