The comfort and gleam of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles depended on the people who waded through rush-hour traffic on the 405 Freeway or the Pacific Coast Highway every morning to do the service work there.
That’s why Elvis Sandoval and other workers, largely Latino immigrants, considered themselves part of the community. They trimmed the lawns, cleaned the living rooms, folded the laundry, watched the children or did any number of other jobs that made idyllic life by the ocean possible.
Now, though, thousands of homes and many businesses in the neighborhood are gone, and so too is “all of our work,” said Mr. Sandoval, 43, a landscaping-business owner who immigrated from Mexico and for more than 20 years has maintained lawns and gardens and built the ambitious landscaping projects of Pacific Palisades residents.
The victims of the fires still ravaging Greater Los Angeles include not just the people who lost their lives or their homes, schools and communities to the infernos. Service workers, many of them already clinging tenuously to their rung on California’s steep economic ladder, have lost their livelihoods to the fires.
“There’s no safety net for these workers,” said Maegan Ortiz, the executive director of the nonprofit group Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California, known as IDEPSCA. The group supports day laborers, who often count on work in upscale neighborhoods like the Palisades. “This is going to be a dire, dire situation for quite a number of years,” Ms. Ortiz said.
When Mr. Sandoval was 21, the wealthy community of Pacific Palisades gave his fledgling business its first big break. Word of mouth about his services spread quickly. Before Tuesday, his company’s 12 employees — some recent immigrants, some who came years ago — worked on more than a dozen private properties, and tended the median gardens on Sunset Boulevard under a contract with a local beautification organization. They include friends who grew up with him in Mexico.
Now, Mr. Sandoval said in Spanish, “We’re going to find ourselves unfortunately needing to lay people off.”
That is one small slice of the employment picture. Around 10,000 Latinos worked in the evacuation zones of the Palisades, making up 34 percent of the work force there, according to the Latino Policy and Politics Institute at U.C.L.A. Another nearly 20,000 Latinos worked were in the evacuation zones of the Eaton fire near Pasadena to the east of downtown Los Angeles.
Ms. Ortiz and other IDEPSCA staff members have been calling workers whom they had supported during another wildfire in December to see how they have fared this time. At least 73 of them said they had lost their jobs. Over the weekend, one worker simply received photographs from his employer of the construction site where he had been working before the fires. The house is now a pile of rubble.
Many more of the workers said they had not yet heard from their employers.
Over the last week, demand for landscapers and other workers at the organization’s five day-labor centers has gone quiet. Worker numbers are also down at the support stations that IDEPSCA uses to distribute water to day laborers near hardware stores.
The organization’s main office has turned into a disaster response hub, where more than 100 workers who have lost wages because of the fires are seeking food, baby formula and diapers.
Latino communities have been hit hard. Residents of Latino neighborhoods are almost three times as likely as residents of mainly white neighborhoods to work in farming, landscaping or outdoor construction jobs, which expose them to wildfire smoke. They are also far less likely to have health insurance or to seek care when the effects take root.
While Latinos make up a small portion of the population in the area affected by the Eaton and Palisades fires, many Latino workers from elsewhere travel to work in those areas.
Last week, as long lines of cars clogged the evacuation route on Sunset Boulevard in the Pacific Palisades, a few residents chose to hold out. And then there were the gardeners and housekeepers who were still working under a blotted sun.
Some of Mr. Sandoval’s workers pivoted to a form of firefighting, spraying the walls and tiled roof of an out-of-town client’s house with a garden hose. At one point, they drew water from the swimming pool. The house survived.
Since then, Mr. Sandoval has been fielding calls from other clients who did lose their homes. He has rationed work hours among his employees and moved them to jobs outside the fire zone. But Pacific Palisades represented one-third of his business.
Past fire disasters in the region hint at the challenges to come for day laborers and short-term hires who do physical work like construction or landscaping.
Following the Woolsey fire, which ravaged parts of Los Angeles County in late 2018, the day-labor work force had not fully recovered after two years, Ms. Ortiz said, and her organization was still working with foundations and private donors to provide rent assistance and other support.
“If it took two years for workers to come even close to a semblance of recovery — and that was one fire,” she said, then it might take “at least five years” for workers to recover from these blazes.
In the meantime, she predicted that workers would face diminished pay and a risk of exploitation.
“This is about workers being desperate and about employers potentially taking advantage of that,” she added.
Beyond the economic pain is the trauma of crackling flames, harrowing escapes and, for workers who had formed yearslong relationships with their employers, genuine loss.
Lucy Acosta, a housekeeper, picked up three strangers during the exodus from Pacific Palisades — fellow housekeepers who were fleeing on foot. In the rearview mirror, the four women could see the wall of gray descending on homes.
When it became clear that the flames would engulf Ms. Acosta’s job, she said, she thought about her employers and their daughters, with whom she had grown close over the last four years.
Ms. Acosta, a Mexican immigrant, would drive from Inglewood to Pacific Palisades every Tuesday and Friday to clean the family’s house. But housekeeping, Ms. Acosta said, can be intimate, and she shared with her employer both moments of familial joy, and after a recent death, grief.
“So that’s why it makes one sad,” Ms. Acosta said in Spanish. “And also because there’s no more work.”
She cleans another home in Culver City, far from the burn zones, but the job in Pacific Palisades was the one that provided most of her income and helped pay her bills, including the $900 monthly rent she pays for the converted garage where she lives with her husband and two children.
Other workers lost both their jobs and their homes. Maria Nol lived in a mobile home at the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates on Pacific Coast Highway and worked as a cleaner for a local family whose house burned down. Ms. Nol lost her own home as well, one of nearly 200 that were destroyed at the mobile home park. (Ms. Nol did not have an insurance policy on her property because of the cost.)
For Marco Fiorini, a dog groomer, Pacific Palisades represented a significant leap. After more than 20 years of experience, he had finally landed a job at a salon that he said valued his skills, paid fairly and treated him well.
He had been working for seven months when he had to evacuate on that windy afternoon last week. He recalled seeing the road leading to the Pacific Coast Highway shrouded in smoke. Fearing for his life, he contemplated ditching his car and running toward the beach, but that proved to be unnecessary.
The next day, Mr. Fiorini was at a restaurant celebrating his daughter’s 11th birthday when his boss called. The salon was gone.
Mr. Fiorini, 43, who immigrated from Guatemala decades ago, broke into tears. His four daughters consoled him.
“They knew that’s how I was able to provide well for them,” Mr. Fiorini said in Spanish. “With that job, I was finally starting to do better.”
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