Visionary Art of the Americas: Hemispheric Transculturations, Hallucinogens, Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Consumer Culture in the United States, Mexico, and Colombia 1666934070, 9781666934076

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Visionary Art of the Americas

Visionary Art of the Americas Hemispheric Transculturations, Hallucinogens, Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Consumer Culture in the United States, Mexico, and Colombia

Juan David Cadena Botero

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cadena Botero, Juan David, 1986– author. Title: Visionary art of the Americas : hemispheric transculturations, hallucinogens, politics, aesthetics, and mass consumer culture in the United States, Mexico, and Colombia / Juan David Cadena Botero. Other titles: Mestizo visionary art of the Americas in the late twentieth century Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2024] | Revision of the author’s thesis (doctoral)—Columbia University, 2022, under the title: Mestizo visionary art of the Americas in the late twentieth century : hallucinogens, politics, aesthetics and mass consumer culture in the United States, Mexico, and Colombia. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023041964 (print) | LCCN 2023041965 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666934076 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666934083 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Drugs and the arts—United States—History—20th century. | Drugs and the arts—Mexico—History—20th century. | Drugs and the arts—Colombia— History—20th century. | Arts and society—United States—History—20th century. | Arts and society—Mexico—History—20th century. | Arts and society—Colombia— History—20th century. Classification: LCC NX180.D78 C33 2024 (print) | LCC NX180.D78 (ebook) | DDC 700.1/03097—dc23/eng/20230922 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041964 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041965 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To my little brother, Milo, and to my inspiring and beloved aunt, Pao

Contents

Figuresix Acknowledgmentsxi Introduction: Hallucination, Psychedelia, and Visions in the Americas and the Arts 1 The United States of America

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2 Mexico91 3 Colombia171 Epilogue: A Tradition Debating the Real

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Bibliography237 Index 249 About the Author

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Figures

Figure 0.1 The Collective Building of the Maloca Is Presented by Wade Davis as a Site of Encounter for “Two Vital Branches of Human Knowledge” 7 Figure 0.2 Ancestral Visionary Art Fuses with the Territory in the Colombian Amazon: “Chiribiquete, Truly in the Presence of the Sacred” 23 Figure 1.1 A Monument to Freak Culture and Politics—“The Double Fist, with Double Thumbs”—Marks the Memory and Passing of Hunter Thompson Today 66 Figure 1.2 Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) Regale a Hitchhiker (Tobey Maguire) on Their Way to Las Vegas: “He Is a Foreigner. I Think He Is Probably Samoan” 72 Figure 2.1 The Characters Experience Withdrawal Symptoms That Turn into Visions Which Evoke “A Good High” 130 Figure 2.2 A Profane Blessing by the Female Protagonist Breaks the Fourth Wall 134 Figure 2.3 The Metaphor of an Alienated Generation Becomes a Vision of Monstrosity: “Toothless, Enormous, and Grotesque” 140 Figure 2.4 Guerrillas and Performance Fuse as the Pretended Revolutionaries Manufacture Prop Rifles in the Hospital’s Workshops: “It Is for My Nephew, He Wants to Become Part of the Guerrillas One Day” 142 Figure 3.1 The Ashes of Carlos Mayolo Serve as an Occasion for Some Lines upon Friendship 204

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Figure 3.2 Catholic Icons, Pop, and Hallucination Allow for Complex Transcultural Images, Such as That of Guardian Angels Lighting a Joint Figure 3.3 The Cali Group and Nadaísmo Meet in Retrospective in the Movie Un Tigre de Papel; J. Mario Arbeláez Holds a Collage Allegedly Made by Pedro Manrique: “No to the Pope, Yes to the Pill” Figure 3.4 Lemos’s Graffiti Summarizes the Contradictory Experiences of Mestizaje and Transculturation Among the Youth of the First Half of the Twentieth Century in the Americas

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to a number of people and institutions that have made this book possible; Bibiana Quiroga’s support and advice, the artist Christian Rivera (who created the cover art), and editor Alexandra Rallo (who reached out to me to start this process) were supreme allies. Also my family, beloved María Teresa, Hector and Juanca, my admired grandpa Jorge and grandma Mery, Uncles Gustavo and Luis, Consuelo, Jaime, Memo, Pato; Lucas, Cuervo, Johnnier, Judy, Alex, Fernández, Paola, James, Suárez, Santiago, Manuela, Gloria, Sophie, Majo, Nicole, Ernesto V., Angélica, Andrés, Adam, H. Peña, F. Afanador, and in particular my dear friend Nancy Ng Tam, whose observations improved every single page of this work. Yse Bourdon’s gaze brought a new perspective into the work at the last minute and helped it grow. Dear colleagues like Diana Figueroa Gutiérrez and Carly Beth Sheffield were important and unforgettable voices during the last revisions of the manuscript. I am also extremely appreciative of the book Narcotic Agent, the counterpart of the first edition of Junkie, which my friend Laura Martínez Jiménez helped me get a hold of. In parallel to all that personal help and solidarity, the Fulbright and Colciencias Foundations provided funding and guidance. I am particularly thankful for the dialogue I have had with persons of knowledge, such as Luis H. Tez, a Kamsá spiritual leader from the Putumayo; Marcelo Murrieta, my Murui brother of the Amazon; and Angélica Rojas Anzola, a mestizo healer in Bogotá DC, with whom I had the chance to talk in depth about plants and sacred geometries. I was also assisted with all diligence and patience by the kind nieces of Dr. Salazar Viniegra—whose works are discussed here—as they explained about his personal archive, guarded by them in Ciudad de México. In particular, Magali Ocaña Salazar heroically responded to all my questions even shortly after giving birth and in the midst xi

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of a pandemic. There were also the brief email exchanges I had with a leading psychologist specializing in drugs, addiction, and culture, Dr. Carl Hart, who pointed me to a very useful bibliography on the subject of psychedelia, in addition to suggesting a reflection on the terminologies at hand, from hallucinogens to psychedelics. I am thankful for finding a shared interest after a number of in-person conversations with Dr. Julio Ramos, an authority in nineteenth- to twentieth-century Latin America, lately intensely dedicated to the effects and moments of these substances in our history and identity. He provided me with the concept of “narcographies”—narratives motivated by visionary experimentation—including many works of literature within our Hispanic tradition. I received key intellectual grounding from some direct conversations with Michael Taussig, a well-known anthropologist who specialized in modern and traditional ritualism and with whom I undertook a class that focused on Nietzsche and Shamanism—itself a great example of the transculturations I observe in my book—as well as other courses I took with extraordinary thinkers in different areas of knowledge dealing with a globalized context. Many specialists helped me discover and understand the existence of hemispheric circuits, of both culture and politics, that define our perception of hallucinogens in these times of savage late capitalism, such as those outlined in the course I took under Dr. Vishakha N. Desai in the field of foreign policy and another one on the sociology of globalization under Saskia Sassen, as well as some dialogues and a class with Professor Bruno Bosteels, who highlighted the importance of 1968 as a crucial date in the timeline of this project. Professor Dianna Niebylski, at the University of Illinois, was crucial in helping me approach narco-narratives and aesthetics critically. I also had the opportunity to become much more familiar with the numerous traits of mysticism that remain in modern times alongside Professor Gustav Peebles, at the New School for Social Research, whose class approached in detail the philosophical insights of Walter Benjamin and Edgar Allan Poe, perhaps the two most representative critical thinkers engaged in whatever is originally mystical about modernity. As it relates to popular and massive dynamics in Latin America (and it has been a great aid in understanding the commercialization of hallucination in many manners, as well as its lingering subversive potential today), my usage of the concept of consumer culture—the very idea that there are sophisticated cultural devices behind the acts of producing, acquiring, or consuming that can even nurture initiatives of resistance—resulted from dialogues with my book adviser, Dr. Graciela Montaldo at Columbia University. I am especially thankful for her inspiring discernment, patience, and dedication during this whole process.

Introduction Hallucination, Psychedelia, and Visions in the Americas and the Arts

Problematically blurring use and exchange value, the twentieth century seized hallucinogenic substances as sources of forbidden pleasures which alienated laborers, while their prohibition generated immense fortunes that destabilized democracies throughout the continent, motivated violence, and funded mafias, guerrillas, and paramilitary groups. Yet, visionary plants and practices spread with a transcultural power that even today allows for the survival of ethnic groups and traditional knowledge long hidden, while also feeding urban consumptions that generate innumerable subcultures and art, time and again misunderstood as a sign of decadence. In this book these “underworld” practices are also manifestations of something prior and parallel to the birth of a culture of mass consumers: they mark an encounter between Indigenous, Afro, rural, and mestizo influences in the voices of authors who contributed to culture from the margins of very hierarchical and racist societies and assumed a leading role in their intellectual debate, capturing its mixtures, dark humor, conflicts, and transculturations via writing and films. Initially marginalized in the low worlds of taverns, destitute neighborhoods, crime, prisons, and prostitution venues, hallucination and hallucinogens—simultaneously a colonial anathema and a sacred pre-Columbian ritual of transcendence—survive and thrive, passing on to the urban minorities of artists and thinkers I will examine in this book, now even including synthetics like Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD). Late avant-gardes between the 1950s and 1990s partially rescued this knowledge, preserving some of them as an original heritage within their metaphysics, politics, and aesthetics, and as a core part of many of their ideological and secular inquiries. Banned and misconstrued by the viceregal, republican, national, and transnational elites, both in the colonial past and in the contemporary moment of a hemispheric circuit—within the geopolitics of Nixon’s War on Drugs—visionary and 1

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hallucinogenic uses continue shaping much of the cultural panorama of the Americas today. Reviewing the origins of Indigenous, mestizo,1 and transcultural visionary traditions in the Americas implies following the trace of once immense imperial and tribal oral repositories, themselves remnants of many civilizations that did not preserve their memories directly in any written records. This vast corpus, encompassing detailed knowledge of a multitude of sacred plants, animals and practices, has often been reduced to mere fragments that survive scattered among peoples and territories (see figure 0.2). Rarely do academics consider these remains as evidence of broader traditions, but they in fact formed a part of whole knowledge systems, some of which only survive into the present day as common wisdom and practices as they passed through generations and cultures, from the Indigenous and Afro-descendants to whites and mestizos. Only by piecing together these remnants of visionary traditions scattered across continental, national, cultural, and historical divides, do hallucinogenic practices in the arts become visible as a pervasive (cross-cultural) hemispheric practice: “the Tukano say that everything has an ‘echo,’ but that not all people can hear it because the person has to have ‘stability’ and has to ‘sit well’ upon his little stool” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1978, 152). Some of these system resurfaces in the rich mythology of the Indigenous Amazonian Tukanos, whom the Austrian anthropologist Reichel-Dolmatoff observed in the 1930s. They follow the echo of their origins pondering under the hallucinogenic influence of yagé—the name of the preparation including the vine of capy or ayahuasca and parts of the chacruna bush—as they sit on their ritual thinking stools—carved and painted with shapes and patterns taken from previous sacred visions. Much like them, I examine a constellation of “echoes” and peoples throughout this book as I identify common patterns between generations and territories. Although fascinating in its own unorthodoxy and complexity, a branch of visionary mysticism in Europe remained marginal, solely made of extreme fasting, self-inflicted pain, and abstinence. It usually only amounted to Catholic propaganda after it was assimilated by the Roman Church as a testimony of its might. Yet in the New World, the visionary field included craftsmanship, medicinal knowledge, hallucinogens, and a wide array of recipes and experiences of transcendence. Visionary practices were a patrimony shared not only by spiritual elites of ascetic saints but also as a resource accessible to most people in traditional markets as a means of healing, learning, and creating. They allowed for an active agency among communities which managed to approach hallucination as a source of aesthetic creativity and stability that served to provide perspective and continuity to a marginalized and often despised cultural heritage in the continent of America. By illuminating the relationship between selected authors and the traditions and influences in

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their home countries, this book affirms alternative genealogies for the mass usage of hallucinogens in the twentieth century outside of the oft-cited hippie and rock subcultures which were its international counterpart after the 1960s. This text additionally places hallucinogens usage in the arts within a hemispheric context as a tradition practiced by multiple generations, peoples, nations, art movements, and intellectuals, spanning the whole continent of America as these very substances did. To “speak with the devil” was the way that the Spaniards very early characterized Indigenous visionary practices. The expression at once held true to the idea of contact with otherworldly divinities maintained by the native communities, while also distinctly marked with prejudice how the conquerors regarded these substances. By the twentieth century, to observe Mexican and Colombian authors engaging with this heritage still showed a dynamic in which both heaven and hell became sensorial metaphors of human mental extremes, as users faced a Janus-faced societal judgment. By communicating with their unconscious and liberating their repressed ideas, hatreds, and desires, these authors still negotiate between a Western concept of evil and an Indigenous search for revelation. Therefore, their works “speak with the devil” even today, when morality has moved on from colonial times and secularized, but much of its old prejudices and beliefs linger sublimated. Even in the twenty-first century, the artistic works analyzed here still manage to become spaces to speak with gods and devils of our human nature, in a way perpetuating both the myth of the colonizers and that of the colonized, and continuing to play out the dichotomous moralizing interpretations of visionary practices. With parallels to the original concept of catharsis as a bodily purge among the Greeks, a whole genre of experience is suggested in the visionary trances of the Americas; the ritual produces these sensations through aesthetic and chemical means, but often it may motivate its participants to imprint the strength of these visions later, marking the making of yet new aesthetic objects to accompany their everyday life, as it happens with the houses of the Tukano tribes in the regions of Putumayo and Amazonas in Colombia, adorned with patterns taken from hallucinogenic trances. A usual comparison with the sacred communion in different sources is not out of place, via a transubstantiation, a hallucinogenic myth is not only relived in a ceremonial sense but also literally experienced in first person by the believers. In the place of Greek mimesis, we may see a principle of hallucination, but just the same, the Gods become audible as in classic theater or modern novels and cinema: “The individual hallucinations do not constitute a private world, an intimate or almost secret experience; they are freely discussed, and anyone will ask questions and solicit answers” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 180). Although the adjective “visionary” I will deploy throughout this text

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primarily refers to the experience of visions and trances, for traditional and modern societies in the Americas its meaning can also border on the more common one often given by the dictionaries, referring to an ability to foresee the future or to plan ahead for it.

THE CATEGORIES OF VISIONARY KNOWLEDGE, HALLUCINOGENS, AND PSYCHEDELIA: AN OBJECTIFIED MIXED HERITAGE Margaret Mead’s ideas and her choice of words in a column from 1968, sum up well the transcultural power of visions and hallucinogens as she compares the mystical search of American communities and the sensorial exploration of secular modernity, two different legacies which I relate here: “Even when the vision comes to an unbeliever like Saul or Tarsus, who neither sought it nor prepared for it, the experience is within a living tradition” (Mead 2000, 180–181). The article discusses and compares the links between visionary knowledge and psychedelia via the “living tradition” of visions. Conflicts between Indians, Afro-Americans, mestizos, and white people over visionary practices ultimately revolve around different understandings of what health, spirituality, art, or human community entail. While these clashes are erroneously portrayed within official narratives as something of the past in allegedly multicultural democracies, the persisting uneven criminalization of particular groups’ hallucinogens usage throughout the twentieth century suggests that they have been far from resolved peacefully in the so-called melting pot of mestizaje. Transculturation and the physical availability of these substances have assured the survival of practices which, albeit often changed from sacred to secular, are confronted with violence and legal prosecution, similar to how they had been demonized by the Catholic religion and Europeans in the past. Within the discourse of both academia and government authorities, the rich history and diversity of hallucinogenic traditions of the Americas have been neglected and undermined, with its role today still little studied and understood. Aldous Huxley, and other white authors, could also have been instrumental in opening such a horizon for the masses in the late twentieth century. He reflected on visionary knowledge in a vast registry and pointed to how it had decayed in the modern Western World, becoming an utter and discredited rarity (Huxley 2009, 149), as he explored the contrasts in its treatment in some dominant religions: The Protestants disapproved of visionary experience and attributed a magical virtue to the printed word. In a church with clear windows the worshippers

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could read their bibles and prayer books and were not tempted to escape from the sermon into the Other World. (2009, 109)

Catholics were in the middle position, with stained glass in some churches and the visual effects of baroque both in the buildings and in their furniture. The Indigenous malocas (as seen in figure 0.1) are also buildings for visions. In connection with their plasticity and aesthetics, a distinction appears in perfect correspondence with the complex performative aspects involved in visionary practices like the intake of yage, cacti, or mushrooms, their ceremonies, and the aesthetic layers leading to catharsis through visions: “Two distinct and separate arts are practiced in the theater—the human art of the drama and the visionary, other-world art of spectacle” (Huxley 2009, 162). This conceptualization of the “visionary” opened up so widely and consistently through Huxley’s writing that it even encompassed a defined corpus, with its very own philosophical load and a historical relation with popular classes. Visionary optics, closer to oral than to written traditions, as per his explanations, seemed to be increasingly more definitive of the aesthetics of modernity, with the marked distance between high and low brow art becoming less meaningful in mass consumer culture. Prone to special effects, mass consumer culture and pop naturally revisit these aesthetics through psychedelia: “Vision-like effects and vision-inducing devices have played a greater part in popular entertainment than in the fine arts. Fireworks, pageantry, theatrical spectacles—those are essentially visionary arts” (Huxley 2009, 156). Some other clarifications on terminology are important, particularly the difference between psychedelia and hallucination and how that distinction may depend simply on the dosage. When used in small amounts, the effects of hallucinogens are mainly visual, including the lights and shapes that distinguish psychedelia, whereas to reach hallucinatory states, the quantities of intake must be often exponential. Still, even when the discussion recognizes the cultural complexity of these modern practices in a term like “psychedelia,” mainly used in the past for US arts and its drug subculture, such categories may also understate the vivid link with Indigenous practices that centered on the use of these substances. Most references restrict the term as a privilege of white and industrialized cultures, as if they were the original source of many of these creative trends. Terminology is not a simple matter since already the foundational author in the field, Louis Lewin, would create a whole new term for these specific compounds, particularly poetic for a pharmacologist and a good measure if any exist of their capability to inspire people’s minds: “Phantastica” (Lewin 1964, 89–146). Throughout this book, I privilege the category of the “visionary,” as well as the terms “hallucinogens” and “hallucination,” so as to highlight not only the big quantities ingested quotidianly by the artists I analyzed but also that a visionary tradition is in the making: “No one term fully satisfies

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scientists, but hallucinogens comes closest. Psychedelic is most widely used in the United States, but it combines two Greek roots incorrectly, is biologically unsound, and has acquired meanings beyond the drugs or their effects” (Schultes 1976, 5). Rather than the secular entertainment implied by “psychedelic,” the sensorial searches of Nadaísmo, the grupo de Cali—a cinema school also called Grupo de Ciudad Solar, which was the name of its collective residence and place of work at the time—and the Mexican Onda wander into a territory of excess that borders on the ritual, they chase visions and netherworlds, effectively consulting these substances and opening a dialogue with their deep unconscious and even that of their nations. I suggest the term “visionary” under the awareness that it may echo—to reference only two random examples—categories like the ones deployed by the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism to define its aesthetic technique, or as a main innovation in the style of European surrealists. Such is the case with Edgar Ende, born in 1901, whose works are presented by his son Michael Ende with the expression “an archeology of darkness” and who got the visions from his paintings mostly from meditating in the absolute dark of his studio (Ende and Krichbaum 1985, 39–42, 99–102). The fact that many European artists are usually more readily associated with the idea of “visionary” aesthetics than any Latin American author, as well as the fact that the term “psychedelia” has been often restricted solely to North Americans and Europeans, are perfect examples of the whitewashing of visionary traditions that can be at work in the choice of certain appellatives. Said appropriation may be unfortunately present depending on the terms employed. Mentioned by Herodotus and used in parts of the Old World, even among Scythians, Romans, and Greeks, hallucination was well known, and different substances were kept in use and held as sacred. These traditions, historically inhibited in the West and practiced in the East, were reactivated in the colonial encounter with the Americas, where even cannabis (a colonial import) would be used early on as a psychoactive by native communities. Hallucinogens are, in fact, exponentially more numerous and better known in the Western Hemisphere, where they had been integrated into the daily life of many peoples, including the previously mentioned Amazonian Tukanos. Patterns derived from yagé-induced visions decorate the entrance to the “Maloca”—the big collective house of the community with no doors (see figure 0.1)—and that of the smaller houses. Its designs also cover the stool that each male member of the tribe has exclusively for his sitting, along with other sacred tools. As anthropologist Reichel-Dolmatoff mentioned about the community, “all decorative elements that adorn the objects manufactured by the Tukano are said by them to be derived from hallucinatory imagery” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 177). Set in a daily life space, the Maloca—a visionary site that results from visions and metaphors itself—is brought to cinema in the film El Sendero de

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la Anaconda (Angulo 2019), where it is shown as a crucial part of sophisticated rituals honoring prime matters which are sacred entities, like the cult of the palm and fruit of chontaduro. The movie brings to life the experiences of Evans Schultes and Wade Davis while learning from Indigenous communities of South America, presenting the communal mythic building in terms of an encounter: “Some of the peoples, including the Macuna and others, say that plants are but people in another dimension of reality. So what we have here is two equally important vital branches of human knowledge coming together in this sacred space” (Davis in Angulo 2019, 55.00 / 55.05). ​ For a clearer contrast between the “visionary” and the “psychedelic,” one can simply compare select samples of the corpus I have compiled to analyze here and the bibliography of works on literary production and hallucination, such as the one by Robert A. Durr, Poetic Vision and the Psychedelic Experience. He states an objective similar to the one I pursue here: “the primary task of this essay is to demonstrate that the psychedelic experience and romantic, mystical, or visionary literature do indeed have in common much that is essential” (Durr 1970, xii). Similar to my own methodology, Durr’s approach effectively connects psychedelia and visionary knowledge within an aesthetic analysis by including an outstanding bibliography of Asian and European references to the mystic usage of hallucinogens. Durr is systematic when it comes to joining together those traditions; however, any Indigenous, black, or mestizo works are left out, and Latin America, although an original source of this knowledge, remains excluded within other approaches. My

Figure 0.1  The Collective Building of the Maloca Is Presented by Wade Davis as a Site of Encounter for “Two Vital Branches of Human Knowledge.” Source: Angulo, Alessandro (Dir.). 2019. El Sendero de la Anaconda. Motion picture. Colombia: Caracol Televisión, 56:10.

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book contributes to filling that gaping omission in this field and its literature, focusing on the second half of the twentieth century as a particular historical moment that allowed for these seemingly local, or at least national, transculturation processes via hallucinatory substances and political activism to become a hemispheric and global event, including high and low brow art, critically adopting leftist ideals, and embracing the language, performativity, and multitudes of pop culture, as well as the social reclamations of the most marginal communities in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States. The apparently minor gap between consumers and non-consumers developed into a deep generational divide that confronted young masses against often older, uneven, and strict national establishments, as well as showed vast differences between drug-producing and drug-consuming countries in the world. Although some critical authors include Latin America in their analyses of producing countries, their works reproduce the imperialist and extractivist paradigm in which raw materials are seen as passive contributions from the undeveloped world to the developed one. At all times there remains an unequal value between the two kinds of export, depending if the type of product coming out of each center itself is seen as mere materials or as a finished assembled object. The developed world is seen as the site that processes, synthesizes, and distributes assembled and finished products, including aesthetic ones, while the undeveloped nations are associated with raw materials. Such a hierarchical scheme is reaffirmed whenever psychedelic culture is seen as a spontaneously produced fad, when it actually was but another chapter within a wider tradition of visionary arts and thinking. In the same sense, although Mexico and Colombia are recognized by authors like Sadie Plant in her Writing on Drugs as the sites of power of mafia characters such as Pablo Escobar (1999, 253–263), little does she mention the active and original role of Indigenous or mestizo knowledge on the subject, nor the Latin American authors writing on drugs. Similarly whitewashed is the idea of the visionary in Culture on Drugs: Narco-cultural Studies of High Modernity by Dave Boothroyd (2006), in which Sadie Smith’s volume is referenced while it manages to omit mentioning a single Latin American last name within its bibliography, to the point that the names of many of the traffickers and producers, and even their countries, are ignored, much less those of thinkers and artists, with the sole exception of Carlos Castaneda, precisely the one whose name, anglicized by his choice from the original spelling “Castañeda,” is omitted here due to its lack of clarity in defining the boundaries of his master thesis Las enseñanzas de Don Juan—often accused of being a fabrication—as an academic memory or a literary fiction. Whereas writers like De Quincey, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Huxley, Cocteau, Deleuze, and the US beatniks in general are always accounted for, many Latin Americans have been omitted in most comprehensive anthologies of psychedelic writing.

