The all-encompassing term <i> Latino </i>...

Gilberto Fuentes is a day laborer from El Salvador who fled political unrest in his country to seek work here 10 years ago.

“All of sudden, there was fighting and they were harming the innocent, not just the political people,” Fuentes, 62, above, said of his homeland.

An electrical worker in El Salvador, Fuentes now does cement work, painting and any other manual labor he can find from his daily spot on the sidewalk in front of the Villa-Parke Center, which provides a variety of counseling services for Latinos.

He gets chosen for jobs only about twice a week and makes $5 an hour, which works out to making about the same money he did back home.

“There you get little, but you work all the days,” Fuentes said. “Here, the pay is better, but sometimes you don’t work at all in a week.”

Fuentes lives three blocks away from Villa-Parke with his wife, Rosa, who works as a housekeeper and baby-sitter in nearby La Canada Flintridge.

The couple chose Pasadena because the city is peaceful and less crowded than nearby Los Angeles, Fuentes said.

He has not been back to see his three grown children in El Salvador and tries not to get sick, because he cannot afford the costs. But he does not worry about his plight.

“When one is here, you don’t think of the future, you think of the present,” he said.