Eagles and Jaguars

ABSTRACT

There are direct archetypal relationships between Mesoamerican/pre-Columbian native myths and the beliefs and behaviors of gang-entrenched Latinx youth and men. These include relationships between warrior imagery and sacrifice in gang activity, the Virgin of Guadalupe and male-female relationships, and ancestral connections to the land and the love of the neighborhood. Within psychotherapy, centralizing the beliefs and experiences of gang-entrenched Latinx youth and men allows for an increase in trust and for the roles and goals of treatment to be assessed critically.

KEY WORDS:

• archetypal psychology
• Aztec beliefs
• culture
• depth psychology
• Indigenous beliefs
• male psychology
• mass incarceration
• psychotherapy

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My deepest gratitude to Dr. Fanny Brewster for encouraging me to submit this manuscript. Thank you to my clinical supervisors, whose relentless inquiries challenged me to look deeply at myself and the role of therapy with Latinx men. And, of course, thank you to the youth and men who shared their stories with me—this work is yours.

NOTE

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).

Notes

1. See Wikipedia, s.v. “Latinx,” for more information on the use of gender-neutral neologisms, available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx.

2. See Wikipedia, s.v. “Tuskegee Syphilis Study,” for more information and resources, available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abner Flores

Abner Flores, MA, is a graduate in counseling psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Pepperdine University. He has provided mental health services in juvenile detention, with wrap-around/at-risk youth programs, and with court-mandated parolees. His dissertation topic is focused on providing a resource manual for working with Latinx parolees. Correspondence: [email protected].