On Oct. 4, 2024, I found myself sitting in my car next to a barbecue place in Lexington, N.C., waiting for a group of guys to meet me so we could head to Asheville. My car was full of the supplies I’d heard were needed in the days after Helene hit the mountains: chainsaws, tortillas, cans of beans, Maseca. I’d met only Celes before; he was bringing friends of his to come help clear trees out of roads and people’s yards. My job was figuring out who, if anyone, needed that kind of help.

I was very reluctant to go on this trip. I lived in western North Carolina for several years, and I wasn’t sure I was prepared to see firsthand what I’d been watching on my social media feed for days: beloved places that had completely disappeared and the rivers and creeks I’d gone swimming in, stared at, hiked near completely transformed. I was afraid of seeing so many of my friends and loved ones actively trying to survive the aftermath of this disaster.

I was also worried that we wouldn’t be able to get into western N.C. at all because there was so much misinformation. I fell for the rumors I saw all over Facebook that volunteers and cars with supplies were being turned away at I-40 and I-26. All the information I found online was contradictory. Finally, I started calling around until a friend told me a friend had just told her about someone who had successfully driven into Asheville from the east.

The organization I belong to, Siembra NC, mostly organizes around workers’ rights. We were in the middle of our most ambitious electoral program yet, attempting to knock on the doors of 100,000 Latino voters in the state. Our members had recently voted to endorse Kamala Harris, mostly out of the sense that it was the most practical path toward beating Trump. Some of the same members had risked Covid-19 exposure to knock on doors in the 2020 election, saying that Trump was more of a threat to their community than the virus. I could see the same math at play here: both parties have now turned against immigrants and are using them as scapegoats, but we still have to try to make our lives and futures more bearable.

Maybe it was that same spirit that got me into the car even when I was so preoccupied with that campaign. People already on the ground might have been working out distribution hubs and water sources, but we couldn’t just wait and watch. These people are our people; this home is our home. We have to do something.

Back in 2018, our small Latino base-building organization got a phone call about an early morning immigration detention. Then another. Then another. ICE agents were detaining immigrants as they left their homes to go to work. The agents had ICE warrants (not judicial warrants) for some, but not all, of the people they took. Nearly all of them were the primary earners in their family.

The next thing I knew, we were canvassing mobile home parks in Chapel Hill, N.C. We helped people start neighborhood watch programs, learning their neighbors’ names and what kinds of cars they drove so they could more easily spot an unknown vehicle that might be ICE. If we were going to get through this crisis, it was going to be because we broke through the way some of us had started to believe we could stay safe by isolating.

A common refrain in Latino immigrant communities you’ll hear after knocking on doors is “Yo solo voy de la casa al trabajo, y del trabajo a la casa” (I only go from home to work, and to work from home). It might be surprising to some, but the same migrant crime narratives that scare people in English-language news get told by Spanish-language media in the U.S., too. These stories can create more fear, making people believe they can’t trust their own neighbors. They can also create the misconception that only criminal immigrants get detained. Many immigrants believe that they can escape ICE detention by behaving impeccably, and they also believe that if someone else got detained, it must be because of something they have done wrong. When Siembra NC posted advice on Facebook about what to know if you encounter ICE agents, sometimes we’d get a comment that “el que nada debe, nada teme” (he who owes nothing fears nothing), chiding us for not knowing the rules.

What we figured out over the course of a few days was that these detentions were part of a broader immigration raid. Instead of targeting one workplace, ICE agents drove around the state, hitting up rural and urban communities between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. The panic caused by these detentions was widespread, and rumors abounded; entire families stayed home, pulling their kids out of school. Our organization focused on a few main tasks: assisting the affected families; training verifiers, people who could check suspected ICE sightings; and mitigating rumors on social media so that people could go about their day without fear of leaving their homes.