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As if imitating the continental circuits of extractivism pursuing raw materials in global capitalism, only now in a spiritual and cultural appropriation, William Burroughs searched for yagé itself as a raw material rather than as the accomplished and sophisticated example of material culture it was (Duchesne-Winter 2001, 115–130). Little did he mention the complex local narratives and myths surrounding the hallucinogen in the Yagé Letters nor did he give much attention to the colonial violence which had demonized visionary practices in their very territories of origin, however palpable this divide of cultures and classes is in his account. Due to the insufficiency of a wholly appropriate term to define the substances I mention here, of the two available terms, psychedelics and hallucinogens, I privilege the latter in the following pages. As mentioned before, dosage makes all the difference between mere entertainment, which results from the minor amounts embraced in psychedelia, and the mystic experience of awe and horror that visions and hallucinations often bring forth. Nevertheless, all the authors I observe tend to move on from mild and minor dosages to extremely high intakes. Taken in big quantities and repeatedly, even if at a secular level, such usage progression can culminate in elaborate moral and sensorial transits, and visionary passages between different realms of experience. I include the authors that follow within visionary practices and aesthetics to signal a broader hemispheric lens that both encompasses the psychedelia often associated with North America and relates to Latin American works which are themselves continuations of a rich history of older Indigenous and mestizo visionary practices tied to particular substances and spaces. Thus, an interpretation of visions as sources of knowledge in both psychedelia and ritual hallucination, and as underlying threads knitting together the whole corpus, constitutes an organizing principle of my inquiry. Paradoxically, while psychedelia seems now as something from the past, visionary traditions remain ongoing, live, and transcultural. To trace these links, I will pay close attention to artists who bonded with some remnants of these traditions left marginalized in big cities, now a trait among its mestizo “lumpens,” a vice to be found in working class neighborhoods, particularly in the case of cannabis, smoked as marihuana, and Indigenous drinks like chicha or pulque. By embracing the term hallucinogens and resisting one like psychedelics, I refute the idea of a radical Drug Revolution as envisioned by ideologists like Timothy Leary, and instead put forth a more comprehensive notion that truly understands the role of hallucination in everyday living, decolonization, and culture, and resists the whitewashing of cultural appropriation. Rather than as a state of exception beyond history I view the relations between reality and hallucination as a special encounter indeed, but with the depth of the quotidian. Today in the Americas, in mestizo cultures as before exclusively among Indigenous communities, hallucinogens satisfy a spiritual need, and certain

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compounds facilitate a search for meaning, a direct gaze into the unconscious and imagination that can redefine the boundaries of identity as a dynamic flow rather than a monolithic construct, a particularly interesting property given the conflicted mixed heritage of mestizaje. While psychedelic culture is messianic and maintains a rhetoric of illumination, it is solely a chapter in the long history of hallucinogens and visionary practices of all sorts. I use the terms not to denote dissociated individualistic experiences, but rather to underscore each visionary inquiry as an open dialogue with reality that can take on the forms of modern art, novels, and cinema, and become experiences of transit that can be communal and public: “To the Indians this ‘other’ dimension is just as real as that of ordinary everyday life, and for the individual to pass from one to the other is an experience shared by all” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 74). In fact, if it was not restrained to the twentieth century, this analysis would definitely have to start in detail with sources like the remaining Aztec codices, as well as with written reconstructions from the oral, like La leyenda del Yurupary, from the nineteenth century, and the Mayan Popol Vuh, from the eighteenth. In these sources, we constantly come into contact with leaders who use visionary substances. They, for example, enlarge the clairvoyance of the Amazonian Payé, a spiritual and political leader in the Yurupary legend: “I am deemed a liar though they know that I am a Payé and I see everything with my imagination”2 (in Orjuela 1983, 182). These documents have much to tell us about the narrative and creative qualities of visionary experiences made into vast oral, visual, and sacred traditions, as well as about their presence in modernity. South America’s cultural preference for hallucination was already noted in what is the first comprehensive scientific compendium on these practices, quoted as one of the first volumes to inspect into the subject of hallucinogens—or “phantastica,” to use its own category—as a vast field of its own, Phantastica: Narcotic and Stimulating Drugs, Their Use and Abuse—originally published in German in 1924. Written by Louis Lewin, a German scientist who dedicated his entire life to this field of research, it made clear that all kinds of people were drawn to narcotics and stimulants: “on this plane meet artisan and sybarite, ruler and subject; the savage from the distant island or from the Kalahari desert associates with poets, philosophers, scientists, misanthropes, and philanthropists” (Lewin 1964, 2). A distinctive geography is recognized by Lewin as closely related to the substances and practices he observes: “the Indians of South America are said to have an intuitive appreciation of their own defectiveness” (2), and they are “ever ready to rid themselves of such melancholy feelings by intense excitement, i.e. through the use of kola and similar drugs” (2–3). It is key not only that myths turned into a personal experience via visions but also how the resulting orality and folklore were the closest resemblance

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to an Indigenous art of montage, in which creativity and materials intertwine with hallucinogenic ingestions common to native rites and their early urban practices, producing a complex experience. The Tukanos’ thinking stool, described by Reichel-Dolmatoff, is adorned with the geometry of yagé visions, as mentioned earlier, but in turn it becomes part of the sensorial experience of future yage sessions, enriching its imageries. What is left now of these uses in Mexico or Colombia involves local rituals in which syncretism with Catholicism is evident, as well as something else: by articulating music, light, touch, smell, as well as inner bodily perceptions, yagé ritualism in Colombia, and sacred mushroom and peyote usage in Mexico, become complex ceremonies with plural layers of aesthetic experiences leading to a cleansing climax via the chanting and hosting of the taita, the payé, or the shaman: “As a form of epic theater these yagé nights succeed not by suffusing the participants in unrelieved fantasies. Instead their effect lies in juxtaposing to a heightened sense of reality, one of fantasy” (Taussig 1987, 444–445). Making it clear that there is no such a thing as an “average” yagé experience, Michael Taussig also explored these experimentations with meaning and reality as means to heal a social and historical wound via the use of montage, a concept deployed in Walter Benjamin. As a principle of dialectical juxtaposition, montage articulates complex images and meanings mixing the future, the past, and timeless myths within the present of hallucination as memory and collage: “In this most crucial sense, savagery has not been tamed–and therein lies the magic of colonial healing through the figure of the ‘Indian.’ The ‘mystical insights’ given by visions and tumbling fragments of memory” (Taussig 1987, 441).

VISIONARY ARTS IN AMERICA AS AN AESTHETIC ASSEMBLAGE JOINTING DIVIDED CULTURES In particular, Tukanos, in Colombia and Brazil, the Peyote Church among North American Natives, and the Wixárica in Mexico are living examples of the close bond between hallucination and creation, vastly preceding De Quincey, Baudelaire, or Coleridge in the making of true visionary art. Unlike the more casual association between European and North American writers and these compounds, the tribes of the Americas deploy a highly codified type of art that deserves closer examination. At first, Reichel-Dolmatoff asked the Tukano Indians of the Amazon to draw anything at all from their everyday lives, but after a few tries at producing generic images, he noticed that “the pictures were flat and lifeless, and obviously pleased neither the designer nor the beholder” (1978, 15). Applying a different approach, he then asked a Tukano man to capture the visions

12

Introduction

he had seen using caapi or yagé during visionary rituals: “His immediate willingness and enthusiasm told me that I had touched a sensitive spot. The man chose three pencils—red, yellow, and blue—and set to work with great intensity” (15). After the first man engaged this way, and as others started asking for paper and drawing utensils from Reichel-Dolmatoff and joining in, there was even intense debate: “Without exception they recognized what he was doing and some of the bystanders began to discuss details of shape and color in a serious and knowledgeable manner” (15–19). Gradually, Reichel-Dolmatoff discovered how hallucinogens and hallucinations among the Tukano channeled a rush of creativity that resembles elements of our Western understanding of what art is, in addition to evoking something completely different: People would point to a motif and say, for example, “This is a rattle!” or “This is a door!” although I was unable to see any resemblance to these objects. As a matter of fact, the designs by different people often contained quite similar motifs and it was these the commentators recognized and interpreted. It was a system of communication from which I was excluded. (1978, 28–29)

We deal here not only with how modern arts have approached visionary practices but also with how visionary practices can resemble, at times, modern arts. Due to this principle of montage toward a total experience, the continuities with cinema or literature are more palpable, only now mimesis and catharsis become mediated by a biochemically induced visionary state: “As a matter of fact, the entire ritual is orchestrated, so to say, in a very complex fashion, and no sounds, movements, or light effects are quite arbitrary occurrences, but obey an overall plan of well-defined and predetermined sensory signals” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1978, 11–12). In observing the Tukano, it was evident for the Austrian anthropologist not only that there is a communal coding to the many yagé patterns but also that the young men were merely capturing what they saw, whereas old men took longer drawing their patterns, and were more engaged in naming each element of the work: “they were much involved in problems of meaning and its transmission” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1978, 49). This implies that true experience and craftsmanship derived from a repeated exercise of hallucination, so older adults were better versed in the true complexity of the code at work. By articulating myths not just as a belief or a symbolic ritual but also as a shared experience of altered realities that allow for common aesthetics, morals, and language, hallucination sustains an oral and visual tradition, and even an identity, echoing some of the roles of modern arts in our society. Although women are often left out in the Indigenous rituals, there are also numerous exceptions to that prohibition depending on the community and the festivities, and in many mestizo variations to these legacies female healers

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13

assume a directing creative role, as it was the case with Maria Sabina, a main protagonist of my chapter on Mexico. This montage principle is also reinforced by the way the ritualistic intake develops, in the dark, involving all the senses and available media, aromatic smells, musical sounds, the intensified sense of touch, the visions and the drawings they evoke later, the singing of the payé, and the rhythms of its helpers and its musical instruments, the optical effects of fire inside the common big house of the Tukanos’ Maloca or built in the open by the Huicholes or Wixáricas. In the figurative level of the experience for the users of either community, animal figures came to them and complained about being killed. The visionary ritual became an elaborate form of montage and assemblage, the ultimate aesthetic experience of many Indigenous cultures both for the individual and for the tribe. In terms of how this montage principle reappears in mestizo, urban culture, and in modern art, the novel La Luciérnaga from 1932 is an excellent example of how the aesthetics of Naturalism, Costumbrismo, and Realism, all firmly entrenched in Mariano Azuela’s repertoire and in Mexican literature in general, experienced a series of formal and structural alterations when their boundaries were pushed to express drug narratives, visions, and the pace of transcultural cities. As Cecil G. Wood points out, there is in fact a transition in this novel to a dynamic presentation of the character’s conflicts, almost passing from a third person to a first one, “Azuela has stopped adhering strictly to the traditional method of evoking the psychological state of the human being through description”3 (1977, 187). Along with experimentation that entangles narrative voices and a discontinuous experience of space and time, this effort to capture the psychology of an altered state of mind in action even allowed Azuela to move on to a new style, closer to modern avant-garde narratives, “with his own readings of Proust, Kafka and Woolf”4 (Wood 1977, 194). The novel even offers a few moments in which the plasticity of hallucination almost nullifies the verisimilitude of the text and the prose adjusts to the “grifo”—Mexican slang term for a cannabis user—protagonist’s flow of consciousness, departing from realism. After a car accident, the narration describes an angel statue along with other figures of a church altar directing a series of insulting gestures toward a hallucinating protagonist, Dionisio, before he closes his eyes and reopens them to find himself alone: “The one with the golden keys has moved from his pedestal and the Evangelists make signs and gestures which are inappropriate of a sacred place”5 (Azuela 1991, 86). Readers experience the symptoms via the narrative prior to even finding out explicitly that Dionisio is a user of “doña juanita” (90), a euphemistic term for cannabis we will reexamine more. La Luciérnaga, a novel dealing already in the 1930s with users and traffickers of marihuana in Mexico, is but one example of how technically innovative prose has often touched upon hallucination as a source of plastic

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impressions that formally modify the text. Meanwhile, the narrative experience of modern Latin America also became entangled with the usage and traffic of hallucinogens. Until now there had been some Mexican essays, memoirs, and a brief comedic drama on the traffic and use of cannabis, but La Luciérnaga was the first case in which a highly consecrated national author chose an experimental approach to the novel as the ideal modern genre to deal with the representation of these altered sensorial experiences, increasingly more available in Mexico City and even distinctive of it. To better understand the type of texts and fiction explored within this study, not only in Mexico but also in the United States and in Colombia, I must identify three levels of narrative involvement with hallucination. First and more commonly, there are cases in which either hallucinogens or consumers are objectified as main characters or as a background presence, often merely representing a phase in a circuit of production, traffic, and consumption. Second, there are works of art in which a confluence of the agency of hallucinogens and users results in a narrative engaging with the formal peculiarities of hallucination. In this category, I include La Luciérnaga. Ultimately there is a third kind of hallucinogenic narrative, in which the substance, the user, and the practice are aligned in a way that makes hallucination a creative principle and a means for the creation of knowledge, capable of structuring a work of art in terms of form and content in a characterization directly inherited from visionary traditions. La Luciérnaga is an example of the first two levels, while bordering the third by means of its formal innovations. The term “narcografías” provides an approximate denomination of these kinds of visionary creations, a concept coined by Lizardo Herrera and Julio Ramos, and meaning a complex integration of real experiences, research protocols, and aesthetic experimentation which include critical social and political analyses of drugs and culture (Herrera and Ramos 2020, 10).

SUMMARY OF THIS WORK: RAW MATERIALS VS. INDUSTRIALLY PROCESSED GOODS The divide between consuming and producing countries is not restricted to the world of narcotics and the War on Drugs; it is at the core of the globalized world today and its extractivist economy. Yet, there are no unprocessed or raw materials in culture, each is both a complex entity and a construct at its territory of origin—even some introduced species—where it is signified as integrated in the life of a community and an ecosystem. Fernando Ortiz in his Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar is perhaps the best reference to point out how not only sugar and tobacco have shaped America but also how America has shaped them back into historical and mythical characters.

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Because of how they interact directly with the human brain, hallucinogens are but an extreme example of this principle, and their anthropomorphic humanization is a common case among the visionaries to use them. Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, a priest who arrived to New Spain in the seventeenth century and became obsessed with the prosecution of these visionary practices, described how the Indians perceived a venerable old man in their hallucinations who came to their aid and said to be peyote or ololiuhqui (Ruiz de Alarcón 1892, 146), and anthropologist Weston La Barre put it very poetically: “Being persons, peyote plants naturally talk and sing on occasion” (La Barre 1959, 13). Psilocybin mushrooms are called “sacred children” by María Sabina and other healers of Mexico (Estrada 1979, 46; Munn 1973, 121), while yagé— also said by the Ingano people to sing differently on a full moon according to the variety and strain of ayahuasca used, if you listen under their effect (Davis 1996, 176)—is associated with distinctive entities in chants and rituals in most of Colombia: “The teachers are the yagé people, the elegant beings of the spirit realm, the dwelling place of the shaman grandfathers” (Davis 1996, 226). Hemp was only a passive industrial asset for the Spaniards, who used it as a raw material for the main technologies of Renaissance—paper, textiles, and ropes—but it became “La rosa de María” or “Pipiltzintzintlis”—approximately “the most sacred little princes” in Nahuatl—in New Spain (Campos 2012, 44; Schultes and Hofmann 1979, 101), and it is often called “Doña Juanita” in twentieth-century urban Mexico (Azuela 1991, 90; Doña Juanita 1938, 3–25), encompassing a complex entity in culture, even a myth, with its own personality, complex gender identity, and whims. The discovery and exploitation of minerals often depend on the original knowledge of the native communities of a territory in order to be properly identified and extracted, and, similarly, domesticated crops and animals for human consumption are also a result of generations of knowledge and selective breeding, and even wild species have behaviors and qualities only known locally. By refusing to acknowledge the passiveness, virginity, and purity of raw materials in general, this book approaches hallucination as a site where many substances prove to be much more than assets to be exploited and appear as active beings within human society. I trace the interactions between hallucinogens, politics, and culture as they occurred during the twentieth century, ultimately examining hallucination as an important part of culture itself in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States. I will follow how this process was experienced as a symptom all through the bodies and corpuses of writers and intellectuals as well as among minorities and young people at the time. This research follows Latin American avant-gardes between the 1900s and the 1990s, which strived to redefine the boundaries of the aesthetic and creative realms while breaking free from the weight of Hispanic and colonial legacies and experimenting with altered states of consciousness and with

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Introduction

substances from their rich multicultural heritage. These practices in turn problematized the very concept of “identity” and allowed them for a corporealized understanding of culture and citizenship, or put in the words of Allen Ginsberg, who saw it as a “scientific and literary experiment” (Ginsberg in Ruas 2001, 27): “It is stupid after all that experience still to be clinging to a notion of a permanent self, a reliable self, the self feeling terror or present bliss” (25). I aim at studying manifestos, magazines, literature, cinema, essays, news articles, testimonies, and debates of thinkers who experienced precisely the consumptions, geographies, and time period that corresponded with the massive popularization of traditionally ritualistic substances like marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, yagé, or the coca leaf. At the core of my research lies an interest to explore how any raw material is much more than a passive asset. Hallucinogens are but one of many cases in which any material harvested to be processed or consumed by the vast global market can in fact be the most finished result of complex processes—entailing orality, history, knowledge, research, experimentation, techniques, practices, narratives, aesthetics, beliefs, myths, legends, art, transculturation—for the communities among which they are originally harvested, known, or produced, often to the point that they are considered transcendental entities, anything but a passive reified commodity that could be owned. By confronting the findings of artists and intellectuals with the context of local, national, and international illegalization after the 1960s, as posed by President Nixon and continued on to this day, I expect to demonstrate the cultural biases of the War on Drugs as a strategy of international control, its long-term consequences over the peoples it regulated from afar, and the impact it would have among autochthonous cultural processes in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States. On the opposing side to these repressive political pressures over traditional consumptions, I expected to demonstrate the existence of a web of affirmative exchanges among different countries, social classes, and generations within a hemispheric perspective. What kind of agency did hallucination promote among young intellectuals like those who integrated Nadaísmo, the grupo de Calí or de Ciudad Solar, the Generación de la Onda—literally translatable to a suggestive “the Wave Generation”—or US Counterculture, among other neo-avant-gardes and cultural actors from the twentieth century in Latin America? Only a hemispheric circuit could promote influences that would take US authors like William Burroughs to Mexico and Colombia, countries that in their own time had strong countercultural movements and exported plenty of hallucinogens to the United States over the previous and coming decades, as the War on Drugs was imported back. My secondary theses behind the speculations over these substances and their popularization along mass consumer culture include exposing the

Introduction

17

national characterizations of users and also the transnational ones cast over producing countries. I also aim at reconnecting local and preceding genealogies with the global level of consumerism—the old and the new—of the present. I observe literature and other forms of art and opinion under the rarifying effects of these chemical compounds, as well as under those of their criminal prosecution, redefining the boundaries that differentiate art and life, as well as those of what is allowed in both. Rather than merely being objects changed by signification and semiosis becoming passively resignified by the observer, I contend that substances also change signification and synapsis, affecting how the user perceives and thinks. Therefore, instead of focusing on hallucinogens or the hallucinators, I emphasize their encounter via hallucination and visions. I have structured my book to include an introduction and three chapters, organized geographically to address in turn the United States, Mexico, and Colombia. The introduction constitutes a point of entrance to the general complexity of hallucinogens and some of the cultural precedents that may have influenced modern consumptions in Latin America. It also offers a brief unpacking of the colonial and precolonial characterization of their usage and the moral burdens added by Western culture. Finally, this section reviews a few of the many human actors behind the War on Drugs who criminalized these compounds and demonized them, tapping at local prejudices that preexisted their national prohibition. The first chapter on the United States begins with the works of authors like Diane Di Prima, Anita Hoffman, and Anne Waldman, important references to understand the proximity between the Counterculture of the 1960s and hallucinogens as a practice of the Americas. Finally, Hunter S. Thompson and Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, who popularized a sort of hallucinated journalism and even ran a political campaign to be the sheriff in Aspen, Colorado, and in LA County, respectively, close the corpus as a strong example of the encounter of aesthetics and politics. While I engage Thompson’s fictional work, such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I mainly focus on his columns of political opinion and journalistic pieces in which he discusses in detail his Aspen campaign, and on the books The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, The Revolt of the Cockroach People, and The Uncollected Works by Acosta. The chapter closes with some general conclusions and considerations on the properties of hallucination within culture and the agency it may have provided to artists within the hemispheric circuit considered of Mexico, Colombia, and the United States. Chapter 2 focuses on Mexico, which has produced what is perhaps the most robust body of literature on the subject, being one of the countries that first experienced the popularization of hallucinatory practices in modernity. After exploring some key precedents of the twentieth century, I will mainly

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Introduction

probe the works of three Mexican writers. The first, José Revueltas, was a novelist bent on the project of a dialectical materialistic kind of realism which managed to capture the contrasts of modern Mexican society and its variety of classes. He often included the underworld of drugs and addiction whenever he described jails and communities of prisoners, places that were often shared by drug users and political prisoners at the time. I will observe particularly his earlier novels, Los días terrenales, Los muros de agua, and El Apando, as well as the essays of Mexico 68 juventud y revolución, and consider them in parallel to the student protests and to a peak in generational contrasts that also fed antidrug campaigns. A brief collaboration between Revueltas and José Agustín, writing the script of the movie El Apando (Cazals 1976), signals a generational point of encounter. Revueltas and Agustín also coincided as prisoners in Lecumberri prison in Mexico. Books by José Agustín include the fictions Se está haciendo tarde (final en laguna) and Cuentos completos, and cultural analyses such as Tragicomedia mexicana, La contracultura en México, and La ventana indiscreta rock, cine y literatura. The third author considered of this “generación de la Onda,” Parménides García, makes highly qualified criticisms of mass consumerism, the rock culture, and the coming fashion of hallucinogens. Books by Parménides considered in this work include his fictions Pasto Verde, El rey criollo, the poems of Mediodía, and his collection of articles En la ruta de la Onda, all of which dealt with the narratives of the Mexican rock generation and capitalism at the end of the century. María Sabina’s chants and Margarita Dalton’s single novel are ultimate examples of transculturation which make the core of this second chapter. The third chapter of the book focuses on Colombia, which shared the marijuana6 strains from Mexico and the Caribbean as early as the 1920s, used in its jails and prostitution venues. Its use in these spaces became meaningful enough later, as to mobilize dynamics among the nadaístas, a kind of late avant-garde in Colombia, which used it as a means to rebel against the more institutionalized expressions of culture. This group of young artists, men and women, consisted of poets, plastic artists, and novelists who were scandalous and defiant throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s, and even later in the twenty-first century. Parallel to the colonial heritage of hemp, local Indigenous groups originally used yage and datura as hallucinogens and developed a deep metaphysical system around the complex deciphering of the visions that they provided. The nadaístas challenged Colombian values of the time and would be among the inspirations of what would later be the grupo de Cali, a small circle of filmmakers and writers who mobilized opinion and cinema to agitate for political action and change, located in the communal building of Ciudad Solar. The chapter begins with the works of Gonzalo Arango, the main founder of Nadaísmo, whose works were responsible for transferring a glorification of

Introduction

19

hallucination and hallucinogens to other authors such as Andrés Caicedo. Arango in fact read a short story to a younger Caicedo in a public event, “Medellín, a solas contigo,” a tale in which he ended up detained in a jail full of “marihuaneros.” Works by Arango included in this book’s corpus are: the anthology by Philippe Ollé-Laprune Primer manifiesto nadaísta y otros textos; his two full volumes of Reportajes, a complete recollection of his opinion articles; his memoirs from a brief stay in prison, Memorias de un presidiario nadaísta; and the anthology made by his fellow nadaísta José Mario Arbeláez, Obra negra, as well as texts by other nadaístas like Patricia Ariza and Fanny Buitrago. The city as an underground of party and hallucination is the main inspiration for the creative process of Andres Caicedo. Of his work, I will discuss the novel ¡Que viva la música!, the compendium of all his movie columns from Ojo al cine, and the posthumous autobiography edited and selected by Alberto Fuguet, Mi cuerpo es una celda. Also considered are authors Carlos Mayolo with a brief and experimental text “Pharmakon: Cuento-terapia” that would be brought into the theater by Alejandra Borrero and Sandro Romero Rey, and Luis Ospina with his movie Un tigre de papel, which makes a case for the complex relations between drugs, art, and revolution in late twentiethcentury Colombia. The filmmakers of the Grupo de Cali or de Ciudad Solar have produced some of the most memorable Colombian movies of all times and often pay homage to Caicedo in their productions. He would commit suicide in 1977, after inspiring his generational and creative fellows and friends via his “Cine-club de Cali,” a film society in the city that would screen and debate titles which were unavailable at main-stream distributors. This ­chapter’s sources include fiction and reality, and a variety of media and genres. HALLUCINOGENS AND TRANSCULTURATION: COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS OR DISEASE OF THE RACE? Being the oldest known hallucinogen and the most widespread, an early import from the Old World, hemp was not massively esteemed by the Indians, but there are records of it becoming a sacred substance in the rites of some communities in Mexico: The plant has not penetrated significantly into many native American religious beliefs and ceremonies. There are, however, exceptions such as its use under the name Rosa Maria, by the Tepecano Indians of northwest Mexico who occasionally employ Hemp when Peyote is not available. It has recently been learned that Indians in the Mexican states of Veracruz, Hidalgo, and Puebla practice a communal curing ceremony with a plant called Santa Rosa, identified as

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Introduction

Cannabis sativa, which is considered both a plant and a sacred intercessor with the Virgin. (Schultes and Hofmann 1979, 100–101)

