PROFILE / EFREN (SHORTY) OLVERA : Standing Tall in the Pacoima Barrio

The brown 1979 Cadillac lumbers through the colorful tumult of the Pacoima barrio, past immaculate bungalows and tumbledown drug dens, watchful matrons on porches and gaunt prostitutes in alleys.

At 5 feet, 4 inches, the dignified man behind the wheel is hard to see. But everyone--pushcart vendors, burly fathers working beneath the upraised hoods of parked cars, gang members propped against fences--recognizes him and waves hello. The adults and small children call Efren Olvera “Shorty” or “Chaparro,” the Spanish equivalent. The gang members call him “Mr. Olvera.”

“We call him by his name,” said Abraham Alvarado, a 19-year-old gang member standing by an unfinished Cayuga Avenue mural titled “Barrio Warfare.” “We respect him.”

The neighborhood knows Shorty. Shorty is a 64-year-old gang counselor, anti-crime activist, community organizer, former union leader, retired auto worker, father of nine and the unofficial mayor of Spanish-speaking Pacoima.

And Shorty knows the neighborhood.

“Look at that house. They sell drugs there day and night,” Olvera said in Spanish, steering the Cadillac one-handed. “The police raided it last week.”

Fifty years after emigrating from Mexico City, he still prefers Spanish to English. Depending on the occasion, he speaks it with jovial eloquence or streetwise directness.

“In that house there, they have cockfights at night in the back yard. . . . See these guys at the truck, with the tattoos--they are drug dealers. You watch, when they see me they’ll say ‘pelon ,’ ” which means “baldy.”

The two mustachioed men next to the pickup truck track the Cadillac with baleful stares. Then they grin and drawl, “Hey, pelon. “ Olvera grins back.

Olvera came to the United States at 15, he said, “as so many of us did, to work in the fields.”

He picked grapes in the Tulare and Visalia areas, then made his way to the San Fernando Valley. He worked as a manager in a poultry house, on the assembly line at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys. He raised a big family and retired in the mid-1980s.

It was a short retirement. Brazen drug dealers and prostitutes had taken over the streets around Olvera’s house on Haddon Avenue, doing business in cars and front yards and trading gunfire at night. Four years ago, some of the invaders made a mistake that would transform Olvera into something of a folk hero. They mugged his niece in front of her 4-year-old son, throwing her to the ground and stealing her purse.

Enraged, Olvera, his wife, Sylvia, and a handful of neighbors organized a campaign of confrontation. They marched in protest against the dealers and buyers, photographed them and put pressure on politicians, demanding more police action. The police responded, and the drug business suffered.

In retaliation, the dealers torched Olvera’s car and front door and threatened his life.

“They told me that I’d be dead in a year,” he said. “I told them, ‘Don’t give me that about a year. If you are going to do something, do it. Here I am. I’m old. If you kill me, you liberate me from a lot of suffering. You are the ones who have something to lose.’ ”

Today, the area has become markedly cleaner and safer, though by no means crime-free. Olvera’s Haddon-Mercer Homeowners Assn. is “probably the strongest neighborhood watch group in the northeast Valley,” said Capt. Tim McBride of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Foothill Division, which patrols the area.

Olvera’s activism didn’t stop with his street and his block club. He has become a trouble-shooter, an all-around grass-roots leader attacking the wide variety of social problems in the predominantly Latino, working-class area.

He has worked with residents in other parts of Pacoima who want to follow the Haddon-Mercer example, an effort that has spawned about a dozen neighborhood watch groups. He has urged his neighbors to overcome their fear of retaliation and what he says is some Latinos’ reticence in dealing with the authorities. Although that attitude is understandable among the undocumented or those who have had bad experiences with government, he says it must change.

“We have to defend our homes,” he said. “That’s what I say to the Spanish-speaking people. Of course we are going to be afraid. We all feel fear. But we have to think of our children. We have to defend our children.”

