Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has already made history with her campaign to challenge Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley for his seat in Congress: The 28-year-old Bronx-born woman is the first person to face off against Crowley in a primary election in 14 years. She has shocked skeptics by even getting on the ballot for the June 26 primary election, which will determine the Democratic nominee for New York’s 14th Congressional District. The contest heated up last week when The New York Times editorial board called out Crowley for skipping two debates with Ocasio-Cortez. Crowley’s seat, representing part of Queens and the Bronx, the board wrote, “is not his entitlement. He’d better hope that voters don’t react to his snubs by sending someone else to do the job.” Which is exactly what might happen tomorrow, if Ocasio-Cortez—who just nine months ago was running her campaign while still working as a server in a restaurant—wins the nomination.

Ocasio-Cortez is part of a number of young women of color who are challenging establishment incumbents in the Democratic Party. A third-generation New Yorker whose family has roots in Puerto Rico, Ocasio-Cortez looks a lot more like the constituents in the very diverse 14th District than Crowley, a 56-year-old white man. The optics of the race, then, also reflect a battle for the future of party leadership: Who is better equipped to represent the largely working-class and non-white Americans in the 14th, and in places like it all over the country?

But Ocasio-Cortez’s challenge goes far beyond surface level; Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a leftist organization that has helped buoy the campaigns of dozens of outsider candidates running on very progressive platforms in places where Democrats like Crowley are used to winning—handily. Some of Ocasio-Cortez’s positions include fighting for Medicare for All and a federal jobs guarantee, abolishing ICE, and insisting on much more severe policing of luxury real estate development (part of the reason she has refused corporate donations). Her push on economic justice has exposed ways that Crowley, as a powerful Democrat who sits on the House Committee on Ways and Means, pays lip service to the post–Donald Trump resistance while maintaining largely centrist politics. Newcomers like Ocasio-Cortez and Cynthia Nixon, who is hoping to unseat Governor Andrew Cuomo (Nixon and Ocasio-Cortez have endorsed each other), have already helped spur a leftward shift in some of the stances of their opponents.

Ocasio-Cortez spoke to Vogue on the phone last week before heading to a child detention center in Tornillo, Texas. Trump’s family separation policy has been a flash point not just along partisan lines, but also between Democrats: those who denounce ICE’s action but refuse to call for its dismantling, like Crowley, and those who believe it should not exist. It’s an issue that has also created a debate around “civility,” as pundits squabble over whether or not Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, for example, should have been heckled out of a Mexican restaurant last week. As the people’s millennial challenger, Ocasio-Cortez weighed in on what needs to change in New York, in elections, and in how we talk about holding those in power accountable.

What does being born and raised in New York mean to you and your family? How has it changed?