LA on Fire and in Solidarity

Sara Dar Salcedo grew up in a rancho in rural northern.

Mexico in a beautiful ranch.

When he was a teenager, his family moved to the La area, a far cry from ranch life, but Sal took to his new home and found his life's work.

I worked on some of the best salons in La as an assistant, and then I got my own chair and I decided to open up my own space at age twenty eight. And my salon is about to be seven years old and Carnovo Art Salon, and I love it.

It's a safe space where everyone's welcome.

When where people can come in and make the dreams come reality.

Sal also moved to a neighborhood that he really.

Loved, Altadina. It's the most in my opinion, the most communal, beautiful place.

Two weeks ago, Sal took a vacation in Baja, his former hometown, and as he drove back to his home in Altadena to his family, his partner called him, she's.

Be really careful. The wind's getting crazier getting clothes. Maybe like about an hour away from Altadena, and.

I call another friend of mine who lives really close to the mountain I said, Jess, how are you? She says, dude, look at this and the fire's like right outside her house, and she's like, we're grabbing everything.

Where are you?

And just start really just feeling, you know, like, oh my goodness.

I start speeding up.

I started driving faster and faster, skipping trees and branches, and all I see is lines of cars getting out of Altadena.

Sal was heading towards the fire as people were fleeing from it. He got home to his six year old son and his partner. It was around seven pm and the power had been out for hours, so they all put headlamps on and started packing, grabbing clothes, documents, water, and crates for their pets.

We have about three cats and a dog.

They spent about thirty minutes loading up the car.

Oh, I did grab honey, honey in a pack of butter. That's what we grabbed because we love honey and butter. We figured it will be all right.

They hugged, prayed, and left. Sal was headed for his hair salon in downtown LA without a plan. During the drive, friends started calling asking if he and his family had a place to go, and a couple of hours later they ended up going to a close friend's house in Crenshaw, an area safe from the fires. Sal didn't sleep much the first night away from home.

I kept waking up. I will fry it.

At one point I had a dream myself us like my family on fire.

And then.

The next morning I just felt like I had to go.

So he drove to Aldadina alone. Police cars, firefighters everywhere, houses still on fire. His neighborhood turned to ashes.

I didn't know emotionally what to do. You know, it was just odd. It was odd.

Some houses were just completely gone nothing. There was a lot of chimney standing.

And then South saw what was left of his house.

So my chimney was standing, maybe like parts of the wall were standing, like the arches. Mainly all the ceramics stay, you know. So there was this wall, the entrance of a wall. I have a Buddha, a Buddha statue. He's there meditating, and then there's a sun in the moon that I got in and baja like little clay, and all the pots from my plants are there.

South thought of all the things he wished he had brought with him.

It's almost like when you you know, life flashes before you looking at things like I have some pictures of my parents. Pictures that we have are pieces. I mean, I love boots. I have these beautiful leather boots. If I would have done, I would to grab my boots because those probably were my precious things.

But I didn't, you.

Know, because you're looking at your your animals, and you're looking at your family, and I kept checking on my son that he's okay, and so it's almost like every time you're thinking about grabbing something, you just don't, at least for us, because it's just a sense of like, no, let's make sure that.

We get out of here.

We did not think for a one second that our house would have been burned. We're very very faithful people, very spiritual people. You start thinking of beautiful things that happened there, you should thinking how do I share those with my family?

How do I tell my son? How do I tell my parents?

That's really when I broke down, when I called my my dad.

Yeah, Sal remembered the first time his dad came to see his new house. How his dad joked with Sal telling him that he'd never be bored as a homeowner now because it would always be something to fix. The landlord who no more landlords.

Son, I learned to love our house because I was always on the move, you know, I've always I never owned anything, And so for me, the idea of loss is very interesting because I did allow myself to attach to this beautiful place where it's the American dream.

Really, you know, I came from another country.

I made it.

I thought I have a place, I have a business, I have a beautiful family, and then just to see it be gone in a matter of hours. I still don't comprehend what it's like. Like, like I said, the emotions, like you hear me, I'm like laughing, I'm biggling and I'm crying.

Like it's really hard for them mind to wrap around it.

So we are.

A thin that sadds me the most is my son's school being gone, because those people, those children are just amazing and so all the parents. You know, it's I call a heaven on Earth.

From evacuation day on every day, sal has been happily overwhelmed with support. Support that shows up in different ways social media fundraising efforts, surprise visits at his hair salon from friends and clients, and in the kind of cross cultural solidarity that's very on brand for La. He has his Chinese in laws dropping off Chinese Tamalis and his

Like my son, the beautiful things I heard, he was sad. He said, oh man, my school burn. I'm not going to be able to go play anymore. And then a couple of seconds lighter, he said, well, maybe I'll buy my friends to go play in the ashes. You know, I think children get it as always possibilities. I hope we can continue to see possibilities.

Los Angeles has never seen this level of destruction, this level of loss, and with social media, many of us are seeing things that are breaking our hearts from afar, like that video outside of the McDonald's when the winds were so extreme that the flames seemed to be spreading sideways by a blowtorch, or the aerial images of thick, red and orange clouds moving like a strong undersea current.

