HOW LA PAZ TOOK ROOT
Organization, celebrating its 20th anniversary, has become a vital bridge for the Hispanic community in Chattanooga
Asked about the early days of La Paz — the Highland Park-based nonprofit which, now in its 20th year, has become a vital bridge between Hispanic Chattanooga and the city as a whole — Jaime Bentancourt thought back to something that came before: a soccer tournament at Camp Jordan.
Somewhat new to town himself, Bentancourt, the Hispanic pastor at Red Bank Baptist Church, arranged the competition around 2000 with a man named Brad Pitts, who’d spent years exploring the Hispanicbusiness-lined Main Street seeking to welcome a burgeoning migrant community and who’d founded an organization under the umbrella of the Salvation Army based right around present-day Niedlov’s Bakery: Esperanza Del Barrio: Hope of the Neighborhood.
“I told him, ‘Look, let’s put on a big soccer tournament where we can see how many people there are,” Bentancourt said in an interview in Spanish.
As it turned out, there were a lot of people — mostly men, who learned through word of mouth of the rare communitywide gathering. Betancourt doubts many of those specific men are still here today. Many, he said, have likely returned to Guatemala or another home country. Yet he sees their children sometimes, and like many, he understands that early community as a seed of what was to come.
In the past three or so decades, a diverse Hispanic community has put down deep roots in Chattanooga. It has done so with the consistent help of Esperanza Del Barrio’s successor organization, La Paz, established in 2004 with a mission to help newly arrived immigrants — largely, at the time, undocumented working men whose reputation for keeping cash under their mattresses made them appealing robbery targets.
Today, the nonprofit still serves newcomers learning to trust a foreign and sometimes hostile system. But it also serves nuclear families, prospective business owners and youth imagining college. Now integrated deeply into the fabric of the city’s nonprofit community, La Paz has become a true Chattanooga institution — a “tremendous” one, according to Bentancourt — whose trajectory reflects that of the historically hidden and now rapidly professionalizing community it serves. How did La Paz do it?
EARLY DAYS
“I think it’s important, not just for the Hispanic community but also for Chattanooga in general, to have an organization that is like a bridge between the two communities,” Marisol Jimenez, then an English teacher at East Side Elementary and an early board member, told the Chattanooga Times Free Press in March 2004, just after La Paz — originally La Paz de Dios — announced its formation.
“The kids absolutely trusted her,” said Mike Feely, an early board member, in a phone interview. “I spoke Spanish but still sounded like a guy that went to a Rossville, Georgia, high school with my bad accent and all that stuff. But Marisol could say, ‘You can trust Mike,’ and suddenly I was welcome to the house. She was the original trust source.”
In 2003, La Paz reported, there were about 900 Hispanic students in the Hamilton County school system — La Paz’s metric of choice for measuring a community whose full scope, they said, is not well represented in U.S. census data.
Roughly 15 years later, when La Paz was planning to move into present-day offices in an old firehouse, that number was more than 6,000. Today, said the group’s executive director, about 9,000 Hispanic youth are enrolled in the district.
By late 2004, it identified its first physical home, in East Lake United Methodist Church — present-day New City Eastlake. It had no paid staff but had volunteers and a working board. In a 2005 tax return, the new nonprofit reported $10,651 in revenue and stated a dual mission: “To match resources with needs within the Hispanic community” and to “educate the Anglo community about our new Hispanic neighbors.”
Some needs for newly arrived Hispanic community members were pressing. Most arrived seeking work, and some got scammed by bosses, having completed a job and received no pay. Translation services were scarce, and there was physical danger, too. Weeks after La Paz’s formation was publicly announced, two men barged into the Southside home of a man named Carlos Puac-Aguilar and shot him dead, according to a Times Free Press report from the time. That was no anomaly. In the six months prior, Hispanic families had seen more than 10 home invasion robberies, the newspaper said.
Matt Baez, a former head of Esperanza Del Barrio who helped lead the new standalone nonprofit La Paz, told the newspaper that many Hispanics, often undocumented and wary of outside institutions, didn’t keep bank accounts, and there was thus a common perception they kept cash at their homes — an observation Bentancourt and several others echoed in interviews for this article.
