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About The Asian reporter. (Portland, Or.) 1991-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 2, 2023)
Page 8 n THE ASIAN REPORTER WILDFIRES October 2, 2023 Lahaina’s fire-stricken Filipino residents are key to tourism and local culture. Will they stay? FIRE FALLOUT. Evangeline Balintona, left, and Elsie Rosales pose on the balcony of a hotel room in Lahaina, Hawai‘i. The two are among the many Filipinos who work as Maui hotel housekeepers living temporarily in hotel rooms after losing their homes to a deadly fire. (AP Photo/Jennifer Sinco Kelleher) By Jennifer Sinco Kelleher The Associated Press AHAINA, Hawai‘i — Ambulance and fire truck sirens wailed outside as Elsie Rosales stripped linens from king-sized mattresses at a beachfront resort in Lahaina. She tried to focus on the work, but was beset by dread: Had a wildfire taken the home she scrimped to buy on a housekeeper’s wages? It had. And now Rosales, like many other Filipino housekeepers used to cleaning hotels, is living in one with her family, a poignant example of how the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century has afflicted Maui’s heavily Filipino population. “All our hard work burned,” Rosales told The Associated Press in an interview conducted in Ilocano, her native language. “There is nothing left.” The disaster has prompted fears about what will become of Lahaina’s community and character as it rebuilds. Many are concerned residents like Rosales won’t be able to afford to live in Lahaina after the community is rebuilt, and that affluent outsiders seeking a home in the oceanfront town will price them out. Will Filipinos, Native Hawaiians, and others who have been the backbone of the tourism industry for so long be able to remain here? Will they want to? Filipinos began arriving in Hawai‘i more than a century ago to labor on sugarcane and pineapple plantations. As their descendants and successive generations of immigrants have settled, they have become deeply ingrained in the community’s culture. L Today, they account for the second- largest ethnic group on Maui, with nearly 48,000 island residents tracing their roots to the Philippines, 5,000 of them in Lahaina, which was about 40% of the town’s population before the fire. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates about one-fourth of Hawai‘i’s 1.4 million people are of Filipino descent. Many of them work in hotels, health- care, and food service. Filipinos account for about 70% of the members of UNITE HERE Local 5, the union representing workers in those industries, union president Gemma Weinstein said. She is Filipino and a former Honolulu hotel housekeeper. “If it wasn’t for the Filipinos having two or three jobs, a lot of the businesses here, including the hotels, would have a hard time operating,” said Rick Nava, a commu- nity advocate and Filipino immigrant who lost his own home in the fire. A month after the August 8 disaster killed at least 97 people, nearly 6,000 peo- ple were staying at two dozen hotels serv- ing as temporary shelters around Maui. A number are hotel housekeepers like Rosales, 61, who is in a two-bedroom suite with her two sisters, her son, his wife, and three grandchildren at the Sands of Kahana resort. Rosales’ 72-year-old sister, Evangeline Balintona, works there as a housekeeper. In the sisters’ suite, there is an artificial plant in the corner of the living room, between a window overlooking the ocean and the flat-screen TV, that Balintona has dusted countless times. When she makes the bed, she does it the way she always has done for work, with layers of sheets and a comforter tucked neat and tight under a heavy mattress. “I know every corner of this room,” Balintona said. She is thinking about returning to Ilocos Norte, the family’s hometown in the Philippines. She hopes her son there has saved enough from the monthly remittances she sent over the years to support her if she returns with nothing. Tourists had been told to avoid Lahaina, and many hotels are housing federal aid workers. Balintona and others worry about the futures of their jobs. Rosales, who said she did not know anyone who died in the fire, immigrated to Hawai‘i in 1999. After years of renting and saving for a down payment, she bought a five-bedroom home on Lahaina’s Aulike Street in 2014 for $490,000. Her mother and siblings owned homes nearby. Those also are gone now. She continues to work at another resort a few miles from where the sisters are staying. On her days off, she sorts out insurance paperwork, including trying to itemize belongings lost in the fire. Rosales recalled the night of the fire when she and her co-workers — almost all from the Philippines — were forced to remain in the hotel because roads were blocked. She didn’t learn the fate of her home until the next morning, when her youngest son called. “Mom, no more house,” he told her. “No, anak ko!” she shrieked, using an Ilocano term meaning “my child.” Around her, other housekeepers sobbed as they received similar calls. Continued on page 14
