New Questions Arise for Salvadorans in Los Angeles : Immigrants: As war ends, thousands must decide whether to uproot their lives and if it’s safe to return.

For 12 years, the civil war in El Salvador echoed loudly in Los Angeles and transformed the city.

Tens of thousands of Salvadorans took up residence in the Los Angeles area during the last decade, converting a tiny refugee enclave into a huge, thriving community. From pupusas to political activism, Salvadoran influence became known in wide circles, often mirroring here the conflict at home.

Salvadorans injected new militancy into immigrant labor movements, challenged the definitions of political asylum, formed street gangs, and built businesses.

Salvadoran nightclubs came to dot downtown corners; Salvadoran activists staged noisy protests. Los Angeles became the nerve center for a variety of Salvadoran political causes, while Salvadoran men and women fed a large pool of cheap labor for the kitchens of fancy restaurants and the nurseries of private homes.

“You have your own El Salvador in Los Angeles,” says Carlos Figueroa, who left his country in 1980 and today is host of a weekly radio program for Salvadorans. “It makes it easier to be here.”

Now, as the warring sides in El Salvador agree to peace, Salvadorans in Los Angeles face new questions and uncertainty. Is it safe to return? Is it worth uprooting a new life born of struggle to begin again? And what is left of the tiny Central American country and its economy after so much waste and destruction?

After months of arduous negotiation directed by the United Nations, the right-wing government of President Alfredo Cristiani and the leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front agreed on Dec. 31 to end the war that has claimed some 75,000 lives. The landmark agreement will be signed this week and calls for a cease-fire and gradual dismantling of military and insurgent forces.

In the wake of the accord, no one is predicting an immediate, massive return to El Salvador. After so many years of bitter disappointment, most Salvadorans want to wait to see if real peace takes hold.

But remaining in the United States legally may become more difficult for many Salvadorans, as peace renders the case for political asylum or other refugee status harder to make. Thousands who last year took advantage of a temporary safe-haven program now fear imminent deportation.

The program, called Temporary Protected Status and authorized under the 1990 Immigration Act, comes up for renewal on June 30; with the war winding down, many Salvadorans are afraid that the U.S. government will decide to let the protected status expire rather than renew it.

So far, no decision has been made, according to a spokesman for the U.S. attorney general’s office in Washington. About 200,000 Salvadorans nationwide have temporary status.

Both the Salvadoran government and advocates for immigrant rights--rare allies--are fighting for an extension. At the least, they argue, El Salvador needs time to get back on its feet before an estimated 1 million exiles rush home.

“National reconstruction . . . is not an overnight process,” cautioned the Salvadoran government representative in Los Angeles, Consul General Jose Mauricio Angulo. “The Salvadoran must have much patience, strength and, above all, a spirit of reconciliation, not revenge, to participate in the rebuilding of the country.”

El Salvador would have difficulty absorbing the sudden return of its many expatriates, especially as both the armed forces and guerrillas begin to demobilize and seek work in a civilian sector heavily damaged and depleted by a decade of war.

Furthermore, Salvadoran exiles in Los Angeles and other parts of the United States send an estimated $700 million annually to their relatives in El Salvador. The money has long constituted a kind of safety net, easing the poverty of thousands of Salvadorans, buying small homes for the relatives of Salvadorans working in Los Angeles, educating the children left behind.

Indeed, the bleak prospects for work and prosperity are a major deterrent to going home for many Salvadorans.

“Go back? For what?” asked William Cuellar, 22, as he waited for work on a corner near MacArthur Park. “To become a burden on my parents, unemployed and with no money? I’m a little old for that now. My life is here.”

Cuellar has lived in Los Angeles for six years, picking up some English and computer skills, he says, from work in a tourist agency. He plans to visit his mother and daughter in the Salvadoran city of Santa Ana next month--but it will only be a visit.

Mauricio Orlando Rodriguez, a 21-year-old from the tiny village of San Pedro Mazahuat, did not move to Los Angeles until 1990 and is more likely to return home sooner. Taking odd jobs in carpentry and construction, he is able to send $50 a month to his mother, who otherwise earns a livelihood by washing clothes in a river and capturing iguanas for sale to restaurants.

“This country is nice,” said Rodriguez, who lives with seven other people in a one-bedroom apartment in North Hollywood. “But it never stops being a borrowed home. You always miss your own people.”

