FOR PUERTO RICANS, LIFE IN LOS ANGELES CAN be especially lonely.

Despite the city's huge Latino population, it is impossible to find a Puerto Rican community organization. There are no Puerto Rican barrios or baseball teams. And as best as can be determined, there are no Puerto Rican restaurants.

Conversations in Spanish are filled with slang unfamiliar to "puertorriquenos," also known as "boricuas." Festivals feature mariachis far more often than salsa. Bank tellers hesitate to cash checks from Puerto Rico, where the currency is the U.S. dollar. And grocery stores with Latino food rarely carry Puerto Rican products.

To top it off, many local residents, including Latinos, are unaware that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens at birth. That may cause a special problem considering the sentiment surrounding Proposition 187, the initiative to restrict services for illegal immigrants in California.

"It will hurt everybody who is not white," said Jorge Pineiro, 61, a longtime activist statewide who is treasurer of the San Jose-based Western Region Puerto Rican Council. "There are many Puerto Ricans who are brown or black or speak with an accent. I'm a citizen."

To Pineiro and others, the debate over immigration reform is only the latest example of how the Puerto Rican experience in Los Angeles and other parts of the state differs from that of all other Latino groups.

One basic problem, activists say, is that the Puerto Rican community in Los Angeles is small and dispersed compared to the region's massive Mexican and Central American communities. Many Puerto Ricans are either too preoccupied professionally, too busy with family responsibilities or struggling too much to organize as a community.

But the situation in Los Angeles is considered shameful by those who point out that Puerto Ricans have a history in California that dates back to at least the early 1900s. Active Puerto Rican advocacy groups exist in other communities such as San Diego or San Francisco, but not Los Angeles.

"There's no agency to help a Puerto Rican who arrives (in Los Angeles) from Hawaii or San Juan or Chicago," Pineiro said. "There should be a center to at least provide referrals."

In Los Angeles County, the 1990 U.S. Census counted more than 40,000 Puerto Ricans, with nearly 14,500 living in the city itself. Small pockets of Puerto Ricans were counted in surrounding municipalities such as South Gate, where there were about 1,000, Huntington Park, where there were more than 500, and Bell Gardens, where there were about 120.