The Brief

Gone are the rich, jewel toned thick carpets, gold embossed Qur’ans and the fig tree. Now, all that remains of Masjid Al Taqwa — the first mosque in the Altadena-Pasadena area — are soot, ash and charred twisted skeletons of chairs. A sign proclaiming the mosque’s name stands beside a burned, hollowed out billboard.

The place of worship and gathering was among many buildings destroyed by the Eaton Fire, which broke out Jan. 7 during an historic wind storm and grew to become one of the deadliest fires in Southern California’s history.

“It's a place where we come and we gather, but it's also our community … It's gotten me through some trying times and I've always known that I could go to the masjid,” said Najla Abdus-Samad, who grew up attending Masjid Al Taqwa. “Even when I didn't understand it, it was a place of openness where we could go and run around and it was safe.”

The skeleton of chairs at the former site of Masjid Al Taqwa which was destroyed by the Eaton Fire in Altadena.

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Now, mosque leaders, despite suffering losses of their own in the fire, are looking toward recovery and rebuilding as the full scale of destruction sinks in.

Early beginnings 

The mosque started as the Altadena-Pasadena Dawah Center in the 1970s by a group of Black Muslims leaving the Nation of Islam. The community was tight knit and used various locations to worship. But as their numbers grew, they needed a permanent home.

Daarina Abdus-Samad, Najla’s mother, was driving around Lake Avenue in Altadena and spotted the building which at the time was a thrift store. All it needed was a name.

Masjid is an Arabic word for “place of prostration” and Al Taqwa loosely translates to God consciousness or piety. The leaders agreed it would be a fitting name for their new home.

The tight-knit Masjid Al Taqwa community hopes to rebuild despite the loss of their place of worship.

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What remains of Masjid Al Taqwa, the first mosque in the Altadena-Pasadena area.

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Multigenerational place of community

Najla Abdus-Samad recalls Sunday school at the mosque and learning the Arabic alphabet.  

“We'd stay there for hours and we'd learn and we'd read the Qur'an and we'd play with each other,” she said, carrying her 1-year-old son Zavian Henderson.

“ I want him to grow up with what's right and what's wrong and the masjid taught me that. So not having the masjid, it's going to be a lot harder to teach him about a faith, about Allah that has carried me through my whole life.”

Jihad Saafir, the founder and executive director of Islah LA, a nonprofit offering education and housing in south Los Angeles, grew up in the Altadena-Pasadena area.

 ”This has always been my uncles, aunties. They helped raise me,” he said about some of the mosque’s early founders gathered to speak to LAist. “I lived right around the corner from the masjid at one point. I was the imam here. These are sites that I've seen growing up every day so to see them and to hear about them being burned down and seeing video and pictures, it's heartbreaking.”

Jihad Saafir, the founder and executive director of Islah LA, a nonprofit offering education and housing in south Los Angeles, grew up in the Altadena-Pasadena area.

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Rahil Siddiqui and Zayaan Qazi grew up attending Masjid Al Taqwa.

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For Rahil Siddiqui, 19, some of his best memories at Masjid Al Taqwa were around Eid, the festival marking the end of a month of fasting.

“ My father owned a restaurant nearby, so we would help with food for Eid,” he said. “We had this tradition where the kids would be able to put three gifts that they wanted, and the masjid would crowdfund in order to get those gifts and distribute it.”

And now as an adult, he helps keep the tradition alive, distributing the gifts on Eid morning.

Zeyaan Qazi, a student at USC, got her last Eid gift when she turned 18.

“ I've been helping the little kids paint their Eid bags, even like the little babies who can't even hold a paintbrush,” she said. “Now I'm older and I can help Sister Dolores plan the wish list and stuff the bags and decorate the gifts and it's honestly just such a tradition that I'm so excited to continue insha Allah (God willing) when we rebuild our mosque.”

Rebuilding and what the future holds

The loss is compounded for the likes of Aaron Abdus-Shakoor, one of the mosque’s early founders who also lost his home and business in the fire.

“Home, nothing was salvaged, office, nothing was salvaged, and other homes that I'm involved in, they were totally destroyed,” he said. “It is devastating. It's completely gone. It's flat. These areas are flat to the ground.”

Despite his personal losses, Abdus-Shakoor is thinking about the congregants. He is working to secure a place for the Masjid Al Taqwa community to continue Friday Jummah prayers (congregational prayers that Muslims offer like Sunday service). Ramadan is a few weeks away and he’s looking to lease a property so they can continue the free daily evening meals.

Delores and Aaron Abdus-Shakoor are early founders of Masjid Al Taqwa which was destroyed by the Eaton Fire along with their home and office. Here they stand with their son Jihad Abdus-Shakoor and his wife Desha Dauchan.

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Saafir has launched a LaunchGood campaign through Islah LA to crowdfund for the Masjid Al Taqwa’s needs, with the funds earmarked fortemporary housing, clothing, hygiene products and foods for those who have lost homes. The mosque is also raising funds to rebuild.

“ I think it’ll come back, but it's going to be years. It's not going to be overnight. It's going to take time because there's so many properties that were destroyed,” Abdus-Shakoor said. “It's a process of planning and building and getting permits and going through that system.”

