Earlier this month, Bank of America trumpeted a loan it had awarded, the first of its kind in the country. It was not a megabucks deal for international corporate expansion, but a $51,000 start-up loan under a new federally backed loan program to the owners of Loubara's, an 18-table restaurant in San Diego.

A few days later, Wells Fargo publicly declared its intention to lend $550 million this year to small businesses in Los Angeles. And in a few months, First Interstate Bank vows, that bank will unveil new programs designed to give small businesses easier access to credit.

This horn tooting by big banks about tiny loans reflects a new banking landscape, one in which giant lenders--belatedly, according to critics--are scrambling to prosper in a fast-changing economy in which small business is no longer small stuff.

Loans of less than $1 million made up nearly a third of the $11.3 billion in loans outstanding from banks to commercial and industrial companies in California, according to June, 1994, figures from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Those loans generate up to 20% of net bank earnings, bank officials say.

Of that total, six of the state's largest banks--Bank of America, Wells Fargo, First Interstate, Union, Sanwa and Bank of California--logged more than half of all the small-business loans in California.

Many owners of small businesses remain highly skeptical that the big banks are sincere, however, and complain that it is no easier to do business with them now than it ever was. Though available statistics are undependable, by some measures their lending to small business actually declined nationwide from 1993 to 1994.

But analysts say the long-term direction is up-- because such loans are profitable.

"The growth market right now is entrepreneurship," said Eugene Valdez, owner of Claremont Advisory Co., a San Gabriel Valley small-business advisory firm. "The banks may talk about social responsibility, but in reality it's a profit opportunity."

For the most part, big banks abandoned small businesses during the 1980s in favor of retail, international and corporate banking. The net effect was that large banks lost ground to community banks, said Terri Dial, an executive vice president at Wells Fargo.

But the evidence is that the big banks are back.

Radio ads tout small-business loan programs. A blizzard of brochures and press releases fill the mail. Bank-sponsored small-loan workshops dispense advice. And an army of bank loan officers treks out daily to make old-fashioned door-to-door cold calls on small firms.