That the American Psychedelia and Counterculture, the Onda generation as well as the popular “ñerada”—the youth of working-class neighborhoods of Mexican and Colombian cities—the Nadaísmo poets and artists, and the writers and filmmakers of the Cali generation would all somehow adopt marihuana as a daily companion and a creative stimulant comes as no surprise. Mixing traditions of the Old and the New World, marihuana itself has a versatility which is not as common for other hallucinatory plants, in the sense of both its production and its consumption. Cannabis allows its users to remain functional while also instigating visionary states, and it is a highly adaptable crop. Involving black, Indigenous, and even white users, it is perhaps the best example of the hybrid potency of hallucination as a site of cultural, aesthetic, and social encounters. In regard to the pre-Columbian and colonial legacies that remain in the aesthetic and spiritual searches of the twentieth century, it is important first to recognize hallucination as a definitive and original part of many worldviews of the American continent. In a memorable collaboration, Plants of the Gods, Richard Evans Schultes, perhaps one of the greatest specialists in hallucinogenic plants and traditional visionary practices in all of America, and Albert Hofmann, who would discover the artificial compound with the highest hallucinatory potency, LSD, point out that people of the Western Hemisphere distinguish the use of up to 130 of these substances. In contrast, in the Eastern Hemisphere, the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Europe would know only about twenty of them. Thus, “It is in the New World that the number and cultural significance of hallucinogenic plants are overwhelming, dominating every phase of life among the aboriginal peoples” (Schultes and Hofmann 1979, 26). The deep relation between technology and hemp since the dawn of history made the plant of cannabis the most transcultural and the closest to modern workers in these territories. Fernando Ortiz makes clear that other New World crops, also demonized at a certain point among Europeans, in fact connected all layers of the colonial society as much as hallucinogens connect a plurality of classes today: “both tobacco and sugar are intertwined with different races. Tobacco is a treasure bequeathed by the Indigenous people, appreciated and immediately collected by the black, but cultivated and exploited by the white”7 (Ortiz 1978, 57). As I conclude later, quoting words by the priest Alzate y Ramírez from 1772, the hemp brought by the Spaniards, intended to be exploited by slave labor, was adopted and consumed by the Indians for their pleasures and horrors. In a further stage of these elaborate interactions, the prosecution of drugs is itself a very early result of an increasingly connected world. Indeed, the International

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Opium Convention in 1912 implemented a world ban on opium by 1919 as capitalism took over and later promoted legal and illegal emporiums from the early twentieth century onward (López 2018, 237). According to Isaac Campos’s conclusions in Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs, an extraordinarily complete volume I quote throughout my analysis, it is evident that the inclusion of cannabis among the substances prosecuted internationally by the Convention was an independent contribution by the Mexican government itself in 1925 (Campos 2012, 200–201). José Venustiano Carranza, proposed the law on January 19, 1917, using terms that framed substances within a duality of medicine and poison, while the notion of “degeneration” displayed a trace of the intense preoccupations over eugenics at the time, even in the progressive young republics of the twentieth century. They regulated their sale and use “to correct this disease of the race that comes mainly from alcoholism, and also from poisoning with medicinal substances such as opium, morphine, ether, cocaine, marijuana, etc.”8 (Congreso Constituyente de México 1960, 647). The 1920 Constitution as well as the 1917 debates that led to it, along with the works of authors and artists, are documents crucial to understanding how post-revolutionary Mexico dealt with a problematic heritage deemed threatening, as marijuana was simultaneously being employed as a modern fad among elites, a new source for reconnection with a pre-Columbian past among Indigenous and mestizo communities, and was seen as an alleged cause of violence in the cities (Campos 2012, 155; Boullosa and Wallace 2015, Ch. 1). Being the very source of the word “marihuana,” Mexico is also the first country to fight the practice institutionally. In my present perspective, it is precisely those aspects perceived as “problematic” in culture that can be most fruitful to explore critically, since it is through them that the readers attest to the contact, or collision, of the many different actors and forces that make contemporary Latin America and its contradictions. As the authors quarrel with the establishment, public opinion, and media over what should be a free democracy, many struggling definitions of citizenship and identity become more visible. Just as descendants of European colonizers later demonized as marijuana the hemp that their very ancestors brought to the New World as an industrial asset, its sacred uses are also persecuted by law under modern imperialist capitalism. I want to echo Fernando Ortiz’s ideas from Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar regarding modernity and substances, specifically his reflections on the long-term effects of tobacco and sugar over the pace, scale, and nature of colonization and transculturation in America and the world. As they penetrate the nervous system, these two stimulants subtly alter certain aspects of our decision making, reflexes, and our general mood. Usually so

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observant of the true cultural richness of the many underground consumptions, even Ortiz reminds us of other psychoactive substances with apprehension, despite suggesting they are parallel to sugar and tobacco, a point of encounter for urban subcultures and Indigenous knowledge: “Let’s not forget coca and marijuana, which the Indians knew and whose effects are still lamented today due to the extent of their use among certain people in the big cities”9 (1978, 142). As Ortiz did with the Caribbean, I intend to identify traces of transculturation via practices around hallucinogenic substances, a dynamic bidirectional encounter building a corpus that connects America in a pre-Columbian, colonial, and contemporary continuum. Problematizing the extractive circles of raw materials and manufacturing, these practices of wonder and terror, light and darkness, persist today as vehicles for accessing the individual and collective unconscious in a conscious and revealing state of mind, both secularly and sacredly, albeit in conflict with part of public health and the law, and the sensibilities of some of the elites, the masses, and the middle classes. Introducing moral and cultural heterogeneity into rigidly codified and hierarchical societies, hallucinogens connect the developing and developed countries, the intellectual and the criminal, producers and consumers, and the non-Western knowledge of our colonial origins and mixings. Their variety spans the entire continent: from the latué, latuy or kalku-mamüll of the Mapuches to the San Pedro Peruano, the yagé and the Amazonian borrachero (or “drunk tree,” also grown in the Andes), and the mushrooms among various Mexican Indigenous groups. Peyote from Mexico even promoted the Native American Church in the twentieth century, reuniting various Native American peoples who have come together through the bonding practices of a common religion including an ample number of different tribes. If these pages deal with how hallucinogens have transitioned to written audiovisual traditions, Schultes, in a previous volume to the one written alongside Hofmann, Hallucinogenic Plants, reminds us that these practices predate writing itself: “It must be remembered that alteration of the function of the central nervous system by chemicals is not new; it is older than written history” (Schultes 1976, 155).

A CORPOREALIZED SENSE OF CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY ALTERNATIVE TO THE COLONIAL LETTERED CITIES Rather than stating a Manichean difference between a “bad” modernity and a “good” one that could have been, I focus on the distinctions that make the true complexity of modernity as it is. Visionary art is observed here as a dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious, a vivid lucid entrance into

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23

the aesthetic realm, which also provided a critical stance and perspective, a distance from which artists could observe that which their societies repressed and denied. I enter into an area of imagination in which the individual mind experiences itself directly as part of its own input, and where modernity in general confronts the contradictions between its means and its ends. One main element of analysis comes from observing the sheer ambition and complexity of the works I include next, but also from pondering how their searches would be construed by their contemporaries, their nations, families, and societies. Wade Davis explains it well in El Sendero de la Anaconda, as he suggests concrete political action today, stemming from the complex symbolisms and cosmologies imprinted in the drawings of the Chiribiquete area (as shown in figure 0.2), where elaborate ancient drawings on a mountainside tell ancient stories of visions that should be understood and protected by non-Indigenous nations and peoples too. Davis suggests that a single reservoir should be set between the Pacific and the Atlantic, with the Amazon and Chiribiquete at its core: “coming here in particular, this is the first time I have felt, in Chiribiquete, truly in the presence of the sacred” (in Angulo 2019, 48:50–48:55).​ A proud heritage sustained the original narratives of visionary practices, which I try to relate here by delving into the work of mestizo intellectuals in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States, who communed with visions to the point of creating mixed objects of art that carried on traces of ritualism in their profanity. In the case of Nadaísmo in Colombia, this dialogue is direct, with the poets coming to love the jungle as a place of their own in

Figure 0.2  Ancestral Visionary Art Fuses with the Territory in the Colombian Amazon: “Chiribiquete, Truly in the Presence of the Sacred.” Source: Angulo, Alessandro (Dir.). 2019. El Sendero de la Anaconda. Motion picture. Colombia: Caracol Televisión, 49:15.

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their writings, even rejecting the legacies of progress and Hispanization. This cultural sympathy also becomes a true social commitment at times, such as when Nadaísmo members denounced the harassment of the native communities by the Colombian army, in an issue of the magazine Nadaísmo 70—a short-lived pop magazine by the movement—which focused on the violence in the small town of Planas, Meta. In Nadaísmo 70, no. 5 (in Arango 1970, 1), with the caricature of a crucified Indian on the cover being mocked by a priest, the nadaístas insisted on the colonial complicity and brutality of the Colombian army and the church. The article on Planas documented the official torturing of a thirteen-year-old with electricity, as well as the following revolt against the government, under the leadership of a mestizo farmer, Rafael Jaramillo Ulloa. When contrasted with the refined style of, say, the Latin American Boom writers, it has often been noted how many of the Latin American oeuvres now selected for this book were minor in aesthetic or intellectual terms. Such are the opinions of Margo Glantz in regard to some of the authors I examine next, as she expressed ideas that sound unintentionally derogatory in the present, perhaps because the members of the group she referred to have grown so much older or even died: “because the Onda is determined by the dynamic and screaming and breathless rhythm that originates-in and surrounds the language of young people, developing a new type of realism that appeals to the senses more than to reason”10 (Glantz 1979a, 98). Similar ideas are held by Carlos Monsiváis more generally with regard to that generation, which he characterizes as “more sensitive to bodily experiments than to class struggle arguments, to rock uprisings than to Marxist study circles, ‘68 activists diversify into just about everything”11 (Monsiváis 2008, 105). I aim to reexamine such particularities as a sign of a different understanding of what literature should be in a context of hallucination and show how these young people, contrary to the assessments of their critics, were anything but apolitical. Each by different means, all these texts present the book as an unfinished and unpredictable object, which the reader, turned into a protagonist, tries and completes as an experiment and as an experience, instead of as a finished fetish resulting from applying technique and aesthetics to create something for passive contemplation. Rather than represent a reality, visionary authors contend and engage with what we define as real. The spontaneity in the chants of traditional healers like Maria Sabina denotes automaticity and repetitions similar to the ones at the core of these works, as they connect to the individual or collective unconscious. In ceremonial intakes, it is commonly underlined that the mushrooms are the ones actually speaking (Apolonio Terán in Estrada 1979, 120; Maria Sabina in Estrada 1979, 60; Aurelio Carreras in Wasson 1980, 39): “Mazatecs say that the mushrooms speak. If you ask a

Introduction

25

shaman where his imagery comes from, he is likely to reply: I didn’t say it, the mushrooms did” (Munn 1973, 88). That common interpretation can also apply to the oeuvres I examine here. Once a given consumption complicates the matter of pure authorship and renders it impossible to give total credit to the writer or the hallucinogenic substance speaking through the writer’s words, one should see hallucination as a whole which results from their conjunction. As Baudelaire put so well in his own analysis of drunkenness, humanity, and intoxication from 1860, Artificial Paradises: On Hashish and Wine as Means of Expanding Individuality, in a version translated from French precisely in 1971, the beginning of the decade in which that subject became of massive interest: “together they engender a Holy Spirit, a kind of better man, who is the issue of both” (Baudelaire 1971, 15). As we read the descriptions by a variety of Latin American authors, aligning a series of cultural and physical symptoms, a body discipline reminiscent of traditional rituals comes into action allowing for these narratives to unfold as experiences of our minds, but also of our bodies. As we read on, we live them and feel them as we interpret their sensorial magnifications and appropriate their trances. Could we think of the holes and unfinished characteristics of these works in terms of formal strategies toward building visionary knowledge along with the reader? Confronting us with unpredictable metamorphoses, their textuality mutates as it proposes to change the visual nature of the text. Reading on supposes an exercise of interpretation which offered a site of supreme sensorial freedom that we can still tap into today. An insight into their own darkness for the Mexican, Colombian or Chicano youths of the 1960s and 1970s, deeply repressed—from both inside and out, in a simultaneity of punishment and discipline—mistreated, and sometimes massacred by the state. Assuming the modern forms of novel and cinema, and altering them as plastic objects and devices of knowledge, the holes and patterns in these works allow us to reflect upon modernity as an altered state of consciousness toward which they become passageways. A world experience of utter enclosure under the pressures of a pandemic reminded us all of the dangers that lurk in a de-corporealized world culture. Examples of this are still numerous near the present, like the patriarchal paternalism which at times neglected women’s rights under the administration of a seemingly alternative politician like Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico, which nevertheless has taken a step in another direction with its recent decriminalization of cannabis markets. On the complete opposite position, there was also the brutal repression targeting young activists and protesters in the social explosion of Colombia in 2021, when thousands of young people took to the streets to oppose the neoliberal conservatism of Ivan Duque’s presidency, who responded by both enforcing police brutality structurally and

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Introduction

publicly framing it as a series of seemingly isolated cases. In a context where drug possession charges are often used to criminalize activists, the Gustavo Petro administration that followed started by declaring the failure of the War on Drugs at the United Nations in 2022. In the United States, this issue still confronted Federal and State authorities as national prosecutors fought it even amid local efforts to legalize it as recently as 2021, before the Biden administration took a stance against penalization of marihuana possession. By relegating health services and progress to the dynamics of a greedy market, neoliberal deregulation pushed us deeper into the logics of a society of the spectacle, as envisioned in Guy Debord’s analyses. Bodies themselves are celebrated but only as spectacles of alienated experiences made into a fetish. As entertainment enforced the alienating notion of a culture without a living body, development policies of the past decades underlined a sense of progress without the limitations of a confined planetary ecosystem, a sort of de-corporealization already implicit in the reduction to exchange value of the living forces of labor as seen by Marx even obscuring use value, but now strengthened by the increase to a global scale of all technologies and markets. Contrasting these ongoing conditions of full-fledged world machines in operation, I examine next a group of imperfect texts and audiovisuals from the past century, writings that at times fail to be a finished device but strive for something else altogether. Taken over by sheer perceptions, visions, symptoms, and ingestions, the works of art and the authors I connect here, privilege the aesthetics and ethics of an embodied culture, one to live, grow, hallucinate, and even die, within a complex ecosystem of ideas, forces, and other beings. Some of these works may be openly “bad” at moments, but at the same time they are so readers can challenge the paradigms that make highbrow and lowbrow art, inviting a perceptive and self-aware type of consumer and producer of aesthetics and culture. Although deeply immersed in the aesthetics and the philosophical possibilities of hallucination, this book is not simply about a body of culture that may have been neglected or disregarded and should be vindicated as a subaltern knowledge. Although, indeed, that may be one of the most tangible of my motivations, this work should also serve as evidence of the cultural and racial persecution that has imprisoned or killed countless people all over the world—producers, traffickers, and consumers, but too often also innocent victims of police prejudice, structural inequality and racial profiling. The War on Drugs has been pointed to as the first cause of incarceration in the United States. Despite cannabis smoking being an extremely common habit by the twenty-first century, and although there is in fact a strong cultural background to its usage, racial profiling prevailed to the point that “in 2009, 83% of marijuana prosecutions involved black or Latino defendants” (Provine 2011, 47). At the national level, racial biases motivated much of the strategy

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27

against drugs, and globally it allowed for the United States to have a much tighter control over neighboring drug-producing countries. It was much more efficient and unaccountable than any strategy of soft or even hard diplomacy could ever be and has remained useful ever since. Despite my cultural focus, the countless bodies and communities, besieged, detained, erased, or maimed by the brutality of the War on Drugs and its tough policing since the early 1970s through to today, as well as all the past bearers of the colonial stigma against these practices ever since the Renaissance era, remain another true motivation behind the pages that follow. Hallucinations and visionary practices can operate as sources of agency, as cultural and social devices that can generate new contents. A number of the artists read and quoted here insist on the fact that even in hallucination a butcher and an artist remain such, as Baudelaire stated originally in his Artificial Paradises. Indeed, “not everyone who smokes cursed herbs is a poet”12 (Arango 2017, 236), but at the same time the readers can be sure that a poetic sensibility by itself will never substitute the effects of hallucination as a particular mental state, capable of unique insights and associations on itself. Even as part of an elite of intellectuals and artists, the people included in my chosen bibliography share a particular awareness of the legitimacy of the many sensorial searches rendered a public enemy during the 1970s, as some of them connect all society: “There is a poet, a painter, a mystic and a bandit, and all seek high routes to their creative imagination through drugs”13 (Arango 2017, 236). Rather than a romanticization of the ancestral or the recent past, this book constitutes an effort to consider a continuity of hallucinatory practices in all of the many Americas, a connection however subtle between their urban and rural expressions of culture and mestizaje, linking the Indigenous, the Afrodescended and the European in an attempt at finding an identity which is never free of constraints or conflicts. As one of the most important elements of continuity between ancient and new traditions in America, hallucinogens figure here as a catalyst, linking together a heritage that remains ever changing and alive still today. I underscore the way in which these phenomena mark a continuity that reminds us of the existence of a connected America. Irreconcilable at many levels, the conflicting characterizations of aesthetics enforced by the Old and the New World suddenly come to meet within the radius of influence of these sacred substances. A modern sense of narration clashes with ancestral practices bordering the magical, leading to an open dialogue between contrasting extremes of mestizo identity which nevertheless produce a singular experience of art, fusing a bodily trance and a mental exploration into the pieces I read here. Such is the very axis of this analysis, focused on some materials from the twentieth century in which such a clash, a creative encounter between two worlds, comes to happen within single

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authorial efforts, often more or less articulated into more comprehensive collective efforts which remained critically politicized, such as Nadaísmo or the Onda literature, interacting with substances that hold myths together and render us capable of experiencing them in the first person. Although I will revisit works of art which are also public visions, the true conviction behind that search—particularly in regard to so many of the victims of the War on Drugs and the masses in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States that fitted its target—is that hallucination alone can be considered a form of art, a field of knowledge, and a transcultural practice. As a way to dignify the complexity of visionary uses and substances, this research does not even address the phenomena within the boundaries of what should be legal or illegal but rather serves as an entrance into the debate from the realms of beauty and horror, in the interest of connecting an itinerary in which hallucination can speak for itself through aesthetics and culture.

NOTES 1. The terms “mestizo” and “mestizaje” are deployed directly from Spanish throughout this text, pointing to the coexistence of Indigenous, African, and European cultures within a complex heritage. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui points out, the concept of “mestizaje’’ may be a double-edged sword, since it has often been used for a whitewashing of history in which the colonized cultures would assimilate and disappear within that of the colonizers (2015, 52–53). Visionary traditions and the modern inclusion of hallucinogens as a target of the War on Drugs are an ideal field of study to observe how mestizaje implies both an encounter and a clash in America. 2. “Me creen embustero sabiendo que soy payé y que lo veo todo por medio de la imaginación” (Author’s note: All quotes in notes are the originals in Spanish, while the translations alongside the text are my own). 3. “Azuela ha dejado de atenerse estrictamente al método tradicional de evocar el estado psicológico del ser humano mediante la descripción.” 4. “Con su lectura de Proust, Kafka y Woolf.” 5. “El de las llaves de oro se ha removido de su pedestal y los Evangelistas le hacen señas impropias de un lugar sagrado.” 6. The spelling “marihuana” is more common, but since they are both valid, I use them indistinctly throughout this work, often mimicking the source I may be discussing, as well as the spelling “mariguana” used originally in Mexico. 7. “Así, el tabaco, como el azúcar se entrelazan con las razas. El tabaco es un tesoro legado por el indio, apreciado y recogido en seguida por el negro, pero cultivado y explotado por el blanco.” 8. “Para corregir esta enfermedad de la raza provenida principalmente del alcoholismo y del envenenamiento por substancias medicinales como el opio, la morfina, el éter, la cocaína, la marihuana, etcétera.”

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9. “No olvidemos la coca y la marihuana, que conocieron los indios y cuyos efectos aún ahora son harto lamentados por la extensión de su uso entre cierta gente de las grandes ciudades.” 10. “Porque la Onda se determina por la dinámica y gritona y sin respiro que origina y envuelve el lenguaje de los jóvenes, desarrollando un nuevo tipo de realismo que apela a los sentidos antes que a la razón.” 11. “Más sensibles a los experimentos corporales que a los argumentos de la lucha de clases, a las sublevaciones del rock que a los círculos de estudios marxistas, los activistas del 68 se diversifican en casi todo.” 12. “No todo el que fuma yerbas malditas es poeta.” 13. “Hay un poeta, un pintor, un místico y un bandido que busca a través de la droga vías elevadas a su imaginación creadora.”

Chapter 1

The United States of America

Some lines by Fitz Hugh Ludlow, author of The Hasheesh Eater, a part autobiographical and part fictional account from 1857 of his usage of cannabis extract, make it clear that he recognized other ways to truth than reason and that he confronted prejudices against them often: Nor am I anxious to repel the charge of insanity which may be brought against the facts evolved by a hasheesh delirium. Indeed, the exaltation, in this narrative, has been repeatedly called an insanity. I only wish to be understood as believing that into some subjects the insane man can look farther than the sane. (Ludlow 1857, 289)

He was one of the earliest writers to compose an entire volume on the hallucinatory effects of marijuana. His words suggest a perspective on hallucinogens that was already distinctive to native communities in the Americas: beyond the matter of the sensations produced by drugs and natural compounds, the core focus of discussion should be on their productively stimulatory effects on the building of knowledge and culture. The process led to the consecration of a threat which was but an isolated fear explicit in the publication of The Hasheesh Eater. It signaled an opening of the visionary experience to ordinary humans of all classes and cultures, a historical possibility for the masses as a social or individual experiment, bringing mestizo and other marginal intellectuals closer to a redefinition of hallucination as an all-inclusive practice of transcendence, creation, and imagination. However, Ludlow criticized such an indiscriminate expansion, writing: Shallow persons, urging that claim to notoriety through extravagance, which they were aware they could not press to celebrity by greatness, have been 31

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disgusting humanity with their absurdities from the time that Diogenes coiled himself in his tub down to the era of the last apostle who blew his trumpet through Broadway. They have all glorified themselves with the name “visionary;” when the radiant mantle fell from the shoulders of the last ascending prophet. (1857, 277–278)

Still, Ludlow himself writes within the visionary genre albeit from a secular point of view, recounting in enormous detail his visions with hashish, which often assume heavenly heights or hellish depths. One has to wonder if he realized he could easily be seen as one of those shallow people and false prophets he lamented existed, who used extravagance and absurdity to achieve notoriety, in his case as someone who recognized some of his own hashish insanity, yet explored it as a legitimate source of knowledge, to the point that it wholly structured one of his best known literary works. Narcotic substances, then as now, were often associated with a means to access realms of ultimate pleasure, especially those which altered human perception of time and space, but as Ludlow’s account documented, the true dual potential of hallucinogens lay in their ability to induce deep experiences of self-discovery in users, which could encompass both states of bliss and damnation. In fact, such description and level of involvement in their own writing subject—this strange entanglement of a narrator and a protagonist, of hallucination and experience, philosophy and narrative—seems to be a common denominator for the otherwise chaotic variety of authors here included. In addition to a redefinition of the act of writing and storytelling, a particularly interesting trait of The Hasheesh Eater is how, already in 1857, Ludlow inscribes the visionary experience within a European tradition of moral rectitude and presents it against the more liberal connotations of the New World, writing: It is, no doubt, the perversion of this principle which has caused the word “visionary,” most righteously belonging, by its first title, to souls of the grandest insight, to be held, together with the idea which it conveys, in contempt even by serious and thoughtful men. (1857, 277)

We will explore here how the secularization, politicization, and popularization (even among the masses) of the visionary search in fact constituted a unique phenomenon that resulted from the historical and transcultural origins of the Americas and its fusions of modern and ancestral influences. Ludlow was not alone in his discovery or experimentation and recognized that he was partaking in a more widespread practice that included predecessors and pioneers of the genre of drug memoirs, like English writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey. Ludlow underscored the link between

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drug use, intellectuals, and a creative drive more broadly when he rhetorically wrote, “Why do ideal men often use narcotics? Indisputably it is ideal men” (1857, 347). Unlike the native communities which valued the insights obtained during a hallucinogenic state as a truth, Ludlow’s critics’ painting of the cannabis “exultation” in his narrative as “an insanity” spoke to an altogether different social view and treatment of artistic production under the influence of hallucinogenic substances within Anglophone America. Of what had been Coleridge and De Quincey’s drug of choice, Ludlow noted by his time that “opium-eating in all countries is an immense and growing evil. In America peculiarly it is so, from the constitution of our national mind” (Ludlow 1857, 362). Although at this time Ludlow’s drug of choice still remained much less known and out of regulators’ sights within the United States, this tendency and narrative categorization on addiction and opium would eventually expand to encompass marijuana as well as other local hallucinogens, catching intellectuals and native communities who had long incorporated the making of visionary art into their dragnet. Still, for Ludlow, on the contrary, the distinction could not be clearer: opium was already a clear menace to health, whereas hashish was a source of truth. This tacit rejection of “intoxication,” itself a problematic term used by the West, could itself have a mythical background too. In The Odyssey, an epic that would become a foundational example of the colonial episteme of modern Europe, the episode of the Lotophagi (eaters of the lotus flower) provides us with yet another literary example of the double-edged bliss and danger to be found in a perception-altering substance: the Lotophagi are put on the periphery of the known world, beyond measurable time and territory. The Homeric epic describes the flower as “so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus” (Homer 1952, 230). The sailors who were sent off by Odysseus to scout, and to taste the flower, had to be forced back onto the ship and tied to their benches, since they had completely forgotten about home and only wailed at the prospect of returning. The rest of the crew was forbidden to disembark, and their captain ordered them to “sail away with speed in our fast ships, / in case another man might eat a lotus / and lose all thoughts about his journey back” (Homer 2007, 167). In their rereading of the epic in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer project this story beyond antiquity and situate it in the logic of European colonization and the Industrial Revolution. For both writers, the sailors’ ingestion of the lotus flower becomes “reminiscent of the bliss-induced by narcotics, by which subordinate classes have been made capable of enduring the unendurable in ossified social orders” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, 49). Still, while the

