Robin Alvarenga De La Torre was born on Jan. 5, 2025. Two days later, the Eaton fire took the Altadena home she was supposed to grow up in. And it took her grandparents’ house on the same lot. And it took the house across the street where her great-grandmother had lived for more than 40 years.
Thousands of Altadena families have spent the year recovering from one of the most destructive disasters in California history. Few have experienced it the way Robin’s parents have — raising a new life while burying their old one.
The milestones of Robin’s first year shadowed the milestones of her family’s recovery. She was four days old when her parents, Lizbeth B. De La Torre and Javier Alvarenga, first contacted their insurance company. She was nearly two months old when they moved into a temporary rental home. At almost seven months, their rebuilding plans were submitted for permits.
“It’s almost like a parallel universe,” Ms. De La Torre said, “where everything suddenly changed when she arrived.”
The Eaton fire did more than destroy the family’s three homes. That first layer of damage was eventually cleared away. But another deeper layer of damage revealed itself as the year dragged on: the fire’s slow-burning emotional, financial, mental and social toll.
Robin experienced some developmental delays. Mr. Alvarenga’s career was derailed. Robin’s grandparents delayed their hopes of retirement. Ms. De La Torre collapsed from stress.
It was Jan. 8, the day after the fire erupted, when Robin and her mother were discharged from the hospital. Word had spread there that morning that they had lost their home, and the nurses dropped off bag after bag of formula and diapers to their room. One nurse pressed an envelope of cash and gift cards into Mr. Alvarenga’s palm — everything the staff could pitch in with.
Ms. De La Torre had received 18 staples from her C-section. Mr. Alvarenga wheeled her to the car. They buckled Robin into her seat and drove not to Altadena but to the suburb of Covina, where an aunt and uncle lived.
The place was crowded. Air mattresses had been hauled out. The stove was on and there was food on the tables and jackets were draped over the couches. It felt almost like a holiday.
Everyone rushed in when they came to the door. Even amid the chaos, there was a newborn to celebrate, the family’s first baby in 16 years. Before the fire, Ms. De La Torre had hung a mobile of woodland creatures above her crib, to symbolize Altadena’s mountains. Mr. Alvarenga had laid the flooring in her nursery himself. Now nine newly homeless members of the De La Torre family had landed in this house in Covina, refugees of the Eaton fire.
This was Robin’s first home.
Jan. 19, 2025
Twelve days after the fire, when Robin was two weeks old, Mr. Alvarenga returned to his old street. The smoke had subsided. He put on a respirator mask and dug through the ash with his bare hands.
Everyone was still staying at the Covina house, crammed on the floors and couches. Ms. De La Torre, Mr. Alvarenga and Robin had taken refuge in a cousin’s room.
Mr. Alvarenga’s street was an alien landscape of gray ash and melted doors. He pulled shreds of their life from the wreckage. A pin from Ms. De La Torre’s job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A flight bag from Mr. Alvarenga’s job as a pilot. A model of the 1972 Camaro beloved and restored by Ms. De La Torre’s father, Guillermo Villarreal. The real Camaro was nearby, its windows blown out and roof bashed in.
He banged the Camaro’s hood. “She’s gone,” he sighed.
Most everyone from the family had made a trip to see the rubble of their old home, except for Ms. De La Torre. She wanted to stay strong for Robin, and for her husband. “I don’t want to cry,” she said.
The two first met as freshmen at Pasadena High School, P.H.S., as they called it. Two years after graduation, they were married in 2010. Mr. Alvarenga got his citizenship in 2017 — he had fled El Salvador in 2002, his parents fearing a civil war — and after high school worked at an auto shop, then later as a flight attendant. Ms. De La Torre got a design degree, and later a master’s at M.I.T.
Mr. Alvarenga had always loved aviation. For his birthday one year, Ms. De La Torre got him a flight lesson over the Golden Gate Bridge. When she asked him what his dream job was, he half-joked racecar driver, or pilot. With her encouragement, he enrolled in flight school. He eventually graduated with his commercial pilot’s license, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt. All he had left to do now was complete his flying hours, and he hoped to get a job as an airline transport pilot.
The fire put all that on pause.
