In one room, displaced worker Luis Casarrubias slouches in a metal folding chair in search of a month's rent.

In another, volunteer Genoveva García telephones Mexico to investigate a crushingly false rumor of a missing man's appearance.

Up a set of worn stairs, Spanish-speaking psychological counselors hear the horror stories of perhaps the most disenfranchised survivors of Sept. 11.

These are the spare offices of Asociación Tepeyac de New York on West 14th Street, a nonprofit group that has emerged to help the thousands of Latino immigrants who lost either loved ones or livelihoods in and around the World Trade Center.

With little more than a shoestring budget and trust earned in the insular Mexican and Central American communities, the group has done what no one else thought, or cared, to do: reliably tally the 65 mostly undocumented Latino immigrants missing and 2,866 left unemployed.

"We have no lives outside of work. We are open all night," said Jesuit Brother Joel Magallán, the executive director of Tepeyac, who organizes the rush of activity with the commitment of a missionary and the authority of a general. "And these volunteers, they need to pay their rent. They work anyway."

The challenges for the staff of a dozen college-age workers, most from Mexico, and the Jesuit who leads them have grown larger.

The American Red Cross, which came to the Tepeyac offices earlier this month, says it may have to leave because the average of 25 immigrants coming in each day for one-time rent and food vouchers is too few to meet organizational mandates.

Those immigrants who do emerge usually crowd in an hour before the 11 white-vested volunteers with the agency are scheduled to leave at 6 p.m., creating a hurry-up-and-wait routine.

"We may have to pull back to our normal offices," Ron Smith, a coordinator of Red Cross volunteers at Tepeyac's offices, said Thursday. "I'd like to stay because I'm not sure the clients we are trying to help will seek us out at another site."

Thankful that the Red Cross came to his building and streamlined rules on proving employment to grant the payments, Magallán is now worried that bureaucratic requirements will sever the only immediate relief to emerge for the undocumented and unemployed.

He says many immigrants have told him they are too busy looking for jobs during the mornings and afternoons and that there is a glut of deliverymen, kitchen workers and other low-income laborers also job-hunting across the city. He tells his volunteers to urge immigrants to abandon a day of job searches to receive the money.

Casarrubias, 28, with thick shoulders and a purposeful air, took the advice to spend 45 minutes with a Red Cross volunteer, who was able to grant him more than $500 in help. But the native of Guerrero, Mexico, who has been in the United States for 10 years without documents, was unsure if it was a wise trade-off.

"This helped, and I thank them, but it's one time only, and I don't know what I'll do next month," said the former employee of a restaurant at 5 World Trade Center. "I have to get back to looking for work, anywhere I can find it."

Meanwhile, the volunteers at Tepeyac are conducting perhaps an even more difficult search.

Having counted the 65 desaparecidos, or disappeared, they are now calling rural areas all over Latin America to break the news of presumed death.

Awarded a $20,000 grant from the AFL-CIO and $15,000 from regular citizens who heard of their work through news reports, Tepeyac is handing the money back to those left without breadwinners.

They include a 15-year-old Guatemalan girl named Anita Regalado who had scarcely heard of the World Trade Center but did know her father, mother and brother, who worked near the site, had not called in a month.

"We asked her how much they would send home a month, she told us, and we sent that to her," Magallán said of the $250 payment. "But what we really need is to send one of our people to these places and assess the needs of each family."

Officials with the Mexican consulate in New York said they had verified 16 Mexican nationals as missing from and around the Twin Towers and provided about $300 to five relatives in New York. The Mexican government is reportedly to provide $3,000 in assistance to each of the 15 families.

And in what Magallán calls oddly roundabout assistance, the Mexican state of Puebla, from which many of the disappeared come, has pledged a $200,000 pot to share for funeral expenses. "The problem is there are no bodies, so there are no funerals," Magallán said Thursday, when there had yet to be any remains discovered of the disappeared.

There have been no reports of government assistance from Central American nations.

All the while, the counting of the jobless and the accounting for the disappeared continues at Tepeyac.

Through word of mouth and outreach in the Latino immigrant community, about 200 displaced workers have come to six meetings at the Tepeyac offices since Sept. 11.

Their children and spouses often with them, the assembled explain where they were when the attack came and their pressing financial needs in the wake of it.

A Tepeyac volunteer, usually Omar Saracho, will ask the assembled where they worked and how many other busboys, or dishwashers, or cook's assistants worked at their side.

Saracho asks how many of them were documented and undocumented and if any of their co-workers have yet to be heard from. Those who are said to be missing are sought out through calls to employers and other known friends and put on the list of the disappeared only when that proves fruitless.

During the meetings, Saracho etches the facts in columns on a chalkboard at the head of the room. By the end of the night, another picture of the attack's effect on immigrant workers is there for all to read.