Opinion: The flames erased lives, homes and the still to be told stories of Los Angeles

Last Wednesday morning, after a singularly terrifying night of fire in Los Angeles, people miles away from Altadena or Pacific Palisades discovered more than ash in their backyards. The pages of books, some almost entirely blackened and illegible, others serrated and singed by flame from which fragments of text emerged, had been ripped, I imagine, out of peoples’ burning homes by hurricane-force gusts. These were the remains of intimate archives, the runes of lives scattered by fiery winds.

We think of Los Angeles as a celluloid city, not a lettered one. Hollywood has long romanced disaster, films showing us the Hollywood sign tumbling down in a temblor, the enormous white letters losing their form and order, becoming gibberish. In disaster movies, Hollywood ironizes its relationship to the violence of its representations, its distortions and erasures, its fabulous wealth heavy against the barrios of East L.A. and South Central. Of course, Hollywood also reflects the actual geography of disaster here — earthquakes, fires and floods, the price of California paradise, of being able to ski and surf on the same day.

But Hollywood could never match the actual disasters. No director-screenwriter team has ever dared to approach one of the costliest social disasters in American history, the L.A. riots of 1992, the price of the city’s reactionary heartlessness in the early 20th century and the liberal fecklessness of its latter years.

Over the last couple of generations, Los Angeles has begun to write itself more seriously, through its scholars, journalists and poets and, more recently, its podcasters and even influencers. The pastless paradise has unearthed more and more of its history, peeled back the layers of the language of conquest to reveal Indigenous names beneath Spanish and English ones. The Gabrieleños are once again the Tongva, and colonial-era Indigenous rebel Toypurina is depicted in street murals and taught in the same fourth-grade classrooms where California history used to be a mission diorama assignment.

The city is written not just by its Didions, Hockneys and Chazelles or, for that matter, its Carlos Alamarazes, Charles Burnetts and Luis Rodriguezes. The development of West Coast hip-hop (culminating with generational rapper Kendrick Lamar) has provided a contemporary chronicle of survival on L.A.’s seething streets. Still, we are far from our representations catching up to our lived history. Among the many stories missing an epic treatment, we lack the great film or book telling of the wave of immigrants and refugees who arrived in the 1980s and 1990s and transformed the city.

But beyond representations popular or elite, beyond the collections at MOCA or the Huntington or the basement of the Los Angeles Central Library, there are, or were, in the living rooms of Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, collectible or amateur paintings, brilliant or banal diaries, forgotten demo tapes of bands that never made it.

The collective social archive has been steadily migrating into the digital realm since the 1990s, but there are still countless hard copy “letters,” some of them literal, like the correspondence between my parents, handwritten in the late 1950s, from my Mexican American dad in L.A. to and from my mother in El Salvador during a long-distance separation before they married. These are stored in a box in a cedar closet in my family’s Silver Lake home.

Today my father lies in a hospital bed in the same room where my mother died a few years ago, where my grandparents spent their final days decades ago. My father loves to comb through the Martínez archive — thousands of Kodachrome snapshots, expired passports, the crumbling playbills of my grandparents’ performances on Mexican vaudeville stages a century ago in downtown.

There has been plenty of death in the Silver Lake house. But the archive speaks more about life, our lives spilling across and beyond the pages of documents intimate and public that join — or should join — the vast story of the city.

In my office at my home in Mt. Washington — which, as it sits next to the open space of a canyon, suddenly feels vulnerable to fire — there is a wall of cabinets crammed with banker’s boxes. My personal archive: photo proofs with images highlighted in wax pencil, flyers for poetry readings held decades ago in coffeehouses that no longer exist. Should an ember ignite the canyon one day, what would I want to save, what would be too painful to lose?

How many African American family archives are there, or were there, in Altadena living rooms, narrating the fate of relationships as well as the story of civil rights and integration at the foot of the San Gabriels?

What of the homes of screenwriters, art directors and lighting designers in Pacific Palisades and the archives of their aesthetic struggles, their union drives, Hollywood’s glories and sins?

As I write this, I see a post on Facebook about yet another loss: The late UCLA historian Juan Gómez-Quiñones’s house was destroyed in the Palisades fire, along with his archive. As a founder of Chicano studies, his life’s work was about saving the stories of ordinary people who rose up in extraordinary circumstances. It became a part of the rain of ash and burning pages.

An old African proverb holds that when an elder dies, a library burns. As our city burns, we lose bundles of essential letters of all kinds. The singed pages fall to earth; we breathe in the ash of our stories. Recovering and rebuilding will mean many things in the months and years to come. Remembering especially that which we never realized had been forgotten should be the foundation of any meaningful return.

Rubén Martínez is a professor of literature at Loyola Marymount University.