The New Black View
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes eighth graders from Zeta Charter Schools on impromptu tour of U.S. Capitol building. For 115 years we have delivered award winning racial justice journalism —Eighth graders from Zeta Charter Schools in the Bronx were scheduled to tour the U.
S. Capitol building Wednesday morning when theOcasio-Cortez, who represents swaths of Queens and the Bronx where some Zeta students live, had already planned to greet the group on their tour. When she found out the tour was canceled, she decided to get the students into the building the only way she could: by personally escorting them. “It was a totally different direction than we thought the day would go,” said Dan Rojas, the school manager and one of the chaperones. “We knew that what we had planned was not going to happen in the way that we had planned it many months ago. It turned very, very quickly into, actually, a much better experience.” The adult chaperones were immediately star-struck when Ocasio-Cortez, a 35-year-old Democrat representing Queens and the Bronx who has shot to national prominence as a vocal leader of the party’s progressive wing, strolled up to the group outside the Capitol, Rojas said.“Before we actually met her, I had no idea who she was,” said 13-year-old Jordan Allen. But Allen was excited to learn about Ocasio-Cortez’s backstory of growing up in the Bronx and Westchester County and working as an organizer and bartender before unseating a powerful incumbent, Joe Crowley, at age 28 in the Democratic primary. The impromptu tour hit many of the major spots in the Capitol building, including the Rotunda and Senate chambers, where lawmakers just hours earlier had reached an impasse over health care funding and sent the government into a shutdown. Seeing the Capitol, eerily empty without its normal tours, in the immediate aftermath of the shutdown — the first in seven years — made the Zeta students feel like they were witnessing history.The tour led by Ocasio-Cortez, often referred to as AOC, also included some stops that aren’t on the normal visitor agenda. The tour focused on the long history of discrimination facing female lawmakers — and their creativity in overcoming it. Ocasio-Cortez took the students to aShe told them about Patsy Mink, the first woman of color elected to the House of Representatives, and Shirley Chisholm, the Brooklyn native and first Black woman in Congress whose portrait now hangs in the Capitol. For 12-year-old Maia Gilliam, it was seeing Ocasio-Cortez in action that made the biggest impression.“She made the tour a lot more interesting,” added 13-year-old Zachary Martinez. Ocasio-Cortez wanted the students to leave the tour feeling like they were welcome at the Capitol — a building she reminded them is called “the people’s house” — said Karla Santillan, a spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez who joined the tour. Some Zeta students left feeling hopeful they can make a positive change at a moment when political divisions have never felt sharper and the federal government has ground to a halt. “I feel like all these old people are often not making good decisions, and it’s really affecting us a lot,” said Martinez. “But as time goes on, people of our generation, or even people coming close to our generation, they’re making big changes. They’re changing the world. They’re making it better for everyone.”Since 1909, bringing you the news that mainstream media just doesn't.“The Other Americans” depicts the American Dream turning into a nightmare
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