Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Xiomara Maribel Cortés SolanoM.D., F.A.C.S., known colloquially as Xo, is a researcher, and pediatric surgeon with board certifications in fetal surgery. She is currently the Chief of Pediatric Surgery at Metro-General Hospital in New York.
Born of Captain Javier Solano Fortis, an NYPD police captain, and Julieta Cortés de Solano, a former U.S. Navy nurse, and an OR scrub nurse, Xiomara was raised in a comfortable but stringent lifestyle in Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York with her older brother, Victor Solano.
Xiomara is bilingual; she was raised speaking English and Spanish and was nicknamed "Marita" within her family. As a young girl, her maternal grandfather passed away and while she was too young to understand the significance of death, Xiomara marked a particular change in her mother that festered as the years went by.
Raised devoutly Catholic, she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls private school in an accelerated program. Like her older brother Victor, Xiomara was raised on the notion that school and family come before all else, encouraging a distinguished academic career. However, the Solano family's pragmatic and emotionally distant patterns have sunk into individual dynamics, such as that of Xiomara and her mother, Julieta,and, for most of her childhood, her relationship with her brother.
With a nine-year age difference between them and Victor's military deployment during her teenage years, Xiomara has never felt like her brother was something more than an entity who understood how cold their mother's womb was. Coupled with a subconscious estrangement fostered by the fact that Xiomara was Javier's only daughter and his soft spot, while Julieta consistently favored and made excuses for her eldest child, Victor, both siblings developed a streak of competition that earned the Solano family a formidable reputation. However, as they matured they rekindled their relationship to that of familiarity, but not quite intimacy.
A prodigious child, Xiomara was a star student who participated in gymnastics and, at her father's behest, became proficient in the art of jiu-jitsu for self-defense. Her academic prowess was refined to the quality demanded for her early admittance into college and medical school at Columbia University. Being a very young admit in a competitive professional track and deprived of community and familial warmth, Xiomara's lonely upbringing continued to haunt her. Until the middle of medical school, where she would meet PhD-candidate and Alchemax protégé, Miguel O'Hara, at a party. Struck by the other's likenesses and intellectual distinction, the two would enjoy an intimate relationship where priorities were far and few. School, each other, and family.
But family would come and go, beginning with the death of Captain Solano following Xiomara's graduation from medical school. It was soon after, during her surgical internship, she discovered she was pregnant with Miguel's baby. Immediately following this reveal, the two were married. Xiomara was twenty-one, the same age as her mother when she first had a child.