Altadena is a tight-knit and diverse community where people have been able to achieve homeownership. Many residents who've been impacted by the Eaton Fire hope to rebuild.

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Darina Abdus-Samad, agreed, adding that the masjid has to rebuild, even if it’s with a tent or rug, because “the family is strong.”

“It just has to make us stronger. We can't let it go someplace else,” she said. “So much love and work has been put in it and you can feel the feeling when you come into our (masjid) — we've had families come from different places into our masjid and say, OK, this is home.”

Howl about this for the history books? A wolf was found in L.A. County for the first time in a century on Saturday morning.

“It's the furthest south the gray wolves have been documented since their reintroduction into Yellowstone and Idaho just over 30 years ago,” said Axel Hunnicutt, the state gray wolf coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The wolf, tagged as BEY03F, was spotted in the town of Neenach, near Lancaster, at 6 a.m.

The three-year-old wolf was born in 2023 in Plumas County, north of Lake Tahoe, as part of the first litter of the Beyem Seyo pack.

“ We don't know what happened to her after that,” said Hunnicutt. “ We documented her through genetics when she was born.”

Last May, BEY03F was caught in  Tulare County and fitted with a GPS tracking collar. The department has been monitoring her movements since. Hunnicut estimated that she has traveled more than 500 miles throughout the state.

The end of January marks the start of the breeding season for gray wolves, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. They will typically break from their pack to find a mate, sometimes traveling thousands of miles to establish a new pack.

There are no records of wolves in the San Gabriel or coastal regions, but the likelihood of her finding a mate is not impossible. Researchers were surprised to discover the pack that BEY03F belonged to in Northern California.

 ”No one expected a pack to pop up there,” Hunnicutt said. “And that's because two wolves wandered hundreds of miles, so it's possible that some other wolf is doing the same thing.”

The last gray wolf to make it into the Southern California region was in 2021, when the male wolf, OR93 traveled as far down as Ventura County. His journey was cut short later that year, after he was struck and killed by a vehicle along Interstate 5 in Kern County.

Hunnicut said that’s one of the main challenges for BEY03F in her search for a mate.

“ This morning she’s just east of Pyramid Lake,” said Hunnicutt. “Close to I-5, which is honestly just down the road from where [OR93] was killed on the highway.”

Bad Bunny has fans the world over. One of them apparently is Gov. Gavin Newsom.

On Saturday, Newsom posted on social media proclaiming today, Super Bowl Sunday, as "Bad Bunny Day" in California in a rather tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top tweet written in all caps.

"AS MANY PEOPLE KNOW, I AM A TREMENDOUS LOVER OF 'THE SPANISH'... THAT IS WHY I AM DECLARING TOMORROW IN CALIFORNIA AS 'BAD BUNNY DAY' WHEN BAD BUNNY PERFORMS AT THE BIG GAME IN THE GOLDEN STATE WITH HIS SOOTHING, BEAUTIFUL VOICE, AND HIS VERY NICE LOOKS," reads the message tweeted out through Newsom's office.

For months, the governor's social media team has been adopting the manners and tone of President Trump's signature style.

 "Obviously in this case, the governor is making light of the President's criticisms of  Bad Bunny performing during today's Super Bowl halftime show," said Chris Micheli, an adjunct professor of law at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, as well as the author of a number of textbooks on California state government.

So, is the proclamation for real?

To answer that question, let's take a detour into the state proclamation process.

"The governor has a wide authority on proclamations," said Micheli, who also works as a lobbyist for groups like the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.

Proclamations generally fall into two categories, he said. One is official actions, such as states of emergency in the case of disasters, to direct resources for relief. The second is proclamations that are ceremonial and commemorative in nature, where the governor may designate a specific day, week or a period of time to recognize a person or an event — like Black History Month or Ronald Reagan Day.

The Bad Bunny Day proclamation, Micheli said, falls in the second category. But, he added, proclamations are signed by the governor and attested by the Secretary of State in written declarations. As such, it's easy to interpret the Bad Bunny Day tweet as done in jest.

Here's what the Governor told LAist

"The Governor declared Bad Bunny Day via tweet. Enjoy!" The governor's office told us in an email seeking confirmation on Sunday.

Micheli said that means the governor would likely follow up with an official written declaration.

Here's the thing with ceremonial proclamations, though. Micheli said they need to be re-upped every year by the governor — they don't automatically renew.

So yes, let's celebrate Bad Bunny Day on this Super Bowl Sunday. Let's hope to do it again next year, and the years after.

Puerto Rican superstar, Bad Bunny, made history at the 2026 Grammy Awards when he became the first artist to win album of the year for a Spanish-language project, with him winning for his album Debí Tirar Más Fotos. In addition to the top prize, Bad Bunny, whose given name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, took home the award for the best música urbana album and best global music performance for his song "EoO".

In his acceptance remarks, and not unlike other moments throughout his career, the artist used the spotlight to express his political views.

