It’s been one year since Altadena burned to the ground. One year since an electric tower sparked in a dry canyon during a rainless season and destroyed what tens of thousands of people knew as their life. If you drive east or west along the 210 freeway and look north, you’ll see that the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, while slowly greening up again, still remains largely gray, ashed-out, like the non-playable area of a video game.

In this year of recovery, I have often thought about what I would tell people who were in my position pre-fire. People who don’t know what’s coming for them, who think they’re safe from disasters they see happening elsewhere, even if they can sense the slight hint of danger lurking around the corner. I was always afraid of wildfire and have even written about the deep sense of knowing I lived with from a young age that someday I would lose my home to the flames. But even that fear and that knowing did not truly prepare me.

I bought a house in the foothills but I thought we were safe because we were on the other side of the street that marked the beginning of the high fire severity zone. I thought the large streets that divided our town into smaller sub-neighborhoods would serve as fire breaks. I thought, surely the fire department would never let this fire jump Lake Ave, jump Loma Alta Dr, would never let the fire come down past Cobb Estate. I thought there were protocols in place. An alert system. Water tankers. Whatever machinery might be able to withstand the wind and still fight the fire. When I left our home the night of January 7th, the Eaton Fire was still burning east of us, blowing the opposite direction. Winds were 60-100mph. I imagined a brigade of trucks lined up on the major streets surrounding our homes, blasting the flames, doing whatever it took to stop the destruction of property and, most importantly, protecting human life.

I was wrong.

There were no fire trucks. There was no alert system. No one came to save us. When my next door neighbors left their home at 3:30am, their yard was already on fire and we still hadn’t received an evacuation notice. No firefighters in sight, they said. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t.

I have spent most of my professional career writing and researching and teaching about systems of power, of government, of infrastructure, and one of my primary take-aways from that work is that the most important systems we have, the systems we can actually rely on, are the systems we build together in our communities. These systems are usually not formal. They don’t have legal status. Their rules aren’t inscribed somewhere for crossreference. These are the systems we make precisely because our other systems are insufficient and sometimes even run contrary to our needs.

When no alert came to inform us of the fire’s progress toward our home, our neighbors who stayed behind sent us text updates. When no one told our neighbors to evacuate, I stayed up all night checking in, trying to make sure they made it out.

The next day, when no law enforcement or government agency could tell us the status of our home, it was our neighbor’s son who braved the smoke and sent us photographic evidence of our loss. That first image of our burned down house will forever be seared in my brain, but if it weren’t for our neighbor, it would have taken days to confirm our loss. A loss we need to confirm in order to file an insurance claim and to begin the long, devastating task of beginning our lives over again.

When I think about how to help prepare people for the ever-impending intersections of disaster in our American lives—wildfire, floods, hurricanes, ICE raids, pandemics, the gutting of our social systems—the loudest thought I hear in my own head is Know Your Neighbors. It is the first and most important instruction I could give anyone bracing for whatever circumstance might throw at them. I know people who survived the deadly Eaton Fire that claimed 19 lives precisely because their neighbors knew they might need help evacuating. I know people whose homes were spared the flames because their neighbors soaked them down and risked their own lives to do so without a firetruck in sight. I know people who have successfully fought eviction because they rallied with their neighbors to maintain their tenants rights. Neighbors who started GoFundMe’s for other neighbors when they were in need of funds with nowhere else to turn. It’s our old neighbor Kate who found us an apartment after the fire while we were traumatized and buried in paperwork, and our old neighbor Karen who met us in Huntington Park to help us translate when my husband needed to buy a new motorcycle off Facebook Marketplace so he could go back to work since only one of our vehicles survived the fire.

Knowing your neighbors is easier said than done. We don’t often live lives conducive to knowing one’s neighbors. We work many hours to afford our mortgages and rents. We use our spare energy to cook for our families and tackle our chores and find small pleasures when we can. But I promise you there are ways to build neighbors into all of these routines of our lives. Even if you’re shy. Even if you’re new to your neighborhood. A lot of it starts with giving yourself a reason to be outside. This can be uncomfortable, but many good things can come from cultivating your ability to sit in discomfort.

If you have a dog, you have to take that dog outside to walk, to go to the bathroom, to look at a squirrel. You might meet another neighbor with a dog on your walk. Or maybe just a neighbor who likes dogs. Small conversations that repeat over time become routines, rituals, and the next thing you know, you might trade phone numbers with a neighbor. Maybe it’s just for emergencies. Maybe it’s to exchange dog care or set up a playdate for your kids. There is no secret to the kinds of conversations that lead to building community. If you talk about the world you both share, you will find a point of connection. Even if you find points of disagreement. One of the more challenging aspects of building community is figuring out how to navigate difference, and for this there is no quick solution. Just patience, tolerance, curiosity, a solid relationship with your own boundaries, and a willingness to respect the boundaries of others.

My husband usually meets neighbors when he is outside working on our car or his motorcycle. Especially when he lived in a neighborhood where many people worked on their own cars on public streets, he was able to connect over a shared desire to troubleshoot, sometimes swapping tools and knowledge. This is, in fact, how he met the neighbors across from where we live now in our little apartment post-fire, and that neighbor now brings us bread from the bakery where he sometimes works. These relationships don’t have to be deep. But the more connected you are to the people around you, the higher your chance of survival in a disaster.

