Hilda Solis (D-CA 31)
Biography

After eight years in the California legislature, Hilda Solis was elected last year to represent the state's 31st Congressional District.

Solis served in the California State Assembly from 1992 to 1994, and the following year became the first Latina elected to the State Senate. As chairman of the Industrial Relations Committee, she led efforts to raise the minimum wage in the state from $4.25 to $5.75. After being vetoed twice by then Governor Pete Wilson, the wage hike was eventually passed as a ballot initiative in 1996.

Solis also worked on legislation to combat domestic violence and define spousal rape. When she was elected to the state senate, her district had shelters for abused animals, but none for humans, she recalled. Solis got federal funds to open the district's first shelter.

Solis earned a master's degree in public administration from the University of Southern California. She served in the White House Office of Hispanic Affairs during the Carter administration, and later as an analyst at the Office of Management and Budget. The daughter of Mexican and Nicaraguan immigrants, Solis was the first in her family to graduate from college.

In August of 2000, she became the first woman awarded the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award for her work on environmental issues. She has been endorsed and recognized by a number of environmental and labor groups, including the AFL-CIO and the Sierra Club.

Profile

Hilda Solis represents what might be called the other L.A. Crisscrossed by miles of concrete freeways, scarred with abandoned quarries and landfill sites, California's 31st Congressional District seems a world away from the glamour of Hollywood.

Solis, 43, comes to Washington as a traditional Democrat: supporting abortion rights and gun control, looking for ways the federal government can do more to help a district battered by high unemployment, a housing shortage, polluted water and smog. The biggest landfill west of the Mississippi sits in Solis' district -- 22 stories deep, directly over the water table.

"Communities like mine are hurting," she said in a recent interview. "The federal government plays a big role here. We can demand cleanup, we can demand clean water, let's unite and see that our community has the same crack at those federal funds just like any other community."

As a freshman House member, her primary role, she said, is to be "a voice for the voiceless," helping her constituents speak up and ask for help.

The district is 65 percent Latino, 25 percent Asian and solidly Democratic. Solis was elected easily, ousting a nine-term incumbent Democrat who leaned to the right and eventually defected to the GOP.

It is a district where 12-year-olds have organized a gun buy-back program to get firearms off the streets. "Folks in my district want to see more restrictions on guns. They feel afraid at night when they hear gunshots," Solis said. "These are real stories. We know people die. "

So far, Solis says, she has learned the ropes quickly but is disappointed by the early victories of the Bush administration in rolling back environmental protection and workplace regulations designed to reduce injuries.

"Most of the people back home don't know what the ergonomic regulation rollback really means in terms of workplace safety," she said. "Most of the people affected by those injuries are women. The legislation was rushed through so fast I didn't even have time to get the word out back home. It seemed almost deliberate."

She said she hopes to support the president on some issues but realizes they come from vastly different philosophical grounds.

"I hear a lot about government being too large," she said. "I agree there are areas we can do a better job -- make things simpler, eliminate redundancy --- [but] sometimes the government has to be there to correct something that was wrong."

She hopes to push initiatives granting in-state tuition rates to illegal immigrants, and to expand health care coverage for undocumented workers.

It's not enough, she said, for the president to speak a few lines of serviceable Spanish during photo-ops, she said. She wants action to help the Latinos in her district, for whom college is often a financial impossibility.

"Many of them have children here who only speak English, they don't know Mexico, they don't know El Salvador," she said. "This is their home."

Even when the administration and the Democrats agree, Solis complained there is little effort to work together. In February, she spearheaded efforts to grant temporary protective status to undocumented immigrants from El Salvador fleeing two devastating earthquakes -- an issue that directly affects nearly 100,000 people in Los Angeles County.

"We didn't hear a word back from the White House or from congressional Republicans that anything was going to be done," she recalled. "Then, lo and behold... the president of El Salvador comes and we get word that it's going to be granted.

"I want to believe that our hard work -- making noise outside the White House fence -- had something to do with that, but if that is the way things are going to work for the next three years, so be it. I am going to talk about the truth, what I know is happening in the real America, in my district, whether the other side wants to hear it or not."