AOC has 'awakened' to her Taino 'indigenous heritage'

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) said she ‘awakened’ to her ‘indigenous heritage’ during her 2016 protests with Native American tribes at a North Dakota oil pipeline.

The Puerto-Rican lawmaker says she is also part Taino – the people indigenous to the Caribbean, also known as Arawaks, who lived in countries like Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. Cuban President Fulgencio Batista (1940-1944) was also thought to be a descendant of the Tainos of Cuba, according to British historian Hugh Thomas.

AOC made the comments during an Instagram story Q&A session on Sunday in response to an anonymous self-identifying Puerto Rican who said they “wanted to learn” more about their Taino roots and traditions.

Ocasio-Cortez said standing beside indigenous American groups protesting the Standing Rock Pipeline is what made her want to investigate her own indigenous origins, describing it as a shared “commonality.”

“When I was at Standing Rock surrounded by Native people, Lakota Sioux, Cherokee, all people coming together, and I looked around, it really just clicked that this is us, and the grace that they extended to say, ‘No, you are a relative,’ was really formative for me,” Ocasio-Cortez said in the video.

“And while we may not be — and come from — the same exact lineage, there is a commonality to that ancestry,” she added.

“And it’s important for us to recognize that we were raised, and we were told growing up, that we were extinct, that Taíno don’t exist, and it’s really important for Puerto Ricans to understand that that narrative is being challenged right now.”

AOC continued by saying Americans had appropriated Taino culture, claiming that Jurican, the Taino diety of chaos and disorder, helped form the root of the word “hurricane,” according to the Daily Mail.

Born in the Bronx to Catholic Puerto Rican immigrants, Ocasio-Cortez has also claimed links to Sephardic Jews – one of the groups expelled from Spain during the Expulsion of the Jews, in 1492.