Beyond knowing your neighbors (which is my number one piece of disaster preparedness advice), I’ve spent a year thinking about what I wish I had done differently to prepare for a wildfire that destroyed my home and town and here is what I would recommend:

1. Insurance is necessary but also complicated. When we bought our house, we were required to get homeowners insurance in order to carry a mortgage. I had no idea what insurance actually covered and there was already so much paperwork that went into buying a house, I just didn’t look too deeply into any of it. We were located immediately south of a high fire severity zone and in the state of California where insurance carriers are pulling out of the market, so I was mostly just worried about getting insurance at all. I asked the neighbors on our street who they had for insurance and then called that company. Some of our neighbors, though, have had to turn to the CA Fair Plan as a last resort. Not all insurance companies function equally and it only takes a quick google to see how different insurance companies have handled different disasters.

   Homeowners without a mortgage are not required to maintain an insurance policy, and since insurance policies can be incredibly expensive, some people may not be able to afford insurance. This is part of what makes insurance a complicated aspect of disaster preparedness. Relying on a primarily for-profit system to support you in a disaster isn’t ideal, and you can’t afford what you can’t afford.

   If you are a renter, your landlord may or may not require renters insurance. When I was a renter, I sometimes carried it and sometimes didn’t depending on how much room I had in my budget at a given time.

   If you CAN afford insurance, even if it’s not required for you as a renter or a homeowner without a mortgage, it can be the difference between recovering from a disaster or not, despite the delays and denials many insured face. What I did not know the day our house burned down is that insurance policies have what is called Loss of Use coverage, and this money pays for you to live in a comparable place to the one you had while you are displaced. There is a limit on how much you can spend or how many months they cover, but it at least buys you some time with a roof over your head because if you are a homeowner with a mortgage, those monthly payments are still due, whether your house exists anymore or not, and if you are a renter in a contaminated home, sometimes your landlord still demands rent, even if you can’t live there (this is illegal, but still potentially requires you to battle them in court). The tough part is finding a rental that is low enough in cost that you can stretch your loss of use money for as long as possible. For us, this meant moving into a place much smaller than the home we had, but the cost to rent a comparable place to our home would have eaten up all our loss of use money within a little over a year. We’re looking at a three year recovery timeline, from the date of the fire to moving back home, so we needed to stretch that money as much as possible.

   Check your coverage limits. Almost everyone I know in Altadena who had insurance is underinsured by a few hundred thousand dollars. The cost to rebuild a home in reality doesn’t always align with the cost an insurance company assumes. Coverage A is what you want to look at. It sets the bar for all your remaining coverages, and will cover the majority of your payout. Total losses (as in, your whole home is gone) are easier to navigate from an insurance perspective than damaged homes where you might have to argue with insurance over what they will and will not cover. United Policyholders can help with this.

2. Know your evacuation zone. This one is pretty controversial in my town because most of us never received a formal evacuation notice and many people died because of it. A friend of mine had told me to download the app Watch Duty right after the fire started so that I could set up alerts for my zone, but by the time my house burned down, my zone was still not notified, no yellow warning or red mandatory evacuation issued. We learned later that an elderly neighbor one street south of us never made it out. Nonetheless, knowing your evacuation zone and knowing how to check for alerts can be crucial, but works best in combination with knowing your neighbors.

   

3. Make a plan ahead of time. We did not have a plan. By the grace of god and my college best friend who lives in Windsor Hills and had just completed the conversion of her garage into an accessory dwelling unit (tiny little apartment), we ended up with somewhere safe and free to stay for as long as we needed to get our feet under us. This is a blessing for which I will never be able to share enough gratitude. Had the fire hit a few months earlier, there would be no converted garage and I’m not sure where we would have gone. Having pets, children, elders, and/or a disability makes emergency shelter much more challenging. And it’s not always clear how wide a disaster will hit, so your emergency place to stay might also be disaster impacted. There is no perfect way to prepare for this. But in general it’s good to consider your options in advance, whether they’re a friend or family member’s place nearby or far away or a list of affordable hotels in the area.

   Part of this plan can and should include checking on your neighbors. My neighbors who lived in their home for nearly 50 years happened to own a giant RV (a lot of Altadenans seem to have campers and RVs and I now see those vehicles so differently post-fire as tiny mobile evacuation centers). They offered to take me and our pets with them in the RV if need be. In retrospect, I am glad I took my own car, because at least that way one of our vehicles survived, but had my circumstances been different, like if I didn’t have a working vehicle, going with them would have saved my life.

4. Make a list of things you’ll evacuate with and tape a hard copy inside of a cupboard (keep a copy on your phone if you have a smart phone). As I was evacuating, I called a friend who has lived in fire zones. She calmly walked me through what to take with me: medications, our computers and phones and their chargers, all sets of keys to our vehicles, face masks, cash, important documents, food and supplies for our pets, non-perishable snacks for us, a couple days worth of clothes. In a panic, I grabbed what was visible, not what I thought we would want in case everything else disappeared forever. Because of her guidance, we didn’t have to replace IDs, the house deed, car titles, and other necessary documents after the fire, and we had the basics with us.