In one of its early initiatives, La Paz worked to form a neighborhood watch program and sought to educate the Hispanic community about banks, many of which were starting to allow people without Social Security cards to open accounts. Primer Banco Seguro opened in Dalton, an early hub of the Hispanic community seeking work largely in the carpet industry.
A woman named Stacy Johnson returned from a transformative experience in Mexico and got hired at First Tennessee Bank to create a Hispanic banking program. Lou Garcia, an Episcopal minister, invited her to join him on the board of La Paz.
It was determined that one thing the then-male-dominated Latino community needed was a grandmother figure, Johnson, now the longtime executive director, said in an interview at La Paz’s offices. They hired Sonia Sasse. She helped clients with discrete needs, making sense of a bill, understanding a court summons and generally navigating the systems of a foreign language and land.
La Paz also quickly became a cultural ambassador. Months into its founding, it was hosting a Latin culture market at First Tennessee Pavilion, with piñatas broken at every hour and a salsa tasting competition, subject to the vote of those who made a $5 donation. Immigration attorneys were on hand. There were inflatable slides, face paint and a six-piece mariachi band.
COMMUNICATORS
In 2022, La Paz reported receiving nearly 42,000 calls seeking help. It has more than a dozen paid staff — working on case management, communications and development, education, administration and legal access — and now, through mostly grants and donations, routinely brings in on the order of $1 million in annual revenue, which pays salaries, furnishes emergency funds and powers classes and community events.
Asked about his impression of La Paz, Walter Nolasco, a grocery store clerk, said he’d never received services from the organization but heard it helps families with personal problems and economic problems.
‘“I have heard that La Paz is a very good thing,” he said in an interview in Spanish.
“They fill a really, really important gap in the philanthropic ecosystem,” Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly said in an interview at a La Paz event Friday. “We have a really healthy and large nonprofit community here in Chattanooga. But sometimes the swim lanes get a bit confused. In this case, they’re not at all confused about what they’re doing or why they’re doing it.”
According to Feely, one of the founding board members, La Paz has from its inception communicated exceptionally well. Its leaders didn’t wait for the newspaper to call but reached out for every little event, and he said the news trickled from there into the local TV stations.
La Paz projected pride, publicly recognizing Latino leaders in the community. And its purposes were from early on highly intelligible to Chattanooga’s vast network of foundations, among other deeppocketed benefactors. Within a few years of La Paz’s creation, initial grants were rolling in — $20,000 from the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga, $34,000 from the Benwood Foundation, $53,000 from the Lyndhurst Foundation.
More and more Hispanic women were arriving to town, and children were on the way. Backed in part by a large government grant, La Paz launched a program, Promotores de Salud, to assist with prenatal care.
Such resources, said Bentancourt, the pastor, were something his old friend Pitts, who no longer lives in Chattanooga, did not have at his disposal in his days roaming Main Street. With robust financial backing and substantial volunteer support, La Paz met community needs early on, Bentancourt said, and on that basis was able to earn the trust of new arrivals and gain general credibility in town.
A FRAGILE TRUST
In 2006, La Paz leaders began packing moving boxes, and painting the walls of a small new office at St. Andrews Center, a repurposed church in Highland Park.
“People won’t have to go out of their way to find us,” La Paz board Chair Ed Candler told the Times Free Press at the time. “Everybody in the community knows where St. Andrews is. It’s really easy for them to reach us here. So business is going to grow.”
La Paz sought to link the Latino community to other local institutions. It partnered with the Chattanooga Police Department as it sought to win Hispanic community trust. When, in 2007, some Latino parents were having trouble enrolling their children in Hamilton County Schools, Candler, the board member, complained to the press.
Beyond client services — helping people with rent, fuel, utilities, medical needs — general La Paz programming continued to expand. With “Vecindarios Limpios,” it encouraged
Hispanic residents to keep homes clean and comply with livestock and pet ordinances. It brought a Hispanic Santa to the St. Andrew’s Center.
Trust, however, remained fragile. Immigration was and remains today one of the most contentious issues in U.S. politics, and many, in Chattanooga and beyond, resented the growing presence of Latinos, and the government support that undocumented immigrants among them received, those critics felt, at the expense of U.S. citizens.
One day in April 2008, the Times Free Press reported, young students who’d spent the day in testing got off their school buses to find an even more stressful situation at home: Their parents were nowhere to be found.
