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In the wake of the Palisades fire, Theresa is one of many domestic workers in Los Angeles trying to make ends meet after abruptly losing her job. Though she didn’t personally live in the fire’s path, she has worked as a house cleaner in the Pacific Palisades for eight years. Theresa says she does not know if her employer’s home is still standing, as they have not responded to her since the fire broke out. Now, Theresa, who requested the use of a pseudonym, is awaiting payment for work completed before the blazes and struggling to figure out how to pay her bills and support her two children.
The air quality is also causing concern. Theresa’s nose has been bothering her and one of her children has asthma. Each night, she has to give her child a nebulizer treatment and has even had to take them to the emergency room.
“I understand that the focus is on people’s losses right now, but how are they thinking about workers like me?” she says, speaking in her native Spanish. “How are they [the government] thinking about the trauma that workers like me experienced that night when we had to leave the fires and try to get home to our children? How do we make sure something like this doesn’t happen again?”
Theresa is currently receiving guidance from Maegan Ortiz, the executive director of the non-profit Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California (IDEPSCA), who assisted with translation during our conversation. Theresa is one of the many domestic workers in need of help since several wildfires torched over 50,000 acres and have so far left 28 dead. Tens of thousands of people were placed under evacuation orders, and more than 16,000 structures—including homes and businesses—have been destroyed in the fires.
On Jan. 23, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a $2.5 billion bipartisan relief package to help Los Angeles recover and rebuild.
But Ortiz says that it could take years for individual workers to regain their financial footing. After the Woolsey…
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