   But I wish I had made another list, the sentimental list, 10-15 irreplaceable objects, the family heirlooms, the things that helped tether us to the selves we used to be: my favorite band shirt from 2008 that I slept in so much, it became like a second skin; our childhood stuffed animals; the baby book my mom made me that documented my first years of life; my husband’s grandfather’s suitcase; the microwavable heating pack filled with rice that my grandma used until she passed away; things given to us by people who are dead now. I only had my one car (my husband had taken the bus across town for an appointment earlier that day) and it had to fit the dog, the cats, and me, plus our necessary items. But there was room for this sentimental stuff, and those beloved things I left behind will haunt me for the rest of my life.

5. Photograph your belongings and home. This one is hard, so I hesitate to even suggest it. As I was leaving our house for the last time, I snapped pictures of each room. I sent these to insurance later to help corroborate our loss claim. But these photos are pretty tough to look at, and what is missing from them is photos of the insides of cabinets, closets, and drawers, where most of our belongings lived.

   When you claim loss of belongings in a disaster, insurance wants a detailed list of everything you lost, down to the paperclips. They want to know the brand and the age and the quality and the quantity. How many pairs of pants, how old, what brand, estimated cost. This is called the inventory list and it is the worst document I have ever had to compile (I’ve honestly not completed it and I don’t know if I can). In the worst period of your life, you will be asked to detail everything you’ll never see again, give it a monetary value, and watch while insurance tells you it’s worth less than you think. This list requires a ton of research, a good memory, and photos to look back on to help you piece it all together.

   Now that we have acquired new belongings post-fire, I cannot say I have made a list of these new acquisitions. I keep meaning to, but even making a list of things you can see and hold in present time is exhausting, daunting, and feels not worth the effort. Maybe someday I’ll do it. One of my biggest regrets is not keeping a spreadsheet record of my 2,000+ books in my personal library. I’ve tried looking through photos of my bookshelves, but I can’t always make out the titles or remember some of the books. In the future, I will probably use https://www.librarything.com/ to make a catalogue of my books. They are what I miss most of my belongings, a record of my intellectual and creative journey from teenage-hood through an English PhD and beyond.

There is another kind of preparedness list I would like to mention, and that’s a list of things you might prepare to do to help people living through a disaster if you yourself are not living through a disaster at the time. This list is so personal so it will differ from person to person and is really just based on the support our community provided that was most helpful to us:

1. Offering a place to stay. Not everyone has space to accommodate others, but having a friend offer us a place to stay without us having to ask made all the difference that first night and in the weeks that followed.

2. Food delivery gift cards. I am usually someone who resists these kinds of services, but my colleagues worked together to send us a bunch of DoorDash gift cards and we ate off of those gift cards for months after the fire. First when we had no cooking supplies—no pots or pans or spices or dry goods—and then later when we were too exhausted from fire recovery to cook for ourselves. We prefer home cooked meals to take out, but sadly when loved ones cooked for us immediately post-fire, we weren’t always hungry (stress can make it hard to eat) and the food would sometimes go to waste.

3. Donating useful goods. A lot of well-meaning people donated a lot of stuff after the fire, most of which was clothing. Many disaster recovery experts have called these donations “the disaster after the disaster.” For us, the most useful things people gave us were gently used bath and dish towels, clothes that actually fit us both in size and style, new socks and underwear, and luggage (a former student of mine brought us two huge and one medium suitcase that her former employer had donated and they were filled with toiletries and a year later we are still making our way through those toiletries and it was so nice not to have to think about buying things like moisturizer or face wash, even though pre-fire I was so fussy about what kinds of face products I used).

4. Donating what I would consider luxuries. This one is sort of complicated but as I mentioned, I lost my entire library of books. Rebuying books was absolutely not a financial priority for us post-fire as we struggled to imagine how we might afford the bigger things, like a new car or a rebuilt house. But some of my fellow writers and writing teachers from my job got me a gift card to a local bookstore, which gave me permission to buy some books without feeling irresponsible about how I was spending the money. The gift card (vs. actual books) gave me agency over what I bought and when, which is important because agency is in short supply after a disaster and so is the space to store new things. It turns out those books are what helped me slowly come back to myself in the months that followed, as reading has always grounded me and located me in the world. Each person will have their own version of this kind of stuff. For my husband it was his tools. For someone else it might be vinyl records or art supplies or something else.

5. Setting up a GoFundMe or some other way for people to give money. Direct cash assistance is the single most needed resource in a disaster. People still have bills to pay, and non-profits/philanthropists/the government aren’t often quick to give cash to residents. But cash provides immediate relief and, like I mentioned above, agency. Having agency over how you use your resources helps you regain a sense of dignity, and both agency and dignity are massively underrated necessities in and outside of a disaster. One of my students asked me if she could set up a GoFundMe and I was so resistant to the idea but that GoFundMe is what allowed us to buy a new used car, pay the security deposit on our apartment, and buy homegoods and work clothes before insurance money arrived. And since we will need all of our insurance money (even that money designated to replace personal belongings) to rebuild our home, that extra bit of donated money made a world of difference.