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lotus did provide them a mental escape, it is important to keep in mind that the renegade scouts did not wish to endure further their laboring drudgery or stay on the ship. Simultaneously in the modern reading by the critical theorists and in the original Homeric poem, it is of note that the “homeland,” sometimes translated as “nation” (Homer 1952, 227) from the Greek original, is rapidly forgotten under the effect of the lotus. A different sense of belonging arises in those who come under the lotus influence and becomes more important than anything else, something altogether different, even implying some other social contract beyond the life of servitude that they were offered aboard the Homeric galley on its way to a faraway Ithaca, redefining the boundaries of their citizenship. The fact that they are not even interested in retelling their adventures after returning once they have some lotus attests to the problematic relation between hallucination and narration. The alternative path granted to the Lotophagi seems to make hierarchies and national projects pale in comparison, compelling Odysseus, the classic hero, also a figure of Enlightenment’s violence and a symbol of all conquests and savageries at the core of civilization for Adorno and Horkheimer, to force his sailors back aboard the ship, which in turn will lead them all into the Cyclops’s lair, a much more tangible threat. It is very briefly mentioned in the poem, but this episode is fascinating in that, unlike the Circe or Calypso encounters, and even unlike that with the Sirens, there is not a particular character or an effective physical danger behind this obstacle: They simply “met the Lotus-eaters, / who had no thought of killing my companions, / but gave them lotus plants to eat” (Homer 2007, 167). Rather, it is the sailors themselves—their altered experience of time and homeland—and their reluctance to serve that become the menace. The sole difference between the scouts who try to stay behind and the crew that remain voluntarily on the ship is the experience of tasting the lotus; however, the nature of the danger is real to the point that, unlike with the song of the Sirens, which he forces himself to listen to, Odysseus does not even consider trying the flower, not even if chained to the ship. In a way, the War on Drugs replicates this mythical episode at a world scale, echoing the Dialectic of Enlightenment within the conflicts and global confines of its modernity, whenever the idea of “homeland” or “nation” may be redefined among certain sectors of the population. These included feminists, beatniks, communists, hippies, Yippies, homosexuals, jipitecas, Chicanos, Cocacolos, political activists, racial minorities, avant-garde artists, freaks, cockroach people in the twentieth century, all who claimed as part of their freedom and citizen rights, the autonomy to engage in practices, and ingestions that could alter their synapses, help them explore their marginal identities, and liberate some of the ideas and values that remained repressed in their psyche and their society, sometimes engaging in these practices as individuals and other times as a whole group even against the recommendations

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of public health at the time. Yet, despite half a century of punitive (and violent) drug control measures, some of these dissenters and their practices have resisted being intimidated into submission and chained back through police control, though many were forced to accept the values of capitalistic and patriarchal national projects under the threats of criminalization and state violence. For Horkheimer and Adorno, there is something else to the lotus and the childish and flavorful experience of eating flowers, besides being a means to cope with perpetual subordination. Their modern deciphering of the episode of the Lotus Eaters and Odysseus’s response suggests that which here becomes a main preoccupation when observing the late twentieth century in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States and the prosecution of traditional hallucinogens and stimulants as they were being adopted in mass consumer culture throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In those decades, dual possibilities opened up for these trends, one of alienation and another of profane illumination, to use the terms applied by Walter Benjamin, who perceived a similar ambiguity in media like cinema, and other modern forms of culture with a fascist potential as much as a revolutionary one. Both an invitation to dream on and a push toward a transcendental awakening accompany these consumptions: alienation and emancipation. The lotus-eating, as other practices involving the ingestion or smoking of flowers, as marihuana or peyote usage, “bears the promise of a state in which the reproduction of life is independent of conscious self-preservation, the bliss of satiety uncoupled from the utility of planned nutrition” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, 50). For them, the lotus is read as a metaphor for hallucinogenic resistance against the epics of progress, extractivism of resources, and modernity. Visions subject new ideas and memories to an intellectual process that may not be led primarily by reason and is therefore capable of revealing new combinations of the same ideas and producing new ideas using the same combinations. Both marihuana and the lotus are flowers, and the former has been the most representative of hallucinogens, not only because of its connections to the Old and the New World but also because of how it has appealed to working classes, marginal groups, and some cultural minorities. It is the eccentrics, the subordinates, and subalterns who mostly tried the flower initially, while political elites in the Americas’ world remained distant due to the moral boundaries of their Anglo or Hispanic heritage, and a culture more inclined toward alcohol and sobriety. The subject of legal and illegal psychoactive substances connects a number of other urgent matters. In the same way, the authors I selected for this chapter on the United States used substances under political, geographical, and social conditions that were a mixture of local, national, and global culture. The importance of their works and political projects to understanding our present

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cannot be overstated, especially when considered within the broader realm of materialism, as it linked an environmentalist dimension of politics with the postcolonial debate, while alluding to generational tensions of race, gender, identity, and class struggle throughout the very different national dimensions of the United States, Colombia, and Mexico, as well as in their transnational encounter. In thinking about the broadening and altering of our field of sight that visionary substances and works produced, Walter Benjamin’s description of the effect one experiences while on hashish as an “overlap” of correspondences comes to mind. As a fundamental part of his Arcades Project, made of pure itineraries through quotations, he described how that constant sensation of similarity was an effect of hashish as such, when “everything is face: each thing has the degree of bodily presence that allows it to be searched—as one searches a face—for such traits as appear” (Benjamin 2002, 418). Spontaneously, one either recognizes whether a face belongs to a stranger or not, and it is always someone that looks back, at the same time it is possible to read the expressions it has and know what it feels or approximate what it thinks, how would it be if you could read things as you would a person’s facial gestures? It is a very complex metaphor that somehow conveys some of the visionary experience and its intuitions, and how it could help to promote alternative thinking and exploring other identities and ways of being in society. This chapter on the United States examines a diverse collection of visionary works and authors. Walter Benjamin was European, but his interest in traditional Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah and his incorporation of cannabis use as part of his academic writing on modern art and culture are not unlike some of the experiments of the authors that follow. Richard Evans Schultes shared the practices with peyote among Native Americans and also lived in the Amazon for many years as he researched rubber and conducted ethnobotanical fieldwork among various Indigenous communities; through his work, he brought knowledge of native visionary practices to an enormous number of students throughout his career, including Wade Davis, whose book, One River, I later reference as a source on the invaluable cultural legacies passed from traditional communities of the Americas to modern science. Aldous Huxley was British, but his encounter with mescaline is geographically linked to the ecosystem and culture of Southern California, and his works also brought knowledge of visionary practices to an Anglo audience, yet remained universal. Albert Hofmann was both the discoverer of LSD and a researcher who engaged with traditional hallucinogens, even writing alongside Schultes. His work constitutes a formidable example of an encounter between artificially created and naturally occurring hallucinogens. William Burroughs was a writer whose travel itinerary in search of drugs and subject matter for his literature connected all of the Americas and was additionally an old Harvard University acquaintance of Schultes, who would

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be instrumental in the appearance of Counterculture. Burroughs’s novel Junky, published alongside the memoirs of an undercover police agent, Maurice Helbrant, in a single volume, signaled the coexistence of contrasting narratives on narcotics use and anti-narcotics enforcement. Even if not completely black and white, there is the creation of an enemy that somehow profiles the other in the reverse side of the book, first titled “Junkie,” by Burroughs, as the undercover agent states that “the addict is as serious a problem and as grave a menace as the criminal” (Helbrant 1953, 51). Although highly politicized by the very context of criminalization, with Ann Fettamen’s Trashing the topic of hallucination becomes resignified politically as an act which consolidates a group identity among Yippie movement activists in New York, in stark contrast to the innocent dilettantism of experiments of the previous century engaged in by authors like Fitz Ludlow. Albeit Trashing does not make explicit a relation with traditional visionary practices, other examples within similar cultural circles of beatnik Counterculture in Anglo-American literature from the 1960s and 1970s do. Ann Waldman’s work paid tribute to the life and chants of Mazatec healer María Sabina by fusing her own voice and those of women around the world to Sabina’s magic poetry. In authors Hunter Thompson and Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, I explore a friendship and a dialectical exchange between two figures emblematic of very different identities and activisms that came to coincide in the transculturations facilitated by hallucination and hallucinogens, which brought together vastly different marginal groups such as the rising Chicano movement, beatniks, hippies, and other so-called “freaks” in the United States. In terms of transculturation, don’t these substances at least put in contact different times, regions, classes, ethnicities, and cultures in these heterogeneous societies, where more official institutions such as democracy, religion, or even a shared language have not solved the gaps of inequality and the divide between peoples? Even at the level of single individuals, visionary trances force first-person revelations of similarity and difference which may, as Benjamin postulated, help to relativize the absolutes and empathize with each thing and being as one does with a human face.

THE WAR ON DRUGS AS A RACIST DEVICE OF FOREIGN AND NATIONAL POLICY: A DIVIDE BETWEEN PEOPLES, CLASSES, AND GENERATIONS There are non-Western references to cannabis used as a medicine or as a recreational hallucinogen in a number of very early records dispersed throughout Asia. The plant was a main component in bhang, a hallucinogenic drink of

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South Asia, and in hashish, a solid edible made of its resin in North Africa, and South and Central Asia (Schultes and Hofmann 1979, 92–101). There are many positive non-Western associations of such practices, and they show an evident contrast with modernity. They invite us to reflect upon the negative expression of cultural diplomacy making and soft power dynamics today, in the context of international relations of globalization, particularly in regard to naturally recurring hallucinogens and how they are regulated or rendered illegal. Put in terms of prohibition, the War on Drugs made visible a distinctive trend of US foreign relationships in Latin America, as well as the cultural distance and contrasts between those regions. For Shane Blackman, both nationally and internationally, there is no question as to how the strategy has shaped culture as much as it was originally shaped by it: “American drug war policy can be described sociologically as ‘governing through prohibition.’ The war on drugs policy influences how we govern other areas of life, thereby prohibition reconceptualises diverse social and cultural problems including those caused by drugs” (Blackman 2010, 841). Thinking about the United States as holding the power-specific situation to establish or influence global policies of public health or development opens up a critical path of analysis. The US government and its policies establish the distinctions between legal and illegal markets; regulate everyday practices— not only agriculture but also culture in general; define some of the limits, if any, of local and international commerce; and actively impose a certain pattern of development over other countries. This distance in treatment between antiquity and modernity—between the East and the West, the North and the South, in history—but also between impoverished drug-producing countries, and other rich nations whose populations in turn buy those drugs as their governments police the world for trafficking, makes visible not only how there are affirmative cultural policies but also policies which are cultural by virtue of that which they prohibit and deny. The War on Drugs took shape within the US domestic context of a singular hegemonic definition of culture and its political agenda which was later globally projected onto other nations, over their own cultural wars and their peoples: who made the policy and for whom? Between the administration of Richard Nixon—from 1969 to 1974—and those of Ronald Reagan—from 1981 to 1989— the strategy to make a criminal profile out of certain drug users was effectively turned into a war, perfected and intensified into a full-fledged frame of international diplomacy for prohibition: “Not very long ago, it was possible for Americans to persuade themselves, with some justification, that narcotic addiction was a class problem. Whether or not this was an accurate picture is irrelevant today, because now the problem is universal” (Nixon 1971, n.p.). By 1988, the certification process, implemented during Reagan’s administration, ensured the joint functioning of the whole repressive apparatus by

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pressuring with economic sanctions and the denial of loans to the producing countries that were not aligned with the initiative: “non-cooperative states have been threatened with a combination of aid and trade sanctions” (Ayling 2005, 377). With this privilege still pretty much valid today in the hands of its executive power, the United States gained definitive surveillance rights and decision weight over the development processes of a number of Latin American neighbors, especially Colombia and Mexico, perhaps the two countries more often framed as main producers and exporters of different controlled substances in the continent. Included in traditional fantasy literature from the Middle East like the One Thousand and One Nights and used as an orientalist marker of exoticism in European narrations like The Count of Montecristo, cannabis was also perceived as a promoter of crime and was previously associated with black communities and Caribbean culture (Sáenz 2007, 214; Partridge 1979, 149–172). It was brought to Louisiana and California by Hispanics (Abel 1980, 201–205) and appeared very early in places like New Orleans, where it was adopted by the Jazz culture. However, the original Mexican prejudices in relation to marihuana seemed to come into the United States along with the plant itself and its migrant users. Mexico had already banned it completely after the Mexican Revolution. In the United States, it was not until the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, drafted by Harry Anslinger, that the federal government taxed and regulated the substance, making it much more expensive and harder to find without the aid of a registered physician (Abel 1980, 251–260). It was followed by the Boggs Act of 1951, sponsored by Hale Boggs, a Louisiana Democrat representing the state where the city of New Orleans was located and for which the racial stigma against the plant would probably have been stronger. The Act set up a range of two to ten years sentences for possession and fines throughout the country (Provine 2011, 43). Lastly, the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 would include it as a Schedule I substance (Quinn and McLaughlin 1973, 605–606), adhering to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 set up by the UN. With subtitles as suggestive and related to the conclusions I follow here as “Reefer Racism,” “The Jazz Era,” or “The International Game,” Ernest Abel in Marihuana: the First Twelve Thousand Years makes one of the most systematic outlines of the plant throughout history and connects antiquity and marginal groups of modernity, including Mexicans, African Americans, as well as many of the modern legislations I have mentioned. By the 1960s, Harry J. Anslinger had been US Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for over three decades and had long been campaigning against marihuana, along with other substances. In his article “Bureaucratic Cold Warrior: Harry J. Anslinger and Illicit Narcotics Traffic,” Douglas Clark Kinder makes it clear that after the 1940s Anslinger strategically

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framed marihuana in the context of the Cold War’s anti-communist fears and passions (Kinder 1981, 170). He accused Communist China of distributing narcotics across the world during the Korean War and blamed Fidel Castro agents for the distribution of cocaine in the early 1960s (171). As a Cold War warrior, Anslinger exploited existing racial and social prejudices against narcotics (and their minority users) and reframed them as a foreign problem in a strategic way—just as Nixon would do later with Anslinger’s views in the post-Vietnam War context: White southerners expressed fear that the sexual passions of blacks might be unleashed by the use of cocaine as well as alcohol; California spokesmen voiced apprehensions over the smoking of opium among the West Coast Chinese population; South Westerners occasionally exhibited alarm at Mexican-American violence supposedly linked to the use of marijuana. (Kinder 1981, 170–171)

Anslinger would influence the social perception of marihuana for an entire generation and managed to establish much more severe punishments for possession after the Boggs Act of 1951 and the Narcotics Control Act of 1956 (Kinder 1981, 172). These initiatives and his ongoing lobbying were a definitive influence in what would later be redeployed by Richard Nixon as a world strategy. The War on Drugs should therefore be contextualized within the 1960s cultural upheavals in the United States that included the Counterculture and the Civil Rights Movements, and the heavy polemics over national values and the acceptable ways of life during the final decades of the century. The strategy was a partial reaction to the events included by Andrew Hartman in his book from 2015, tellingly titled A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, where he addressed how “this dramatic struggle, which pitted liberal, progressive, and secular Americans against their conservative, traditional, and religious counterparts, captured the attention of the nation during the 1980s and 1990s” (Hartman 2015, 7). Schultes’s travels and research as an ethnobotanist studying Indigenous rituals with peyote, as chronicled by his student Wade Davis in the book One River, showed how hallucinogenic uses played a social role all over the continent. Considering the complex systems of meaning around peyote rather than viewing its use as just a vice or a form of cultural decay, and using them to decipher peoples and ecosystems, Schultes found that Mexican peyote had fueled a spiritual renaissance among a number of Native American Indians. They initially received knowledge of the rite from Mexico in the nineteenth century (La Barre 1959, 42–43) and passed this knowledge to a growing number of North American tribes and legally organized them into the Native American Church, or Peyote Religion. As recounted by Davis, starting with the Mescalero, the Apache and the Comanche:

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From the Kiowa, the Peyote Cult had passed to the Arapaho and Cheyenne, the Shawnee, Wichita, and Pawnee, eventually touching not only the peoples of the Northern Plains, the Crow, Sioux, and Blackfoot, but going beyond to the Seneca and Creek, the Cherokee, Blood, Chippewa, and reaching even into Northern Canada, where it was taken up by the Cree. Despite violent opposition and anti-peyote laws enacted by nine states, peyote had within seventy years reached almost eighty tribes, a phenomenal rate of diffusion of better than a tribe a year. (Davis 1996, 71)

In 1936, Weston La Barre, who would become another celebrated specialist on these practices among Native Americans, joined Evans Schultes in Oklahoma to study peyote (Davis 1996, 76). Eventually, their findings attested to the powerful social agency that peyote provided from Central to North America, linking a variety of communities: “Indeed, the very origin legend of peyote indicates a period of beginning inter-tribal contacts, and peyotism in later days became the specific vehicle of inter-tribal friendships, when mutual warfare disappeared” (La Barre 1959, 60–61). Aldous Huxley also considered the visionary as encompassing different Indigenous tribes which had evolved practices around hallucination in the Native American Church and traced their adoption in the United States to Mexican native communities. According to Huxley, “peyote-eating and the religion based upon it have become important symbols of the red man’s right to spiritual independence” (2009, 72). Despite the sense of purity that sometimes has marked a tendency to preserve Indigenous or Christian cultures unaltered among some, the writer underlined an alternative trend of dynamic encounters and mixings, unlike those leaning toward white supremacy or radical Indianism, as he put it in The Doors of Perception, describing the peyote cult among Native Americans: But some have tried to make the best of both worlds, indeed of all the worlds— the best of Indianism, the best of Christianity, and the best of those Other Worlds of transcendental experience, where the soul knows itself as unconditioned and of like nature with the divine. Hence the Native American Church. (Huxley 2009, 72)

Schultes and La Barre would personally attend dozens of ceremonies with at least fifteen different tribes eating peyote up to three times a week, although Davis calculated there had been nine attempts between 1916 and 1936 to render the cult illegal by Congress (Davis 1996, 71–92). When these widespread practices were legally endangered yet again in 1968 due to being caught in the dragnet of culture war fears over the popularization of many ancient and new psychoactive substances, none other than Margaret Mead, a very wellknown public intellectual figure, and a celebrated American anthropologist quoted in my introduction from an article tellingly titled “Psychedelics and

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Western Religious Experience,” inserted herself in defense of those practices. In an entry in her column “Redbook,” precisely from a year as definitive for my arguments as 1968, Mead contended, The panic roused by the widespread and uncontrolled individual experimentation with LSD is precipitating a flood of poorly conceived legislation. One unexpected byproduct of these laws may be a new kind of interference with the regular religious exercises of the American Indian Church, in which peyote is used. (Mead 2000, 181)

Mead saw visions as sources of wisdom and knowledge of the past and the present. She quoted Huxley’s experiences as important in reconsidering the limited space that canonical religion gave to mysticism, and she was also aware that some continuity with older traditions was implicit in hallucinogenic practices of the late twentieth century. In Judeo-Christian traditions, the validity of a mystical experience was subjected to proof or to its capacity to maintain the belief of others in someone else’s visions, stigmata, and miracles. However, for Mead, since these substances altered the mind directly, and as they were definitely real only for the one who experienced them, there were no other external manifestations of them other than their very narratives. Based on that logic, she concluded, “in this sense the question of whether or not LSD users have valid mystical experiences is beside the point” (Mead 2000, 180). But perhaps Mead’s most extraordinary argument in that very brief “Redbook” column, is one that definitively distinguishes the corpus I organize next, and articulates a strong argument for including so many different authors within the visionary genre, which also contains psychedelia: For unlike those Eastern religions in which mystical experience is a purely individual spiritual belief, Western religions contain the expectation that religious experience benefits not only the visionary but also others who share his faith. With this exception the solipsistic aim of the LSD user, whose interest is wholly introspective, is out of key. (Mead 2000, 181)

Literary and artistic works on hallucination correspond with the coincidence between ancient and contemporary significations, with as many secular as sacred implications to them. By creating art and literature, and by engaging in public debates on identity and politics, visionary authors bring a true social dimension to their hallucinations, sharing their complexities beyond the “solipsistic aim” of casual users. In this sense, the visionary Americas are unlike the West or the East, connecting individuality and society via mysticism. This anthropological clarity and Mead’s advocacy of her particular understanding of the Native American Church were not confined to her journalism.

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She in fact gave her testimony as a specialist before the US Senate on October 27, 1969. She testified against the criminalization of cannabis, causing controversy that was covered in the United Press: “Anthropologist Margaret Mead told senators today that marijuana should be legalized for anyone over 16 and that drinking and voting ages should match the draft age” (United Press International 1969, 306b). Her attempt to think about democracy and citizenship, the war and the voting exclusions, alongside the legalization of cannabis was not accidental, and it showed the increasing politicization of the corporeal experience that came to be debated within the polarization of the Culture Wars as well as the coverage of its debates in the US media. Since she was even more of a public intellectual figure than an average academic, and being one of the more influential women of the 1960s in the country due to her career, her columns and reflections remain critical to understanding the tone and ideas more heavily contended at the time. Her declarations would also affect her image among the public, with the Governor of Florida Claude Kirk even calling her a “dirty old lady” in the media (Shankman 2009, 232), giving a good idea of how increasingly more intense and personal these debates and disagreements over what were acceptable ways of life became throughout the century, as well as the sexist and reactionary kind of people Mead disturbed with her liberal positions in the public sphere. In her testimony as a specialist in the US Congress’s Senate Committee Hearing, Mead also addressed the divisions between older and younger citizens over attitudes toward marijuana and debunked with evidence prejudicial assumptions that stemmed from this divide: Prof. Mead, who recently wrote a book about the generation gap, told the senators that medical evidence leaves no doubt that marijuana is not addictive, does not by itself lead the user to hard drugs and is much milder in its effects than alcohol. (United Press International 1969, 306b)

This coherence between academic knowledge and the committed confrontation of prejudice as well as the willingness to debate against these laws is also shared by some other authors included further ahead, and it underlines the heavy politicization of these debates since the 1960s, and their indirect yet crucial relation to the civil rights movements, the Black Power and the Chicano movements. The cross-circulation of pop culture from the 1950s to the 1980s between the Americas also contributed to expanding an urban syncretic usage of some pre-Columbian substances, like coca leaves. The Bolivian and Indigenous social researcher Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, an authority on coca leaves and a user, identified it being adopted massively among urban white and mestizo people in Argentina and other countries during the last decade of the twentieth century (Rivera Cusicanqui 2003, 33).

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In part, this political commitment of some intellectuals seemed to result from their critical understanding of our ancient relations with hallucinogens as a species, and how it reappeared in modern practices. For someone as apolitical as Schultes, who seemingly, probably half ironically, had even declared himself a “royalist” against American Independence at times (Davis 1996, 23), the laws criminalizing users were absurd enough to push him into a sort of activism against their enforcement. As described by Wade Davis, “His devotion to struggling students is legendary. For years he used to travel around the country using an obscure taxonomic argument to obtain the release of dozens of young people charged with marijuana possession” (Davis 1996, 24). Apparently, in a time when legislation only prohibited by name the species cannabis sativa, Schultes would travel around and testify as a specialist that there was no way to distinguish the genus properly from cannabis indica with the evidence available beyond a reasonable doubt and therefore often could make the case for the charges to be dismissed. PREJUDICE, TRANSCULTURATION, AND COUNTERCULTURE: BEATNIKS, FREAKS, AND COCKROACH PEOPLE Now that I have commented upon some layers of the US War on Drugs, I must move on to consider the intricacies of the drug culture in a continent with a long visionary tradition, and how it has amalgamated groups and individuals across races, generations, and territories radically different in most respects other than their sharing of a sensorial dissent with the establishment and an Indigenous past. Despite the political consequences of such dissents, these traditions managed to maintain continuity through a visionary corpus in a context in which the endless violence of past and present imperialistic projects undermines many other sources of stability. As Huxley put it in his 1958’s essay “Drugs that Shape Men’s Minds”: The problem of drug addiction and excessive drinking is not merely a matter of chemistry and psychopathology, of relief from pain and conformity with a bad society. It is also a problem in metaphysics—a problem, one might also say, in theology. (Huxley 2009, n.p.)