Back on the lot, a propeller airplane chugged overhead, surveying the wreckage. Mr. Alvarenga recognized the shape of its wings.
“That’s a Piper Archer,” he said. “I fly those.”
At his feet, his pilot licenses were among the documents that had turned to ash.
Feb. 10, 2025
Ms. De La Torre had collected dozens of children’s books in anticipation of Robin’s arrival. But she had neither books nor time now, so she read Robin what she herself was consumed with: rental listings. She coaxed her daughter to sleep reading bathroom counts and descriptions of school districts aloud.
“She’s going to be a great Realtor one day,” Ms. De La Torre joked.
At the dining table at her aunt and uncle’s house in Covina, she clicked through rental websites. She and Mr. Alvarenga passed a swaddled, five-week-old Robin between them.
Ms. De La Torre’s doctor had recommended bed rest, but she was rarely in bed. She signed up for every relief program she could find. She drafted emails to FEMA and filled out federal loan forms. She sent out rental applications, feeling the pressure every night while watching her father and mother tuck in on an air mattress.
Ms. De La Torre’s parents, Guillermo Villarreal and Evelia De La Torre, had met in the late 1980s when Evelia was in high school, too. Guillermo had recently arrived in the U.S., and would pick Evelia up at P.H.S. in his Camaro. They eventually bought the lot across the street from the house where Evelia grew up, and later built a backyard house where Ms. De La Torre and Mr. Alvarenga lived as renters.
As Altadena gentrified and neighbors sold their lots, the De La Torres stayed put. There were three generations in three homes on Mountain View Street, all in sight of each other: Ms. De La Torre’s grandmother, Conchita, in the home she’d been renting for more than four decades, along with her aunt Mina and cousin Yulianna; her parents and brother across the street; and she and her husband in the house at the back of her parents’ lot.
Already, Ms. De La Torre could see looming financial problems.
She and Mr. Alvarenga had received about $60,000 in renter’s insurance. The family was largely living off donations and the proceeds from their GoFundMe page, but it could only last for so long. Her parents had a policy that would pay about $488,000 for rebuilding, but every phone call seemed to reveal a new hurdle to actually receiving that amount.
Ms. De La Torre had no idea if they could actually afford to rebuild. She got an email showing a new listing in Altadena. The price tag: $2.5 million. “It’s crazy,” Ms. De La Torre said.
Ms. De La Torre strained her eyes and kept scrolling for rentals as her grandmother passed the lentil soup.
“You need to lay down,” her mother told her. “Have you slept today?”
“A little bit,” Ms. De La Torre replied.
She walked toward her room, then grabbed the wall. Something was wrong. Mr. Alvarenga was soon rushing her to the hospital.
March 18, 2025
Ms. De La Torre stood in an empty room, a skylight overhead. They had already painted its walls the same color as the Altadena nursery they had lost.
They finally had a place of their own.
That night in February, Ms. De La Torre could barely walk. She had thrown up in the car, the hospital parking lot and the emergency room. It was her first night away from her daughter, and she spent it hoping she was not going to die.
Doctors diagnosed her with vertigo, likely stress induced. She was bedridden for days. She was still struggling to walk unassisted when her aunt and uncle told her about a three-bedroom rental house in Covina that a friend knew about. The family rushed to see it. A few weeks later, the three moved in, along with Ms. De La Torre’s parents, and her brother, Danny.
The space in the new rental allowed Ms. De La Torre and Mr. Alvarenga to relax a little, but they were still in limbo, with a two-month-old baby. Boxes stacked up in the living room. Conchita was still sleeping at Ms. De La Torre’s aunt and uncle’s. Mr. Alvarenga wasn’t flying. Ms. De La Torre’s parents, both of whom worked at IHOP restaurants, had set aside their hopes of retiring.
Ms. De La Torre later found a book for Robin called “In-Between Places,” about the uncertainty of transitions. A tunnel was an in-between place. So was riding on a bus.
“You might be in a situation where you’re not content,” she said, but “everything is temporary.”
April 5, 2025
Ms. De La Torre was finally ready, nearly three months after the fire. She opened the car door and stepped for the first time onto the lot where her home once stood.
