Solis’ political style and her agenda evolved from her upbringing as the daughter of naturalized citizens. Her father, a worker at a battery recycling plant in the San Gabriel Valley, organized immigrant co-workers for the Teamsters Union to gain improved health care benefits. Solis herself broke through cultural barriers to be the first in her family to finish college.

An energetic lawmaker in her fourth term, she advocates for women, immigrants’ rights, education, worker safety and better access to health care. Central to her career in the California Legislature and now in Congress has been eradication of toxic waste in poor neighborhoods and other “environmental justice” issues, earning Solis (soh-LEEZ) a Kennedy Profile in Courage Award from the Kennedy Library in 2000. She belongs to the Progressive Caucus, the group of the most liberal House Democrats.

In Solis’ second term, her close alliance with then Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California led to a coveted seat on the Energy and Commerce Committee. Solis became the top-ranking Democrat on its environment subcommittee, but on a panel where seniority matters, her relatively junior status kept her from securing the gavel when Democrats took control of the House in 2007 and instead she was made vice chairwoman.

Still, her loyalty to Pelosi and her aggressive fundraising for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee earned her a spot as one of two vice chairmen of the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, which makes all-important committee assignments. She also is a senior member of the leadership’s whip team.

As the 110th Congress (2007-08) opened, Solis was part of a rebellion by women in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus who objected that Chairman Joe Baca , a California Democrat, had been demeaning to women and had abused the group’s political action committee. Solis was among six caucus members in 2006 who cut ties to the group’s political action committee after it made campaign contributions to Baca’s two sons in their unsuccessful races for seats in the California Legislature. Solis said there was a general “lack of respect afforded to women members of the Hispanic Caucus.” Baca called the claims “categorically untrue.”

On Energy and Commerce, one of her top targets is the Environmental Protection Agency, which has delayed cleanup of superfund hazardous waste sites and enforcement of the leaky underground storage tank program. Solis’ district includes dozens of drinking water wells that have been shut down because of the presence of perchlorate, a rocket fuel and munitions component. The Bush administration is “siding too much with the industries that need to be regulated,” she says.

In 2006, Solis and New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone Jr. won House support to block the EPA’s plan to scale back public disclosure of chemical and waste releases under the Toxics Release Inventory. The administration argued that the process was burdensome for small businesses.

In her early days in the House, Solis was on the Education and the Workforce Committee, where she defied then GOP Chairman John A. Boehner of Ohio over his proposal to combine minority-serving institutions with special education programs in one subcommittee. She organized her network of college presidents to block the move.

Solis’ agenda is rooted in the San Gabriel Valley where she grew up. “In places like the assembly plant my father worked at, where they recycled batteries, there were a lot of contaminants and people were getting ill,” she says. While in the California Legislature, she overcame opposition from GOP Gov. Pete Wilson and the business community to win passage of “environmental justice” legislation to address pollution in poor neighborhoods, which Wilson vetoed and Democratic Gov. Gray Davis later signed.

Solis is the third of seven children of immigrants who met in a citizenship class. Her father arrived in the United States from Mexico and worked blue-collar jobs. Her mother came from Nicaragua and worked for a toymaker after her last children, twins, were born. Solis and her siblings were in charge of the babies and chores. “It wasn’t what you would call the all-American life for a young girl growing up,” she says. “We had to mature very quickly.”

Her mother stressed education, sometimes using a jar of uncooked pinto beans to teach the children addition and multiplication — “our abacus, Latino-style,” Solis quips. She was the first in her family to go to college, encouraged by a school counselor, who came to her house to help her fill out college and financial aid applications.

Solis earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and a graduate degree in public administration. As part of her graduate studies, Solis wrote dozens of letters and landed a job as a newsletter editor for the Carter administration’s White House Office of Hispanic Affairs. At the start of the Reagan administration, she moved to the Office of Management and Budget’s civil rights division, but the undoing of Carter’s policies drove her back home. She got a job with a state program helping disadvantaged students prepare for college.

Her first election was in 1985, to the Rio Hondo Community College board. She moved on to the California Assembly in 1992 and to the state Senate in 1994, becoming its youngest member and first Hispanic woman.