While the War on Drugs has played a structural part in the devaluation of assets, capital, and cultures, and aided in the project to dispose of “undesirables” across the Americas, I want to focus now on how visionary traditions, on the contrary, have helped in connecting said “undesirables”—mostly marginal to the mafias, elites and national projects—and even helped them battle repressions and inhibitions within themselves and in society, thus

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enabling them to embrace notions of identity which, like mestizaje, remained dynamic, uninhibited, and mutable. In relation to this topic, Oscar Acosta made one of the most conclusive parallels between freaks and Chicanos in terms of marginality, exclusions, and second-class citizenship. As he put it during a court audience, “A hippie is like a cockroach. So are the Beatniks. So are the Chicanos. We’re all around, Judge. And judges do not pick us to serve on Grand Juries” (Acosta 1989, 228). It is this continuity both in hallucinogens and in prejudice that brings much closer than expected in history the Chicano itinerary and novels like Trashing, since beatniks and hippies had a similar experience to Acosta’s cockroach people. Hunter Thompson described his particular style of journalism for Random House editor James Silberman in a way that resembled Fitz H. Ludlow’s very technique. He popularized a Gonzo style in the United States that inserted the reporter as a first-person narrator. In a letter dated June 2, 1971, Thompson made a connection between his style of writing and that of a famous writer of Counterculture: Probably the first big breakthrough on this front was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road—a long rambling piece of personal journalism that the publisher (Viking) called “fiction” because if they’d said it was “journalism” no literary critic would touch it. (Thompson 2000, n.p.)

This mark of Gonzo journalism was also a distinguishable trait of other visionary and psychedelic works. As I have suggested in the introduction, psychedelia is but a single chapter within a wider visionary tradition with a history going back to the Neolithic, inclusive of De Quincey and Ludlow. The narrator as a participant also constituted a distinctive thread of Counterculture pieces like The Doors of Perception, On the Road, Howl, Junky, The Yage Letters, and other books examined in this dissertation, such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson, or The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and Revolt of the Cockroach People by Oscar Zeta Acosta. It also characterized works from the Colombian and Mexican traditions, like the chronicle Memorias de un Presidiario Nadaísta, the theatrical monologue “Pharmakon” by Carlos Mayolo, and the Vida narrated by María Sabina, and particularly her mushroom chants, which create a character and a language as much as they describe real qualities of the experience of the healer, as well as some of the works by José Agustín, Margarita Dalton, and Parménides García. Being art that resulted from visionary searches, these works inevitably describe live corporeal symptoms along with abstract ideas and visions of the imagination as much as observations of reality. Truth and fiction become entangled as a single tale-telling device in which the narrator is inescapably involved with a starring role as it is its synapsis that provides the very diegesis. As Thompson describes

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it in the original “Jacket Copy for Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream”: The writer must be a participant in the scene, while he’s writing it—or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character. (1996, 208–209)

I aim to observe the reaches and depths that this experimentation has opened, as it brought the notion of culture closer to the reality of Latin American experience. Often undermined or neglected, hallucination inspired a considerable corpus of art, literature, philosophy, and cinema. Ultimately, I explore the link between certain groups of disbanded strangers in the Onda literature in Mexico, Nadaísmo and the Grupo de Cali in Colombia, or Beat and Gonzo art in the United States, and the search for a personal and local experience of the global. It is on this intersection that hallucinatory explorations seem to uninhibit the users’ boundaries of the self. Many of these authors and groups also dialogue, in their very own intimate terms, with the sequels of colonialism and the pressures of neocolonialism: Spanish and religion from European conquerors, and industry, English music and movies from Western capitalism. These approaches produced works of art abundant in mysticism and intuition while they also provided sites to challenge the mechanisms of consciousness, reason, and self-awareness, suggesting playgrounds, zones of parody and resistance where identity is temporarily debatable and mutable. As it happens many times in the hallucinogenic trance to the identity of the user, Latin American identity is no longer seen as fixed, it becomes open to question in these narratives. I have explored some of the conditions regarding exchange value that fetishized drugs and criminalized them, making them a bloody commodity capable of destabilizing public order and devaluing entire territories, yet now I step into the cultural realm. The mystical and aesthetic possibilities of hallucinogenic drugs open up through examining works of art which are often conflicted in regard to their own form and fundamentally humanize and intellectualize substances and practices which have been reduced at times to a public enemy across the world. Ultimately, the “disposable people” who engaged with visionary knowledge were made up of an overwhelming variety of individuals and groups that could probably never have come together in a single front all by themselves in the United States, Mexico, or Colombia. It was their collective transformation into a target of police brutality, reactionary conservatism, and anti-drug measures that often constituted the last straw in politicizing them, and in rare instances even united them in clamoring for more liberal societies and a

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more uninhibited and corporealized definition and exercise of citizenship, particularly to rights of drug use, class struggle and freedom of expression. These authors implemented aesthetic innovations into their narratives and art which implied an altered sense of culture and society as much as an altered state of mind. When wondering about what came of the beatnik generation in the foreword to her Memoirs of a Beatnik, Diane Di Prima concluded that “some of us sold out and became hippies” (Di Prima 1988, iii). Perhaps, in the extreme opposite of that assimilation, the Youth International Party, or Yippie movement, radicalized those trends that were more problematic from the hippie phenomenon. There can be no discussion of hallucination and politics that dismisses their history. Parménides García, one of the Onda writers in the Mexico chapter, characterized the Yippies as taking hippie identity to another level: “From my Shorty point of view, the yippie movement has been the most imaginative youth movement ever, even more than the French”1 (García S. 1972, 37–38). Parménides García expressed his admiration for the profound relation between marihuana and the political project of Abbie Hoffman—which he recognized as the first point in a strategy privileging five numerals starting with: “1. A fusion of weed and politics in a moto-political movement of blades of grass”2 (1972, 38). In fact, Parménides admired the riots of the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, where the Yippies released their manifesto and organized a parallel and surreal counter-convention, motivating the trial of the Chicago Seven, which included Abbie Hoffman. For the Mexican author it was the climactic moment of the movement: “There! Oh, in my beloved Chicago! The love of acid sympathized with the Black Panthers, taking from these first revolutionaries, coming from the lumpenproletariat, their language to address Power”3 (1972, 38). Interestingly enough, it was through these very disturbances that a key author in the corpus examined in this book—Hunter Thompson—would become politicized from then on. Treated violently by the police while he covered the riots as a journalist, Hunter Thompson realized that political commitment was the only way to deal with social repression and police brutality: Probably it was Chicago—that brain-raping week in August of ‘68. I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a raving beast. For me, that week in Chicago was far worse than the worst bad acid trip I’d even heard rumors about. It permanently altered my brain chemistry, and my first new idea—when I finally calmed down—was an absolute conviction there was no possibility for any personal truce, for me, in a nation that could hatch and be proud of a malignant monster like Chicago. (Thompson 1980, 179)

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Still, rather than focus solely on the ideological political particularities of the movement, I will approach my analysis by examining what is perhaps the most explicit literary testimony of how Yippies politicized identity and the body within the aesthetics of performance and hallucinogens: the novel Trashing by Anita Hoffman, another Gonzo-like narrative, with a narrator involved in its own subject matter, a mixture of fiction, chronicle, and autobiography written under the bold pseudonym of Ann Fettamen (amphetamine) a pen name which signaled an embrace of drug as culture.

ANN FETTAMEN AND ANNE WALDMAN: RITUALS, PERFORMANCE, AND IDENTITY A book review from 1971 in the New York Times is merciless when judging Trashing, giving a good idea of the reception that many of the works I include here had among traditional literary critics of their time. Presenting the novel in the most negative light and oozing rejection, the Times critic Miriam Ungerer wrote, “It’s a rancid little pellet that purports to be ‘a novel of sex and violence backstairs in the movement’” (Ungerer 1971, 43). Perhaps one of the most telling aspects of Ungerer’s critique is her total lack of empathy for the content or author. Even reading a rape scene in a book which feels closer to a personal account because of its seemingly lack of filters and euphemisms, all Ungerer could muster was this: “There is a rape scene detailed in Times Square corn-porn. At this point I thought a bunch of Yippies must be using bourgeois tactics (writing a trashy book) to put on the bourgeoisie” (1971, 43). Also mocking the change of name to a pseudonym by Anita Hoffman as gratuitous, the column dismisses the literary value of the book and denies it any significance even as a memoir, as a testimony from a leader of a movement that at some point was clearly targeted by the police. Although it is perhaps true that Anita Hoffman’s technique falls short when it comes to capturing the true complexity of the Yippie movement in literary terms, failing to break free from conventions and common places as a writer as successfully as she did as an activist, her strongest points come from how she expresses its discomfort with traditional revolutionaries and authorities. Another strong point of the novel is the sensorial reconstruction of the personal process of the narrator, as well as those passages in which Yippie interventions in the public space and public opinion are more closely described: “since today’s hip rebels seem to measure their success by column inches and TV news footage, Why an alias for the author of this novel?” (Ungerer 1971, 43). Although for the reviewer in the New York Times this preoccupation with media accompanied by the use of a pseudonym was absurd, it remains as one of the most concrete signs of what was a real novelty in the strategy of

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the Yippies as a revolutionary initiative of the youth. Besides corporealizing politics and bringing performance closer to them, the elaborate deployment of identity as both a construct and an ideological tool made relations with the media part of their resources. The characters are indeed extremely stereotypical and generic, yet that also seems like a strategy by the author to promote the identification with the narration and provoke the empathy of readers, rather than to focus on the cult of individual figures. If it had been just a selfish run for fame, Anita Hoffman would have probably used her real name. But since it was a strategic gesture meant to bring interest in the movement rather than to an individual person, the pun name of Ann Fettamen puts in a nutshell how there was a functional redeployment of identity as an ideological tool for internal consensus that could also be used externally for provocation and, additionally, how there was a relation with natural and artificial substances that were facilitators of those processes of becoming. The novel begins with the narrator’s arrival in New York in search of a way to participate in a non-specified peace movement as she settles in the Lower East Side like many artists and activists did during those years. Along with police dressed as civilians exerting violence on the organization she joined, it is interesting to see the meaningful entanglement of Hoffman’s fellow young activists with substances like cannabis or LSD, the latter of which the narrator takes for the first time as a newlywed, despite the heavy campaigning against lysergic acid on the media: “It came to symbolize the final rite of passage into the new consciousness. But acid was the one aspect of the culture about which I was skeptical” (Fettamen 1970, 22). As part of her involvement with the peace movement, the narrator often distributed cannabis joints by the hundreds in concerts and smoke-ins—perhaps the most consistently used form of protest by the Yippies, with numerous users coming together to publicly share the illegal substance (Moynihan 2001, 1)—and along with her romantic partner, dealt constantly with comrades being charged with possession or disorderly conduct: “Danny and I spent many nights trying to spring close friends who had been busted for pot” (Fettamen 1970, 29). The sensorial searches described by Fettamen coexist with accounts of terrible police and male violence, even including what is perhaps one of the most terrifying and shattering retellings of a rape experience ever written in Counterculture (1970, 41–48), in which the narrator is surrounded and brutalized by three sadistic men. As with what one can read on some of the effects of LSD and cannabis on the novel, the corporeal sensations of this violation are narrated with an unbearable inexorability as intense as that of live symptoms. In the same way that the narration by Fettamen does, Yippies embraced the performance as a political tool, with the interventions mentioned in the novel resembling many of the actual plots devised by Anita Hoffman and her partner Abbie Hoffman in real life. One of them, for example, consisted of

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nominating a pig as a candidate for president in parallel to the Democratic Convention of 1968 (Moynihan 2001, 1). Some other actions in the novel included getting all of New York’s fountains to run red on the anniversary of Hiroshima’s bombing by using dye pellets (Fettamen 1970, 33); contemplating the hypothetical possibility of putting massive amounts of LSD in the water reservoirs ultimately not acted upon (73), or the sending of four thousand envelopes and leaflets via postal mail, each containing marijuana and a small typewritten note including some instructions and a warning not to go to the cops, since possessing the attached “sample” could result in a year of incarceration: “Once again it’s Halloween and the friendly spirits here at DRUG MENACE have decided to bring you a FREE SAMPLE!” (Fettamen 1970, 73). They later move on to more concrete actions, bombing a side of a precinct building, although there are no fatalities (115). Yet, the ultimate intervention just envisioned but not enacted at the end of Trashing is almost ahead of its time and foreshadows what militancy could look like in the digital era, when they suggest secretly feeding false data into the Stock Market of New York to destabilize the economy. As Fettamen put it, “The idea is to control the information that goes out over the ticker tape at the New York Stock Exchange” (1970, 124). As with the category of “freaks” by Hunter Thompson or the “cockroach people” of Oscar Acosta discussed in the coming sections, Trashing’s title also underlines marginality applied as a political marker of cohesion and resistance, centering on the radical political activism of Yippies, people perceived to be dispensable. This dispensability is not unlike the one alluded by the gatekeepers of culture against low brow art, as in the column by Miriam Ungerer, who finds Trashing to be merely a “trashy book” (Ungerer 1971, 43). Interestingly enough, she was using against the book the very adjective that it had appropriated from other detractors. This animadversion by society in general is also evidenced in the novel when some older lady screams at the narrator when they bump into each other in the subway: “Ya wanna know who ya are? I’ll tell ya: Trash. That’s what. Trash. T-R-A-S-H. Nothing but trash!” (Fettamen 1970, 76). Although the formal descriptions of Trashing sometimes captured part of the experiences with hallucinogens, its laconism and precision were not unlike that of Junky by Burroughs, and the technical prowess of both novels came from an intense yet dry realism, in which substances are but a means of awakening. The impact of Mexican cultures and compounds were so integral to Counterculture that a few poets acknowledged them with actual tributes and created pieces directly inspired by the voice of the country’s artists and healers. One example of such a Counterculture poet was Ann Waldman, whose 1974 book Fast Speaking Woman: Chants & Essays was influenced by the translation made by Álvaro Estrada of Mazatec healer María Sabina’s words. Waldman

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composed the poem “Fast Speaking Woman” while directly inspired by the Mazatec mystic and the sacred language deployed in her chants, and the narration of her life. Having traveled to México in 1972, Waldman managed to see a parallel between the New and the Old World, as she commented in her introduction: “The fierce images one sees in Olmec, Toltec, Aztec, Maya iconography are not unlike the fierce shamanic deities of Tibetan Buddhism” (Waldman 1996, 37). Other compositions like “Talking Mushrooms” and “Billy Work Peyote” draw directly from ancestral cultures of the Americas: “Sabina’s work comes out of chaste vision. The sacred mushrooms speak through her as she guides young female initiates to confident womanhood and into the Mazatec healing lineage. Her litanies are of radical empowerment” (Waldman 1996, 38). By taking Sabina as an example of the potency of any womanhood to heal historical wounds, Waldman extends the transculturation started by Sabina herself, as a mestizo cultural figure that sacramentalized psilocybin mushrooms in a syncretism of Catholicism and oral beliefs from Indianism, as Mexican and US Indigenous communities have done with peyote: “I remember the delight I had when I began ‘Fast Speaking Woman,’ thinking every woman can do this, every woman is doing this” (Waldman 1996, 42). The poem takes the formula of invocations used by Sabina, recorded in the long play Mushroom Ceremony of The Mazatec Indians of Mexico from 1957, and moves on to enumerate almost ad infinitum different forms of womanhood as associated with a variety of practices, ideas, presences of nature and poetic figures, among many others, bringing a Mazatec author’s voice and teachings into the English language: “I am a speech woman” (Waldman 1996, 3). The numerous people and connections needed for such an influence to materialize (María Sabina, Estrada as a translator, the Wassons who recorded her, Waldman, knowledge of the Far East and of Pre-Columbian Empires), some of which we will look into in Chapter 2, gives an idea of the highly complex set of actors and cultural interactions needed to approach a translation or a transference of this knowledge from one culture to another. Another highly interesting aspect of Waldman’s reading of Sabina is her agreement with the idea that, by passing on to mass consumer culture, these practices had experienced a loss of their purity, given the huge amount of outsiders that arrived in Huautla by 1975 to “abuse” the mushrooms. For her, Estrada’s Vida de María Sabina la Sabia de los Hongos is “both an invaluable ethnographic text and a heartbreaking account of the adulteration of a sacred practice” (Waldman 1996, 39). Although I will come back to this sense of purity later in the conclusions, it is important to note how any practice of transculturation could be seen initially as an act of “adulteration,” a conflict which is often interiorized by these authors as a problematic sense of identity that extends to their understanding of their own works.

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By deeming the secular hallucinogenic practices among young people of the 1970s as an “adulteration,” Waldman is disqualifying her own poetry along with their practices. Not only that, but she is also seemingly dismissing the fact that Sabina is a mestizo herself, who did not learn her healing methods from other healers, but rather created her own tradition and a language for it using psilocybin mushrooms directly. There is no doubt that among some of the Indigenous communities that take mushrooms and other hallucinogens within their own traditions, the transcultural mixture created by Sabina, even involving figures of Catholicism like the Virgin Mary, could be considered an adulteration itself. Still, the initial profanation that brings Western poetry into the sensorial passageways of visionary poetry of the Americas also implied a renewal that brought new life to this knowledge in the late twentieth century, an encounter of Western poetry and ancestral practices: “Poets don’t claim to be enlightened curanderos, but sometimes, making themselves available as ‘antennae of the race,’ they might receive or tap into energy sources we are usually impervious to” (Waldman 1996, 42).

RACIALIZATION, BROWN BUFFALOS, FREAKS, AND VISIONARY POLITICS IN THE NIXON ERA Memoirs of a Beatnik is set in the 1950s and describes the hopeless yet expectative atmosphere of Greenwich Village intellectual scene during the US presidential elections of 1956, capturing anxieties among young bohemians: “There were more and more drugs available: cocaine and opium, as well as the ubiquitous heroin, but the hallucinogens hadn’t hit the scene as yet” (Di Prima 1988, 126). There would be promoters of LSD and meditation such as Baba Ram Dass and Timothy Leary debating the issue of hallucinogens and culture since the 1960s, but their works are usually prone to impose a mystical or intellectual program into their reflections, rather than treat the direct playfulness and pedagogy of their visions as a source of creativity and free thought. Ultimately, the formal aspect of their writing is quite conventional, and, unlike the living experience that pours out from the works I privilege here, it becomes a passive vehicle to discuss and debate rational ideas. Given that formal difference between an active and a passive way to embrace hallucinogens, none of their works are included directly in this book, given the aesthetic innovations that are the priority of the corpus I have put together. Incidentally, throughout the bibliography of this analysis, an interesting observation has appeared a number of times regarding the seemingly universal untrustworthiness that Timothy Leary inspired in the eyes of many of the authors I include here when they met him personally. In the Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Oscar Acosta recounted that Leary remained mute after

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he addressed and greeted him directly: “He stared right past and showed me a mouthful of white teeth. I knew right then and there that religion and hard drugs just don’t mix. So I couldn’t take his message to heart” (Acosta 1972, 101). Di Prima felt similarly (1988, 110). Their impressions ultimately corroborate the brutally honest assessment made by Hunter Thompson in a letter from April 21, 1969, to editor Peter Collier explaining the reason why Thompson energetically rejected writing a book review for Politics of Ecstasy by Leary in the magazine Ramparts and constitute the main motive to exclude his works from this section. Remarking on Leary’s past in the army, Thompson explained to Collier, “He’s nothing but an aging PR man— for himself, and that’s a pretty lonely gig these days” (Thompson 2000, n.p.). Quite apart from Leary’s artificial and egomaniacal program of public relations, it is characters like Hunter Thompson that bring individual hallucination back into the living realm of the social world, therefore giving birth to Gonzo journalism, which he defined as a chronicle whose narrator is also involved as a character, to the point that the historical reality of some events coexists with the hallucinations and delusions of the chronicler (Thompson 2000, n.p.). As put by Hunter Thompson in a Letter to Editor Jim Silberman at Random House, discussing the killing of journalist Ruben Salazar, June 2 1971, visionary art had engaged in politics among the youths of the 1950s and on: “The same people who instinctively identified with the mad angst of Howl and the high speed underground rebellion of On the Road also understood—personally, if not politically—the importance of beating Nixon” (Thompson 2000, n.p.). Rather than define the drug experience within an ideological program, Thompson sets it free. After gaining fame with a Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, which resulted from covering the biker gang in 1967, Thompson had begun getting more offers as a journalist. The book not only explored circles of people that were considered wild and misunderstood at the time but it was also representative of the rock and roll and the drug subcultures, so popular among many in those years, as well as a strong testimony of violence that somehow added to the associations between crime, LSD, and cannabis. The author also clarified how beyond any mitigations the court could find, sentences were already fixed by design of law in California, and for one who was convicted two times for possession of a joint or the leftover tenth of one in 1966, it meant a minimum sentence of two years, whereas a third conviction would impose five years of imprisonment. But still, the motorcycle gang, made up of only white members, which also had a history of fascism and would openly threaten peace rallies against the Vietnam War, also demonstrated the uneven enforcement of the law: “They smoke marijuana so openly that it’s hard to understand why they’re not all in jail for it. California’s marijuana laws are among the most primitive manifestations of American politics” (Thompson 1967, 215).

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Still, in the assessment he gave in Hell’s Angels, by 1967 the presence of the substance was already beyond any control in society in general, and he compared the “marijuana situation” in the United States with the “booze situation” of the 1920s’ Prohibition, with illegalization creating a cult level of use, and observed that “pot is everywhere, thousands of people smoke it as often as they take aspirins” (Thompson 1967, 215). Referring to their relation to marijuana, Thompson reported that the biker gang had discarded its mystique and took it for granted like wine, beer, seconal, or LSD (215–217), rapidly becoming involved in traffic and distribution: “the Angels have always been consumers, but in 1966 they were drifting toward a more business-like involvement” (215). The ideological confrontation over the Vietnam War between the Hell’s Angels and the pacifists Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Rubin—who had been a cofounder of the Yippie movement alongside Abbie Hoffman and was another one indicted with the Chicago Seven—is well documented, with the motorcycle gang declaring their public contempt for anti-war demonstrations. Rubin invited the Hell’s Angels to join the army as volunteers if they really supported the war, and Ginsberg declared, “The big problem for us now is how we can start to groove with the Hell’s Angels instead of getting into fights with them” (in Van Niekerken 2018, n.p.). Between October and November 1965, they sort of agreed to disagree, and the gang stated it would not attack demonstrators since that would bring sympathy to their demands, as is explained in the San Francisco Chronicle article, “Hells Angels vs. Allen Ginsberg: The Unlikely Vietnam War-era Confrontation.” The debate, and a difference of opinion that ended with the mutual enmity of the two sides, was a proof of the distance between how mafias and violent groups seized the business of illegal substances and their public image, and how other projects that came up in the cultural expressions of hallucinogens’ users emphasized their capability for wholly alternative ends. This contrast and tension replicates itself often at different points of this work, and it emerged in Hell’s Angels reunion with various authors, including Thompson and Neal Cassady, at the house of the poet Ken Kesey, in which Ginsberg made the suggestion for the motorcycle gang to support the young Left. The final separation between the two fronts came in the infamous Altamont concert, when the Hell’s Angels killed a black fan while working as the Rolling Stones’ security detail (Thompson 1996, 179). Increasingly more politicized after the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, where the police were brutal in confronting the rioters, Thompson began embracing hallucinogens in a less casual way than he did in Hell’s Angels. Although he had reproduced some clichés in portraying an atmosphere of crime and decadence in his book, by the start of the Nixon era he had drifted into a more active stance, in which he went beyond orthodox journalism and into politics.

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He had lived for some time in Aspen, Colorado. It would be there that he would meet one of his closest friends and the main subject of this chapter, Oscar Acosta, a Chicano lawyer born in El Paso. Although there are many Anglo authors within the genre of psychedelia, Acosta’s is an oeuvre and a life story which sum up better than any other many of the conflicts that hallucinogens and other substances pose for the Latino identity, personally, locally, nationally, and internationally in the continent. Perfectly situated within the timeline of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the story and works of Oscar “Zeta” Acosta are an ultimate example of the complex links between aesthetics, political activism, and hallucination, and of the particular consequences of such an entanglement for the life of singular artists, but also, more broadly, for what it implied for the Chicano community and the Latino identity in general, both in the United States and down south in Mexico. The “first Chicano Lawyer,” another epithet for the Brown Buffalo also used by Hunter Thompson to refer to him, and an actual title used on Acosta’s business cards, in fact situated his own story within a deeper historical schism: the one between Mexican Americans and Chicanos, divided by a profound ideological and generational gap. Eventually, just as in the two of Acosta’s autobiographical volumes, the politicization of both the young and the old Mexicans in the United States as a single Chicano front, albeit not definitive, proved there could be a reconciliation of the conflicted identity of their problematic heritage once united against a shared enemy: structural racism and police brutality. A key figure to connect both mainstream psychedelic culture in its true deep freakiness and more traditional expressions of resistance that resurface in the modern vindications of “La Raza,” Oscar Acosta embodies many of the dilemmas of visionary authors. In his relation to hardcore public activism, identity, literature, and aesthetics, there are a number of distinct mestizo claims over a dynamic sense of culture, in which hallucinogens helped articulate a position against the devastating madness of state injustices. As Margaret Mead or Richard Evans Schultes did, by deploying their expert testimony against possession laws, or like the narrator of Trashing who goes around at times helping friends out of jail from drug arrests, Acosta often put his law skills toward a similar labor, first in a professional capacity as a lawyer and later as an activist. He described the kind of cases he handled before joining the Chicano movement, while working as a public defender, showing they were already predominantly marked by drug arrests: “Criminal .  .  . Dope busts and such” (Acosta 1989, 34). Later on, his work got more explicitly political after he joined the Brown Berets as a lawyer, as he explained in a letter to Thompson, shortly after meeting him in Aspen for the first time in a bar, in the summer of 1967: “He was America’s only ‘Chicano lawyer,’ he explained in a letter, and he liked it. His clients were all Chicanos and most were ‘political criminals,’ he said” (Thompson 1996, 227).