About a week into the raid, detentions slowed down, and I headed to Asheville to visit friends and enjoy a little peek into normalcy. While I was driving there, a friend in Asheville called: “Hey, we just had a detention call here.” The agents, it turned out, also had gotten on I-40 and headed west.

My friends had merged a couple of Asheville community organizations and projects into an immigrants’ rights organization called CIMA, and now it was responding much as Siembra NC had. A friend and I were asked to verify a suspicious vehicle in a neighborhood and confirmed that the people inside were ICE agents. When they pulled out of the mobile home park, we followed them from Asheville to Morganton and back.

Then it was time to go home, driving through a heavy rainstorm to get back to Greensboro. That storm turned out to have been a tornado that devastated East Greensboro, which is primarily home to working-class Black and Latine people. It was days before any kind of official response to the tornado materialized; in the meantime, many homes were damaged, some made unlivable. Landlords were unresponsive, and Black organizers in East Greensboro had begun to mobilize on their own. They told us, “What we need the most are chainsaws and people who know how to use them.”

At Siembra we came up with an idea. We knew many Latinos in Greensboro work in landscaping and construction and put out a public call: “¡Manos y motosierras a la obra!” (Let’s get our hands and chainsaws to work!) There was an outpouring of help over the next few days: workers ready to take days off work, people who wanted to drop off supplies and groceries, others still who wanted to cook hot meals for the volunteers. That’s when we met Celes.

Celes became sort of a crew leader. He jokingly called my partner “jefe” (boss) and ribbed him constantly: “Where are we going next, jefe?” My partner drove around and talked to people with trees in their roads and yards, offering our volunteer crew’s support, to many people’s surprise. Many of the homeowners and renters who took us up on our offer were working-class Black people, and some of them joined our cleanup crew.

It was moving to see Black and Latine workers responding to crisis side by side, especially because it came immediately after an event that could have forced everyone deeper into isolation. Instead here we all were, taking part in a community response. Workers moved trees off and tarped the roofs of complete strangers, because we all knew more rain was coming.

The immigration raid and the tornado, one right after another, solidified what would become a key part of Siembra’s ethos: confronting the increasingly intertwined crises of immigration panic (both the manufactured fear of immigrants and the subsequent fear caused by more aggressive detention strategies and border enforcement), capitalism, and climate change required an organized community that was willing to watch out for and take care of one another. We would have to mind one another’s business. Over the years, that would come to mean many things — from detention fights and housing campaigns to cultural organizing (such as our big Día de Muertos event) and electoral work.

I wasn’t surprised when, just days after Helene made landfall, Celes texted us. “Are we going?” he asked. “I can organize more people to go, too.”

That’s how I ended up waiting for him in Lexington.

I used to live in western North Carolina. My parents and I moved from Paterson, N.J., to Haywood County just in time for me to start high school. The textile factory they had worked at for years had closed, and relocating to N.C. was the only job opportunity offered by the company that had owned the factory. My father is a craftsman who loved his work as a mechanic specializing in the huge looms that produced clothing labels, following it to North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and then back to North Carolina until there were no more factories left. I left the mountains to go to college in Chapel Hill, and then in 2011 I went back to the mountains because I felt called to be part of the immigrant organizing happening in Asheville.

So much of my own identity and what I hope I’ve contributed to Siembra traces back to the mountains. I can remember my parents’ factory co-workers, who shared their summer squash and ramp harvests with us. When my mom’s brother died, they quietly handed her an envelope full of cash; they had taken up a collection for her family. My parents are Colombian immigrants, their co-workers mostly white Appalachian people. When the factories closed, they closed for everyone.

From the work I did in Asheville in my mid-20s, I learned so much about community building: the slow, patient labor of bringing people in and together. When I was a baker at an earlier iteration of Firestorm Books that sold food, I learned that it’s one thing to have political ideals and it’s another thing to live our politics, when the practices of democracy and consensus turn toward the price of sandwiches. I volunteered as a hotline operator for Defensa Comunitaria, which identified immigration checkpoints and potential ICE activity. Through that work, I saw my first immigration raid, at a restaurant where the owners were committing wage theft. A very shy 20-something with no organizer training, I found myself awkwardly approaching people and asking if they had gotten the money they were owed.

