When the Tubbs Fire ignited in 2017, Paloma Reyes’s gloved hands didn’t brush against the smooth skin of grape clusters on vines for weeks.
“In that time of the fires, we did not work,” said Reyes, speaking in Spanish. She had just come from a vineyard in Napa where she’d been preparing vines for spring.
For months, the smoke-filled air and the threat of fires burning vineyards kept Reyes and other farmworkers out of the fields for long enough that it hurt.
“In those months when the fire happened, we did not save enough money to sustain ourselves through winter,” she said.
The Tubbs Fire was the first blaze to force Reyes out of smoke-crowded vineyards and into the safety of her apartment near a commuter rail line in Santa Rosa in Sonoma County.
“2017 was the year that marked all of us girls,” she said.
What held Reyes together during that fire — and a slog of fires in the years to come — is the community she worked for six years to foster: Santa Rosa Trans Latinas, a grassroots network of transgender people, including farmworkers, who advocate for each other in California’s wine country. Reyes has called Santa Rosa home for more than two decades.
“We were supporting each other,” she said of the weeks after the Tubbs Fire cut her community from work. “It was not easy for us trans girls who work in agriculture.”
Reyes’s life is one example of how queer people often have to create space for themselves, especially during climate disasters, because the services offered to most people may not be or feel available to them. And when there’s a climate disaster, LGBTQ+ people are often more vulnerable because of intersecting factors like poverty, incarceration, homelessness, immigration status and discrimination.