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In his autobiographies, Acosta narrated he was in fact born in El Paso and spoke Spanish as his mother tongue, and yet his impulsive personality, his experiences, his writing, and his political commitments later also made him part of US Counterculture. His extremely radical and liberal views on race and politics were only matched by how conservative and reactionary he could be when it came to his patriarchal stances on gender and his preference for violence in general. His Mexican Americanness, in terms of his origins and affections, entangles in a constant counterpoint with his Chicano identity when it comes to his art, politics, experiences, and activism. This is well captured by many of the ambiguities in his two autobiographical novels. The very same inner contradictions that would be the point of fracture for the Feminismo Chicano as the most important critical front of the movement are foreshadowed in Acosta’s The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo from 1972 as much as in The Revolt of the Cockroach People from 1974. In the first book, it happened with the narrator’s personal life, in which strong, brilliant women got Acosta to really understand much of the intellectual and emotional dimensions of his own life story and to grow as a person, while, despite his constant efforts to objectify them, they also got him to try new psychoactive substances and ideas. Equally, in Revolt of the Cockroach People, however insensitive and patriarchal he could be, it is fascinating to see how it was strong intellectual women who made the Chicano movement from its very beginnings, and how it showed palpably in the public demonstrations narrated by Acosta, in which female activists took the lead in confronting the crowds and voicing social protest. The fact that female leadership on the movement and on his own spiritual evolution showed so clearly in both novels, with the first one more focused on a personal process and the second book describing more of a political becoming, along with the macho ideals of Acosta which constantly hid an inner sense of inadequacy that nevertheless he shared with readers, are all proof of his constant relentless honesty, even when it was against his best interest. Another aspect that became problematic, and which haunts many other visionary trends in Colombia and Mexico as well, was that only the most radical in the Chicano movement were willing to break with their Catholic heritage: “all but the most fanatic amongst us separate themselves from the struggle against church” (Acosta 1989, 79). Still, this radical stance of Acosta did not embrace secularism, what perhaps only the Feminismo Chicano did more coherently later in history, but rather evoked pre-Cortesian roots and became a strong—kitsch and ironical, yet solemn—metaphor to celebrate a particular heritage within Acosta’s novel. There he echoes the Massacre of the Temple in Tenochtitlán, which extinguished many lives among of the Aztec nobles in the early conquest: “Chicanos have not fought inside a temple since the Spanish conquistadores invaded the shrines of Huitzilopochtli in the Valley of Mexico” (78).

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Other conflicts, typical of the gap between Mexican Americans and Chicanos appear in Acosta’s autobiography in the form of a very hard childhood, which contrasts with the artistic and playful sensibility of his adulthood and hallucinations: “It seemed that the sole purpose of childhood was to train boys to be men. Not men of the future, but now. We had to get up early, run home from school, work on weekends, holidays and during vacations” (Acosta 1972, 75). But perhaps the most decisive episode comes when he tells of the time he spat on the American flag, due to how his father, an “indio” (either a mestizo or a rural person of Indigenous origins) from Durango who worked with the US Army driving a barge and serving in transportation in the Vietnam War, was absent for long periods of time as he served. Seen by other Mexican American kids as desecrating the flag, he is quickly punished: “The seven whipped my ass on that day that I spit on the picture of my father’s flag. I have never, to this day, had any respect for that flag or that country” (76). At the same time, Acosta was aware of the prejudices that came along with one’s place of origin, made of their own complex Mexican influences: My mother, for example always referred to my father as indio when he’d get drunk and accuse her of being addicted to aspirin. If our neighbors got drunk at the baptismal parties and danced all night to norteno music, they were “acting just like Indians.” (Acosta 1972, 86)

The first book by Acosta was a progressive distancing both from the prejudices and pressures of assimilation and from those of Mexican traditionalism, while he slowly discovered his inner “indio” Brown Buffalo. The Autobiography starts with Acosta heavily medicated under his psychiatrist’s prescriptions to help him deal with the heavy stress of his job as a public defender. He eventually grows tired of the pills and the psychiatrist, quits them both, and moves on to a wider number of hallucinogens and people after leaving his job and “dropping out” (Acosta 1972, 33–99), although the psychiatrist becomes an ongoing hallucination that expresses Acosta’s insecurities after that, and mocks him throughout the novel. In addition to this rediscovery of himself via different substances, he mentions a heavy dependence on amphetamines, which he started taking during law school, and compares them to a cold shower (172). Once he quit these heavy stimulants, associated with heavy and long working hours, it is LSD and other visionary compounds that help him move on to rediscover himself. The search for identity and belonging takes him on a solitary soul-searching road trip, and after meeting Hunter Thompson in Aspen and wandering around, he ends up jailed in Ciudad Juárez as he chases his origins and is received like a stranger in Mexico: “I am clear, I say. I’ve checked it all out and have failed to find the answer to my search. One sonofabitch tells me I’m not a Mexican and the other one says I’m not an American. I got no roots anywhere” (Acosta 1972, 196).

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The way in which the two books, The Autobiography and The Revolt of the Cockroach People, are a joint testimony—the first of Acosta’s search for identity as a person, and the second of his politicization—replicate the layers that made the true complexity of the Chicano movement and how it articulated an intimate heritage and a public exercise of citizenship simultaneously. For his intimate search, Acosta deployed the totemic figure of the buffalo, while on the political stage he used the metaphor of the cockroach people: “Yeah, the Cockroach People . . . you know, the little beasts that everyone steps on” (Acosta 1989, 135). Still, the two identities keep an unlikely common trait, as they both are constantly threatened by society at large. Everybody is out to get the cockroach as they did with the buffalo, “the animal that everyone slaughtered” (1972, 198). The conspicuous role that hallucinogens (LSD, cannabis, and others) play in both volumes, and in Acosta’s entire life and process, cannot be overstated. The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo explores Acosta’s childhood and some of his beginnings as a lawyer, discovering himself as he discovered certain substances and their effects. It is very telling that Acosta is initiated in different drugs in contexts of US culture. He tries marihuana with Cynthia, a young white American artist who also shares LSD with him (Acosta 1972, 37–38), and in his Uncollected Works he emphasizes the association with a cultural heritage mentioned before as crucial in the popularization of cannabis among AfroAmericans: “That’s when I started smoking grass and taking bennies. I was a jazz musician, mainly” (Acosta 1996, 5). He tried mescaline with his friends in California (Acosta 1972, 54), and then he was initiated in peyote also containing mescaline, a Mexican hallucinogen I have mentioned in the previous sections, and which he was completely ignorant about at the time. His ignorance in fact shows as he discusses with the American woman hosting the party: “‘Oh, but it isn’t supposed to taste good. Don’t you really know what peyote is?’ ‘Well, shit I assume it’s some kind of a fucking narcotic’” (Acosta 1972, 124). Still, it is clear he is interacting with the people Thompson called “freaks,” what was left of the drug culture of the 1960s in the next decade, all joined together in a strange sense of Americanness completely alien to the common places of what the 1950s had been. The first time Acosta ingests peyote and feels its effects, he is in fact at a Fourth of July gathering in Ketchum, Idaho, at which the button is served mixed into guacamole. Under the effects of the hallucinogen, Independence Day becomes an alien experience, with a flag showing chips instead of stars. As it happens in the general structure of Acosta’s writing, as soon as he starts feeling the effects of the hallucinogen his memories become entangled with his present, and his mother appears as a vision in the midst of the celebration, a type of intimate hallucination he would often deploy in his novels, with his ex-psychiatrist and others often torturing him in the form of ghastly delusions:

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“This sure beats Budweiser,” I am telling my mother while she cleans out my ear with Koolaid. The others have changed into their Fourth of July costumes. Phare has a bandage over his forehead and is playing a snare drum. Karin sits on top of the table, next to the peyote, with her legs crossed in yoga. She is sewing Frito chips on the American flag. One chip for each state. (Acosta 1972, 124)

This freaky Fourth of July is but a still image in long cultural processes that led to concrete exercises of citizenship in initiatives like the Yippie Party, or when Hunter Thompson ran his sheriff campaign in 1970 and this population of outcasts was activated via an invitation to vote. But through experimentation with substances common among these particular people in the United States, Acosta discovers pieces of his own identity, to the point that this is initially posed in terms of pure possibility, an open question in his first book: “I’ve been mistaken for American Indian, Spanish, Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan and Arabian. No one has ever asked me if I’m a spic or a greaser. Am I Samoan?” (Acosta 1972, 68). It is in the transculturality inherent to these practices that the narrator finds fragments of his own being. The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo ends with his discovery of the Brown Berets and the Chicano movement and with the narrator moving to Los Angeles to eventually become their lawyer. The complex discovery of his own identity and his localization in the conflict between colonizers and colonized brings Oscar Acosta to one last monologue in which readers find out how the sensorial search for an identity he has engaged upon in his first book—marked by a wide diversity of hallucinogens which seem to determine the transition between the different stages of his journey—brought him to realize the multiple layers that made his true self, as well as to ponder the real political consequences of committing to these findings. As a conclusion of Autobiography of the Brown Buffalo, mestizo identity is presented as an open search, with religious and mystical implications for the visionary heritage that preceded the imposition of Catholicism: Ladies and gentlemen . . . my name is Oscar Acosta. My father is an Indian from the mountains of Durango. Although I cannot speak his language .  .  . you see, Spanish is the language of our conquerors. English is the language of our conquerors . . . No one ever asked me or my brother if we wanted to be American citizens. We are all citizens by default. They stole our land and made us half-slaves. They destroyed our gods and made us bow down to a dead man who’s been strung up for 2000 years . . . Now what we need is, first to give ourselves a new name. We need a new identity. A name and a language all our own . . . So I propose that we call ourselves . . . what’s this, you don’t want me to attack our religion? Well, all right . . . I propose we call ourselves the Brown Buffalo people . . . No, it’s not an Indian name, for Christ sake . . . Don’t you get it? The buffalo, see? Yes, the animal that everyone slaughtered. Sure, both the cowboys and the Indians are

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out to get him . . . and because we do have roots in our Mexican past, our Aztec ancestry, that’s where we get the brown from . . . (Acosta 1972, 198)

Acosta’s conclusions sum up all too well some of the deep existential findings of many other narrators and artists of his generation, all great examples of how mestizo identity could only embrace itself as an open and creative conflict. The US minority of the Pachucos had felt similarly in the past decades: they were neither Mexicans nor Mexican Americans. Due to this, perhaps only extreme experiences of alienation and revelation like hallucination can ever allow mestizo people to grasp the true complexity of their origins and realize the rupture with the European traditions they have interiorized and made a part of their thought processes and spirituality. As with the Lotus Eaters, the concept of “homeland” becomes totally secondary to something different: My single mistake has been to seek an identity with any one person or nation or with any part of history . . . What I see now, on this rainy day in January, 1968, what is clear to me after this sojourn is that I am neither a Mexican nor an American. I am neither a Catholic nor a Protestant. I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice. Is that so hard for you to understand? (Acosta 1972, 199)

Acosta also stressed the importance of unity. His realization that he had to go to East Los Angeles, “the home of the biggest herd of brown buffalos in the entire world” (1972, 199), and become a lawyer within the Chicano movement, introduced a final becoming to the book. Still, it became evident that this individual discovery by Acosta was part of a bigger issue once those of his generation and the coming ones no longer labeled themselves “Mexican Americans,” as Oscar put it in a letter from February 20, 1968, addressed to Hunter Thompson (in Thompson 2000, n.p.). This issue of identity came along with another struggle after the War on Drugs had made a routine of criminalizing users. His legal exercise as a public defendant confronted Acosta with an immense number of marihuana-related cases, and he even suggested an elaborate protocol of four steps to deal with arrest if one was detained. First, never open the door voluntarily; second, stay completely silent; third, if you sell a substance, do not keep it in the house; and fourth, just hide everything: “I’ve had about 25 dope cases in the past three weeks and could possibly have won twice as many as I did if people would remember a few rules of the road” (Acosta in Thompson 2000, n.p.). Even before he joined the Chicano movement, there was a heavy political load and a performative attitude to how he handled these cases. In the very same letter, tying together the issue of Mexican Americanness as an artificial label placed on them by politicians, and the high number of cases for possession of marihuana he dealt with, Acosta described an encounter in court with an unqualified specialist, a cop rushed to testify by the prosecutor:

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He testified that he had seen and smelled dope over a hundred times and that in his opinion, by smelling it and looking at it there on the stand, that it was dope. So I asked the following questions to which he answered “I don’t know.” Is that a California joint or an Eastern joint? Is that Acapulco gold or Bangkok gold? How much, if any, hash does that contain? Is it rolled in sugar? Well, is it cut with anything? You ever smelled clover? How would you define that “unique” smell? Are you sure it isn’t dried banana? Have you smelled dried banana skins? Is oregano a narcotic? Have you ever smelled a mixture of oregano, banana and dried clover? Are young kids using that combination to turn on? Needless to say the judge struck his testimony on the grounds that the cop was not an expert. (Acosta in Thompson 2000, n.p.)

This legal dynamic, in which Acosta ridiculed the prejudices of power and ultimately triumphed at objecting to the system on its own terms, was in fact a skill he would use as an activist and a trait of his job that was further enriched, as he explained it himself, through his experiences with hallucinogens. There were other high-profile cases, some detailed by Acosta and some by Thompson, with one of the most conspicuous being the Biltmore Six, in which six activists were indicted for various charges after some fires at the Biltmore Hotel: “Acosta had subpoenaed every Superior Court Judge in Los Angeles County and cross-examined all 109 of them at length, under oath, on the subject of their ‘racism’” (Thompson 1980, 134). Although, according to Acosta himself, the actual number of judges was even higher: “I’ve subpoenaed every single sonofabitch . . . One hundred and thirty-three of the bastards” (Acosta 1989, 215). Later on, the Biltmore Six would walk freely but only after a long time on trial: “Oscar´s contention, throughout, was that all Grand Juries are racist, since all grand jurors have to be recommended by Superior Court Judges— who naturally tend to recommend people they know” (Thompson 1980, 134). Acosta argued with objective numbers that no Latino could count on being judged by a “jury of his peers,” since “over a ten-year period, 178 judges nominated a total of 1,501 nominees, of which only twenty were Spanish surnamed. Of these judges, 91.6% never once nominated a Spanish surnamed person” (Acosta 1996, 285). TWO SHERIFF CAMPAIGNS: “EVERY DOPE BUST IS A POLITICAL EVENT” As the years passed, Acosta became more defensive against Thompson’s escapism from society, with some letters from 1970 marking some of their

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most intense debates, as in one from January 11, 1970, in which he lays out all the different places where his way of life was a reason for rejection, making himself a victim of his own honesty: I have insisted that I be allowed to develop my own style, speak my own words and live my own life. To this end I dress as I please, speak as I please and advocate the use of drugs as I please . . . for which I have been permanently excluded from employment from the L.A. County Government, the Federal Legal Services Programs, and, most recently, from the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund. (in Thompson 2000, n.p.)

In the same letter, he is clear about a routine in which LSD integrates an intellectual process which itself has evolved out of many stages: “Once every month I take acid. I question myself, under acid, about the value of my situation in East L.A.” (Acosta in Thompson 2000, n.p.). At the same time, he energetically refuses the invitation to settle down extended by Thompson in a previous epistle: “You want me to build a retreat! You dumb motherfucker, I’m trying to build a society, a country, a land where we can live in peace without having to pay taxes to and be jailed by those petty little men” (Acosta in Thompson 2000, n.p.). Acosta’s invitation for Thompson to politicize himself was extended almost as a challenge then, precisely at the beginning of the year in which they both would each decide to run for sheriff: Can you freely plant grass? Can you really keep the cops off your property? Don’t you still have to pay taxes in support of a government that is bent on destruction of the human race? I’ve told you before, your sanctuary is nothing more than a temporary prison. Your dissatisfaction with the world around you has, unfortunately, led to more drugs and more rage. (Acosta in Thompson 2000, n.p.)

They both ran in 1971. Acosta campaigned with the recently formed party La Raza Unida, and Thompson’s run was in Aspen, under a platform looking to mobilize what he called “Freak Power.” At the end of the election, both came in second place. Acosta got between 110,000 (Thompson 1980, 173) and 500,000 votes (Acosta 1989, 183) in June 1970, depending on what testimony readers believe, whereas Thompson only lost by 465 votes in Aspen in November of the same year (editor’s note in Thompson 2011, 38). Encouraged by friends and neighbors, Thompson had been part of Joe Edwards’s campaign for mayor in 1969. Edwards was a young liberal lawyer who had defended hippies against institutional discrimination in the past. After that campaign came really close to victory, Thompson felt confident enough to run for sheriff in 1970. Although the association between

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gangs, violence, and marihuana was already conventional, as chronicled in Hell’s Angels, one got the sense that cannabis and hallucinogens in general had irreversibly reached an immense part of the population by the 1970s. While for Nixon and Reagan, this prompted a definition of drugs as a public enemy—“Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is” (Reagan 1986, n.p.)—for people like Thompson and Acosta it would offer a political possibility of transformation at the national level. The historical moment made these discussions even more important in the public sphere after the Vietnam War, in which many young Americans had become heavy users of the endemic species of cannabis, as Thompson put it, using his characteristic humor in a letter from May 11, 1969, to CBS News correspondent Hughes Rudd: “god only knows what’s going to happen when Nixon brings 100,000 pot-smokers back from Vietnam” (Thompson 2000, n.p.). The intent of both writers, each at a time, to take over the political system by mobilizing the masses of rebellious youth and hardcore hallucinogen users is still as current as ever, in times when the Drug War remains ongoing in most of the world, and as social protest keeps being criminalized and turned into a target of police brutality across the Americas. A visionary complexity entangles activism, revolution, mestizo identity, and hallucinogens, to the point that visionary practices remain as structural to society and government today as they were in the Pre-Columbian and Colonial eras. In an additional note, Afro and Oriental traditions add up to the native understanding of hallucinogens and become a part of their definition. In a continent made up of peoples that would dissent and differ in their languages, cultures, and beliefs, it is at least conspicuous that hallucination and visionary practices connected both past and present, to the point that, for example, marijuana would remain effectively in use among some Indigenous people already in the eighteenth century, but also among the mestizos in the cities in the twentieth century, while many Afro-descendants in the Caribbean kept it as a local crop, smoking it for leisure as well as to soothe the aches and stresses of heavy labors. The fact that the Chicanos would integrate its usage into their personal lives and embrace it publicly as a collective symbol of their struggle would only make it more political once it also became part of policemen’s racial profiling and an important justification for the incarceration of black and Latino people. Visionary traditions have remained alive throughout centuries via oral and written culture, and a strong proof that they keep evolving along with Latino identity is the integration of LSD as an effective part of Chicano politics. The association of marihuana with Aztec identity became a constant in the Chicano exercise of politics, while LSD also constituted a core practice that in fact strengthened the movement. In the most straightforward of statements, Acosta makes it clear how hallucinogens have played an indispensable role, not only in his professional practice

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as a lawyer but also generally among the ranks of the Chicano militants as a whole: “Now, just about all of my friends have tried or are taking acid. I think the acid experience is part and parcel of the radical Chicano Movement” (Acosta 1996, 14–15). After The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, and the personal visionary search of identity it supposed, The Revolt of the Cockroach People introduces us to the political struggle to defend that found identity and its place in the world: In 1968, our first problem was that of identity. As time went on we no longer questioned that. We had chosen a name—Chicano—whether we had Spanish or Indian blood, and we knew that we existed alone. That is, we relate to Mexico, but in a nostalgic way. We know that when the going gets rough, the Mexican government ain’t going to do shit for us. (Acosta 1996, 10)

Later in his novel The Revolt of the Cockroach People, the protagonist tells about his intentions to become sheriff to a character who is no other than a fictionalized version of Ruben Salazar, the journalist killed in October of that very year, 1970. Roland Zanzibar (the fictionalized Salazar), whom he described as just back from covering Vietnam, asked him about the seriousness of his campaign. It is to him that Acosta first reveals his plans for the sheriff election, expressing pedagogical aims that displayed a very refined sense of democracy and politics: I know there’s no hope for actual victory at the ballot box. I have no money and no supporters other than a few ragged friends. We can hardly compete with the pros. My effort is an educational endeavor. I expect to carry my message to as many as are interested in my views . . . If I were elected sheriff, I would make every attempt to dissolve the office. The community has no need for professional killers. (Acosta 1989, 136)

The proposal by Acosta was ahead of its times, and even more highly articulate about his intention to defund the police than Thompson’s was a little later, also in 1970. Acosta developed a whole social initiative that resulted from his work with the Chicano community, which suffered the War on Drugs and police brutality more sharply than any in California, and proposed a series of ideas not unlike some of what has been suggested recently by the Black Lives Matter movement: “I would have a People’s Protection Department. I would enlist the aid of the community to find ways to protect ourselves from the violence of our society. Obviously, the answer is not more tanks, helicopters and tear gas” (Acosta 1989, 136). Some months later, also in 1970, Thompson tried to address and mobilize what he called “Freak Power” in Aspen, Colorado, encompassing

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ultra-liberals and anarchists, and including hippies from a few communes who came from bigger urban areas to Aspen and were related to different spectrums of the drug culture: So in the context of semantics or straight word logic, the phrase “Freak Power” is a sloppy contradiction of its own terms. How, after all, could a group of deviates and monsters be capable of acting together to accomplish something? (Thompson 2000, n.p.)

As he described it in his “Second Paid Advertisement Sheriff Campaign” from October 22, 1970, published in the Aspen Times, I use the word “freak” in a positive, sympathetic sense. In the ominous, uglysplintered context of what is happening in 1970 Amerika [sic] a lot of people are beginning to understand that to be a freak is an honorable way to go. (Thompson 2000, n.p.)

“Ecology” was a main priority of Edwards’s run for mayor. Although today this is a main political focus, back in those decades it was mainly the “freaks” who expressed any real preoccupation for conservationism besides scientists and very traditional minorities. Among the authors included here from Mexico and Colombia, a small group also professed an environmental awareness that led them to suspect the very notions of progress and industrialization to be sources of destruction. In Thompson’s campaign for sheriff, protecting the environment and halting development was also a key part of the platform, one that put local and external investors on the defensive and their confidence in the tourist industry in jeopardy: But “ecology,” to us, meant something else entirely: We had in mind a deluge of brutally restrictive actions that would permanently cripple not only the obvious landrapers but also that quiet cabal of tweedy/liberal speculators who insist on dealing in private. (Thompson 1980, 176)

The way in which the chosen terminology seemed to give agency, and rights, to the land, as if it was a living and sentient entity, is still definitive to understanding the “freak” background of the campaign. Defunding the police was already an important idea in Joe Edwards’s campaign for mayor, as Thompson expressed it in a letter to John Wilcock published in the Los Angeles Free Press on December 17, 1969: “One of the most obvious facts of our campaign was that every cop in town would be fired, at once, if we won” (Thompson 2000, n.p.). With regard to drug sales, they would be allowed for nonprofit only, while “all sales for money-profit will be punished severely” (Thompson 1980, 185). Even its chosen poster was a derivative of

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the peace sign and the closed red fist (similar to the version seen in figure 1.1), the two of which had been suggested in Edwards’s initial campaign—as Thompson also explained in the same letter for Wilcock (Thompson 2000, n.p.). Ultimately such ideas integrated the concept of a human hand holding a peyote button designed by Thomas W. Benton which became the most representative of his platform (Benton in Sokol 2021, n.p.) and summed up emblematic freak symbols. The effects of peyote and other hallucinogens can lead to humanization of what the sober mind perceives as inanimate, and for the platform to include that formal and totemic aspect of hallucination remains to be a very telling example of visionary politics, even connecting a practice of government and healing in ancient civilizations of the Americas and its syncretic and transcultural examples in modern times. Much later, this very fist would turn into a live monument to commemorate the passing and life of Hunter Thompson near his ranch, marking it as an ultimate symbol of transcendence after the death of his own choice. The documentary Gonzo includes some images from another movie on Thompson, When I Die: “In top of the big arm: the double fist, with double thumbs” (Gibney 2008). A symbol simultaneously alien and human, itself visionary, which Thompson described in his will, and whose building process we see as a posthumous tribute. ​ This sheriff campaign addressed populations that were often indifferent to voting, but once it galvanized their political possibilities, it became a struggle over voting rights too. Thompson stated in a private letter from April 23,

Figure 1.1  A Monument to Freak Culture and Politics—“The Double Fist, with Double Thumbs”—Marks the Memory and Passing of Hunter Thompson Today. Source: Gibney, Alex (Dir.). 2008. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Motion picture. USA: HDNet films, 1:55:31.

