Editor’s Note: Today’s Freaky Friday brings Points readers the insights of Tace Hedrick, Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida and a specialist in 20th-century Latin American literature and culture. Having written previously on Mestizo Modernisms, Hedrick is now at work on a study of national and cosmic identity discourse across the Latin American and Latino Americas diaspora. Her meditation on the mid-20th century Mexican mushroom vogue is drawn from that project, whose working title is Queering the Cosmic Race: Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Mendieta, and Walter Mercado, 1968-2010. She will return in a few weeks to discuss the psychedelic journeys of Gloria Anzaldúa.
Most people do not think of the middle of the 20th century—the super square 1950s—as a time when indigenous drug rituals and experiments with psychoactive plants were topics of popular interest for the average Joes and Janes (or Ozzies and Harriets) of the United States. In Mexico, however, traditional rituals with psychoactive plants had been a sometimes intense focus of interest (for Mexicans and people from the United States alike) since the post-armed phase of the Revolution, beginning in the 1920s, and in the U.S. the 1950s brought a resurgence in the popularity of earlier texts about indigenous drug use. Among these were Carl Lumholtz’s 1902 Unknown Mexico, which detailed Mexican Huichol peyote rituals, and Robert Zingg’s 1938 writing on Huichol artwork, commonly assumed to be psychedelic because of their religious use of peyote. Also during the 1930s, Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes traveled with anthropologist and ethnobotanist Raoul Weston LaBarre throughout Oklahoma (not quite as exotic as Mexico) to study Plains Indians’ peyote use. Their disparate findings, published in 1938, were among the texts revived first in the 1950s and again in the ’70s: LaBarre’s The Peyote Cult sought to psychologize the indigenous use of peyote visions, while Schultes’ “The Appeal of Peyote [Lophophora Williamsii] as a Medicine” (published in American Anthropologist) argued that the substance’s value lay in its therapeutic and stimulating properties more than in its psychoactive ones.
Research performed in the 1930s and ‘40s, then, formed the basis of many of the bestselling ‘70s volumes on the indigenous roots of psychedelic culture.