Immigrants Change Flavor of the Way L.A. Area Plays : Culture: Growing more secure in a new land, Central Americans step out to a new beat in entertainment.

Late at night, young Salvadoran men and women, their hair slicked or teased, their clothes primped and pressed, flow through the painted glass doors at the corner of Temple Street and Rampart Boulevard just west of downtown, past the security guards and into the darkened cavern that is the Pan American Club.

There, under the pink and purple neon stars, a Salvadoran band breaks into a cumbia and other familiar tunes from the tropics. Instantly, the dance floor is jammed with the furious movements of bouncing torsos, gyrating shoulders and whirling feet. The dance--at this club and dozens all over the city--will last the entire night.

Clubs such as the Pan American have sprung up throughout greater Los Angeles in recent years, catering to a growing Central American community and competing increasingly for a portion of the immigrant dollar. Their presence shows that new waves of immigrants are changing not only the way Southern California speaks and works, but also the way it plays.

With the influx of hundreds of thousands of Central Americans into the region over the last decade, these nightspots are taking their place alongside the traditional Mexican mariachi clubs and theaters that have existed in Los Angeles for decades. Together, they offer a glimpse into the ways recent Latin American immigrants are making recreation and entertainment a part of their transplanted lives.

To outsiders, the clubs may appear as seedy bars with strange names on unattractive street corners. But to those who cross their thresholds, they represent something else altogether. Inside, scores of people who have escaped civil wars and poverty seek nostalgic links to their homeland, camaraderie among compatriots and relief from their daily drudgeries.

“This is one of the few places where we can enjoy lo nuestro , what is ours, a bit of El Salvador,” said customer Luis Parton, a Salvadoran who works for a local Spanish-language television station, as he sipped a drink and watched the dancers crowding the floor.

“Everybody knows each other here,” Parton, 35, said. “The faces rarely change. I can stay away three months and, when I return, I see the same faces.”

It is the same story for many of the Guatemalans who frequent the 3-year-old Guatelinda Night Club on Hollywood Boulevard. “There are people who come just to hear the marimba,” said Hector Cano, a bartender at Guatelinda. “Marimba music is (Guatemala’s) national music, the music of our elders.”

In the early 1980s, with war menacing El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, refugees poured into Los Angeles by the thousands. As they tentatively formed new lives here, mere survival was the primary, perhaps only, goal. Luxuries such as entertainment were rarely part of the picture.

The Central American community became more established. As part of that evolution, the number of recreational and entertainment outlets has grown to include everything from restaurants, nightclubs and pool halls to soccer leagues and civic associations.

Couples with children crowd Salvadoran and Guatemalan restaurants in the Pico-Union area or in North Hollywood; parks as far flung as MacArthur Park near downtown to the soccer fields of suburban San Gabriel Valley are scenes of weekend picnics and gatherings.

“In the past, there was a hope things would change in Central America and people would be able to go back,” said Francisco Rivera, head of the newly formed Central American Cultural Center, which promotes musical and artistic performances. “But now you have this incredible situation of half a million Central Americans settling definitely in Southern California.”

For example, Rivera said, the number of Central American restaurants in Los Angeles quadrupled during the past decade, to about 200.

Historically, the addition of entertainment and recreation to the immigrant’s activities has always been considered an important milestone in any foreign-born group’s integration into American life.

It marks a point where the immigrant has overcome an initial feeling of isolation and has moved on to join social networks, which gradually give the immigrant a sense of belonging. Such support networks allow the newcomer to cling to something familiar while building a new life.

“One of the key things the immigrant tries to do is re-create a sense of security (and) emotional support by re-creating his community,” said Leo Chavez, an anthropologist at UC Irvine.

Especially for undocumented aliens, in this country illegally and often living an underground existence in a seemingly hostile world, the mainstream forms of recreation are off limits. Chavez said they look to their own clubs, soccer games and restaurants to provide a form of refuge, an “island of security.”

Estimating how much money recent immigrants spend on recreation is difficult. The amount depends on many factors, including the proportion of earnings that a person sends back to his family in Mexico or Central America, the number of family members in this country, and so forth.

Nevertheless, from interviews with experts and participants, it is clear that entertainment tailored to Latin American tastes has become big business in Los Angeles.

For the savvy entrepreneur, it only makes sense to tap into a growing base of potential customers--people who may not have a lot of money to spend but who will gladly dedicate a portion of their budget to entertainment.

One proprietor of a bar on the eastern edge of Hollywood said he began adding Central American and Caribbean tunes to a previously all-Mexican jukebox when he bought the place nine years ago. Gradually, the clientele shifted from a mostly Mexican crowd to a mix that is about 40% Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Honduran.