A few hours earlier, a group of workers had been called into the Chattanooga Pilgrim’s Pride plant and surrounded by armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, a witness told the Times Free Press at the time. The meat-processing company had cooperated in the raid, in which more than 100 people were arrested and accused in many cases of using false Social Security numbers.
Immediately after, immigrant advocates in Chattanooga, Nashville and Dalton gathered at the St. Andrew’s Center with the families of those rounded up.
“We had 300 people that showed up,” Feely recalled. “I’d never seen so many people in the building. I didn’t expect that, but people trusted us — that they were going to be OK during a really, really traumatic time.”
When the raid happened, a lot of Hispanic bank customers went underground for a few weeks, Keith Sanford, the First Tennessee Bank president, told the Times Free Press a few months later.
“They really lost a lot of trust in our institutions,” he said. “Now it has calmed down again and evened out.”
FINGERLESS GLOVES
The St. Andrews Center was a charming building, but its heating and ventilation systems were not. La Paz in 2008 hired two more staffers, Melody Bonilla and Laurie Stevens, and Johnson, who officially became La Paz’s executive director that year, recalled them typing away wearing fingerless gloves to stay warm.
As La Paz began to see more familial units, Johnson said, it moved to add to its breadand-butter direct client services more expansive cultural programming.
In home visits, Bonilla, for example, perceived that some women had experienced domestic violence, but they weren’t willing to talk about it, Johnson recalled.
Bonilla put on a periodic program called Entre Nosotras — among ourselves — which was supposed to give local Hispanic women a place to talk freely among themselves, outside the home. They made jewelry, did yoga and learned how to sew.
“And the goal is not to learn how to sew,” Johnson said. “They may think it is, but the goal is to provide a safe environment where these women can feel themselves, where they can connect with someone else, from within their culture.”
ON THE MOVE
Soon, La Paz moved to a bigger office on the top floor of the St. Andrews Center.
“We thought we were big time,” Johnson said, though she also remembered certain disadvantages of the new space, recalling women lugging their strollers up the stairs in their search for help.
Seeking to be more accessible, it went on to rent a 2,000-square-foot house on Bailey Avenue for roughly a decade. La Paz carried along — changing emphases and adding new programs in alignment with changing community needs — but eventually, that space got cramped, too, and provided clients inadequate privacy.
Around 2019 La Paz was looking for a more permanent home. Fire Station No. 5 in Highland Park had tiles missing and furniture strewn across the floor after the Fire Department moved out. But it had double the size, a location in the historic heart of the Hispanic community, and the clear potential to house discrete offices, centered around a multipurpose space in the old fire truck bay.
With help from the Maclellan Foundation and others, La Paz bought and renovated the property. Today, the naturallight-bathed offices, popping with colorful Latin American art, is the nonprofit’s greatest financial asset and a highly visible symbol of an institution — and a community — taking root.
SEEING
Johnson said a refrain for her recently is that La Paz has for two decades climbed Mt. Everest and that this year is an occasion to look around and enjoy the sunrise.
“We have been present for 20 years,” she said. “We have been here. We have stayed here. It’s been hard, and we still show up. We’ve seen the Latino community — like, really seen them — and I hope they feel seen by us.”
She added, “We’ve tried to show Englishspeaking Chattanooga that the Latino community matters.”
La Paz continues to offer new programming, new emphases. With housing prices skyrocketing, it sought grants for housing assistance and to address youth homelessness.
Another recent focus has been wealth creation. It has workshops on home ownership and credit building. With a new program, Avanzando, La Paz aims to help Latino youth, some of whose own parents have less than a high school education, prepare for college.
Meanwhile, the migration continues. The Howard School receives more than a hundred new immigrants every year — some from Guatemala, but also from Mexico, or Venezuela or somewhere else, said Jose Otero, an English as a new language teacher there who also co-hosts the Chattanooga podcast “Amigos Unidos.”
Otero said La Paz is a beacon of light, a onestop shop. He said new immigrants can go to La Paz if they need anything and trust they will be guided in the right direction.
“My model of what I use at Howard — I took that same structure and example from La Paz,” he said by phone. “Whoever goes to La Paz goes to La Paz. But whoever comes to us, we try to help them in that same way.”