Each kind of disaster necessitates its own level of preparation, but every disaster intersects with many of the same systems. The question becomes: what systems, what safety nets, have proven themselves to be reliable across different kinds of disasters and which systems often fail the people who assumed those very systems would catch them safely in a crisis? One final last tip would be to think about the systems you rely on to survive now: where you get your food, your drinking water, your medication, your shelter. Think about how you access social and emotional support. What do you think happens to these systems in a disaster? What can they withstand, and what would cause them to crumble? At this point in history, the U.S. (and the whole globe) has seen so many different kinds of disasters. We have seen supply chains break down, law enforcement occupy cities and terrorize civilians for political purposes, utility companies neglect powerlines that lead to devastating fires, landlords that abandon their tenants to slum conditions. What does it take to survive the many-pronged disasters that shaped our present and threaten our future? The more curious we can be about these questions, the more we can learn about the world we live in right now, the more resilient the systems we build for each other might become.

To my fire survivors, it is only being in community and shared grief with you that I have made it through the year. It is you who know what it is like to walk into a big box store after losing everything and freeze at the sight of so much—rows and rows of products, most of which we never needed to begin with. You who have also walked for months in other peoples’ donated clothing, whatever you could find that fit well enough, hit by wave after wave of realization that “oh this thing I loved is gone” and also “oh this other thing I loved is gone.” We also know that there is no amount of preparation that will prepare you for the truly unimaginable, erratic long haul of grief you have to face in these circumstances. In our family, my husband and I say to each other sometimes, “baby, I’m sorry your house burned down.” Him to me and then me to him. To all of you, I’m sorry your house burned down. Or became a toxic, uninhabitable museum of your old life. All I know is that there is an unfolding future ahead of us, and that we can move toward whatever that is together.

How does one even begin to describe a star as large as that of Gustavo Adolfo “Kaboom” Robles? In the early hours of Saturday, September 6th, 2025, not long after breakfast with his mom, and just before he was scheduled for another shift at work, Gustavo passed away suddenly in his sleep. He’d turned 37 years old just ten days earlier. While this article is by no means his full story, it is written in honor of his legacy for our people.

Consider how just two days after the news broke, scores of friends and family found some time out of their Monday night to pay respect to Gustavo at a vigil set up for him at the Sunset Junction’s 4100 Bar, the backyard home away from home—besides Lotus Lounge—where he became more than just a regular, but like family to the staff and myriad other locals over the years.

Huddled underneath the tungsten light-bulbs at 4100 that evening, a lot of us had few to no words for the sudden loss of such a fervent life-force, another born and raised L.A. real one who carried the grit of our city on his shoulders and spoke the lingo of Los Angeles through his eyes as much as with each step he stretched across the concrete.

One thing a handful of us childhood friends of his did have though, were jokes; before we knew it, after one laugh here and another there, it didn’t feel like we were gathered strictly for mourning, but also for a celebration of this kid whose best days were surely just ahead of him.

Gustavo’s own quips and insights were the type which constantly pulled a smile from even the deepest frowns on those around him. But personally, what I admired most about his way of doing it was how he could go from goofing off with the homeboys, to two-stepping in front of the homegirls, to then still find time to lend a helping hand to the Señoras of our Pueblito, all in one fell swoop.

Gustavo also just had a knack for talking smack about his homies, most of all right to their faces. While it’s true that sometimes this led to a squabble or two–and in rare cases even a tinge of regret afterwards–in hindsight it’s clear he ultimately loved using banter to squeeze out as much laughter from the moment as was ever possible for everyone’s enjoyment.

Born x Raised.

Gustavo Adolfo Robles was the youngest of three children born to Donaldo Robles and Mirna Molina, who hailed from Tiquisate, Guatemala, and Ahuachapán, El Salvador, respectively. He first attended elementary school in Riverside, followed by some time in San Diego before making his way to East Hollywood (long before anyone referred to the neighborhood as such.) Then came Thomas Starr King Middle School, where like so many 90s kids from the 90029 area he met his people, those who would comprise his “chosen family” for the rest of his life. This was also the time when Gustavo picked up the moniker he would carry with him for more than three decades, “KABOOM,” which fit him well given his extroverted–and especially in his younger days, supremely untethered–personality.

By the time he reached his teens, Kaboom quickly became a recurring figure through arteries like Virgil Avenue and Santa Monica boulevard on his skateboard, which he first picked up following in the footsteps of his older brother Donald, also known as “VOMIT.” Like his older bro, Gustavo landed all the basics, including ollies, kickflips and heel flips. Yet there would be a limit to how much he would glean from Donald, who around that time would find himself in just a little more trouble than he felt was appropriate for his younger brother to get mixed up in.

So Gustavo did make his own lane, picking up a legion of homies along the way. Cesar, who was around Donald’s age when he first met Gustavo at the local Family Arcade, told me about how he absolutely dominated Marvel Vs Capcom there.

“With just one quarter, he would knock me out quickly and take it all the way. I even got mad a few times.”

