Settling In: From Refugees to Residents : Services: As more Latino immigrants decide to stay here, agencies shift from short-term relief to providing help with seed money for business owners and piano lessons for the kids.

Arms folded firmly across her chest, her look stern and wary, Patricia Villatoro sits on a metal folding chair at El Rescate, a service agency for Latinos in the Pico-Union area.

Years of danger, hardship and heartache have settled into her face. And yet, she occasionally softens. In those moments, dimples dominate her smile and she becomes a young, pretty, 28-year-old woman whose obligations and ambitions pull her in two directions.

The divorced mother of three left her sons, now 9 and 7, with her mother in San Salvador last January and headed for Los Angeles to join her sister and three brothers. (Villatoro’s daughter lives with her former husband.)

A union and leftist party worker, she left El Salvador because of government pressure, she says. With El Rescate’s help, Villatoro has filed for political asylum here.

Her children are never far from her thoughts. What money Villatoro earns, she sends to support them. The expense of a visit is out of the question. She has stopped thinking of returning to El Salvador and started planning to bring her sons here in a few years.

And so, she takes 12 hours of English a week and also volunteers at El Rescate, organizing a girls’ basketball team and helping with arts and crafts sales.

Villatoro also plans to open a community coffeehouse with people she met at El Rescate. She is counting on the agency for help with loan procurement, training and planning. And El Rescate staffers say that they are committed to helping her reach her dream.

As Villatoro and her compadres are changing from refugees to residents, El Rescate and agencies like it are responding with their own transformation.

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In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, several hundred thousand Salvadorans headed for el Norte, fleeing the violence and economic shambles of their war-torn country. Most arrived in Los Angeles traumatized, without legal papers and usually without money.

The organizations that formed to help them took their names from calamity: El Rescate, the rescue; CARECEN, the Central American Refugee Center, and Clinica Msr. Oscar Romero, named after the beloved archbishop of San Salvador who had been gunned down in 1980 by a right-wing death squad in front of his congregation.

These agencies, and others like them, offered emergency shelter, food and health care, legal aid in applying for political asylum or refugee status, and sanctuary from deportation. They offered services to a people who saw themselves as sojourners, waiting here until it was safe to return home.

Now a fragile peace has come to El Salvador. Although accords were signed last year, the peace process, slated for completion last month, has experienced setbacks.

Whatever happens in El Salvador, many of the estimated 400,000 Salvadorans in Southern California have decided that their future is here.

Today, the first thing one notices at El Rescate is a sign in Spanish offering free lessons in guitar, pantomime, painting and flute. Another announces the Saturday karate class. They are signs of a community settling down and entering the mainstream.

But El Rescate is much more than leisure activities. Located on Bonnie Brae Avenue in space belonging to Angelica Lutheran Church, its predominantly Salvadoran staff speak English filled with the currency of the moment: economic development, empowerment, networking, coalition.

Organizers say its new focus is economic development and political power: “We’re going to be talking empowerment by participating as citizens. That’s going to be the new hip thing,” says Oscar Andrade, El Rescate’s executive director. He estimates that about 200,000 Salvadorans in the L. A. area are eligible for citizenship: “You’ll see a lot about it in the next six months. The message will be ‘If you’re thinking of staying, think of becoming a citizen.’ ”

A few blocks up the street, CARECEN operates from cramped quarters in two shabby buildings. On Saturdays, the conference room is filled with 25 kids seated at silent keyboards supplied by Yamaha, learning piano.

On Thursdays, a staff women’s group meets. “We got started after Anita Hill,” says Delmy Ruiz, director of human services.

Female staffers, Ruiz says, “started to discuss what we don’t like here as women.” After talking among themselves about sexism, they invited male colleagues to a meeting, and “we told them what we didn’t like.” Up next: domestic violence and sexual harassment.

Meanwhile, CARECEN is planning its future community center on Alvarado Street, made possible with a $3.2-million loan approved by the city last September. CARECEN will soon have a community center downstairs and housing project for 21 families upstairs.

The site used to house a detention center of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. That it once held Salvadorans headed for deportation is a sweet irony that CARECEN staff cannot disclose without grinning.

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Maria and Alfredo Reyes arrived here without papers six years ago with their son Danny. Now 8 years old, Danny has a sister, Amanda, a U. S. citizen born five years ago. Maria and Alfredo often worked as street vendors in San Salvador and withstood the violent street confrontations of the war. But the 1987 earthquake devastated their home, destroyed all they had and drove them out.

Life here has been bouts of temporary employment for Alfredo, including a year with a cleaning and painting company, followed by unemployment insurance. He wants to get electronics training and says he has an aptitude for working with appliances. Maria has cared for her children at home and is restless for the day she can work, preferably as a nurse’s aide caring for the elderly. Both want to learn English--Maria plans to start classes in a few weeks--and they say, without hesitation, that they want to become citizens.