My friends and I were just beginning to talk about the dream that would one day become Poder Emma — a dream to combat gentrification and for our gente to own their own land — when I moved away. It started with my friends buying and moving into a mobile home park in the Emma community in Asheville. Poder Emma has since grown into an organization that supports housing and worker-owned cooperatives and networks in the neighborhood. It has generated assets, employment, and stable housing for working-class people in a city that is rapidly losing affordable housing as it grows.

I’m not sure who I would be or what Siembra would look like if it weren’t for the work of the many organizers and activists in the mountains who let me tag along and learn from them.

By the time I was driving on I-40 with my chainsaw brigade, I knew all my loved ones were safe and accounted for, but I still was afraid of what I was going to see. I’d heard about houses by the river in Swannanoa that had flooded and moved entirely off their foundations. What the AP called a “wall of water” destroyed the town of Chimney Rock. As I’m writing this, the death toll from Helene is up to 95 people in North Carolina alone; many people I’ve talked to suspect it is much higher.

We were driving into Morganton when things started to look off. Fallen trees lay along the highway. Metal signs were bent. And everything started to take on a tinge of brown that would intensify and thicken the closer we got to the rivers and creeks.

The next morning, we arrived at a community center in Asheville, ready for our first assignment. The rest of Celes’s recruits had already arrived, and true to his word, we had an 18-person crew, most of whom had driven three hours on their day off. They were joined by volunteers from CIMA, Chispas (a co-op that is part of the Poder Emma network), and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. While they all went off to their assignments, I helped out a bit at the center and then went to find food for their lunch.

People at the community center were running a supply distribution hub and had the sort of hazy look I recognized from immigration raids, brought on by the seemingly endless list of tasks and the impossibility of stopping work. It’s worth noting that many of the people who started and run the mutual-aid efforts and distribution hubs after Helene still don’t have power or water in their own homes. They don’t have much normalcy to return to after a long day. True mutual aid, but also: holy shit.

The magnitude of Helene hit us as the chainsaw crew got to work: these trees were big. The trees felled by the tornado in East Greensboro destroyed people’s homes, but they could be dragged and cut into smaller pieces by a crew of volunteers. Some of the trees in Asheville required arborists with special equipment due to their size. We didn’t get the triumphant feeling a weekend of serious work in East Greensboro had brought us, the sense that we’d made a significant dent in alleviating a crisis. Instead it was a humbling reminder of what everyone was saying: No one brigade could solve this. It’s going to take a lot of people a long time.

One of the bright spots of that weekend was the time I spent picking up small bundles of sticks and leaves while the brigade moved a tree out of a woman’s yard. The tree had fallen from a new development across the street onto the property where she had been living for 50 years, but fortunately it damaged only her fence and not her house. We were able to clear her yard completely, which gave me at least a momentary feeling of satisfaction. She thanked us many times: “I didn’t know what I was going to do about that!” Someone asked her if she was going to apply for FEMA relief, and she answered, “I heard it’s all reimbursements, so I’m not gonna mess with that.”

One house we visited had a Confederate flag outside. But as long as we had permission to work, we worked, chainsawing trees, clearing branches, making neat piles. For Celes and his crew, the question of whether to drive three hours with someone they barely knew to clear trees didn’t seem like a complicated one. People needed help — let’s go help them. One guy said, “I’ve never helped people in this way before. This feels good. How can I do more of it?” This is one of the very best moments a community organizer can have: watching someone have the realization that doing something for someone else in a time of need can also be in their own interest. Even in a political moment that would have us believe that we should hide, that we are powerless and have so little to contribute, we are capable of so much.

