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Arms folded firmly across her chest, her look stern and wary, Patricia Villatoro sits on a metal folding chair at El Rescate, a service agency for Latinos in the Pico-Union area.
Years of danger, hardship and heartache have settled into her face. And yet, she occasionally softens. In those moments, dimples dominate her smile and she becomes a young, pretty, 28-year-old woman whose obligations and ambitions pull her in two directions.
The divorced mother of three left her sons, now 9 and 7, with her mother in San Salvador last January and headed for Los Angeles to join her sister and three brothers. (Villatoro's daughter lives with her former husband.)
A union and leftist party worker, she left El Salvador because of government pressure, she says. With El Rescate's help, Villatoro has filed for political asylum here.
Her children are never far from her thoughts. What money Villatoro earns, she sends to support them. The expense of a visit is out of the question. She has stopped thinking of returning to El Salvador and started planning to bring her sons here in a few years.
And so, she takes 12 hours of English a week and also volunteers at El Rescate, organizing a girls' basketball team and helping with arts and crafts sales.
Villatoro also plans to open a community coffeehouse with people she met at El Rescate. She is counting on the agency for help with loan procurement, training and planning. And El Rescate staffers say that they are committed to helping her reach her dream.
As Villatoro and her compadres are changing from refugees to residents, El Rescate and agencies like it are responding with their own transformation.
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In the late '70s and early '80s, several hundred thousand Salvadorans headed for el Norte, fleeing the violence and economic shambles of their war-torn country. Most arrived in Los Angeles traumatized, without legal papers and usually without money.
The organizations that formed to help them took their names from calamity: El Rescate, the rescue; CARECEN, the Central American Refugee Center, and Clinica Msr. Oscar Romero, named after the beloved archbishop of San Salvador who had been gunned down in 1980 by a right-wing death squad in front of his congregation.
These agencies, and...