SMOKEAVSCA, no there in the karade.

The firefighters have told people not to stay home.

He says, you live.

Here right I live right there. Okay, they saved your house, Your neighbors saved your house. My neighbor, I work for him.

I work for my neighbor, and I helped his family, and he helped mine.

Subasino or moments of strength, like this young Latina nurse standing in a light haze outside of a nursing home. She spoke to Chris cavezas a reporter from Los Angeles Telemundo about helping elderly folks evacuate.

Cos because I got up Alidad and suskas Perianos or the La Silla.

Wou See.

She says, they had to help patients who couldn't move. It was four of us, she says, me, someone who works in the kitchen, and two police officers struggling to get people out.

And most persona's Joe.

She said she hadn't fully processed everything that happened. I mean how do you process something of this magnitude. Dozens of people dead and over two hundred thousand people displaced, entire communities burned to ashes. This is reportedly going to be one of the costliest natural disasters in US history, and it's happening in the city with the largest Latino population in the United States. From Futuro Media and PRX,

Of course, thank you so much, and I mean the outpouring of support nationally for Los Angeles and our city has been really moving, so I'm also really grateful for everyone sending love and support our way.

Of course, can you start by giving us an idea of just the scope of destruction up until this point, you know where we're not in the first few days, anymore more than a week has gone by. What are we talking about here?

I think we're still a ways away from fully understanding the scope of what has happened. The death toll is at least twenty four people. Two hundred thousand people had to evacuate, and tens of thousands of structures, so that includes businesses, schools, homes, They were all destroyed. It's really an incalculable loss that the city has gone through. It's still not over, so we're very much still in this devastation, still don't know what's to come, and hopefully the fires.

Can continue to be somewhat contained.

And are there stories of people that you and your colleagues have met that sort of show us the different levels of devastation that we're talking here, loss of structures, loss of history, loss of jobs, loss of community that you can share with us.

Yeah, so we're just hearing these overwhelming stories from folks one of my colleagues, Aaron Schrenk, spoke to a USC professor named Laura Muskita, who's an expert on geriatric care. She was volunteering at the Pasadena Civic Center where a lot of nursing home residents had been evacuated.

To you have nursing home residents who are developing pressure ulcers or their pressure ulcers getting worse because they're left sitting upright because they've run out of cots. They brought in cots last night that were the height of massage tables. You know, they're higher than my waist. You can't lift somebody who's ninety five years old and put them up on there and expect they're not going to ball off onto the concrete floor.

People who you know, need assistants using the restroom, and they don't have access to bathrooms or in continence care, and so they're having to change in public, in front of everyone.

With no privacy. So just a really difficult scene.

Of course, another aspect of this fire that is really heartbreaking is that Alta Dina is one of the places that's been most affected. This is a historic black and minority neighborhood during the Civil rights movement. It was one of the few communities that offered housing loans to Black Americans that were redlined out of other parts of Los Angeles.

We spoke to people whose.

Homes held four generations of a black family that had been redlined, and now that home is gone. So to think of the history there that has lost the community, it's staggering.

My concern is worth the black Alcademians who have bought a home and we can't come back to that home.

And I was exciting that my parents were red.

Lines to live where they lived. They couldn't live on the east side of Lake, they had to stay on the west side. That's why I'm real estate.

And they bought it in nineteen eighty five.

Or one hundred and thirty five thousand dollars, so that was worth like what a million? One million?

May we can't love that, I can't come back.

And another story that's sort of sticking with me is Fernando Lopez. He's one of the founders of leg Lagazza, which is a very popular Wahakan restaurant here in La He started a mutual aid fund for domestic workers. So his mother was a domestic worker and he immediately realized that, you know, we're seeing a lot of these images of these really fancy mansions, specifically in the Palisades on the

That really is, you know, something to pass in think about, because there are folks landscapers, house cleaners that are completely out of income.

Yeah, and you know, we're still we're starting to get stories of farm workers that are affected, that are still picking crops during these fires. Who you know, it's already because of pesticides and other issues, the air quality in those areas is not the best. And on top of that, now with these wildfires and the burning embers, so people doing really difficult things to make sure that all of us get fed under very dangerous conditions for themselves.

There's a lot of gratitude.

And a lot of sadness, I think when you think about what they're enduring right.

Now, coming up on Latino USA.

In the middle of all of this anxiety, I hear the horn of my local Chicharroun guy that comes around once a day.

Will be right back, Welcome back. I'm Fernande Chevri in for our host Marino Josa. Today we're talking about the devastation and solidarity in Los Angeles after the historic fires this month. We're going to get right back to our conversation with Antonio Sirijido, host of Imperfect Paradise out of LAist, Los Angeles Public radio station. Can you tell me a little bit about I know your newsroom, the LAIS newsroom

Yeah, I mean I know of at least three of my colleagues that have lost their homes last week and they're continuing to work through this moment. A lot of us were evacuated filing stories. And then our building is in Pasadena, like you said, and so the second floor right now, no one's using it.

It's so full of smoke.

