Solis was raised in La Puente, California by immigrant parents from Nicaragua and Mexico.
Her father was a Teamsters shop steward in Mexico and after coming to the U.S. worked at the Quemetco battery recycling plant in the City of Industry in the San Gabriel Valley. There he again organized for the Teamsters, to gain better health care benefits for workers, but also contracted lead poisoning.
Her mother worked for over 20 years on the assembly line of Mattel once her children were all of school age, belonged to the United Rubber Workers, and was outspoken about working conditions.
Solis served near the end of the Carter administration in the White House Office of Hispanic Affairs
At the start of the Reagan administration in 1981, she became a management analyst at the civil rights division of the Office of Management and Budget, but her dislike for Ronald Reagan’s policies motivated her to leave later that year
In her one term in the State Assembly, Solis was prominent in the debate on illegal immigration to the United States, backing a bill to allow immigrants in the U.S. illegally to attend California colleges as long as they were residing in the state
In 1997, she worked to pass environmental justice legislation with a law to protect low-income and minority communities from newly located landfills, pollution sources, and other environmental hazards in neighborhoods that already had such sites. She got the bill, SB 1113, approved over the strong opposition of various business interests, water contractors, and some state government agencies, but Wilson vetoed it
Solis was not a member of the Education and Labor Committee, but championed the Employee Free Choice Act and was the only member of Congress on the board of American Rights at Work, a pro-union organization that strongly supports the act, for whom she served as treasurer starting in 2004
For 2010, Solis’s agenda is to enact some ninety new rules and regulations intended to grant more power to unions and to workers
There. Fixed it.