“You have to go where the (business) is,” he said.

As a recent Friday wore on past midnight, dancers continued to arrive at the Pan American. Young men paused just inside the deafening club to check their hair in a wall-to-wall mirror. Smiling women came in groups or on dates and took their place at cloth-covered, candlelight tables facing the boisterous dance floor.

Police have reported complaints from residents who say some patrons who loiter after emerging from the club are a nuisance. There have been a handful of narcotics arrests of people outside the club, but no trouble involving the club itself, police said. The owners said drugs are not tolerated at their establishment.

Sitting at the bar, crowding the dance floor or waiting the tables, a cross-section of the world of recent Central American immigrants can be found.

There are former students from violent countries who barely escaped, and aspiring professionals whose readjustment has been relatively comfortable. There are musicians who were famous in their homeland, only to have to start over in this country. And there are ex-soldiers who reached U.S. soil only after long detours through dank Central American jails.

Here they work as hotel clerks, fast-food cashiers, security guards, sales representatives, delivery truck drivers, housekeepers and writers.

Many political backgrounds and viewpoints are represented on any given night at the Pan American. The owners make one thing clear: Check your politics at the door.

“We do not mention politics here for anything,” said co-owner Consuelo Ayon. “This is a place to dance, to have a good time. It is not a place for fixing political things. It is for having fun. Period.

“We do not allow religion, either,” she added.

While many of the clubs attract a mixed clientele who hail from all over Latin America, sometimes one country is represented more than others, largely because of the music that is played.

At the Pan American, mostly Salvadoran crowds want to hear the club’s star musical attraction, German Mangandi y Sus Amigos , billed as “the best Salvadoran musical group in L.A.”

Mangandi was a well-known figure on the entertainment scene of his native El Salvador during the 1960s and ‘70s. As a young singer in San Salvador, Mangandi formed several of Central America’s most famous dance bands, among them the Fiebre Amarilla (Yellow Fever).

Like tens of thousands of other Salvadorans, Mangandi began to see the civil war touch his family, his life and his work.

There was the time he was playing a concert in Sesuntepeque when shooting broke out. Retreating to the bathroom he had to step over dead bodies.

“Working became difficult,” Mangandi, 43, said in a recent interview backstage at the Pan American.

So he came to Los Angeles, where he has reinvented a career. In addition to headlining the Pan American most weekends, Mangandi & Friends have toured the United States occasionally and even returned to perform in El Salvador.

Standing sentry over the entrance to the Pan American are two security guards who inspect the customers’ proof of age and search each male arriving at the club. With emblems of the U.S. flag sewn on their uniform shirt sleeves, the two guards can recite the date and time they entered the United States--after nearly a decade of what they described as pain and deprivation in a Nicaraguan prison.

The two men, Elen Peterson Bermudez, 47, and Juan Jose Puerto, 50, were members of the National Guard of right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza, who was overthrown in 1979 by the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front. Like many guardsmen, Peterson and Puerto landed in jail.

They gained their freedom 10 years later in a general amnesty granted by the government. They said they continued to feel pressured and watched, and left Nicaragua. The two men ended up in Los Angeles, where they have sisters, and started work for a private security firm.

Although the assignments rotate, Peterson and Puerto lately have been spending most of their shifts at the Pan American.

“Can you imagine?” Puerto said, shaking his head at the blaring sounds around him. “Ten years of not hearing music at all (in prison). And now, hearing it until we go to bed! Such is fate.”

Inside the Guatelinda, Judith Morales, her long black curly hair flowing over her shoulders, and her sister-in-law, Evelyn Gomez, dressed in a tight black skirt, white lacy top and large faux-pearl earrings, were sitting at a table waiting for a punta y soka contest to begin.

The dance, a faster version of the merengue, is especially popular among people from Central America’s eastern coast, a region washed in a strong Caribbean influence. First prize in the contest was $1,000.

Morales, a receptionist, and Gomez, who is studying word processing at a trade school, were the first to arrive, about 9:30 p.m., and would be among the last to leave.

Morales, who left the Guatemalan lakeside town of Amatitlan five years ago to join four siblings in Los Angeles, said she goes to the club, often with her husband, an average of three nights a week: Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. At first, her social life in Los Angeles was limited to parties in friends’ homes, but over the years, her circle widened to take in the discos.

She said she loves to dance, to see the people, to enjoy the ambience. “With the music and everything,” she said, “it almost feels like we were back home.”