22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JULY 3-9, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com Some people find their way to what it means to lead a life of service. Laura Solorio was born into one. She was born and raised in Hollister, the daughter of Henry Solorio, who had long volunteered with community advocacy organizations. He registered people to vote, and eventually people pressed him to run for office. He became mayor, then a county supervisor. He was known for his honesty and his thoroughness, Solorio says, even though he’d only completed sixth grade before going to work in the fields. Solorio’s mother, meanwhile, regularly joined a group protesting international issues; closer to home, she visited labor camps to see what farmworker residents needed. “My parents were ahead of their time,” Solorio says. Given that upbringing, it’s no surprise that as soon as she was old enough, at age 18, Solorio ran successfully for a position on the Democratic Central Labor Committee of San Benito County. While her own political ambitions stopped there as far as campaigning for office, she’s active in many progressive causes locally, largely behind the scenes, fundraising for candidates. She was president of Protect Monterey County, the group that successfully got Measure Z passed in 2016. The countywide ban on fracking and the expansion of the oil and gas industry was largely unraveled in court, but she persisted—she advocated to Assemblymember Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay, and testified in front of an Assembly committee on Addis’ AB 3233. The bill, signed into law in 2024, gives local city and county governments the ability to ban, limit or regulate oil and gas projects. More recently, Solorio attended a training with the ACLU on the rights of protesters, and on June 14, volunteered to help people safely cross the street during Salinas’ No Kings protest. Solorio, a “nature person” who grows a native plant garden, has also served since 2017 on the board of the Elkhorn Slough Foundation. A retired physician who spent her career at Natividad hospital, she is now a member of Doctors for a Healthy Salinas, a group of physicians advocating for rent stabilization policies in the city. How is she so involved in so many things? “When you are in the community and people know what you represent and what you support, they just call you,” she says. “When you have a network of friends like I have, you are always connected.” She has been less connected to her family’s past historically, but she is working to remedy that. She recently traveled to Baja, Mexico, in search of information about her grandparents and her mother, who immigrated from there; her father was born in California. “As children, we never went to Mexico—we never had enough money to vacation,” Solorio says. Raised in an era of assimilation, she did not grow up speaking Spanish, although she heard her parents and grandparents speaking the language. “It’s such a loss,” Solorio says. Eventually, Spanish became her second language. She closely observed her mom’s cooking to learn Mexican classics. (Currently, she’s trying to master her corn tortillas.) Family DNA testing shows 50-percent of their origins to be indigenous, but a large portion of the indigenous population of Baja died during the mission period, leaving many unanswered questions. Even if there are questions about her ancestors’ origins, Solorio’s own personal journey shows a clear devotion to public service. After college, she ran a lab at a United Farm Workers clinic in Calexico, sampling urine cultures and drawing blood. A doctor there encouraged her to go to medical school, and she did—and then she went on to mentor young people interested in the medical field and presenting about career paths. “If you let life lead you somewhere, you just go,” she says. It’s led her to try to make change everywhere she can. Change Maker Born into a family of activists, Laura Solorio has been engaged since she can remember. By Sara Rubin A More Perfect Union Laura Solorio has a lengthy résumé of community involvement that officially dates back to the 1970s, but she’s been active her entire life, following in her parents’ footsteps. “If you let life lead you somewhere, you just go.” DANIEL DREIFUSS
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