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 Hispanic-business-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 this 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.