I knew of Ignacio Martín-Baró’s work long before I invited him to a
conference on Central American refugees in the spring of 1988. It was his first
visit to the San Francisco Bay Area. Having “Nacho” for a week in my house was
a very special and transformative experience. Three of my cousins of were among
his students of Psychology at UCA. One of them was brutally murdered when she
was seven months pregnant.
Ignacio Martín-Baró was “Nacho” to many of us who
knew him, who love him and miss him.
At at the time of his assassination, he was the vice rector Central
American University “Jose Simeon Cañas” (UCA, in Spanish). The University of
Central America played a leading role in the effort to resolve El Salvador’s
decades-long civil war. Jesuit faculty members, who often spoke out against
human rights abuses, were accused by the government and the military of
providing intellectual support for the FMLN rebel uprising.
Ignacio Martín-Baró, a Spanish-born Salvadoran
citizen, at age 50 was best known as an analyst of national and regional
affairs and as the founder and director of the Public Opinion Institute, a
highly respected polling organization.
He was also a writer, teacher, and a pastor. He was killed along with
five other Jesuit priests and two women on November 16, 1989. He was killed by
a military battalion that had just returned form military training at the
School Of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. It was not the first
assassination of church leaders: 18 Catholic priests, including Father Rutilio
Grande and Archbishop Oscar Romero, and four North American churchwomen, had
been killed in El Salvador since the late 1970s - more than any other nation in
the world.
Martín-Baró obtained his PhD at the
University of Chicago, and visited the United States many times. He published
eleven books and a long list of articles in Latin America and the US. His work
dealt with the many issues connected with the field of social psychology. Most
of his life was dedicated to ending injustice and understanding the impact of
violence and terror both on the individual and the social body. His work has
contributed to bridging the individual psychological trauma with the social,
thus opening up the possibility of using psychotherapeutic methods to affect
political emancipation.
Martín-Baró also incorporated in his
framework basic postulates of Liberation Theology. He would explain:
“For the oppressed of Latin America, the process implies a personal and
a social transformation. Whether or not it manifests in individual disorders,
the deterioration of social interaction [by war] is in and of itself a serious
social disturbance, an erosion of our collective capacity to work and love, to
assert our unique identity, to tell our personal and communal story in the
history of peoples… For this reason, the challenge is not limited to addressing
the destruction and disorders caused by the war. The challenge is to construct
a new person in a new society."
Every
Saturday at Clínica Martín-Baró, the pulse of the most vulnerable Latin@s is
taken to understand their housing, employment, migration, family, social
support, psychological and medical condition. We are inspired by the work of Nacho and his desire and hope
for a better world.
Clínica
Martín-Baró's mission is to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care.
We strive to promote wellness and address the health care needs of the
underserved and economically disadvantaged Spanish-speaking community of the
Mission District of San Francisco. We provide access to free health care,
psychotherapy, and health education in Spanish and in a culturally sensitive
manner.
Clínica
Martín-Baró is a student-organized free clinic operating Saturdays. It is a collaboration
between medical students and faculty from the UCSF School of Medicine, and
undergraduates from the SFSU Latin@ Studies Department. We work together to
serve and accompany while learning about the social and medical conditions
facing immigrants. We provide a space for student volunteers to develop and
strengthen a socio-economic analysis of the state of healthcare in the U.S, and
an educational environment to create life-long advocates for underserved
communities. We encourage, support and empower low-income students of color to
pursue higher education (including but not limited to medical school) and a
career that will benefit the needs of such communities.
We do not receive any funds
from corporations. We receive donations from people of conscience and fundraise
by organizing social events and cultural performances. The structure of Clínica is horizontal a non-hierarchical. We take political stands and learned
from Nacho that we are not neutral about the political decisions that affect
the lives in our community, such as impunity, gentrification and the commodification
of health, education and housing.
Every Monday night, we
reflect on the work we do from the perspective of our communities. The commitment among the volunteers has deepened over
the years. Dedication has grown because student volunteers want to be a part of
something bigger than themselves, have the power to make their own decisions,
and do something that they have wanted to do their entire lives.
By Felix Salvador Kury
No comments:
Post a Comment