MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Distressed to find aging homeless women still working as prostitutes in downtown Mexico City, women's' groups are preparing a roomy retirement home to take 65 of them off the streets

Rejected by their families and stripped of much of their earnings by policemen and pimps, the elderly sex workers say they have no choice but to keep working, sometimes for less than $2 a day or just a plate of food. "I may have two or three clients a day but I can't charge what the young ones do. Sometimes I just ask for food or a hotel room," said Gloria Maria, a kindly faced woman of 74 who mostly sleeps outdoors in a grimy downtown food market. Funds raised this week will go toward fixing the roof of a an elegant but crumbling 18th century building donated by the Mexico City government to serve as a retirement home for Gloria Maria and others. Like many of her co-workers, Gloria Maria was raped as a teen-ager and fell into prostitution soon afterward. Prostitution is not legal in Mexico but sex workers are tolerated, along with the shoe shiners, orange juice vendors and tamale sellers who clog the streets of big cities, creating a gray economy that absorbs millions of unemployed. While some of these workers can put savings under the mattress for old age, or hope their children will support them, prostitutes often have nothing after a life of exploitation by pimps and paying bribes to avoid arrest. Few are in touch with their families or children. "Other people pay taxes and can retire with a pension. We are exploited by society then thrown away when we get old," said one lithe young prostitute, with long blond hair and funky platform shoes. "We should have the same rights as anyone else," she said at a fund-raising concert for the retirement home Tuesday. Organizers are collecting funds from private donors and hoping local companies will provide beds and help with improvements to the retirement home like painting, plumbing and rewiring. The women will be expected to cook and clean for themselves and earn money through handicrafts to help with running costs. The home is seen as a pilot project and the organizers realize it needs to be part of a longer-term solution for sex workers. "Sex workers are doubly marginalized," said Emilienne de Leon, head of a local women's' rights group called Semillas. "They are rejected by society and by their families. When they get old, either they sell themselves very cheaply or they don't have enough to eat. It's a very difficult world."