Lahaina’s fire-stricken Filipino residents are key to tourism and local culture. Will they stay? | Jennifer Sinco Kelleher / The Associated Press

Evangeline Balintona, left, and Elsie Rosales pose on the balcony of a hotel room in Lahaina, Hawaii, on Thursday, Aug. 31, 2023. They are among the many Filipinos who work as Maui hotel housekeepers living temporarily in hotel rooms after losing their homes to a deadly fire.

“All our hard work burned,” Rosales told The Associated Press in an interview conducted in Ilocano, her native language. “There is nothing left.” and character as it rebuilds. FILE – Workers harvest a pineapple field in Maui, Hawaii, on March 5, 2002. Filipinos began arriving in Hawaii more than a century ago to labor on sugarcane and pineapple plantations. In 2023, 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 — about 40% of the town’s population before the fire.

While surrounded by food donations, Evangeline Balintona, left, and her sister Elsie Rosales sit inside a hotel condo after they both lost homes in Lahaina to the Hawaii wildfires, Friday, Sept. 1, 2023, in Kahana, Hawaii. 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.

Many longtime Lahaina residents, including Native Hawaiians, told the AP they worry that whatever is built from the ashes of Lahaina won’t include Filipinos and other ethnic groups who made it the working class community it was.

Source: Holiday News (holidaynews.net)

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