Still, Gustavo’s charisma ultimately won Cesar over, just as would be the case with countless classmates, friends of friends, and others he met wherever he had a chance to “work the room” in his immersive and unapologetic fashion.

Gustavo graduated from John Marshall High School in 2006. Soon afterwards, he started working at Victoria’s Secret in Century City, taking the bus there from Vermont Avenue and Santa Monica boulevard. Despite having no “whip” or car of his own though, in just two years he became so indispensable to his teammates that when his manager from the store moved on to H&M in 2009, she took Gustavo along with her.

It was at H&M where Gustavo met Elvira Galindo, circa 2012. With his gift of gab, especially for pointed questions that struck right at the root, he quickly sparked a conversation with her, noting how “[she] wasn’t from around here, huh?” Elvira was originally from Antioch, or the East Bay, though as she tells it, since she was sixteen she was a dedicated “Kobe Bryant and Dodgers fan.” Of course, this went a long way with Gustavo given his ferocious love for the hometown favorites.

Elvira and Gustavo would count each other as partners for no less than six years, and beyond that, as friends for life, so much so that she now considers his loss a nightmare she wishes she could get up from. To this day, Elvira remains connected to Gustavo’s family and even credits him for inspiring her to purchase her own home by 2018.

“He was my biggest motivator,” she told me in a text.

Role Model. Protector. Guardian.

Less than a week after Gustavo’s passing, at the candlelight vigil set up outside of his apartment, Elvira also told me the story of his connection to Lilly, a tender soul just three years old who Gustavo came to befriend and even dub as his “porcelain princess.” On hearing about his passing, Lilly cried as though she lost a family member, and like his family members, managed to place and light a candle for him.

Gustavo met Lilly soon after landing the keys to his very own apartment in 2021. Located right in Virgil Village–something he’d worked hard to ensure–the new crib would turn out to be far more than just his own refuge, but a home for him as well as for his nephew, who bore his uncle’s first name and had just turned 11 years old at that time.

When I asked Gustavo’s sister Mirna how she came to name her son after her little brother, she made it abundantly clear: “The reason I named my son after [him] is because my youngest brother was my baby. I literally helped my mom raise him, take him to school, dressed him…When I told [Kaboom] he literally had tears in his eyes [but] didn’t believe it until he saw the birth certificate.”

The family ties went so deep that two years before landing his own place, when Mirna entered a period of personal crisis and needed major support raising her son–the family, including Gustavo, was caught between a rock and a hard place. Nonetheless, at 32 years old, he stepped up for the task and went on to thrive in it, ultimately becoming the official caretaker and guardian of his nephew. His friends and family alike were proud of how he handled it, but as it turns out, it was a natural fit: Gustavo loved his nephew infinitely, who didn’t just bear his name but whom I once told Gustavo was also the spitting image of him, which I’m certain I wasn’t the first to point out.

Gustavo didn’t enter this role without a serious foundation to work from, either. By 2021, after four years at Trader Joe’s, he once again reached the role of a manager for the company. Whether he cared to admit it or not then, as it was for the friends and family closest to him, it was also clear to those Gustavo worked with that he was a dependable leader and team player.

Los Angeles Fresh.

Besides his official duties though, like so many of us 90s kids, Gustavo was a hip hop head, especially for underground hip hop. And if there was one set of jams he queued up over the rest, it was those by Wu Tang Clan. Maybe he loved Wu so much because of their versatile flows, but I like to think it was also because the ten-member alliance reminded him of his own versatile and frenetic friends on the block who he came of age with.

There is no question among those of us now mourning him, however, that Gustavo himself was one of the most vibrant homies one could find in a city like Los Angeles. In fact, he was such a character that although to my knowledge he may not have any official film credits, I don’t doubt for a second that he could easily have fit on the set of any film picking up where classics like Training Day, The Fast and the Furious (2001), and even 500 Days of Summer left off. Most of all this is because Gustavo knew just how important it was every time he got out there to represent Los Angeles Fresh just as he heard it when the Visionaries immortalized the line back in 2000.

Beyond the limelight, it’s also true that in the days and nights following the loss of the Rios Brothers last year, Gustavo played like an MVP for the friends and family most impacted, jumping on countless phone calls and text threads with us like he was duty-bound for it; this went miles in restoring faith and hope through our community, which I know I’m not alone in still feeling indebted to him for.

Now, however, I can see that with each act of kindness he came to bestow on those he loved, especially as an adult, it’s because he knew it’s simply what his best friends would have wanted for him to do. So with that in mind, here’s a verse by Inspectah Deck from Above The Clouds I’m confident he’d be thrilled to close this brief shout out for him with:

“Stand like Colossus,
Regardless to whom or what,

Numerous attempts on my life, so who to trust?
Who but us, to supply ya’ with the fire?

The burnin’ truth, 150 Absolut proof.
On the mic like Moses, spoke in golden scribe.
Survivor of the oldest tribe whose soldiers died.

I notify families, we shed tears and mourn,
But our hands are on the ammo ‘cause the battle’s still on.

Sound the horn!”

To Gustavo. Kaboom. Robles.

