Latinx Heritage

Hey Friends,

There is this guy that isn't read in Western psychology, although he was European descent and lived in El Salvador. He was murdered by CIA operatives in El Salvador. He was a liberation psychologist. And, partly part of the reason he wasn't as well known in The United States of America is because he gave almost all his lectures in Spanish on purpose. He wanted to be rooted in a Latin American tradition. Ignacio Martin Ibaro had a real vision for psychology to be a liberating movement, not just one that maintains systems and power of the oppressors.

I share this quote from Ignacio, “"The homeostatic vision leads us to distrust everything that is change and disequalibrium, to think badly of all that represents rupture, conflict and crisis. From this perspective, it becomes hard, more or less implicitly, for the disequilibrium inherent in social struggle not to be interpreted as a form of personal disorder (do we not speak of people who have 'lost their balance'?) and for the conflicts generated by overthrowing the social order not to be considered as pathological."

He suggested that trauma resides in relationships between the individual and society and emerges within an historical context; psychosocial trauma, he wrote, is "the concrete crystallization in individuals of aberrant and dehumanizing social relations." He contended that mental health cannot be seen as separate from the social order, challenging psychologists to address not only the individual and social effects of war and other human rights violations, but also, in his words, to "construct a new person in a new society."

Will you join me in creating this change?