She lost everything, but wanted her dignity.
“You know,” she said, “I walked on red carpets at movie openings around the world. But…”
She paused and glanced away.
“I have no underwear,” she whispered. “I’m sorry to say such a thing. It is what has happened to me.”
Gloria Sandoval woke up Sunday morning on a Red Cross cot in the evacuation shelter at the Pasadena Convention Center. The house she was renting in Altadena was incinerated days earlier, and Sandoval, 67, dressed in slippers, a sweatshirt and baggy pants, walked among those like her, people devastated by a storm of wind and flame that hurtled through canyons and raced across highlands.
“My mind is lost,” she said. “I’m confused. Sometimes, I cannot speak. I wonder to myself, ‘What are you doing here?’ I want to go back to my house. My jewelry, my clothes, my pictures, so many pictures. All gone. I have only my pajamas and my little cat, Chispita.”
Sandoval, an actor for many years, stood outside and watched as families signed up for aid through the Federal Emergency Management Agency and hundreds more waited for financial assistance in a line that stretched around a corner. Some wanted business loans; a few asked for shoelaces and showers. Volunteers handed out sandwiches, burritos, instant oatmeal and oranges. A crew from Allstate Insurance listened to stories, and occasionally, in an immaculate city that masked the misery it was hosting, flashes of anger broke through the crowd. Tears fell as a mother enveloped her child or a husband sifted through paperwork, hoping he had the dates and numbers and all the arcane details that make a life.
Many were weary and broken, defiant and scared, calling relatives, listening for news of when the fires would be contained, trying to decide whether to rebuild or strike out for someplace new, a land not so tormented by overdevelopment and the dangerous designs of nature.
“It’s hard to take,” said Jim Crowder, standing not far from Sandoval while his fiancee was filling out forms at a FEMA table. “My house is OK, but she lost hers. A lot of my family and friends lost everything. Altadena is gone. Places that have been there for centuries. Gone. You can never rebuild back to what it was.”
Sandoval’s life began unraveling around 2 p.m. Tuesday when heavy winds arrived and the smoke was still far off. Night fell and the winds gusted. The air reeked. An approaching orange gleamed in the darkness. Cellular alerts started bleeping. She hurried to her car and saw the fire pressing toward her street. Before driving away around 3 a.m. Wednesday, she said she warned her neighbors. Her home was quickly engulfed.
“Look,” she said, scrolling through her phone and calling up a video of flames crackling through the structure. “I’ll show you. See how hard it’s blowing. I was frightened. I tried to save my dogs, but they died. Where do I go? What is my future? I don’t want to stay with my daughters. You know how that is.” She smiled. “The first week is good and by the second week it’s, ‘Mom, are you still here?’ I like my privacy.”
Her daughter Claudia, who does marketing for TV and film studios, has started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to get Sandoval into a new home or apartment. She has also helped her mother apply for FEMA disaster relief and worked with the SAG-AFTRA union to get Sandoval money for a space to store any donated furniture she might receive.
“My mother has always been independent,” Claudia said. “This has been hard on her. Sometimes she feels very hopeful like a Phoenix rising from the ashes, but then hours later she’ll get down and say, ‘I’ve lost it all. My pictures, my memories, my home. It will never be the same.’ Her friends and neighbors are at the shelter. She likes it there. She feels a sense of community. I offered to have her stay with me. But she wanted to be there with them.”
Sandoval fled her native El Salvador as civil war was breaking out in 1979. She said her uncle was Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, who a U.N.-created Truth Commission determined was assassinated by a death squad a year later while saying Mass. Sandoval settled in Lincoln Park and started off as an extra in films, including “Scarface,” before getting roles in the films “Chef” and “El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie,” and the TV series, “Mayans M.C.” in which she played a cafe owner, as well as parts in “The Rookie” and “Arrested Development.”
“This is my job. You can see it on my IMDb page,” said Sandova, who was married and divorced and has two children.
She later moved to Glendale and then Pasadena, where in 2019, after being ill for months and missing mortgage payments, she said the bank foreclosed on her home. She found a small place in Altadena, but said she doesn’t know where to go next, nodding to a lot across the street where her car was parked. “I’m very strong,” she said. “I’m Catholic. I feel God has my hand. But I don’t want to see God behind me. He needs to be in front of me. My life is changing.”
Sandoval’s hair was lose, strands of it flying so she brushed it back. Her red fingernail polish was fading, and she wasn’t as made up as she was for some of the photos on her IMDb page. But she carried an air of grace, talking to people, petting a dog, filming herself with her phone, as if she had ventured into a role she didn’t want, but one that was nonetheless pressed upon her. She held back tears and, like many stranded at the convention center, felt overwhelmed and angry.
“Look,” she said, scrolling again through her phone, stopping at an indignity she could not endure.
“A cockroach,” she said. “He was there on the sidewalk. I smashed him.”
She lowered her voice. Her mood shifted.
“I have deep depression right now,” she said. “I screamed to God, ‘Why did you leave me?’ I escaped war in El Salvador. I came here to make a life. It was hard. I’m old. I wanted to live in peace the last days of my life.”
The moment passed.
“I’ve written a book,” she said, smiling and calling a chapter up on her phone. “It’s called ‘From Hell to Freedom’, but I might change it to ‘From Hell to Hollywood’ or maybe ‘From Hell to Gloria.’”
It’s the story of a girl forced to leave her country for a new one, a place she will find joy and sorrow, and it will be her own.
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