Poor House : Homeless: A makeshift dormitory under a Westside parking garage serves as a temporary dwelling for dayworkers.

Carlos Mercado and his companions call their dark, flea-infested living place la cueva-- the cave.

It is dirty, strewn with trash and redolent of urine. But it is dry, hidden from public view and therefore relatively safe. It also is free. And that is why this cavernous shelter, created by a natural embankment and by the walls and overhanging concrete floor of a Mid-City parking garage, has for years provided a temporary home for a succession of immigrant dayworkers from Latin America.

One recent day, when Mercado led a visitor to the cave, entering through a hole in a chain-link fence, the resident population was 11--from Mexico, El Salvador and Suriname.

“It smells bad,” Mercado, a Salvadoran, acknowledged in Spanish. “We try to use bathrooms but sometimes in the night we have to go into the corners. It is summer. Maybe in the winter it will not smell so bad.”

Near the entrance was what passed for a kitchen area. Patches of brown and faded yellow carpet covered the dirt floor. Flies circled a package of corn tortillas, bottles of corn oil, a square blue crate of eggs and pieces of onion around a tiny hibachi grill. Here, the men cook breakfast each day well before dawn so they can be out at the dayworker gathering places on Pico Boulevard by 6 a.m.

“We use wood,” Mercado said. “But we are careful not to make too much smoke.”

Deeper into the cave, the atmosphere changed from camp-like to almost homey. Two mirrors hung from nails that had been driven into the concrete wall. Mattresses stretched in a line along the wall, disappearing in the darkness of the cavernous space. Most of the beds were made up with spreads and blankets pulled on top of faded sheets. Writing paper and a Spanish-English dictionary lay near one of the pillows.

No one seems to know when the community began, but Mercado claims that hundreds of people have passed through over the years.

At the city-operated Eleanor Green Roberts Aquatic Center, which is within walking distance of the cave and which many of the squatters visit to use the showers, pool manager Varinia Hambrick said the men have been coming to the center ever since she began working there nine years ago.

“They stay out of trouble,” Hambrick said. “Once in a while one of them will come in drunk, but I call the park rangers, and they calm him down.”

A dissenting view is offered by Richard Dunn, who coaches a children’s swim team at the aquatic center. He has complained to the police and to the office of Councilman Nate Holden, who represents the district, urging that the men be evicted. Dunn said the men sometimes get drunk, often wash their clothes in the bathrooms, and have tried to swim in the pool before showering. “It’s a health problem, and it’s not fair to the kids,” Dunn said.

Los Angeles police say they have been aware of the settlement for years, and that the squatters have rarely been a source of trouble.

“We look the other way--they are not doing anything but living,” said Officer Ronnie Kato at the nearby Wilshire Division station, adding that closing the cave would accomplish little.

“It’s really a no-win situation,” Kato said. “All we would do is just push them into the street. Then we would get a call from someone telling us there are people sleeping on their lawn.”

The makeup of the cave community is continually changing. “I know 60 people who have left here since I came,” said Mercado, whose five months of residence there make him a veteran. “Some still pass by to see how things are,” he added.

The most common way out is for a group of the squatters to pool their savings and rent an apartment together.

Although Mercado said there is no leader of the makeshift community, he acknowledged that many in the group look to him for guidance because he speaks English.

“They want to know simple things like: ‘I am hungry. I want work. Don’t cheat me. Leave me alone,’ ” Mercado said.

He said few people stay in the cave longer than six months and that some leave after days or weeks.

“There are hundreds of places in Los Angeles like this place. But the people here want to leave the streets. They want to work. They want to do something. Many of them go to school. None of them want to be a burden to society.”

He said he doesn’t like taking handouts from homeless shelters, because they “only help for two or three days and then you’re out on the street.”

An elementary schoolteacher in his homeland, Mercado left El Salvador early this year to escape the political turmoil there. He said he is shocked by the poverty he has found in the United States.

“I believed that this country was powerful and that it had the solution to everything,” he said. “Now I realize that was only an illusion. In this country there are as many poor people as there are in Latin America. It is possible that it is worse here, because it is as if the poor don’t exist.”

The cave may be dirty and dark, but Mercado and his companions are aware that living there beats being alone and without shelter, so they make an effort to keep their little community functioning.

“Because I was a teacher, I try to motivate people I meet here,” Mercado said. “I say, ‘Look, there are things that are more important than drinking. Work and leave this place.’ ”

He said in order to avoid problems with the police, the group has expelled alcoholics and drug addicts.

“We just get together and tell them, ‘Look, you have to go,’ ” he said.

“On the street there are drugs, but there are no drugs where we live.”

Still, Mercado said, the cave is a sad place. Dayworkers lead an uncertain, hand-to-mouth existence, in most cases thousands of miles away from family and friends.

Asked to describe the general mood of his companions, he replied, “Deprimida, deprimida . “ Depressed.

“How in a country so powerful can there exist such poverty?” he said, looking down the line of mattresses far into the cave.