—
Gustavo is survived by his brother Donald, 41, his sister Mirna, 37, his parents Donaldo Robles and Mirna Molina, 79 and 75, respectively, his nephew Gustavo Adolfo Molina, 16 years old, as well as many more family, friends, and coworkers.

J.T.

For the record, there should be nothing surprising about a convicted felon’s office showing utter disregard for the rule of law just days after our community’s legal victory against the federal government was upheld; like it or not, the fact is that the events of the last six months are still just the opening stages of a much longer battle ahead given the administration’s passage of their budget proposal for the next fiscal year.

At the same time, it’s also true that in the midst of this environment are still a myriad of other tiny victories for our community to uplift. Locally, since July 7th, Quien Es Tu Vecindario has raised and distributed over $1,000 to 10 different families or households across East Hollywood; while none of our donations have meant they could just take the day off work altogether, they’ve still served to acknowledge the value of their labor and affirm that their community sees and stands by them during this time.

Below are just a few of the people and stories we’ve closed in on through the devastating events of the last couple of months that I’m confident our community can keep showing up for, one bit of support at a time.

Pedro, in his fifties, has now set up his OJ stand in East Hollywood going on five years. Even at the height of ICE raids, including when they stormed the community’s local Home Depot, he still set out to vend because the small business is his primary source of income; he’s incredibly quick on his feet and sells with a sparkle in his eyes, as if the oranges he surrounds himself with give him an extra bit of zest above the rest.

Diene is a woman in her mid to late forties who’s vended alongside her husband in East Hollywood from their food truck for two years. When Quien Es Tu Vecindario got her some funds recently, she broke down into tears. Sales have declined substantially since the mass roundups began on June 6th, but she’s still brought out the truck to offer hot dogs, pupusas, and tacos to one and all; their dishes have been especially key for construction workers from across the street who’ve got few other options for affordable meals.

Alex & Frank are two brothers, college age, who’ve taken time away from their studies to support their dad’s stand in Virgil Village. The brothers set up nightly around 6:00 PM and work until about 2:00 AM, and while the hostility of the political environment has ramped up recently, the fact is that they’ve been taking risks alongside their dad for quite some time now, going back to even before the pandemic.

Only a few days after a driver attacked a crowd of people gathered outside the Hollywood/Vermont, including two vendors whose hot dog stand was destroyed by the vehicle, Quien Es Tu Vecindario was able to spread the word quickly and also donate to the GoFundMe put together by the vendors’ two siblings; now the family has just under $10,000 raised, and we’re also in touch with them to consider the best next steps for business to keep going.

Filimon, in his forties, has sold natural ice cream similar to agua fresca, but more concentrated, going on 15 years in Los Angeles now, which he first learned how to make from his father in Puebla, Mexico. During the pandemic, Filimon was a recurring presence at East Hollywood’s famous community cookouts, but since the federal government’s attack on Los Angeles began, he’s sparsely gone out to make his rounds, making the bit of support we can provide a leg up he’s truly thankful for.

To donate to our Vendor Buyout campaign, please do so here, and to sign up to volunteer, please do so here. Last but not least, please note that Quien Es Tu Vecindario, also known as Who Is Your Neighborhood, is a separate entity from Making a Neighborhood, which I speak for with support from my colleagues but not necessarily their endorsement.

J.T.

In Redlining, Gentrification, and Housing, we told the story of the internment camps our neighbors from J-Flats were placed in, and how their contemporaries came together to aid them during their time of greatest need. Before then, I wrote about the numerous attacks and displacement faced by Black, Asian, and Latinx communities in Los Angeles from the 1920s through the 1970s, and how this shameful legacy of American life was only amplified vis-a-vis the gentrification of our communities in more recent years. In each case, I engaged in these documentations and analyses not simply for the sake of looking at the past, but to show our community–near and far–and imagine with them a better, more equitable world.

Today, as more than 1,600 families across Los Angeles reel from the absolutely inhumane, yet entirely legalized abduction of their loved ones under the guise of “Homeland Security,” we’ve been thrust into the exact opposite of that world. Over thirty years after the unrest of Rodney King which first catapulted L.A. into international infamy, now the very government tasked with establishing order is the one looting our neighborhood corners, places of work, and even places of worship in broad daylight. It is a “riot” in the truly measured definition of the term, which historically will be noted as more than an insult in addition to the injuries of land theft and enslavement of Black and Brown people, but as a direct extension of these savageries.

In a now world-famous clip of Angela Davis while she was incarcerated in Santa Clara County jail in 1972, at one point the interviewer asks her whether she “approves of violence” to achieve the goals of the Black Power movement. She curtly replies that: “...when someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible because what it means is that the person who's asking that question has absolutely no idea what Black people have gone through, what Black people have experienced in this country since the time the first Black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”

For a long time after I first heard Davis speak those words, I actually wondered about how even despite the long list of crimes inflicted on and endured alike by Black and Brown communities on stolen land, the latter could never recount the horror of being kidnapped among them. Now, this is no longer the case. Now–in the 21st century–once again some untold number of families whose only crime is the color of their skin and the zip code they reside in have their lives uprooted and humiliated by a lawless, fascist empire and its goons, that is, by small, hateful little men and their sycophants.