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1970, to Rolling Stone publisher, Jann Simon Wenner, that the exercise was mainly an experiment to mobilize the vote of a particularly neglected and marginalized population, that of hard and light drug users of all sorts: “The important thing here is not whether I win or not—and I hope to hell I don’t— but the mechanics of seizing political power in an area with a potentially powerful freak population” (Thompson 2011, 17). His position was ultimately an invitation to reflect on the power of voting, as the retiring mayor, Robert “Buggsy” Barnard, talked on the radio during elections, “raving about long prison terms for vote-fraud and threatening violent harassment by ‘phalanxes of poll-watchers’ for any strange or freaky-looking scum who might dare to show up at the polls” (Thompson 1980, 163). The campaign aimed at politicizing a group often indifferent to the dynamics of the establishment, and according to Thompson a core problem they dealt with was the distance between hallucinogens’ users and political activism: This sense of “reality” is a hallmark of the drug culture, which values the instant reward—a pleasant four-hour high—over anything involving a time lag between the effort and the end. On this scale of values, politics is too difficult, too “complex” and too “abstract” to justify any risk or initial action. (Thompson 1980, 167)

It is interesting how Thompson’s efforts not only reactivated the younger, more radical part of Aspen’s population but also ended up uniting the opposing reactionaries in a joint front against them: “The point was that a gang of freaks was about to take over the town” (Thompson 1980, 176). In addressing these neglected groups, Thompson had the Brown Buffalo himself as a precedent and he was clear about referencing his friend’s sheriff run, alluding publicly to “Oscar Acosta, a brown-power candidate for sheriff of Los Angeles County, who pulled 110,000 votes out of something like two million” (Thompson 1980, 173). Ultimately both their campaigns suggested measures that seemed to foresee our present. Another special similarity was their common deployment of Mesoamerican iconography as a means to convey an image of political innovation. The Aspen campaign used the hand holding a peyote button as a spiritual symbol of transformation that resulted from the peace sign and the fighting fist, but it also conveyed indirectly the cultural continuity between Native American heritage—avid users of peyote—and the original geography of Aspen. In the case of Acosta, the campaign also appealed to a type of freak vote, or to the cockroach people, to use his own concept, but his poster for mayor tapped into the sculptural style of the Mayans and Aztecs, fusing elements of traditional representations of Quetzalcoatl and the xoloitzcuintli or Aztec dog, as well as some characteristics of the depictions of coyotes. Although the book The Revolt of the Cockroach People where the poster is originally included was edited by Jon Goodchild and illustrated by Frank

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Ansley, it is difficult to determine its authorship (in Acosta 1989, 10). According to Allison Fagan in the article “La vida es el honor y el recuerdo: Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Paratextual Struggle for Survival,” which analyzes The Revolt of the Cockroach People, from its very title “Acosta’s book became a space for experimentation with images” (Fagan 2016, 331). Part of said experimentation, the poster included in Acosta’s second book was either a reinvention of his campaign in LA County by Frank Ansley or an unsigned piece created by the La Raza Unida Party staff (Acosta 1989, 10). Both campaigns became a performance in politics and a more ample exercise in citizen rights among minorities that had remained apolitical. The conclusions are still interesting to think about today, as Thompson put it, hilariously, in a letter to Jim Silberman on November 23, 1970, mentioning a predilection for mescaline, a hallucinogen present in peyote that Huxley used and wrote about in The Doors of Perception: “But there is no escaping the harsh truth that all four city precincts voted for a sheriff’s candidate who insisted, throughout the campaign, on his right to keep on eating mescaline after he was elected” (Thompson 2000, n.p.). This was much more than a joke, and Thompson made an assessment about the future of the political stage in that same letter which perhaps never was, or has not yet come to be: Maybe this country is almost ready for Freak Power on the highest levels of national politics. Maybe a presidential candidate in 1972 could actually gain votes by admitting that he smokes marijuana and laughing about it on network TV. That’s essentially what I did. In fact I dismissed marijuana as a low-level “stupor-drug” and said I preferred “more active” things—such as mescaline, and occasionally, Acid. (Thompson 2000, n.p.)

Although cannabis in particular has been legalized in many places now, including Mexico, it is undeniable that the War on Drugs brought collateral difficulty to the many already experienced within the drug culture. The clichés and the satire have overtaken our memory of political movements like the Yippies, obscured works of art like Ann Fettamen’s (Anita Hoffman) and those of Thompson and Acosta, which albeit often parodying traditional politics with the performative resources and the ideas of a cultural revolution, were aesthetic manifestations of very serious political fronts, and had sophisticated proposals that challenged the orthodox boundaries of citizens’ rights and duties. The fact that public opinion and mass media have often undermined the importance and intelligence of those initiatives has been another indirect result of the heavy penalization of the substances they were experimenting with and articulating within their concept of political culture. The fact that Abbie Hoffman killed himself in 1989, and Thompson also committed

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suicide in 2005, along with the early disappearance of Oscar Acosta in 1974 in Mexico, apparently related to violent drug mafias, tells us of a world in which narco-narratives became the dominant reality, while the important figures of dissent, which emerged from the transculturality of hallucinogenic visionary knowledge and psychedelia no longer had a place in the political arena, reduced to outsiders and eccentrics at the margins when they were not directly prosecuted as criminals. Many points of their political projects were also postponed for decades, and only in the twenty-first century, too slow and too late, have initiatives like defunding the police or impeding neoliberal extractivism—“landrape,” in the words of Thompson, or “accumulation by dispossession,” in those of the materialist geographer David Harvey (2004, 63–87)—regained visibility. Nixon and Reagan defined a political and social system in which drug culture and, more important, its priorities in regard to the environment and quality of life would barely be tolerated, much less define a political agenda, beyond the War on Drugs itself, for the years to come. In that sense, aesthetics and fiction become the true sources to observe how these substances structured a way of life, and whatever remains to be political of their usage and the knowledge it produces in agency with human synapsis even in marginal contexts: “The barrio is already plagued by sporadic fire-bombings, explosions, shootings and minor violence of all kinds. But the cops see nothing ‘political’ in these incidents” (Thompson 1980, 158). As if responding to that reflection by Thompson, Acosta underlines the political nature of each and every drug bust. Accused initially of being a “flower child” and a hippie by the comrades of the Brown movement, Acosta presented himself as experienced in the Chicano encounters with the court system and, in a single phrase, revealed the complex entanglement of hallucination and politics in the Nixon era: “Yeah. I’ve had some Chicano clients. And all legal cases are political. Politicians make the laws and we break them. Every dope bust is a political event” (Acosta 1989, 34). FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS AND REVOLT OF THE COCKROACH PEOPLE: AN UNFORESEEN DUAL TESTIMONY OF THE CHICANO STRUGGLE A triad of interrelated, yet perfectly independent, texts truly opens up the complexity of the social relations evoked by visionary practices and psychedelia in the Americas in the late twentieth-century United States. In their order of publication, they are Hunter Thompson’s journalistic piece “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” published in the Rolling Stone issue of April 29, 1971;

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also his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Part I of which was published in Rolling Stone on November 11, 1971, and Part II in the issue from November 25; and Revolt of the Cockroach People from 1973 by Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, who in fact was a central protagonist in all the other three texts. An unexpected hallucinogenic testimony of the pain and loss inflicted on the Chicano and Latino communities in LA during the 1970s, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, one of the most important psychedelic novels in the US tradition, and probably also the one to finish said genre, results as the only possible counterpart to the thick reality of the true end of the American Dream: “I have called it, only half sarcastically, ‘a vile epitaph for the Drug Culture of the Sixties,’ and I think it is” (Thompson 1996, 213). The catalyst for Thompson’s story was the case of Rubén Salazar, a Mexican American journalist, who became entangled in a series of events started by the sheriff department which ended with the deputy sheriff ultimately killing Salazar by shooting a grenade of tear gas at his temple, an outcome that could only be explained either as a result of a calculated conspiracy or as the most coincidental series of stupidities that could happen. In retrospect it sounds a bit different than it did back in 1969 when the sheriff was sending out fifteen or twenty helicopter sorties a night to scan the rooftops and backyards of the barrio with huge sweeping searchlights that drove Oscar and his people into fits of blind rage every time they got nailed in a pool of blazing white light with a joint in one hand and a machete in the other. (Thompson 1980, 536)

The novel Fear and Loathing and the weekend that motivated its first draft became a necessary unwinding from the pressures in LA, an insane catharsis of excesses and drug supra-realism meant to heal the lawyer and the journalist, as the two friends had become trapped in the eye of a storm of state racism and violence, one they could only escape and assimilate as they became Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo: The book began as a 250-word caption for Sports Illustrated. I was down in LA, working on a very tense and depressing investigation of the allegedly accidental killing of a journalist named Ruben Salazar by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept—and after a week or so on the story I was a ball of nerves & sleepless paranoia (figuring that I might be next) . . . and I needed some excuse to get away from the angry vortex of that story & try to make sense of it without people shaking butcher knives in my face all the time. My main contact on that story was the infamous Chicano lawyer Oscar Acosta—an old friend, who was under bad pressure at the time, from his super-militant constituents, for even talking to a gringo/gabacho journalist. The pressure was so heavy, in fact, that I found it impossible to talk to Oscar alone. (Thompson 1996, 207)

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Invited by Acosta himself, Thompson would come up with “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” a fine article of objective yet involved Gonzo journalism. Even more, the weekend in Las Vegas that made the first part of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, only emerged as a temporary escape from the pressures of the writing and the perceived dangers to his life for a paranoid Thompson, and an even more feverish Acosta, as the reporter dealt with writing the piece under the suspicion of most of the activists who surrounded the lawyer, now at the center of the Chicano movement at the time, and a firsthand source for whatever findings there were to the police killing of Salazar. The second autobiographical volume of Acosta, The Revolt of the Cockroach People, added depth to the speculations of Thompson in his article, but it also brought it into the dimension of activism, politics, and intense selfinvolvement that were the trademarks of the so-called “Gonzo journalism.” Just like some of the coincidences between Acosta and Thompson as friends, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the American Dream from 1971 and Revolt of the Cockroach People from 1973 are directly connected. The American classic by Thompson is revealed to us as ingrained in the context of one of the most original testimonies of Latino and Chicano literature by Acosta. This link is made explicit in a third document, an article by Thompson that ties them together within the context of the Chicano community, “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” from 1971, focusing in detail on the murder of Salazar and the activism of Oscar “Zeta” Acosta. Although, of course, both narratives do not explicitly mention each other, both authors are certainly there. Stonewall is Acosta’s version of Thompson, whereas Dr. Gonzo, the Samoan lawyer, is Thompson’s rendering of the Chicano (whose movie versions are shown in figure 1.2): “I want you to understand that this man at the wheel is my attorney. He is not just some dingbat I found on the strip, man. He is a foreigner. I think he is probably Samoan” (in Gilliam 1998, 5:35–5:39). In the movie directed by Terry Gilliam, the racial misunderstandings gravitating around Oscar Acosta are well expressed by a Puerto Rican actor like Benicio Del Toro, who evokes some of the Indigenous traits that Acosta wanted to underline on himself as a “brown” buffalo. ​ With a real involvement in complex testimonies of hallucination and coming from different social crises, by the traditions they are linked to and some of the language they use, the US author is a late example of psychedelia, whereas the Chicano novelist is ultimately drawn to a visionary usage of hallucinogens, which is always political, albeit a few times also messianic. There are so many shared echoes between their narratives, worldviews, and style that Acosta decided to remove any references to the Las Vegas trips they made together to avoid redundancies, as he explained in a letter to Thompson from 1972: “I’ve cut out the entire Las Vegas thing as such. I decided you

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Figure 1.2  Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) Regale a Hitchhiker (Tobey Maguire) on Their Way to Las Vegas: “He Is a Foreigner. I Think He Is Probably Samoan.” Source: Gilliam, Terry (Dir.). 1998. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Motion picture. USA: Universal Pictures and others, 5:32.

wouldn’t understand it and that others might accuse me of using your book as my notes, etc.” (Acosta 1996, 105). It is important to note that Acosta’s activism and the killing of Salazar stood right in the center of a historical shift in Mexican American identity. The very notion of an “American Dream” in crisis was nowhere more palpable than in its failure among immigrants, with disappointment driving the third generation to experience itself as Chicanos rather than Mexicans, Mexican Americans, or even Americans: “The word ‘Chicano’ was forged as a necessary identity for the people of Aztlan—neither Mexicans nor Americans, but a conquered Indian/mestizo nation sold out like slaves by its leaders” (Thompson 1980, 138). This divided those perceived as Latino versions of Uncle Tom, called “Tío Taco” by the barrio people (131), and those in the community who started demanding recognition of their particular heritage, culture, and rights. The killing of Ruben Salazar had radicalized even old-school generations that had started embracing the label of Chicano, which “Oscar was quickly learning to use as a fire and brimstone forum to feature himself as the main spokesman for a mushrooming ‘brown power’ movement that the LAPD called more dangerous than the Black Panthers” (Thompson 1980, 536). Both The Revolt of the Cockroach People and “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” emphasized the particularities of the Chicanos. Their situation was similar to that of the buffalos and the cockroaches, endangered and under attack everywhere but within the protection of certain ideologies of cohesion that were getting stronger during the 1960s and 1970s, like hallucinogenic culture. Vindicating their mestizo background, they saw continuity between the violence of Spanish colonialism and North American

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imperialism, an alliance that materialized in the much later takeover of Aztlán by the United States via the illegitimate Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which paid central Mexico for it (Acosta 1989, 160): The US government was ceded about half of what was then the Mexican nation. This territory was eventually broken up into what is now the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and the southern half of California. This is Aztlán, more a concept than a real definition. But even as a concept it has galvanized a whole generation of young Chicanos to a style of political action that literally terrifies their Mexican-American parents. Between 1968 and 1970 the “Mexican-American Movement” went through the same drastic changes and heavy trauma that had earlier afflicted the “Negro Civil Rights Movement” in the early Sixties. The split was mainly along generational lines, and the first “young radicals” were overwhelmingly the sons and daughters of middle-class Mexican-Americans who had learned to live with “their problem.” (Thompson 1980, 137–138)

The frenzy of drugs and alcohol described during all of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (faithfully adapted in figure 1.2), like the lotus for the Lotophagi, was an escape valve, a catharsis via excess, from the oppressive atmosphere that was the reception to civil protest and the struggle of minorities, in this particular case among US citizens of the second or third generation of ­Mexican origin in Los Angeles. In general, this is a good reading of the role that hallucinogens played in the lives of militants and outcasts that, just like the very substances they used, had been deemed public enemies. Chased by ­hallucinated bats near Barstow, just outside Las Vegas, the narrator of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has to give away the wheel to his lawyer and passenger, as he uses time to pass inventory over their drug collection: The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. (Thompson 1996, 4)

It is crucial that for Thompson’s writing of both “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Oscar Acosta, or Dr. Gonzo, played an instrumental part. He is the one who insisted on getting Thompson involved with the events in LA, as he tells in The Revolt of the Cockroach People: “For nearly two years now I’ve called and written this bald-headed journalist who once told me during a volleyball game: ‘If you ever find a big story in your

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travels, call me’” (Acosta 1989, 20). And sometimes it is his customers, who were all Latinos and Chicanos at the time, who provided the substances that kept the journey going in Thompson’s novel, as with a chemical they name “adrenochrome,” allegedly only found extracted from a living pineal gland according to urban legends and offered by a “monster client” (Thompson 1996, 131) of Dr. Gonzo. In a letter some years later, from October 1971, it is clear that Acosta was perfectly aware of the delirious muse-like role he played in his friend’s life and in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in particular—“the Vegas thing”: Can anyone in his right mind believe that Rudy, Benny, & Frank would have talked to you without me? Or that you picked up all those paragraphs on the Chicano Movement from someone other than me & the gang? To a lesser degree, much vaguer on details, the Vegas thing was no different. (Acosta in Thompson 2000, n.p.)

As among Chicanos and Mexican Americans, the signals of the Drug War as a local crusade that would turn international were visible even in Las Vegas, and although Fear and Loathing recreated a context of heavy use and apparent impunity, the narration is constantly ridden with fear and paranoia: Until about a year ago, there was a giant billboard on the outskirts of Las Vegas, saying: DON’T GAMBLE WITH MARIJUANA! IN NEVADA: POSSESSION—20 YEARS SALE—LIFE! So I was not entirely at ease drifting around the casinos on this Saturday night with a car full of marijuana and head full of acid. (Thompson 1996, 42)

But the book did not only focus on drug culture as it chased the remnants of the American Dream, and in its second half it openly immersed itself into the police suppositions, representation, and ideas of what drug culture and users even looked like. The second part of the Las Vegas trip consisted of a different weekend in which Thompson and Acosta, while hallucinating out of their minds again, went to a drug conference, as it read in a telegram sent by Dr. Gonzo in the middle pages of the novel: “THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF DISTRICT ATTORNEYS INVITES YOU TO THEIR FOUR DAY SEMINAR ON NARCOTICS AND DANGEROUS DRUGS AT DUNES HOTEL STOP ROLLING STONE CALLED” (Thompson 1996, 77). They used press credentials to cover hundreds of cops discussing “the Drug Problem” (80), or, as Thompson’s narrator put it, “To infiltrate the infiltrators” (81). There is a constant sense of danger and paranoia throughout the novel, fear of cops, and the law, which here seems to touch upon the core of the

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issue: “If the Pigs were gathering in Vegas for a top-level Drug Conference, we felt the drug culture should be represented” (110). Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a hard-to-describe novel, and quoting any fragment presents the difficulty of missing the intricacy of the general structure and context, since the narrative voice is so densely packed and convoluted in the whole of its visions. The narrator, Hunter Thompson’s alter ego, Raoul Duke, and his “lawyer,” Dr. Gonzo, seemed to be on the run from reality from the very beginning, while also chasing its secrets. What they are leaving behind, a fact only to be found in the marginalia of the novel, is the harsh context of Chicano marginalization and the police brutality that enforced it. The novel is a chase after a lost mythology, as it is expressed from its very subtitle, “A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream,” but it is also a getaway from the reality of those myths—the American nightmare, the utter failure of all melting pot narratives and the racism that ultimately structured the myth of “assimilation,” often deployed to conceal the mechanisms of acculturation and oppression that were its true agenda.

THE COCKROACH IN THE 1970S (MEANING UNDESIRABLE PEOPLES, A TOTEMIC BEAST, A CORRIDO SONG, OR A REEFER BUTT): METAPHORS SUBVERTING PREJUDICE In an incredible coincidence, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, even the term “Cockroach” is redeployed out of its ordinary use and in relation to marijuana, involuntarily echoing the corrido song from the Mexican Revolution, “La Cucaracha”—also remembered by Acosta or “Zeta,” on his own novel Revolt of the Cockroach People—as the conference about the “Drug Problem” started to sound like a hallucination itself. The criminalization of practices so common among the youth at the time inevitably led to a series of other absurd misunderstandings which reflect the vast distance between the police perspective of the issue as a crime and the real social phenomenon. This surrealism is most evident in some of the information that the narrator and the lawyer manage to hear at the conference, which parodies itself and results from surveillance of the banal aspects of drug practices, which naturally leaves Dr. Gonzo astonished, since the Chicano lawyer, as seen before, had his own surreal rendering of a cockroach’s symbolism: “We must come to terms with the Drug Culture in this country!! . . . country . . . country . . .” These echoes drifted back to the rear in confused waves. “The reefer butt is called a ‘roach’ because it resembles a cockroach . . . cockroach . . . cockroach . . .”

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“What the fuck are these people talking about?” my attorney whispered. “You’d have to be crazy on acid to think a joint looked like a goddamn cockroach!” (Thompson 1996, 138)

The numerous suspicions among the police against culture as a whole become evident in drug-related questions for the conference speaker, including one that implicated an intellectual and anthropologist mentioned earlier who testified in favor of legalizing cannabis in 1969: “somebody in the audience asked Bloomquist if he thought Margaret Mead’s ‘strange behavior,’ of late, might possibly be explained by a private marijuana addiction” (Thompson 1996, 144). Due to the long list of misdemeanors and hyperboles in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the libel lawyers at Rolling Stone were initially completely reluctant to publish it and were later baffled by Acosta’s only request: for his photo and name to be included in the book. According to Thompson, the single aspect that truly offended him was that his racial identity had been changed, but he went along with the publication since changing this would postpone the printing: “The only thing that bothered him—bothered him very badly—was the fact that I’d repeatedly described him as a 300-pound Samoan” (Thompson 1980, 540). Although he himself joked often with the potential multiplicity of ethnicities he had been associated with in life, including calling himself Samoan too, Acosta demanded something back: “And the only way he’d sign the release, he added, was in exchange for a firm guarantee from the lawyers that both his name and a suitable photograph of himself be prominently displayed on the book’s dust cover” (Thompson 1980, 540). This reaction against such racial confusion in the novel is explained by reflecting on the intrinsic value that identity had for Acosta, both in his becoming the Brown Buffalo and as a part of the cockroach people. For him, like truth, it had become a weapon, as he explained it in an undated letter to one Douglas Empringham, in which the search for his own voice appeared as mediated by LSD: I did not write for those years because I could not find my voice. After some time in therapy and more particularly, some time in the mountains and about a hundred acid trips, I realized it had nothing to do with a voice—but with an identity. And when that came, Shazam! I work at it, the words, the revolution and the law about twelve hours a day. (Acosta 1996, 119)

Much later on, Thompson justified the deliberate racial slippage in a way that completely reconnected all of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with the tensions of the Chicano movement in Los Angeles and the complexity of certain racial categories back in the 1970s, along with the dangers they implied:

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In Oscar’s case, my only reason for describing him in the book as a 300-pound Samoan instead of a 250-pound Chicano lawyer was to protect him from the wrath of the LA cops and the whole California legal establishment he was constantly at war with. (Thompson 1980, 541)

Still, since both authors continued to be an influence for each other and the two are ultimate examples of the final years of Counterculture in the 1970s, the heavy hallucinogenic practices they professed and maintained kept political consequences and a visionary depth which was also marked by the sense of irony and skepticism of a disappointed psychedelia. Since their lives were wholly defined by hallucination, it must have been possible for the two friends to swing back and forth throughout their lives between a sense of sacredness and one of secularity in the experience of their visions. Distinguishing between what was visionary and what psychedelic about their customs becomes superficial if, as I have argued, the former contains the latter. The sheriff campaigns of both Thompson and Acosta were a direct response to this situation of marginality of all cockroach peoples in the country, undesirables submitted to a second-class citizenship. A “Handbill from the National Chicano Moratorium Committee” is quoted by Thompson: “POLICE HAVE BROKEN UP EVERY ATTEMPT OF OUR PEOPLE TO GET JUSTICE, THEY HAVE BEATEN YOUNG STUDENTS PROTESTING POOR EDUCATION, RAIDED OFFICES, ARRESTED LEADERS, CALLED US COMMUNISTS AND GANGSTERS IN THE PRESS” (in Thompson 1980, 132). The flyer denounced how “IT HAS BECOME TOO OBVIOUS TO IGNORE THE FACT THAT THE LAPD, THE SHERIFFS, AND THE HIGHWAY PATROL HAVE FOR YEARS BEEN SYSTEMATICALLY TRYING TO DESTROY THE TRUE SPIRIT OF OUR PEOPLE” (132). Thompson was objective and concrete when he described the context of surveillance and harassment lived by the community: EVEN MORE INSIDIOUS THAN THE DIRECT POLITICAL REPRESSION AGAINST LEADERS AND DEMONSTRATIONS IS THE CONTINUOUS ATTACK ON THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF PEOPLE IN THE BARRIOS. ALMOST EVERY MONTH EACH BARRIO HAS SUFFERED THROUGH AT LEAST ONE CASE OF SEVERE BRUTALITY OR MURDER AND THEN STRUGGLED TO DEFEND FRIENDS AND WITNESSES WHO FACE BUM RAPS. (in Thompson 1980, 132)

Ruben Salazar always had identified himself as a Mexican American, but his death quickly turned him into a “Chicano martyr” (Thompson 1980, 142). The pressures of policing, the killing of many, the public racial profiling implicit in the War on Drugs, and the example of the Black Panthers all

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motivated a political reactivation among the disenchanted Chicano youth as it did among the “freaks” of Aspen: Perhaps the main movement/focus in the barrio these days is the politicalization of the batos locos [sic]. The term translates literally as “crazy guys,” but in harsh political terms it translates as “street crazies,” teenage wildmen who have nothing to lose except their hostility and a vast sense of doom and boredom with the world as they know it. (Thompson 1980, 139)

The neighborhood youth, the vatos locos, were described by Acosta as educated and initiated on the street and very early exposed to cannabis or heroin—“carga”—through a formative process at the margins: “You smoke your first joint in an alley at the age of ten, you take your first hit of carga before you get laid, and you learn how to make your mark on the wall before you learn how to write” (Acosta 1989, 90). Not unique to the division between Chicanos and Mexican Americans, this close cultural relation with marihuana reappeared in other moments of Mexican history. As readers will see in the next chapter on Mexico, its usage was in fact a divisive subject, one to mark a deep difference between the revolutionary elites and its popular leaders. After the 1920s, during the government of Venustiano Carranza, it was also a known fact that many of the troops carried it and used it quotidianly. Via an unexpected pastiche of history, the racial rhetoric of The Revolt of the Cockroach People by Oscar “Zeta” reactivates these divisions. Not only do the Chicanos smoke cannabis heavily, as it is accounted throughout the novel, but in the personal experience of the narrator, both the metaphor of the cockroach and the Mexicanness of marihuana become an articulate whole along with the heritage of the masses of the Mexican Revolution and its popular heroes. All these layers are alluded to by means of the corrido song La Cucaracha, which was an intimate source of self-identification for Acosta, who took his added name “Zeta” from the Mexican movie La Cucaracha from 1959, in which he heard the song: I laugh and sing to myself: La cucaracha, la cucaracha, ya no puede caminar. Porque le falta, porque le falta, marijuana pa’ fumar.4 The old revolutionary song is about the only Spanish I know. It puts me to sleep. (Acosta 1989, 23)