"Before I say thanks to God, I'm going to say ICE out," Bad Bunny said during his acceptance speech for best música urbana album. "We're not savages, we're not animals, we're not aliens — we're humans and we are Americans," he added in response to the ongoing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids across the country.

The crowd in Los Angeles, largely met his statements with applause and ovation.

But this Sunday, Bad Bunny will meet a larger and potentially more politically divided audience at the Super Bowl, where he is set to headline this year's halftime show. Since late September when the NFL, Apple Music and Roc Nation announced their invitation to Bad Bunny, many took to social media to voice their indignation at the choice to platform an artist who has only released music in Spanish.

To learn more about Bad Bunny's political history and what we might expect at the Super Bowl, Morning Edition host A Martinez spoke with Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, who chairs the American Studies Department at Wellesley College and the co-author, alongside Vanessa Díaz, of the new book, P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance. The two academics are also behind the Bad Bunny Syllabus, an online teaching resource based on Puerto Rican history and Bad Bunny's meteoric rise since 2016.

Below are three takeaways from the conversation.

Students come for Bad Bunny and stay for the history 

Rivera-Rideau teaches "Bad Bunny: Race, Gender, and Empire in Reggaetón" at Wellesley and said the course uses Bad Bunny's work as a hook to get students into the seminar.

"But we really actually spend most of our time talking about Puerto Rican history and Puerto Rican history is part of U.S. history," she said. "And Bad Bunny music has consistently made references to this history."

Rivera-Rideau pointed to an example from 2018 when Bad Bunny debuted on a U.S. mainstream English language television show, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The artist opened with a critique of the Trump administration's handling of Hurricane Maria, which had devastated his island in 2017.

"After one year of the hurricane, there's still people without electricity in their homes. More than 3,000 people died and Trump is still in denial," Martínez Ocasio said.

Latinos remain "perpetually foreign" to some

Puerto Ricans are born U.S. citizens — but this has not always protected them from being caught in recent ICE operations.

"I think part of that has to do with the kind of racialization of Spanish and the racialization of Latino communities of which Puerto Ricans are a part," she said. "And I think what it indicates is that, to me, Latinos in the United States, many of whom have been here for generations, are often understood to be perpetually foreign as a group of people that just does not belong."

The Party is the Protest 

Rivera-Rideau said if Apple Music's trailer for the Super Bowl halftime show — which features Bad Bunny dancing with a group representing a smattering of ages, faces and abilities — is any indication of what audiences can expect on Sunday's stage, the theme might be joy in the face of a difficult moment for immigrants and Latinos in the U.S.

"One of the things we talk about in our book is that Bad Bunny is part of resistance, he does engage in protests but it's often through joy," she said. "We have a chapter in our book called 'The Party is the Protest' and I actually feel like that's what I expect at the Superbowl, a party and a protest.

Copyright 2026 NPR

The Super Bowl, to someone who a) grew up in the UK, and b) doesn’t really get football, is a strange experience.

Of course, I’m talking American football, not English football, by the way. If England gets into the World Cup quarter final you might find me at 7 a.m. in a pub in Santa Monica drinking a nice cup of tea and cheering the TV.

The Super Bowl is a national cultural event, and there’s so much excitement running up to it, yet when it happens, the thing that everyone is fixated on is the thing you’re least interested in. As in, the football — the men with padded shoulders who pile into a heap. I mean, I get the ones in the middle are doing something, but the ones at the edges are just for show, right?

All the running and the throwing and the tackling … well that just gets in the way of all the entertainment.

OK, OK, I’m kidding. I do get excited when a halfback grabs the ball and starts up the field, elbowing people out of the way, but even that can get a bit wearing when it happens over and over again. Just let the guy get to where he wants to go already!

And that’s where the Super Bowl is ideal. It comes with ready prepared breaks in the action, so there’s no chance to get bored. There’s the commercials. Over the years, some of them have been so great, like that one with the kid and the Force, and that Eminem Detroit one.

Some, not so much. That’s where I do my armchair critiquing. “Well I hoped they paid him a whole boatload of money for that one, his credibility’s down the toilet,” or, “Oh come on, ad agency, for a million dollars per millisecond, that’s all you can come up with?”

But it’s the hope, the desire, that this moment you’ll be blown out of your chair. Wait, that sounds a lot like watching football. Hmm.

Then there’s the half time show, which I always watch. “Call me when it starts!” I yell at my family as I walk out to do some very important laundry folding. As the music begins, I rush back in. Lady Gaga, Beyonce and now … Bad Bunny. As I watch pure perfection, I keep telling myself, they’re doing it live, in front of a billion people. They are not missing a damn note. Or step. Except that left shark. Hell, even the Weeknd won me over eventually.

And then there’s the last quarter. I make sure I watch that. It’s the psychodrama of it all. The looks on the coach’s faces as they chew their gum, serious, determined. The fans, holding their breath. The commentators asking Tom Brady what it was like when he was doing it. And then.. the whistle blows. And one half of the stadium is ecstatic, giddy with delight, while the other half stares into the abyss. It's a Shakespearean tragedy come to life. For all the commercials and the music, this really is the can’t miss part, which brings me back year after year. Go Patriots! Go Seahawks! Let the game begin.