Now a new theory and practice must take hold if the next generation of Americans hope to see even a modicum of the more equitable world we wrote and hoped for alongside our dear Kiwi Burch, and in honor of her and our families alike; one which will take all of us, on every corner we can find, to stand up for their fellow human beings against the racist and fascist military machine unleashed not only abroad, but right here at home.

This is not the most unlikely result. After all, the world in which Professor Davis was incarcerated was not the one she deserved on account of her ancestors; neither was the one my peers and I inherited along Virgil avenue, Santa Monica boulevard, and countless more stretches of Los Angeles; while it’s also true that the fangs of the state may run deeper than they ever have, so does my heart in resistance, and I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. I know I’m one of vastly more and that despite the storm, there are still brighter days ahead.

Yesterday, for one, Public Counsel announced the first class-action lawsuit by workers and families across California against the Department of Homeland Security. From their Press Release:

“‘Since June 6th, marauding, masked goons have descended upon Los Angeles, terrorizing our brown communities and tearing up the Constitution in the process,’” said Mohammad Tajsar, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, representing the plaintiffs. “‘No matter their status or the color of their skin, everyone is guaranteed Constitutional rights to protect them from illegal stops. We will hold DHS accountable.’”

J.T.

As a writer of place, it is often my task to help readers understand how places—towns, cities, communities—are made. If we want to know a place, really know it as somewhere and not just as anywhere, we have to know who wove its fabric and how, what materials they used and why, and how it was shaped by politics and policies. In 2021, my collaborators Jimmy Recinos and Samanta Helou Hernandez and I set out to explore how East Hollywood, especially Virgil Village, was made. We wrote about Virgil Ave and Hoover St, and how Virgil Ave came to be lined with pink trumpet trees. We wrote about an historic Japanese boarding house and its’ tenants’ fight to remain in what used to be a predominately Japanese neighborhood known as J-Flats. We wrote about rental advertisements and how real estate profiteering shapes not just the residents of a neighborhood but its name and boundaries as well. We wrote about local elections and how our political representatives define what is and is not possible for the people they represent.

All of our neighborhoods are shaped by local, state, and federal policy, by histories of migration and community building, by real estate investment and policing, by each and every person that resides in the neighborhood or leaves it behind, whether by choice or force. And increasingly, all of our neighborhoods are being shaped by a newer, more powerful force than all these previous forces combined.

In this publication, we write about what makes a neighborhood, but in January 2025, multiple neighborhoods in Los Angeles County were unmade by fire. As I watched my own house and entire community of Altadena burn, I couldn’t stop thinking about the work I’ve done for so long around place-making and the palimpsest of history we can see when we look closely at the architecture of a place’s buildings, the racial and socioeconomic makeup of its residents, the plants and wildlife that adapt, thrive, or die within its boundaries. But climate disaster threatens to unmake place all over the world, to erase history, and to force new beginnings on unwitting populations.

To watch your neighborhood burn to the ground in a wildfire is to watch the threads of history ignite and arc wildly in many directions as the smoke clears and the dust settles. Out of the ashes of Altadena grew an immediate national, sometimes international interest in Altadena’s history, a history quietly known to its residents pre-fire, but suddenly featured in many major news outlets, depicted in illustrations, captured in thousands of photographs. In those first few weeks, everything felt like it was happening in reverse. Historic Black communities were being reduced to rubble as they simultaneously rose to prominence in the public eye. An NBC news story titled “Effort underway to preserve Altadena's African American history” ran the week after the fire destroyed so much of that very history and took from Black residents the multigenerational wealth they’d slowly been able to build.

The more that real Altadena disappeared from the earth, the more the idea of Altadena shined brightly in a national and international spotlight. Our small town on the edge of a big city, rich with the threads of a million little histories, full of artists and scientists and teachers and writers and abolitionists and food service workers and people finding a way to make it on the outskirts of a city with a much louder legacy. As we have scrambled to reassemble our lives—find stable housing amidst rent gouging, recover insurance funds amidst denials and delays, rebuild our wardrobes and our kitchens amidst the chaos of donation centers—I’ve watched our communities attempt to navigate what comes next.

Being unmade by fire gives us the chance to make something new, and Altadenans have so many dreams for what that something new could look like. There is no one single Altadena community, and as is to be expected, we have conflicting desires around rebuilding, but there are some common threads I’ve witnessed in the many group chats and community picnics and neighborhood email chains I’m a part of. If nothing else, this fire has exposed the mechanisms behind place-making in real time. Each step we take toward rebuilding, each dream we have for the future, is met by some material reality, sometimes supportive, sometimes a barrier.

There are some particularly urgent concerns Altadena is facing right now, largely around money and policy. From a recent CBS article, “As many as two-thirds of fire victims are uninsured or underinsured, according to the consumer advocates at the non-profit United Policyholders.” I could bore you with the details of how this plays out using my own insurance policy as an example, but all you really need to know is that when you buy homeowners insurance (if you’re even able to get insured at all), the insurance company covers you for their own estimate of what it costs to rebuild a home. How they arrive at that estimate is often not transparent, and in our case as well as the case of almost everyone we know in Altadena, their estimate is hundreds of thousands of dollars below the real cost to rebuild.