In the swing state of North Carolina, voters have twice elected Trump and a Democratic governor on the same ballot. This year, we have the challenge of talking to people about our own sort of mini-Trump in the governor’s race. Someone from outside the state asked me and my co-director at Siembra if the disaster might have a silver lining: would the added difficulty more conservative voters in the mountains face in reaching a polling location make it easier for North Carolina to swing blue? We explained that gerrymandering affects the entire state, including the west, and that voters in the mountain counties of Buncombe and Watauga tend to vote Democratic in statewide elections anyway.

The Republican-controlled legislature had earlier passed a voter ID law, which has been criticized by progressives for creating more impediments to voting. In response to Helene, there is now a “Photo ID Exception Form” that voters can fill out as part of their absentee voter packet — raising the question of why IDs are necessary in the first place. The legislature also passed HB10, a bill that both funds an expansive voucher fund for private schools and forces sheriffs across the state to cooperate with ICE.

Much of the devastation of Helene is not just rain and flooding — it’s the impact of rain and flooding on poorly maintained infrastructure that has been systematically gutted by the state. Soon after the storm hit, Firestorm Books made a statement objecting to local officials’ tendency to describe the flood as “biblical,” as something divine rather than the product of greed and abandonment: “The death and destruction in Buncombe County is a direct result of capitalism, and environmental extractivism — a logical extension of colonialism and Appalachia’s two hundred year status as a national sacrifice zone.” North Carolina is often touted as being among the “top states for business” in the country; it’s a right-to-work state, and the corporate tax rate is one of the lowest in the country, on its way to 0 percent. Those reasons also contribute to its ranking as the worst state to be a worker. Our state government has committed itself to these types of policies instead of preparing for the climate crisis.

Much of our day-to-day work at Siembra involves organizing workers subjected to wage theft. We frequently call, protest, and sue developers and business owners in a state where stealing a car or even a soda can have more serious consequences than hiring someone to do thousands of dollars of roofing or landscaping work and not paying them for it. But our members are clear that we can’t just keep fighting these cases one by one. We have to fight for a state that won’t permit this and that will protect workers.

Part of Asheville’s appeal has been its status as a perceived “climate refuge.” High off the ground, far from a coast — what could happen there? Helene shows us that this era of climate change means that these things can happen anywhere and to anyone. Many people still don’t have power or water. Some people I know who do have running water can’t bathe or drink in it because it’s “non-potable.”

I keep thinking about the immigrant workers who have supported the region’s fast-paced growth: construction workers, line cooks, home cleaners, nannies, farmworkers. A friend told me the restaurant where her partner worked was flooded, so now he is out of a job. It’s not like new restaurants are going to open anytime soon, especially given the lack of clean running water. How is he supposed to make a living? Who will look out for these workers while they weather this crisis, which may last for some time?

It’s hard for me to think about western North Carolina without imagining the rivers and creeks that formed its landscape: the Swannanoa, the French Broad, the Pigeon, the Laurel, Walker Creek. It’s common for rivers and creeks to “meander,” changing their path over time. Helene was a storm formed in this era of climate change, so mighty that it changed the paths of rivers in a matter of days. I think for me and many others, there will be the time before Helene and the time after. I remember Wendell Berry’s line “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

The homegrown collective response to Helene has doubtless saved lives. We must continue to contribute to the mutual-aid efforts and let them lead on what is needed. Yet the huge scale of Helene’s destruction on top of years of divestment from public infrastructure will require a long recovery. To address that, we need a government that will invest in infrastructure not just in western North Carolina but across the state, so that our communities can be safe when the next storm — which we know is inevitable — arrives.

If you would like to learn more or donate to Helene recovery, here is a (nonexhaustive!) list of accounts to follow on Instagram:
Centro Unido Latino-Americano
CIMA
Colaborativa La Milpa
Firestorm Books
Pansy Collective
Poder Emma Community Ownership
Rural Organizing and Resilience
Unidxs WNC
Vecinos Inc