Three Powerful Portrayals of Poverty : Television: Misery in El Salvador, deprivation on U.S. streets and the struggle in an urban ghetto offer an overview of what it’s like to be poor.

There are many perspectives on being poor. Three of them--from America’s urban homeless, from a Chicago ghetto and from El Salvador’s downtrodden masses--surface on television Sunday.

Listen:

“When the average Salvadoran gets up, he has no idea if he will have enough food to feed his children that day. That’s reality.”

The words are from “La Lucha,” a somewhat obscure--but extremely valuable--ABC documentary about conflicts within Christianity that is essential for understanding the institutionalized destitution and ongoing turbulence in El Salvador.

Buried in television’s religion ghetto at 12:30 p.m. on Channels 7 and 42, “La Lucha” depicts a level of poverty and bleakness beneath even that seen on “No Place Like Home,” a superb CBS movie about a homeless family struggling to survive not in Central America, but in the land of plenty, the United States.

“No Place Like Home” airs at 9 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8.

The third program is is a two-part drama airing at 7 p.m. on consecutive Sundays as part of NBC’s “Magical World of Disney” on Channels 4, 36 and 39. Far from being Disneyland, however, “A Mother’s Courage: The Mary Thomas Story” is an uneven, but finely acted account of professional basketball star Isiah Thomas’ mother and her heroic battle to lift her children above poverty, drugs and gangs.

The title “La Lucha”(The Struggle) embraces all three programs.

Aired under the “‘Vision and Values” banner, produced by Bill Dale and narrated by Mike Farrell, “La Lucha” could not be more timely, coming so closely after the Nov. 16 murders of six Jesuit priests in the Salvadoran capital of San Salvador. One of the victims, Ignacio Martin-Baro, is interviewed extensively on this program, and his serenely spoken words about the danger of becoming desensitized to Salvadoran violence are now especially haunting:

“You hear daily accounts of people who have been killed, and that’s normal. You see corpses on the street, and that’s normal. You hear bombs around you, and that’s normal.”

Through interviews with all sides, “La Lucha” offers a straight-arrow assessment of the impact of separate-agenda religious faiths in a society where, as Martin-Baro says, “a tiny minority has been living as wealthy people and the majority almost at the starvation point.” The range here is from traditional Roman Catholicism to the Catholic-based liberation theology favored by Martin-Baro and others, an activist faith that merges the church with the poor while encouraging the people to claim their basic rights. As Farrell notes, many critics of liberation theologists consider them Marxists.

What should be the first priority, spiritual poverty or physical poverty? Martin-Baro and his fellow Jesuits answered that question with their actions, and in an atmosphere where anyone working to better conditions for the masses is often seen as subversive, may have paid for their activism with their lives.

Not that conditions are always ideal up north.

The impoverished are nearer in “No Place Like Home,” that rare TV drama which addresses a serious problem with compassion without ultimately softening or trivializing it. Directed by Lee Grant and written by Ara Watson and Sam Blackwell, “No Place Like Home” is utterly grim. Bottom line. Period.

But if the subject and outcome are grim, the characters--a basically middle-class family sinking in a quicksand of poverty after a run of bad luck--are not. And this story is so affectingly told, and beautifully acted by Jeff Daniels and Christine Lahti, that watching it is a must.

Daniels and Lahti are Mike and Zan Cooper who, with their children David (Lantz Landry) and Tina (Kyndra Joy Casper), are relegated to the streets after a fire destroys their apartment house.

Too low on cash to come up with the up-front money to rent another apartment, they’re forced to join the city’s urban nomads, initially staying with Mike’s brother, then in their car, then outside in a tent, then in a shelter, then in a dingy hotel where the hallways are a lovers’ lane and kids’ playground. Ultimately, Zan and the kids are alone, living on the pavement by their wits, and surrounded by violence.

Daniels and Lahti are outstanding as the victimized couple, proud, spirited working-class people with ambitions, but who seem to get deader and deader inside as their situation grows more desperate. Landry is excellent as their angry young son. And Scott Marlowe, as Mike’s older brother, has a terrific scene with Daniels in a family blowout.

Without resorting to manipulation, Grant conveys through her characters the gnawing ache of failure, shame and hopelessness. In not coming from the institutionalized poor, the Coopers defy the homeless stereotype, giving this story an off-center slant. Here is a family left to founder and atrophy under a system supposedly pledged to serve their best interests.

The Chicago setting of “The Mary Thomas Story” is not altogether different, but in this case the characters are trying to rise to a new plateau instead of trying to return to something they once had.

Unlike “No Place Like Home,” moreover, “The Mary Thomas Story” is disjointed and only unevenly interesting. Directed by John Patterson and written by Jason Miller and William Blinn, the drama has unexplained gaps and such script conveniences as a menacing gang that appears when a certain level of conflict seems called for, then inexplicably disappears, even though the problem of gangs is enduring.

There is one bright spot, and it’s a memorable one: Alfre Woodard’s huge performance as Mary Thomas, the benevolently despotic matriarch who, with the exception of one tragically wayward son, kept her children out of trouble and “the projects” while inspiring them to make good lives for themselves. One who did was Isiah Thomas, now a millionaire superstar with the Detroit Pistons. The real superstar, though, is his mother.

La Lucha.