For Ernesto Perez, life on Maui wasn’t easy. But it was pleasant and peaceful, and a long way from the cartel violence of Mexico that his family escaped nearly three decades ago.

He became a chef, serving the flow of tourists that propelled the local economy, and found a home a short walk from the shimmering waters of the Pacific Ocean in the historic town of Lahaina. He got married, had four daughters, got divorced and found love again.

Then in 2023 the fires came, consuming his home and claiming his job, and he was confronted with a choice: Stay or go? His mother invited him to return to Mexico, but he said he would never raise his daughters amid the violence of the drug trade that overshadows his homeland.

Eventually, he was drawn to Las Vegas, a place that has attracted so many Hawaii residents in recent years that it has been called the Ninth Island. These days, Perez works as a cook at the Flamingo Las Vegas Hotel & Casino, dreaming of his lost paradise and worrying about the toll on his family.

“I lived a block from the beach in Lahaina,” said Perez, 42. “My daughters would go to the beach, they would go shopping by themselves. I didn’t have to worry. Here there’s a lot of danger for my girls.”

One year after a wildfire incinerated Lahaina, killing 102 people in the deadliest fire in the United States in more than a century, residents on Maui struggle to find work and housing. Some still live in hotels, while others cannot find apartments they can afford.

Thousands of other people, like Perez, have picked up and left in search of better economic opportunities. But they have discovered new hardships and not escaped their trauma.

Perez’s four daughters are all in therapy in Las Vegas, processing both the psychological wounds of witnessing the town they loved being wiped away and leaving their little piece of paradise, while also trying to fit in at new schools.

One of his daughters, Nicole Perez, 15, said she missed everything about Lahaina — the beaches, the trees, the food, the quiet roads. She is getting ready to start 10th grade in Las Vegas and going through culture shock.

“It looks miserable, it looks depressing,” she said of her new city. “Nothing looks healthy at all.”

She said she appreciated the diversity of the people in Las Vegas but otherwise felt unsafe. “All the cars drive too fast, and animals get run over many, many times,” she said “In Lahaina you could just walk on the road and nobody would hit you.”

The Lahaina diaspora, numbering in the thousands, now stretches from the Philippines to Honduras and through the mainland, especially along the West Coast.

Families who were tightknit on the islands are now scattered about, with some people staying on Maui and others moving to the mainland, leaving sadness and loneliness in their wake.

The diaspora involves more than the residents who lost their homes. Other Maui residents whose seaside livelihoods were tied to Lahaina or who grew worried about the next possible disaster in an era of climate change have also joined the exodus.

Ron Proctor, 71, lived in Lahaina for 13 years, working in restaurants for a few years before retiring — at least from that line of work. Proctor has a long white beard down to his chest, and for years was the community’s Santa Claus at restaurants and strip malls and on boat cruises.

“Basically, the whole west side,” he said. “Anyone who needed a Santa Claus.”

On the day of the fire, he barely escaped with his life, he said, and saw the charred body of someone who had tried to flee on a bicycle. For months afterward he lived in a luxury resort paid for by the government and kept looking for permanent housing, a pursuit he came to believe was “useless.”

A few months ago he packed up and moved to Napa, Calif., near his daughter and grandchildren, and found a cheap apartment through the Veterans Affairs Department. His few belongings that survived the fire fit in one backpack, and he has been scouring garage sales to stock his new apartment.

“It had been a good run, and I just saw no way to sustain what I had,” he said.

While the aftermath of the fire has affected residents of every background, including immigrants like Perez and people who grew up on the mainland and came to Maui to surf and ended up staying, the tragedy has been especially painful for Native Hawaiians.

Kuhio Lewis, CEO of the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, said the fires had exacerbated a longtime exodus of Native Hawaiians because of economic hardship. In recent decades, as tourism overtook agriculture as the state’s dominant industry, rampant development and an influx of wealthy people from the mainland drove up the cost of living, forcing Native Hawaiians to seek economic opportunities and more affordable housing elsewhere.

Census data from 2020 showed that for the first time, a higher share of Native Hawaiians, about 53%, were living on the mainland rather than in Hawaii.

“We were taught that chasing the American dream and moving away from Hawaii was ‘a better life,’ as if living in paradise and living in our homeland and being Hawaiian was not good enough,” said Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, a Hawaiian cultural teacher and community leader on Oahu. “We are a minor minority in our own homeland.”

Gov. Josh Green said in an interview that data he had seen from the Federal Emergency Management Agency showed that about 10% of Lahaina’s population of 12,000 residents had left the island.

The University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization estimates that Maui has lost 3,000 to 4,000 people over the past year, a number that includes people who were not displaced by the fire but left anyway and undocumented residents affected by the fire who wouldn’t necessarily show up in official data because they did not seek out government aid. Carl Bonham, the organization’s executive director, said he considered the estimate to be conservative.

Green said that while the exodus of people was concerning, many were immigrants who were there seasonally and left to find work elsewhere.

“When their jobs went away or their rent went through the roof, many people went and found a different place to live,” he said. “Most of the people who are Hawaiian or longtime Hawaii residents are staying.”

Brett Moore, who has Native Hawaiian ancestry, decided to stay on Maui, where he grew up. But he recently helped his parents move to South Carolina, near his brother.

They had lived on Maui for 49 years, moving there in the early 1970s during a renaissance of Hawaiian culture that drew many families back to the island. But they saw the chance to sell their house at an inflated value because home prices soared after the fire. And they worried about the chance of another disaster, and what the future of Maui would bring — a sense, Moore said, “that this place that has been so familiar for so long is no longer familiar.”

His parents sold their house for nearly $1 million, bought a new one in South Carolina for about $300,000 and paid off all of their debts.

“Now they are living in a place they don’t want to be living at, in a state they don’t want to be in,” he said, “but they love family and they love finally being out of debt.”

Many people who left are hoping to return once the rebuilding process begins and Lahaina regains its economic footing.

Mariana Pantoja, 37, had lived in Lahaina for only a few months before the fire, but it was enough time for her to fall in love with the place. Many of her relatives from Mexico were already living in Lahaina, and she found work as a maid at a hotel. “I used to say, ‘This is work?’” she said. “Cleaning hotel rooms with a beautiful view of the ocean, for me, is not work.”

She never wanted to leave, but her boyfriend, deeply traumatized by the devastation of the wildfire, convinced her that they should move to Chicago, where she has family. Ever since, she said, she has been arguing with her boyfriend about whether to return.

“He said to stop talking about going back, but it’s been a year and I will not spend another winter here,” she said.

In recent days Pantoja quit her job at a food factory in Chicago, where she worked an overnight shift moving boxes of hot sauce and cooking oils onto pallets. She flew back to Maui last week to look for work and housing. “We lived there for a short time, but the time we lived there was the best and we were very happy,” she said.

State Sen. Angus McKelvey, who represents Maui, said the state government hadn’t done enough to keep people in Lahaina. He said he believed there should be a large assistance program, modeled on the federal government’s pandemic response, to stem the flight of people from Maui.

A year after the fire, leaders like McKelvey are concerned that even more people will leave, pointing to a recent survey by the Hawaii State Rural Health Association that showed that nearly half of the fire survivors still on the island were thinking about moving away.

He worried, too, that the exodus would permanently alter the character of his community.

“Local people leave, wealthy people from all over the world come in,” McKelvey said. “That is the palpable fear.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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