One Year After the LA Fires: Recovery, Toxic Soil, and Scams
Latino USA
My Cultura, Futuro and iHeartPodcasts
4.8 • 3.8K Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2026
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“Our government has failed us in many ways.”
A year has passed since the fires in Los Angeles devastated Altadena, CA. Who gets to rebuild? Who stays and who leaves?
We begin by checking back in with Sal Saucedo, a hairdresser who spoke to us after his home became rubble. He has since planted new roots by opening a hair salon in Mexico City.
Then we delve deeper into the slow and heartbreaking recovery in Altadena so far with the help of UCLA researcher Silvia González, comedian and Altadena resident Chris Garcia, and environmentalist Isaias Hernandez.
Latino USA is the longest-running news and culture radio program in the U.S., centering Latino stories and hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Dear Latino USA listener, |
| 0:09.9 | before we start, you should know that if you want to listen to this episode, |
| 0:14.3 | add free. |
| 0:15.4 | Just join Futuro Plus. |
| 0:17.7 | And you can join for as little as $7 a month. |
| 0:21.0 | Joining also gets you behind the scenes access, and yes, some chisement. |
| 0:26.7 | So, click the link in the episode description. |
| 0:30.1 | And after you do that, then click play. |
| 0:32.7 | Let's go to the show. |
| 0:43.5 | Futuro. the show. Three weeks before the eaten fires burned Sal's home in Altadena, he was going through a divorce. |
| 0:50.2 | I had just signed the paperwork before the actual fire. |
| 0:53.8 | And so Mexico was already in my mind, |
| 0:55.9 | okay, like a new start. I can offer myself and my son something different. He can come back and |
| 1:00.8 | forth. I'm going to start a new life, blah, blah, blah. It was just an idea. He thought about |
| 1:06.4 | co-parenting his son in his home country. Sal, whose full name is Salvador Saucedo, grew up in a ranch in |
| 1:13.6 | Mexico. His family moved to the Los Angeles area when he was a teenager. Sal worked as an assistant |
| 1:19.3 | in some of the best hair salons in L.A. And then, at 28 years old, he opened his own space in Altadena. |
| 1:30.1 | He told me about it when I first spoke to him in January 2025. Altadina, it's the most, in my opinion, the most communal, beautiful place. |
| 1:36.9 | And my salon is about to be seven years old and called Novo Arts Salon. And I love it. It's a safe |
| 1:42.9 | space where everyone's welcome, where people |
| 1:46.0 | can come in and make the dreams come reality. So he had built this space in L.A. and thought, |
| 1:53.2 | what a gift to one day be able to do this in Mexico too. And then the fire happens and essentially |
... |
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