The rubble had been cleared. Yellow buds were sprouting from her mother’s flower beds, the same as the ones she had picked as a child.
“I’ve never seen this many,” she said.
It was Robin’s first time at the lot, too. Her parents had noticed that she was having trouble rolling over, lifting her head and pushing herself up. They took her to a pediatrician, who said she was lacking the kind of strength babies are supposed to have. There had been no safe place to do tummy time with her in the crowded house, between the dozen people, three dogs and three cats. It was one more sign of the fire’s long, invisible reach.
Ms. De La Torre had begun looking for a therapist, and found one in the summer who treated her for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. It helped her to understand why she froze when she smelled food that reminded her of home, or why the prospect of another child sometimes terrified her. If she and her husband had another baby, would their house burn down again?
She walked toward the spot where Robin’s nursery had been.
“I don’t know what I would have done if she was not here as a hope for us,” she said.
Ms. De La Torre was determined to recreate what had been, to rebuild her parents’ house and her own.
She looked across the street at her grandmother’s barren lot.
Conchita was probably not coming back to it. Her house had been the family’s hub. It’s where they ate Sunday breakfast, a nopales salad on the table, cut from a massive cactus outside. Before the holidays they made hundreds of tamales in her kitchen.
But Conchita was also a four-decade renter, and her landlords’ plans were unclear. Since the fire, she had grown withdrawn.
Ms. De La Torre had seen her father drawing a new house on a napkin. They began mapping out the plans together, using his sketch as inspiration. In the drawings, Ms. De La Torre put an extra room in the main house. That could be Conchita’s.
Dec. 24, 2025
At their rental house in Covina, Mr. Alvarenga lingered in the bedroom doorway, waiting for Ms. De La Torre’s signal. When she gave it, he stepped out and walked toward Robin, dressed as Santa Claus, presents in his arms.
Robin burst into tears. Mr. Alvarenga pulled down his curly white beard. “It’s Papa!” he said.
The family took these traditions seriously. They wanted normalcy for Robin, moments untouched by the fire. Her first birthday was approaching, as was the anniversary of the wildfires. “She shouldn’t have to think about all these other things,” Ms. De La Torre said.
The rebuilding was progressing, its design loosely based on Guillermo’s napkin sketch. They’d found a builder who quoted a price of $950,000 to build the two homes and a garage. With Evelia and Guillermo’s insurance, and a federal loan Liz hoped her family would secure, she thought they could make it.
Tamales were on the table. Her cousins were screaming and racing to grab presents. Ms. De La Torre had been the family’s planner this year. But Robin had been their rock, all 50 weeks of her. She got to open the first present.
Jan. 5, 2026
Mr. Alvarenga clicked a lighter, and the nine De La Torres who had lost their homes, as well as the aunt and uncle who had first taken them in, began to sing to Robin. First they sang “Happy Birthday,” then “Las Mañanitas,” a traditional Mexican birthday song.
Wake up, my dear, wake up. Look, the day has dawned.
The little birds are already singing, and the moon has gone.
Holding their daughter, Ms. De La Torre and Mr. Alvarenga blew the single candle out in the living room of the rental house. A year ago, Robin had seemed so helpless, and now she seemed so grown. Her strength was improving. She had taken to banging her feet on the ground, as if ordering them to walk.
They passed around slices of strawberry cake. In talking about Robin’s future, they could finally imagine their own.
“Next thing you know she’s going to be going to preschool,” said Ms. De La Torre’s aunt, Lourdes.
“She’s going to be in high school, and go to P.H.S., too,” Guillermo said.
“You’ll pick her up in a Camaro,” Mr. Alvarenga added.
As the party wound down, Ms. De La Torre leaned back in a rocking chair. “It was a good day for me, too,” she said.
Earlier, she had stopped by the lot in Altadena. The contractors had hauled in the first piece of equipment. No Porta Potty had ever inspired so much hope.
There were two milestones on the horizon. Robin’s birthday was first. The groundbreaking was not far behind.
Isadora Kosofsky contributed reporting.
Mimi Dwyer is a video journalist covering California and the West for The Times.
The post She Was Born Two Days Before the Altadena Fire Took Her Home appeared first on New York Times.
