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. – Ambulance and fire truck sirens wailed outside as Elsie Rosales stripped linens from king-sized mattresses at a beachfront resort in Lahaina.
Filipinos began arriving in Hawaii more than a century ago to labor on sugarcane and pineapple plantations. As their descendants and successive generations of immigrants have settled, they have become deeply ingrained in the community’s culture. A number are hotel housekeepers like Rosales, 61, who is staying in a two-bedroom suite with her two sisters, her son, his wife and three grandchildren at the Sands of Kahana resort. Rosales' 72-year-old sister, Evangeline Balintona, works there as a housekeeper.
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. “The new Lahaina should be the old Lahaina,” said Alicia Kalepa, who lives in a Hawaiian homestead where most of the houses survived the fire. “Mixed culture.”