Rodriguez, who belonged to a paramilitary civil defense patrol in his hometown, left when soldiers tried to make him join the army. He plans to stay in Los Angeles long enough to earn the money to open a small business or buy a corn mill when he returns.

The amount of time Salvadorans have spent in the United States makes a big difference in their eagerness to return. Many feel their roots are now well-planted here.

“For years Salvadorans were coming here, thinking the war was going to end and we would go home,” said Oscar Andrade, the Salvadoran director of El Rescate, an agency that works with refugees.

“Now, 10 years later, we realize there are three generations of Salvadorans here. . . . Ten years have passed and we realize we have children who speak English, . . . for whom it would be a shock to go back. We are in a kind of crisis. This is the great dilemma we face.”

Surpassed only by Mexicans, Salvadorans make up the second largest foreign nationality in Los Angeles County--a fact made all the more remarkable considering that Mexico’s population is 16 times that of El Salvador’s.

Today the estimates of Salvadorans in the county range from 350,000 to as many as half a million. Los Angeles is frequently called the second largest Salvadoran city after San Salvador, the capital.

Salvadorans came to Los Angeles for many reasons. They were leftists and suspected leftists, former union activists, students or teachers, fleeing repression and murderous death squads; peasants without politics caught in the cross-fire; pro-government bureaucrats afraid of kidnapings; former soldiers weary of the fight. They are the poor and poorly educated, the well-to-do and professional. Some came with legal permission; most entered illegally, coming northward across Mexico and then over the U.S. border.

Salvadorans were emigrating to the United States in the 1960s and ‘70s. But it was in 1979, when the war really flared, that a trickle became a flood, and Southern California was the leading destination.

As the numbers grew, agencies whose focus was Central American refugees began to spring up in Los Angeles.

El Rescate (The Rescue) started in 1981 with three people working in the borrowed offices of a group of public-interest attorneys, an experimental project with $50,000 in seed money. Today, it employs 38 full- and part-time staffers managing an annual budget of nearly $900,000. Its yearly Oscar-night fund-raising party attracts the likes of Daryl Hannah and other politically active celebrities.

The Central American Refugee Center (CARECEN) evolved about the same time. The two organizations offer legal advice and social services to thousands of refugees annually. Both agencies have been accused by Salvadoran government officials of being fronts for the guerrillas. While the sympathies of some members may lie with the Salvadoran opposition, both agencies deny they work on behalf of anyone but the refugees they represent.

The two agencies are being swamped these days with nervous phone calls and queries from Salvadorans wanting to know if the temporary protected status program is ending and if deportation is likely.

In a sense, the end of the war is the end of an era for a lot of immigrants and their advocates.

“I don’t feel like the work is coming to an end,” said Madeline Janis, CARECEN executive director. “I do feel like we’re entering a new stage”--the fight for temporary status and to protect the rights of Salvadorans who choose to remain in the United States under asylum or other programs.

Through the years, the conflicts of El Salvador have occasionally spilled over into Los Angeles.

Former soldiers have found themselves sharing space in shelters with the former guerrillas they once battled. Some priests and activists have received death threats they think came from local manifestations of Salvadoran death squads, inscribed with the initials “E.M.” for Escuadron de Muerte--Squadron of Death. Angulo, the Salvadoran consul, still frets over “obstinate leftist groups” that he believes operate in Los Angeles and could pose a threat to his safety.

Andres Argueta, owner of a pair of Salvadoran restaurants named for the mythical Indian figure Atlacatl, remembers having to stop a simmering fight between two groups of young men. They had entered his restaurant and were seated at nearby tables; one group was pro-left, the other supported the government, and they were starting to exchange angry words.

“I told them that, here, life is different,” said Argueta, 44. “By being here, I told them, you can no longer be part of one side or the other.”

Like many Salvadorans, Argueta is a successful businessman. He owns a home east of Hancock Park and is father of three children, all born in Los Angeles and fond of El Salvador--as a nice place to visit. Period.

Argueta predicted that many Salvadorans will take their time about returning home.

“Maybe in two years,” he suggested. “Right now, it would be a craziness. What are you going to do? Pick up a basket and sell watermelon?”