And on the first floor we're only using two studios right now. We're running these like industrial air purifiers twenty four to seven to make sure that our hosts are able to get in and continue to broadcast. And there's very limited access to the building in general. So thankfully the building is safe. We're all really grateful for that. But the work, we don't know how long it's going to be before we can go back into our office.

And there's no way that we could talk about this without talking about climate change. And we know, because a science is there that natural disasters are intensifying hurricanes, blizzards, wildfires. So what do we know about the conditions that made these particular fires spread to this magnitude? Like how how did they get this bad?

That's a great question, And the answer to that is this phenomenon that is being called weather whiplash. So here in Los Angeles, the past two years were record amounts of rain, which was surprising for southern California, which is a place that people normally think of as where it doesn't rain a lot, but very heavy rain, which meant that a lot of vegetation grew on mountain sides around

I want to end with just talking about LA because La is such a special place. The cross cultural solidarity that can happen in LA is really unlike many other American cities. I want to know what you have seen that sort of crystallizes the spirit of solidarity among Angelino's.

It's been so beautiful in LA.

To me, is like the dream inside the American dream. It's like, I mean, my show is called Imperfect Paradise, and it's really about how this city is a place made up of like dreamers and schemers and people who are like here because they want to enjoy the beauty that a place like Los Angeles has to offer, but also because they want to create beautiful things. I mean, I think people forget Black Lives Matter started in Los Angeles, Hollywood,

And this guy is he's so inventive.

He has a golf cart where he has all of his accouterments.

So this this this guy is honking the little like horn to alert the neighbors to come out and buy his snacks when the air pollution is like, do not go outside, do not know?

And this guy's like, listen, you want a snack? And I got to make money exactly.

And I think that that's like it's a very resilient city. It's a city full of hustlers. I just want to say that I love la I love everyone here. It's such a beautiful place. I'm so proud to live here. And I'm really proud of my colleagues. They've really been working under extreme duress to keep people informed, to give people information, to keep them safe. And I hope that we don't have to do it for much longer and that the city doesn't have to go through much more.

I hope so too. Antonio Sidehi, the host of Imperfect Paradise for Last Los Angeles Public Radio Station, thank you again so much for your time, stay safe, and thank you for all the work that you and your colleagues are doing day in and day out in Los Angeles.

Thank you foranana.

As the wildfires in LA have continued, there's been a lot of information shared on social media about how about a third of the firefighters out there are incarcerated individuals. Many of these firefighters are young men of color who are risking their lives to save homes and communities, and sometimes they become so committed that they continue the work

Dear listener, before we start, a quick warning, there's a brief mention of suicide.

Take care.

My names are Mondo Perez and I am a hot shot for the Eldorado hot Shots.

Are Mondo Perez, or Mando, as he likes to be called. Never imagine that he would be responding to some of the worst wildfires in US history, But for the past decade, Mondo has worked as a wildland firefighter with the El Dorado California hot Shot Crew. Hot Shots get that name because they work on the hottest part of wildfires. Mondo's career in firefighting wasn't just unexpected, it had a pretty unusual start as well.

When I started getting to my teenageers young teenageers, I started running around with my local friends and we started getting into trouble. When I was sixteen, I got sent to juvenile detention and I did two years, and that's where I kind of got introduced to firefight.

At least thirty states in the country have laws that allow for the employment of the incarcerated population in emergencies and disasters, and the work is not always voluntary. The constitution explicitly denies incarcerated people the right to refuse to work. Prisoners only get paid one or two dollars per hour. In some states, like Texas and Georgia, they don't get paid at all. And then, perhaps the worst part of

I mean that work was hard work, but it was worked.

To understand why Mando and thousands of other wildland firefighters continue to risk their lives under increasingly difficult and record breaking fires. Mando is going to recreate what a typical day for him is going into the fire and also coming out of it.

I don't want to come off as bragging or cocky, but like the top of the wildland firefighters, we're considered a type one fire line crew, right, you're a national resource, so we get scooped up pretty fast. We're starting to see fires when we normally didn't see him around January February, so it's year round and it's starting to be more common. So it never gets easier, it's actually getting harder and harder.

That was Armando Perez, a hot shot firefighter, sharing his story with us back in twenty twenty two. Today, he continues to fight fires and has since been promoted to captain with El Dorado Hotshots in Northern California. This episode was produced by me Fernando chavarri In for our host Marie J.

Josa.

It was edited by Maria Garcia. Production assistance by Noor Saudi and Andrea Lopez. Gruzzlo. It was mixed by Stephanie Labaud, Julia Caruso and j J.

Carubin.

Special thanks to Lays to Report, Aaron Schrenk, Aaron Stone and Brian de Losantos, and extra shout out to Janis Yamoca. The Latino USA team includes Jessica Ellis, Victoria Stradra, Dominique Estrosa Renaldo Lanz Junior, Dasha Sandoval, Luis Luna, Marta Martinez and Nancy Trujillio, Maria Jojosa, Penille Ramirez, Marlon Bishop and Maria Garcia are our co executive producers. Join us again next time, and in the meantime you can find us on social media and at Latino USA dot org. Laios.