They first came to El Rescate for help in applying for temporary protected status with INS. Increasingly, they consider making their permanent home here. The children are accustomed to this country and the Reyes, devout evangelical Christians, frequently refer to raising them “to be of service to this country.”

They watched their new homeland go up in flames during the L. A. riots, and with it their apartment. El Rescate provided groceries; the Red Cross gave them temporary shelter and has since found them another apartment.

They are beginning to feel a part of L.A. life. They are big fans of Sizzler restaurants, love Thai food and watch cooking programs on television. The huge downtown buildings no longer “wow” them, Alfredo laughs. They are questioning teachers about curriculum and books and want a role in their children’s education.

They followed the election closely and favored Clinton, who, they hope, will do the right thing for the whole country--including people like themselves. They are praying for him.

The Reyes’ biggest fear is that their temporary INS status with INS expires on June 30.

Then what?

They will look to El Rescate to find a way for them to stay.

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They are not alone.

A 1991 survey of the Salvadoran community found that 70% wanted to remain in the United States, says El Rescate’s Andrade. Most of the remaining 30% were “unsure.”

It was clear to his agency’s staff, Andrade says, that their priority had to be economic development. Salvadorans were unemployed or underemployed.

So the organization planned to continue, but de-emphasize, direct services such as food and shelter.

The problem with direct services, says community organizer Sara Martinez, is “there is too much dependence. . . . We want to empower people--it’s a matter of economic development and self-development.”

But the organization’s efforts to gain support for this new direction proved futile: “Nobody wanted to buy in,” says Andrade. “It’s easier to provide a bag of groceries than a permanent solution. Direct services are easy to get support for. It’s difficult to fund-raise for economic development.”

Then came the riots.

“It was like click ,” Andrade says. “This turned things around. Funders would say, ‘Yes, we need to think in this direction.’ Thank God. How horrible--a riot, but . . . “

CARECEN and the clinic make similar observations--and all three agencies say they are working more closely, less competitively, with each other now.

In the riots’ aftermath, as talk of rebuilding the city swirled in the air, Salvadoran leaders feared their community of non-voting non-citizens would be left out.

“We have no voice. We have no voter force,” says CARECEN’S community relations director Carlos Vaquerano. “We contribute to the economy. We want to change the image of our community and we want to be considered in the decision making process.”

In response to the riots, El Rescate and CARECEN began sponsoring community forums aimed at ensuring the Latino community’s share in the reconstruction efforts. Soon they were holding forums with other ethnic groups under city sponsorship.

And Vaquerano now sits on the Rebuild L. A. board of directors. It’s time to organize the Salvadoran community, he says, “to accelerate the process of consolidating political participation and economic empowerment.”

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In addition to CARECEN’S loan from the city, there have been other tangible results.

El Rescate has several grants, big plans and high hopes. The grants are for technical assistance, education and job training--in English, computers, mechanics, carpentry, business.

“We want to invest time in convincing members of the community to go into small enterprises, to make a profit but invest some of it back in the community, provide venture capital for other enterprises, and invest in the reconstruction of El Salvador,” Andrade says. “We need to shake the way things are traditionally done.”

Patricia Villatoro’s coffeehouse is one such enterprise El Rescate is promoting. A joint effort with an African-American group, “a-mom-and-pop, black- and brown-owned store,” probably in South-Central, is another.

And, Andrade wants people to invest together in a business and encourage small businesses to expand: “Why just benefit two or three? Why not 10 or 20? We’ll provide the training.”

Soon, federal funds will enable Clinica Msr. Oscar Romero to provide non-chronic, non-traditional mental health care to the Spanish-speaking population in the Pico-Union area.

“It’s a wonderful project,” says health education coordinator Guillermo Rodezno. “We are going to go out to where the people are--Laundromats, apartment buildings, shopping centers.”

Observing that Salvadorans traditionally are ignorant or suspicious of psychology and mental health programs, Rodezno says they will go beyond direct psychological needs. He mentions parenting, negotiating skills, interracial relationships, domestic violence, self-esteem, leadership.

“We will demystify mental health care,” he says.

Meanwhile, ties to El Salvador are not forgotten. El Rescate is steadily transferring its human rights and international law program to its operation in El Salvador. Ultimately, Andrade says, the agency would function there like the American Civil Liberties Union.

This month, Andrade and a group of students from UCLA’s planning department are taking an exploratory visit to El Salvador, to lay the groundwork for a financial organization that he alternately describes as a credit union and a community bank.

Salvadorans in Los Angeles have been randomly sending money to their families in El Salvador for years, he explains. El Rescate officials would like such financial support to happen in a more organized way. As Salvadorans establish small businesses here, El Rescate wants them to invest through the banking system in the reconstruction of their native land.

“Jewish-style,” he says, “like the Jews do for Israel. We don’t want to forget that moral commitment to the motherland. . . . It’ll all take eight to 10 years to accomplish, but we have to start somewhere.”

Hearing himself, he grins somewhat apologetically: “You know, it’s a dream. But Salvador’s social changes were based on dreams.”