The Atlacatl restaurants are among hundreds of Salvadoran eateries, pubs and nightclubs sprinkled through the Pico-Union neighborhood, heart of Los Angeles’ Salvadoran community, into Koreatown and beyond. On any given night in Los Angeles, you can eat Salvadoran pupusas --a corn tortilla sandwich--and dance the Salvadoran cumbia to tunes played by one of El Salvador’s premier bands.

At the other end of the spectrum, violent Salvadoran street gangs have also emerged, using names such as Marasalva-trucha and posing a menace well-known in urban America.

Inspired in part by the horror stories told by people fleeing El Salvador, Los Angeles’ oldest Catholic church, Our Lady of Los Angeles, declared itself a sanctuary for Central American refugees in 1985.

The move angered federal immigration authorities but helped mobilize a Los Angeles-based movement of priests, academics, lawyers and other activists opposed to official U.S. support for the Salvadoran government. They set up a protest network, with participants regularly taking the five-hour flight to El Salvador and staging demonstrations in Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park or in front of the downtown U.S. Federal Building.

Their lobbying efforts were meant to erode the support in Washington and elsewhere for the Salvadoran government. Meanwhile, as U.S. taxpayers’ dollars financed the Salvadoran government’s war--$4 billion over 10 years--activists in Los Angeles were collecting money, medical supplies and other materials to be donated to Salvadoran church and opposition groups. Some of the money and supplies benefited the guerrillas.

The arrival of Salvadorans in Los Angeles also gave rise to a breed of immigration attorneys who championed the cause of political asylum for Salvadorans. Their work tested the definitions of political asylum and eventually caused some of the rules to be changed.

In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, it was very difficult for Salvadorans to obtain political asylum. U.S. officials, staunch supporters of the Salvadoran government, maintained that most Salvadoran immigrants were fleeing economic conditions--not political trouble--and did not qualify for asylum. Few Salvadorans bothered to apply.

The so-called Orrantes case, a class-action suit tried in federal court in 1988, forced the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to notify all Salvadorans detained for illegal entry into the United States that they had the right to apply for asylum. Other cases forced changes in the way asylum was judged.

The issue of political asylum had a politicizing effect on many immigration attorneys, who were suddenly forced to learn about the historical repression in El Salvador, said Sandra Pettit, counsel in the Orrantes case.

“Through that energy, . . . people became sophisticated about working on asylum cases in general,” Pettit said.

Salvadorans also influenced immigrant labor movements. Labor organizers in Los Angeles have found former Salvadoran union leaders, university students and others to be an invigorating force in local efforts to unionize janitors and other low-wage workers.

Because Salvadorans came from a country where police sometimes broke up labor demonstrations by shooting at protesters, or where labor leaders were known to disappear in the middle of the night, some were reluctant to join unions here.

But once the fear was overcome, labor organizers say, Salvadorans became some of the most determined unionists. Together with Guatemalans, who have survived similar experiences, they brought unionizing skills that had withstood brutal tests.

“I don’t think we would have made all the gains that we made (in setting up unions) without having had some of the experience that these folks from El Salvador and Guatemala have brought with them,” said Jono Shaffer, senior organizer for the Service Employees International Union.

The role of some Salvadorans was crucial in the “Justice for Janitors” campaign. During a strike by janitors in June, 1990, about 400 people marching to Century City fought with baton-wielding police. At least two dozen demonstrators, among them numerous Salvadorans, were injured.The marchers had employed a typical Salvadoran technique of hiding their faces with red bandannas to avoid detection by police.

Shaffer said that despite the violence, the janitors were back on the streets days later; the strength of that response, he said, was in large part because of the participation of Salvadorans who had seen a lot worse.

Similarly, a persistent, uphill campaign to pass a law legalizing street vendors is largely the work of a Salvadoran woman, Dora Alicia Alarcon. The proposed ordinance goes before the City Council this week after months of debate, negotiation and resistance from many city officials and merchants.

Still, it is with mixed emotions that many Salvadorans look back at their lives here and wonder about their future.

“I cannot think of remaining here all my life,” said Eduardo Rodriguez, 29, who left his native San Salvador in 1983 after being wounded in a student demonstration. “I am still Salvadoran, more than anything else. . . . I have never lost the idea of returning. And now there is the opportunity. Not right now. But things are different.”