Rebuilding a home isn’t simply a matter of laying a new foundation, throwing up some walls and windows and a roof, then putting on finishing touches. There is an accordion of steps between total loss of a home and its final recovery, almost all of which come at a high cost for homeowners. We have to account for the cost of destroyed utilities infrastructure (in some cases, like ours, we’ve got an out-of-code septic system and no real ability to connect to the county sewer), boundary surveys, geotechnical and soils reports, structural engineering, architectural design, debris removal (because the Army Corps of Engineers does not remove 100% of the debris on a property). And this is before the actual rebuilding. We’ve got to address landscaping considerations, new fire safety codes, and soil safety after rebuilding is complete.

Our community has been in talks with Southern California Edison, the very company likely responsible for burning down our town, about undergrounding the powerlines, but this task is not as straightforward as it may sound. It includes easements, requires ungodly sums of money (likely to be passed down to the consumer), and will take years to complete. Altadena residents are also potentially paying for the cost of permits related to building a home, and those permits cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, the City of Los Angeles waived permit fees for residents in the Palisades (the Palisades is under the jurisdiction of the city of Los Angeles, whereas Altadena, an unincorporated area, is under the jurisdiction of the county of Los Angeles and has almost no real political representation). Residents in Altadena are fighting for equal treatment when it comes to this deeply costly endeavor, and while some progress has been made in this arena, residents still await certainty that they won’t have to pay permit fees.

As residents battle insurance companies and the county for funding and support, our land is being bought up by corporate entities faster than any of us are even able to sort through the long list of decisions ahead of us. A few weeks ago, I attended a meeting with state senator Sasha Renee Perez alongside a few other residents as well as people who work in the community land trust world and we asked her to advocate for state funding to help qualified local non-profits purchase land to get it off of the speculative real estate market; without state, federal, or philanthropic funding to halt corporate development of Altadena, we will see this historic Black neighborhood rapidly remade by disaster capitalism without the input of actual residents.

As a recent report from Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) concludes, “While the Eaton Fire did not initiate the displacement pressures facing Altadena, it has greatly intensified them. Even before the disaster, the neighborhood was experiencing rising corporate ownership of housing, tenure decline, and demographic shifts that signaled a community in transition. The fire has created the conditions for those existing dynamics to accelerate, allowing investors to consolidate land in areas of rising vulnerability. Altadena is not unique in this experience, but it is a critical site for intervention. With one of the highest Black homeownership rates in Los Angeles County, Altadena is a community where residents have historically built and maintained intergenerational stability—now at risk of being undermined by disaster capitalism.”

Altadena needs immediate funding and appropriate policy to guide that funding if it is to be made again as the dynamic neighborhood it once was—a place where middle class Black and Latino families, as well as racially and ethnically mixed families, can live multi-generationally amid the bears and peacocks, the parrots and coyotes, and the once lush tree canopy at the base of the San Gabriel mountains.

As we advocate for the necessary policies and funding that will help us recover, many local organizations have established themselves as anchors and safety nets of all kinds. My Tribe Rise has been hosting lunches for elderly Black community members to help them access resources and information. Altadena Collective has formed to “help Altadena residents make informed rebuilding decisions” while connecting them to architects with designs that will preserve the rich architectural history of the area and other resources to help them remain in the community. Altadena Tenants Union is supporting many local renters in fighting their landlords for safe living conditions and the right to return home to their neighborhood. Eaton Fire Survivors Network is providing an online space for residents to connect, ask questions, and help each other navigate this crisis. Altagether is coordinating and supporting a network of block captains who are helping their neighbors access resources and information while staying connected to each other despite our geographical disruption. These are just a few of the many groups pre- and post- fire that Altadena residents have made for each other in the vacuum of state or federal support and guidance.

Every day we are confronted with a hundred little questions, all of which will remake the neighborhood we return to (if we can, in fact, return): How will insurance affect my ability to return? How will construction costs affect my ability to rebuild? What will the new architecture of Altadena look like? What will become of the lots sold to for-profit developers and corporate entities? Will SCE bury our power lines? Will our soil be safe enough to grow food or allow our pets and children to play? What new code requirements will shape our homes? How much will our property taxes be post-fire? Will FEMA ever come through with bridge funding? Will taking on an SBA disaster loan destroy us financially? Who will have a say in how our public spaces are used? Will they build hideous condos in the lots around us? Will we be able to connect to the county sewer system? Where will our kids go to school? How long will rebuilding take? What kinds of businesses will populate the commercial corridors? Will the tree canopy recover and what will we plant in place of all we lost? How will renters fare in this new Altadena landscape? Will our standing homes be safe after remediation and will insurance ever pay for the extent of remediation we need? How will we remember and honor our neighbors who died in the fire? Will the county invest in effective fire planning to prevent another disaster like this one?

The Eaton Fire exposed Altadena’s history for the world to see, and from its ashes we have the chance to make a neighborhood from the ground up in real time. This effort is a case study in place-making if there ever was one, and if we can effectively understand how places have been made in the past, we have the chance to make a new kind of place out of the good parts of what was, and with thoughtful visions of what can be.