Claire Wang

Jan 19, 2025 | theguardian.com | Claire Wang

Mayra Chacon’s home cleaning service, Ocean Housekeeping, employs Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants who arrived in the US less than six months before. They clean dozens of houses around Los Angeles and, every Saturday, send their paychecks to loved ones back home. But as wildfires erupted earlier this month, Ocean Housekeeping lost more than 50% of its business overnight.

Jan 13, 2025 | nbcnews.com | Curtis Bunn |Claire Wang

Jan. 13, 2025, 11:27 PM UTCALTADENA, Calif. — Dennis “Buzz” Chatman said that, when he bought his house in Altadena in 2020, the original property title in 1950 indicated that the only nonwhite people allowed in the neighborhood were servants. “So being able to plant my flag there meant a lot,” Chatman, a film and TV producer, said. Now, he’s grappling with having lost not only his house, but what he says was a haven for Black families to the devastating fires in Los Angeles last week.

Jan 10, 2025 | theguardian.com | Claire Wang

As California state and federal agencies lag in their response to the widespread wildfires that erupted this week in Los Angeles, a network of grassroots organizations and small businesses have launched their own disaster relief efforts – from coordinating overnight evacuation services to delivering essential supplies to victims and frontline workers. All Power Books, a leftist bookstore, was converted into a warehouse for emergency resources.

Dec 3, 2024 | theguardian.com | Claire Wang

One sunny afternoon in February, a large group of plainclothes federal agents descended on Los Angeles’s La Placita Park, a sanctuary and bustling cultural hub for the city’s growing Mexican diaspora. Wielding guns and batons, they barricaded the park and demanded proof of citizenship or legal residency from the congregants trapped within. Those who failed to produce papers were arrested. More than 400 people were detained and forced on a train back to Mexico, a place many had never been.

Dec 2, 2024 | theguardian.com | Claire Wang

Janssen Vergara, 35, couldn’t wait to rebuild the three-bedroom house she owned in west Maui before it burned down in last year’s historic wildfire. She had been granted a building permit and the burn zone had been cleared for construction. But as the months passed, rebuilding came to feel more and more out of reach. As tourism to the island dropped in the year-and-a-half since the blaze, her income dwindled and she struggled to keep up mortgage payments nearing $4,000.