Victoria Vergara possesses a third-grade education and the confident voice of a natural leader.
She makes beds and cleans bathrooms for a living but tells her daughters that the U.S.A. is a country "where you can fly if you want to." After listening to her tell her story in her humble home in West Adams, I was inclined to agree.
Thanks to the magic of American possibility and her own Latina tenacity, Vergara has escaped the cruel poverty of southern Mexico and reinvented herself as a U.S. citizen and homeowner.
In her life's journey, she's crossed paths with many great and famous people. In October, she met Sen. Barack Obama. And she knows his nominee for Labor secretary, U.S. Rep. Hilda Solis.
"Hilda is a very humble and down-to-earth person," Vergara told me in Spanish. "I don't think I'm wrong about her. She's not a person who will ever turn her back on us."
When Obama nominated Solis to his Cabinet, it was a deep bow of respect in the direction of Los Angeles and its working people. Obama was acknowledging, albeit indirectly, the power of the Southern California labor movement, a strength that's been built with the sweat and struggle of immigrant workers like Vergara.
Immigrant activists revitalized the American labor movement in the final decades of the 20th century. They made Southern California a hotbed of union militancy. Solis, 51, has strong ties to that movement.
Union dollars and precinct walkers helped send Solis to Washington in 2000, when she defeated an incumbent congressman. She is the L.A.-born daughter of immigrants from Mexico and Nicaragua -- her father was a Teamster shop steward at a battery-recycling plant in Industry.
"My vision of the Department of Labor is rooted in who I am," Solis said Friday at her Senate confirmation hearing in Washington. "The fact that I'm sitting before you today as a child of an immigrant family, a working family, is proof that in America anything is possible."
Vergara, 52, was born in Michoacan, Mexico, and is a "room attendant" at the Westin Bonaventure, where she earns an hourly wage of $13.60. She's also a shop steward in her Los Angeles union, a position she earned thanks to her loyalty to labor's collective cause and her willingness to speak her mind.
"I want you to write this," she commands me. "That we Latinas are not all on welfare. I've never taken a dollar of assistance. Not even when I was left alone with my two girls because their father died. . . . We are workers, not beggars."