Recently, Olvera was called on by a neighbors group on Ilex Avenue to help pressure local and state agencies to clean up a squalid trailer park. Another project had him assisting a legal aid lawyer in organizing Latino tenants at Lake View Terrace Apartments, a public-housing project hit by allegations of racial tension and management corruption.

“He has a knack for talking to people,” said Rose Castaneda, an aide to Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) who has known Olvera since she was a child. “People in neighborhoods who were isolated by language, fear, for whatever the reason, they stayed inside. He seems to be able to instill in them a courage. He said: ‘I’m not here to save you, I’m here to help you.’ ”

Olvera’s newest and most unlikely role is with Community Youth Gang Services. He works with counselors less than half his age, mostly former gang members who have given the county-funded agency its reputation for quelling violence by walking a tightrope between gangs and law enforcement.

Veteran counselor Manuel Velazquez pushed to get Olvera hired last year. He was particularly impressed by the spread of Olvera’s reputation among Spanish-speaking parents.

“Sometimes they call Mr. Olvera instead of calling the police,” Velazquez said.

Olvera relishes the time he spends among the gang members.

“I’ve known most of them since they were kids,” he said. “I’ve lived in Pacoima 40 years. They aren’t scared of me, but they respect me.”

Along two blocks of Cayuga Avenue, for example, the agency’s gang counselors have been trying to make peace between the local gang and adults, between a barrio and its children. The counselors persuaded the gang members to paint a mural instead of graffiti on the block. The parents organized a neighborhood watch group.

“He has been a great help,” Maria Luisa Grimaldo said. She went to Olvera several times for help dealing with her 17-year-old son and his fellow gang members. Olvera and the other counselors urged the youths to show respect for the adults and the adults to communicate better with the youths.

“At first when we tried to talk with the boys, they would insult us, throw things at us,” she said. “We were scared. Now they respect us. We can walk the street at night and when we see a group of the boys we say, ‘Hello,’ and they say, ‘Hello.’ ”

Olvera’s small size is irrelevant on the street because of “the way he looks at people, his patience, his understanding for young people,” Grimaldo said. “He has charisma. And he knows important people.”

Olvera has gained political clout because of his influence among homeowners, who are increasingly more politically aware. According to leaders in the government and community, Olvera can pick up the phone and get results from Los Angeles Police Department commanders and politicians such as Berman, City Councilman Ernani Bernardi and state Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar).

A few observers think Olvera occasionally becomes caught up in his rising prominence, but they say his motivations remain unselfish. Olvera says he is not interested in politics for himself.

“I’m a lot more interested in the community than in politics,” he said. “But there are times when you have to work with politicians in order to achieve something for the community. We depend on them.”

Olvera also is hard to pin down ideologically. He is a staunch law-and-order man who identifies himself as a Democrat because “they seem to have helped minorities more.” He speaks highly of the Police Department, but he led a march on the Foothill Division station in 1987 to demand more service.

After the Rodney G. King beating, he alarmed Foothill brass by saying that some police have roughed up Latinos in Pacoima. But he remained supportive of the department and the Foothill leadership, saying the all-out verbal assault on the Police Department has hurt the police and the community.

“The hands of the police are tied,” he said. “They have to go soft on criminals because they are scared of causing another scandal.”

Last week, Olvera stood looking out on Haddon Avenue through the doorway that was set on fire by drug dealers at the height of the battle for the neighborhood. Photos, plaques and awards for community work filled the wall next to him.

He was asked what it felt like to know that people out there hated him and might be plotting to hurt him.

“You know the old saying,” Olvera said. “The important thing is that people are talking about you, not whether they are saying something bad. Because when they don’t talk about you anymore, forget it. You haven’t done anything.”

Then he put on a brown jacket over his white shirt, slacks and high-top gym shoes. He and his wife got in the Cadillac and headed around the corner to a neighbor’s home, where Shorty Olvera started the meeting of the Haddon-Mercer Homeowners Assn., as he always does, with a prayer.