The corrido, part of a popular music genre of Mexican Revolution used in the past to disperse news, becomes an inseparable part of Acosta’s identity,

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even before he relearns Spanish, forever fixed to him through the indelible memory of the name he takes for himself, even after, according to his autobiographical tale at least, it was the reason he lost his job at the Public Defender’s Office: What they really fired me for was my new name, Buffalo Zeta Brown. General Zeta was the hero of an old movie classic, La Cucaracha. A combination of Zapata and Villa with Maria Felix as the femme fatale. It suits me just fine. (Acosta 1989, 37)

The cockroach acquires an unforeseen depth through the resignification of the corrido and the movie as Mexican sources of identity for an urban Chicano, and even as a formal presence throughout the book The Revolt of the Cockroach People. In the first edition published by Straight Arrow in 1973 and the second edition from 1989 by Random House, this metaphor of the cockroach transcends written text, and the insect literally becomes a living presence, with each set of two pages replicating the illustration of a cockroach in multitude positions, as if real cockroaches were crossing all throughout the paper (Frank Ansley in Acosta 1989, 1–262). Like Hunter Thompson’s collaborations with Ralph Steadman as an illustrator, this cover and the book design by Frank Ansley under the direction of Straight Arrow editor Jon Goodchild renegotiate the relation between image and text: “What is the desired reader response? Revulsion? Confusion? Amusement? Tacit acceptance?” (Fagan 2016, 331). In regard to Goodchild, he was an illustrator, with a background in magazines like Rolling Stone and Oz. His obituary in The Independent defined him as the person who put the hippie vision in print as well as the one who strained it. His work expressed a trait that at times overtakes Acosta’s book, since “Goodchild is most notoriously remembered for daring to break the print designer’s cardinal rule: legibility (though not as often as detractors would have it), suggesting, by implication, that the content of the text might be subordinate to the design” (Plimmer 1999, n.p.). This complex relation of mutual redefinition and not a passive illustration between image and written content in The Revolt of the Cockroach People as an attempt to break the traditional sensorial boundaries of writing and illustrating is not completely unlike that of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, albeit with an economy of resources, a single cockroach, which contrasts with the high profile of Thompson’s publishers (from Rolling Stone), who always included original and new illustrations without any need for repetition. The strategy is entirely different. Both authors experiment with plastic artists who interpret the visual aspect of some of their visionary trances in writing and contribute to materializing the sophisticated sensations that

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accompany hallucinatory visions and insights. Instead of the complex drawings by Steadman depicting Dr. Gonzo and Raoul (in Thompson 1996, 14), Ansley and Goodchild deploy a single drawing replicated in different positions, which also manage to convey a sense of hallucination and of paranoid delusion, simultaneously creating a plastic presence of hyperreal roaches that crawl all over the pages in unexpected places, and tapping into innovative resources of design and montage. Although there are a number of other resources which embrace hallucination as a structural principle in the works of “Zeta” Acosta, such as the lack of linearity, the experience of living memories in the present, the humanization of animals and objects, or the visions which populate all the pages of his book The Revolt of the Cockroach People, an autobiography marked by different stages of hallucination—each one introducing new self-discoveries and human networks—substance abuse and visionary practices become more than aesthetics to him, or maybe it is that his aesthetics become a way of life. Committed to revealing the repressed and confronting society’s denials, as hallucination does for the individual subject, the very impossibility to conceal information becomes a life philosophy for the activism of Acosta: “The truth, to Oscar, was a tool and even a weapon that he was convinced he could not do without” (Thompson 1980, 545). His sincerity amounts to a legal confession at times, without omitting even the account of crimes, arson, terrorism, and heavy drug usage at every turn. Acosta and his narrators are constantly exploring the boundaries of what is admissible in society, bordering on criminality most of the time. Not only was Acosta constantly imprisoned as a lawyer for contempt of the court, but his literature can also invade the reader’s sensibility and tease its limits. The metaphor of the cockroach people, meaning the undesirable, the “little beast everybody steps on”, is a resource of that sort, testing the tolerance of whoever is reading, and the willingness to accept the other within, as the book poses identity as a series of layers rather than as a fixed certainty. Similar to the seemingly cultural conflict that brought a division between the Mexican Americans, more conservative and older, and the Chicanos in the United States, precisely circa 1968, the Tlatelolco Massacre (discussed in more detail in chapter 2) marked a point in which such a cultural conflict escalated to the proportions of a war between generations in Mexico. Once that gap was more than merely moral or aesthetic, and the consumerisms and practices of younger Mexicans took them closer, both to a more liberal world culture via mass media, cinema, jazz, and rock and roll, and to their Indigenous roots as mestizos, their findings led them to redefine their understanding of citizenship and democracy, which ended with their increasing demand for a more inclusive society in which education and equality were guaranteed. While the Mexican Americans had longed for a harmonic and seamless integration into US culture, the Chicanos made identity a matter of resistance.

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It is not strange that it was only in this context, one that vindicated Aztec roots and the Aztlán territory as a country for itself, that the sophisticated relation with hallucination resurfaced as a heavily politicized matter. Acosta managed to represent Saint Basil 21, the defendants of the peaceful protest that ended in a confrontation with the police as they tried to attend mass. In the case as presented by the D.A. in the novel, the dilemma that these populations supposed is put as a threat to civilization. The question is not whether they are recognized as full citizens but whether they are even human: “Are they simply citizens exercising their civil liberties as they would have you believe? Or are they mad dogs who would pervert all that this country stands for?” (in Acosta 1989, 157). Acosta also represented activists of the movement captured during school walkouts: “Are we such a threat just because we have demanded a compliance with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which provided for a bilingual society? Is there something wrong with speaking Spanish in our schools?” (60). As for the case of Salazar, one judge deemed it an accidental death; a week afterward, District Attorney Evelle Younger made a public statement: “he had reviewed the case and decided that ‘no criminal charge is justified,’ despite the unsettling fact two of the three jurors who had voted for the ‘death by accident’ verdict were now saying they had made a mistake” (Thompson 1996, 249). A week after that, it was decided that public funds would be used to pay all legal expenses of several policemen indicted after killing “the Sanchez Brothers”: they had arrived at the wrong address to make an arrest and started a shoot-out after the brothers failed to comply with their orders— which they could never have done, since they did not speak English—a case in which Acosta also represented the defense (Thompson 1980, 160). The circumstances under which the deputy shot the tear gas pellet at Salazar’s temple were highly irregular, with the police insisting someone with a gun had taken refuge in the Silver Dollar venue, a version no one else seemed to verify. Ultimately, years after the event, there was a settlement to indemnify the Salazar family, but there was no person convicted. With the community even divided between generations, the Chicano movement experienced external and internal obstacles, which is why Acosta resorted to extreme metaphors of endangered species like the buffalo or undesired ones like the cockroach, emphasizing the external enemy and suggesting the symbolic union of all in a single front, similarly to how Thompson attempted to do with the freak population. Acosta’s relations with these activists were all marked one way or the other by LSD, as with Mangas, the first time he met him: “He told me straight off that he knew I was on acid. He had heard of my reputation as a dope lawyer and he wanted to know if I could get him a cap or two” (Acosta 1989, 66). The drug also figured in his interactions with Lady Feathers and Black Eagle:

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“I told both of them about acid and they told me about Chicano culture” (67). At a crucial point, they all engage in one of the strangest political meetings ever on LSD, and a collective experience opens up as with magic words: “The acid has taken hold” (68). When Acosta finally took a break to visit his brother Jesús in Mexico, the worst of the events unraveled in Los Angeles in the form of minor riots which seemed linked to the killing of Salazar. Meanwhile, he and Jesus rolled joints from two pounds of weed bought in Acapulco. Curiously enough, Jesus lived exactly the life which the protagonist of Se está haciendo tarde, Virgilio, has in Acapulco too, proving there is continuity to the images and site that were known for their cannabis culture in Mexico, as we will see in Chapter 2: “For five years he’s earned his living off the turistas as guide, dope pusher or pimp. He lives on the beach eating fish and coconuts and he knows all the girls at El Club-69” (Acosta 1989, 185). It is at that point in the novel that Zanzibar’s death, the alter ego of Salazar, appears in the news (195). In the novel Revolt of the Cockroach People, a few members of the movement and the lawyer and narrator, the Brown Buffalo, end up bombing a bathroom of the Los Angeles Hall of Justice in revenge, but paradoxically only one Latino dies (Acosta 1989, 254–257). Still, from Thompson’s chronicle (Thompson 1980, 161), it seems that nobody was killed in the real event. Even without casualties, it is as if with the killing of Salazar and Kennedy, and after the drug bust narrated by Thompson, the narration and the activism the Acosta’s novel tells about were pushed outside the boundaries of legality and democracy, ultimately replicating the terrorism of the state by opposing it with similar actions. THE DOWNFALL OF THE BROWN BUFFALO Acosta mentions his dependence on amphetamines since law school in his autobiography, but it is only in the posthumous article by Thompson, “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat,” that readers find out more details about his relation to that substance in his career. His level of use was to the point that he developed a strategy to handle police presence while he represented activists of the movement in Los Angeles. The strategy he put in use was evidence of how closely the substances were integrated into his whole life, and it read as absurd as a passage on Dr. Gonzo from Fear and Loathing, only now in a journalistic work of non-fiction that made tribute to his singularity: After several narrow escapes he decided that it was necessary to work in the courtroom as part of a three-man “defence team.” One of his “associates” was usually a well-dressed, well-mannered young Chicano whose only job was to

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carry at least 100 milligrams of pure speed at all times and feed Oscar whenever he signalled, the other was not so well-dressed or mannered; his job was to stay alert and be one step ahead of the bailiffs when they made a move on Oscar—at which point he would reach out and grab any pills, powders, shivs or other evidence he was handed, then sprint like a human bazooka for the nearest exit. (Thompson 1980, 525–526)

The writing by Thompson is sometimes even more emphatic as to the almost mystical relation between Acosta and drugs, stating how he took acid as other lawyers took valium: “but not the Brown Buffalo—he ate LSD-25 with a relish that bordered on worship” (Thompson 1980, 533). Although one often gets the idea that there were no consequences to this by how casually the two friends described it, it is clear it was an abysmal difference from other lawyers, “a distinctly unprofessional and occasionally nasty habit that shocked even the most liberal of his colleagues and frequently panicked his clients” (533). It is in his Uncollected Works that Acosta confirms his visionary dynamics with the most passion. Published posthumously, the collection appeared as notes taken in the most uninhibited manner: I think one thing I haven’t mentioned enough yet, which is a very pertinent thing, is what drugs have done for me personally. I think psychedelic drugs have been important to the development of my consciousness. I don’t think I’d have gotten to where I am without the use of these drugs. They’ve put me into a level of awareness where I can see myself and see what I’m really doing. Most of the big ideas I’ve gotten for my lawyer work have usually come when I am stoned. Like the Grand Jury challenge was the result of an acid experience. A lot of the tactics I employ I get the ideas for when I am stoned, which is not to say that I wouldn’t get them if I wasn’t stoned. A lot of my creativity has sprung from my use of these psychedelic drugs. (Acosta 1996, 14)

This extended to other substances, like the sacred plant of datura—a variant related to the borrachero, approximately translatable to “drunk” or “drunkenness” tree, its Colombian variant—whose devastating effects are narrated with accuracy by the lawyer of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Dr. Gonzo, who lost his sight and speech for a time. He tells an anecdote of when he ate “enough jimson weed for a year” in some minutes and went blind for three days (Thompson 1996, 132–133). The description, albeit narrated in Thompson, truly captures Acosta’s voice and humor, and his impulsiveness: “I was such a mess that they had to haul me back to the ranch house in a wheelbarrow . . . they said I was trying to talk, but I sounded like a raccoon” (in Thompson 1996, 133). Only an extreme character like Acosta could hold the recognition of being the male LSD-ridden Mexican drug muse of Hunter Thompson, and

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the homage paid in the posthumous article “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat” from 1976 proves how radical he truly was at it. By 1971, the downfall of the Chicano lawyer came after he was detained while aboard a vehicle in which the police also found “illegal amphetamine tablets, belonging to Attorney Oscar Acosta” (Thompson 1980, 526). The rejection of the more conservative members in the movement quickly moved many to dismiss much of Acosta’s previous work with the community: “There was no mention in the Mexican-American press about Acosta’s surprisingly popular campaign for sheriff of LA County a year earlier, which had made him a minor hero” (527). Due to the heavy publicity in the news, the arrest soon became a sentence of ostracism for Acosta: They had known all along that this dope addict rata who had somehow been one of their most articulate and certainly their most radical, popular and politically aggressive spokesman for almost two years was really just a self-seeking publicity dope freak who couldn’t even run a bar tab at the Silver Dollar Café, much less rally friends or a following. (Thompson 1980, 527)

Conflicts over hallucinogens and other drugs divided generations and ultimately brought forth condemnation of Acosta among the Mexican Americans and even the Chicanos after he was arrested for possession. Oscar’s drug bust was still alive on the evening news when he was evicted from his apartment on three days’ notice and his car was either stolen or towed away from his customary parking place on the street in front of his driveway. His offer to defend his two friends on what he later assured me were absolutely valid charges of first degree murder were publicly rejected. Not even for free, they said. A dope-addled clown was worse than no lawyer at all. (Thompson 1980, 527)

How illegal drugs in general were represented, and hallucinogens in particular, also detrimentally affected the Chicano people in general during the second half of the twentieth century, and restricted their true political potential, turning them into a public enemy and an allegedly legitimate target of LA Police. The demise of Acosta in his own community is not the only problematic part of his story. His relation to the US context and tradition also seemed to become a source of conflict. The fact that Acosta has been very recognized among Chicanos, but rarely included within Counterculture or even remembered as part of psychedelic culture, is in itself a proof of a strange paradox. When it came to drug arrests, Latinos and African Americans were the most visible majority in the statistics, but when it came to psychedelic culture, it was a corpus of white authors that was always the most discussed. This disjuncture alone demonstrates the prejudices at work with visionary practices,

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substances, and art, particularly among mestizos, which, like in the case of the Chicanos, are between two, and even many, worlds. Acosta himself tried to confront this bias perhaps in a desperate move after his change of career from a Chicano lawyer to a Chicano writer, and his trip to Mazatlán (Thompson 1980, 527). Incredibly successful as a character in Thompson’s writing, the Chicano had not been as recognized as a novelist himself. He wrote a letter to Playboy on October 15, 1973, which serves as a key document to understand the interconnections between the different sources of this chapter. Acosta claimed co-creation with Thompson of the genre of Gonzo journalism, not legally but intellectually. He made a specific connection between Gonzo writing and the act of “reporting crucial events under drugs and fire” which he also found indispensable in any writing that was a result of those decades: Your November issue, “On The Scene” section on Mr. Hunter S. Thompson as the creator of Gonzo Journalism, which you say he both created and named. Well, sir, I beg to take issue with you. And with anyone else who says that. In point in fact, Doctor Duke and I—the world famous Doctor Gonzo—together we both, hand in hand, sought out the teachings and curative powers of the world famous Savage Henry, the Scag Baron of Las Vegas, and in point of fact the term and methodology of reporting crucial events under fire and drugs, which are of course essential to any good writing in this age of confusion—all this I say came from out of the mouth of our teacher who is also known by the name of Owl. These matters I point out not as a threat of legalities or etcetera but simply to inform you and to invite serious discussion on the subject. (Acosta 1996, 109)

This claim is not unique to that letter to Playboy. In fact I quoted another epistle addressed to Thompson in October 1971, in which Acosta showed he was pretty aware of his instrumental role in two of the most successful texts by his friend, the novel Fear and Loathing and the article on Aztlán, and solely demanded him to recognize him as an equal: “All I want is for you to quit playing the role that I’m some fucking native, a noble savage you discovered in the woods” (Acosta in Thompson 2000, n.p.). Being a protagonist, he seemed offended that he never saw the earlier manuscript for Rolling Stone: “Like, did you even so much as ask me if I minded your writing & printing the Vegas piece? Not even the fucking courtesy to show me the motherfucker” (2000, n.p.). This disagreement escalated to the point of Oscar demanding 25,000 dollars from Thompson and threatening to sue, as the latter explained in a letter to his mother Virginia on October 20, 1973. In the letter, Thompson also stated that Acosta’s threats had forced all the projects to turn the book into a movie to be halted (Thompson 2000, n.p.)—ultimately stalled until the late 1990s, in fact. Acosta never pursued real legal actions, and the threats seemed more like an effort by Acosta to gain his friend’s recognition as he had done with Playboy.

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Like Burroughs’s travels to Mexico and Colombia and his experimentation with yagé, or the more banal anecdote in which Allen Ginsberg first smoked marihuana with two Puertorrican sailors in 1946, forever unnamed (Ginsberg in Ruas 2001, 27) are to the visionary tradition of Latin America, the writings of Hunter Thompson are but the alternative side of a deeply troubled Chicano struggle. On the one hand, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas holds a deep bond with the Brown movement and Mexican American and Chicano identities, a link that only stresses the importance of hallucinogens as a core element of Latin American culture, and of urban politics in modernity. In a more specific reading, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Revolt of the Cockroach People can be interpreted as different sides of a shared struggle for a broader definition of citizen’s rights, and as an aesthetic materialization of the authors’ political ideas. The novel by Thompson unravels as a fictional search for a wholly lost American Dream, while its counterpart of harsh reality appears in articles like “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” and “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat,” pieces in which the social consequences of the absolute mental freedom exercised in Fear and Loathing, become tangible as an inescapable stigma. The complex reluctance to accept a drug culture capable of visionary inquiries is an original Latin American conflict, defied by definition to harmonically embrace conflicted heritages. Both the sacralization and the demonization of drugs and hallucinogens become palpable as a gap between how Mexican Americans, as opposed to Chicanos, embrace political action, and a full image of this conflict is drawn by the life experience and work of Oscar “Zeta” Acosta. Whereas Thompson’s eccentricity and love for hallucinogens were celebrated as a late example of “psychedelia” in his Anglo culture, the drug charges against Oscar Acosta were the tipping point toward his ultimate demise, despite the fact that his very Chicano identity implied a sophisticated entanglement of politics, hallucination, performance, and aesthetics. Acosta connected both extremes of political and de facto action, and that was his ultimate error in the eyes of his community. Thompson stated in his tribute how he could never prove to his friend how all fears were justified by the reality of the times: I tried and totally failed, for at least five years, to convince my allegedly erstwhile Samoan attorney, Oscar Zeta Acosta, that there was no such thing as paranoia: at least not in the cultural and political war zone called East LA in the late 1960s and especially not for an aggressively radical Chicano lawyer who thought he could stay up all night, every night, eating acid and throwing Molotov cocktails with the same people he was going to have to represent in a downtown courtroom the next morning. (Thompson 1980, 525)

Seen in detail, hallucination and experiments of consciousness, even if taken at the purest extreme of secularity, are the main elements in the

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shared social experience of Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, who used them to read into the conflicts and historical wounds of their times, and even connected them in an intercultural creative synthesis that would have made Los Angeles a city of the future had it also connected more concretely freaks and cockroaches, Anglos and Chicanos. Transculturality becomes inescapable as Thompson went more in depth into the experience of pain and struggle of the Chicano community, the “vatos locos,” young and violent, and the growing Brown movement as he researched the events after Ruben Salazar’s killing. Not only does his constant usage of illegal substances allow him to understand much better the continuous harassment endured by the Chicano community in Los Angeles, but his growing involvement in the investigation of the killing of a fellow journalist by the police made it obvious to him that he could become a target too, imposing more stress on his peace of mind. Seen with increased suspicion by the activists surrounding Acosta, “the Gabacho writer”—Mexican slang for white foreigners—hanging around, Thompson finally took his friend to Las Vegas, after being offered a gig to cover the Mint 400 race in the desert of Nevada with all expenses paid by Sports Illustrated. The constant, inexorable paranoia which from the very title underscored most of the hallucinations and visions that structure Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is connected to the complex geopolitics of the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the War on Drugs, the coming Nixon presidency, and the politics linking Mexican Americans, Chicanos, and the Brown Power movement, particularly in California. Acosta complained to his friend of how intense this mix of drugs and activism could get, to the point that he had to skip going back home some nights and stayed in a motel to have some rest during those years: “I can’t stay up all night arguing radical politics when I have to be in court the next morning. These wild-eyed fuckers show up at all hours, they bring wine, joints, acid, mescaline, guns . . .” (in Thompson 1980, 135). Acosta’s life and his literature are perhaps the best full-fledged examples of many different traits of the 1960s that became definitive for the years to come. His “drug bust” and the charges for possession are but an example of how the sophisticated politics of the Brown and Black movements were criminalized and delegitimized by the War on Drugs. Just as it would allow for the United States to forego more elaborate diplomatic efforts beyond its borders and instead force fumigations and sanctions in Colombia and Mexico, it would become a strategy of concealed racial profiling within its own territory, and ultimately a means to address political dissent through violence and policing, rather than directly confronting the social problems of each community. Visionary culture, like the cockroaches or the buffalos, seems to also be a presence that everyone is out to get, victimized and submitted to violence both by the War on Drugs and by the illegal drug mafias.

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The way in which Oscar Acosta also became a pariah among the Mexican American community that had voted for him in his run for LA sheriff, to the point that even some of the radical Chicanos would also ostracize him, reveals the extreme public consequences that any “drug bust” came to have, even dividing the fronts of activism and rendering political militants into mere criminals in the eyes of their own communities. Later on, in 1974, his disappearance is speculated about in stories heard by mutual acquaintances. A letter to Hunter Thompson from Annie Acosta, Oscar’s sister, on October 22, 1974, mentions that he had been missing since April of that year and includes what she had heard about his whereabouts: “Two ugly rumors—he was shot and on a yacht doing a bit of smuggling!” (in Thompson 2000, n.p.). A later letter to Thompson from a mutual friend, Grover Lewis, on April 17, 1976, offered new speculations: “I’ve heard from several sources that Oscar Acosta is dead, the murder victim of drug traffickers” (2000, n.p.). His disappearance in 1974 is surrounded by a shroud of mystery, with the common idea that he either was killed by smugglers or died while trafficking himself in open seas between Mazatlán and California, pointing to the fascination that artists had with these illegal circuits and the substances offered through them, while also showing the conflicted relation that intellectuals and community leaders in Latin America would have with narco bosses and their merchandise, often with deadly consequences for the former. The artist as a criminal was viable as an ideal but not sustainable as a real-life practice, since the values and ideas of what the future should be like confronted culture in general and narcoculture as complete opposites. As it happened in the disagreement between Allen Ginsberg and the Hell’s Angels in regard to supporting the Left and pacifist alternatives, as it was told by Thompson, Acosta, who had thrived in drug culture, came to disappear forever in the midst of the drug trade and its traffickers. Similarly, extractivism, capitalism, and violence often clashed against intellectuals, popular leaders, ecological efforts, and other communal initiatives to preserve their ecosystems, their identity, and their territories, while mafias have been mortal enemies to those figures in Latin America. One of the final letters from Acosta to Thompson on November 29, 1973, marked his last attempt at a personal and a historical reconciliation capable of forming a single front. In it, there figured a beautiful possibility that never was, an invitation from an increasingly delirious “Zeta”: “Send immediate seed money to discuss the possibilities of forming a political alliance between your freaks and my cucarachas” (Acosta in Thompson 2000, n.p.). Of course, outraged by the threats to sue him and by how Acosta had sabotaged his possible movie deal for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson refused to agree to any alliances or money wires. Yet, in his refusal, there was a sign of something much more meaningful and determinant to the decades to come, and it was symptomatic of a perpetual historical divide between freaks and

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cockroaches which has had a number of consequences. On the one hand, it has forfeited the possibility to reintegrate visionary aesthetics and practices as the true precedent of psychedelia, sequestering for capitalism, mafias, and Western culture what has been an originally pan-American field of knowledge. Besides cultural appropriation, another collateral has been the failure to connect the traditionalism of some hallucinogenic uses and the modern syncretism of others, often presented simply as diametrically different impulses, so drug legislations have pervasively failed to recognize their intrinsic intellectual value all over the continent and throughout history as a single field of practices and knowledge that express and satisfy an inherent human need. Beyond this divide in the United States and Mexico, the fact that none of the political initiatives that kept hallucination at their core and appeared back in those decades seems to have survived today—although consumption remains on the rise—proves that besides cockroaches and freaks, many other fronts remain disconnected, and there is still a potential for a proper political force that articulates the unconscious forces of hallucination as initiatives like the Yippies, the Onda, Nadaísmo, or many others in the Americas would attempt to do. Of course, the legalization of some hallucinogens has become more common, but beyond mere tolerance of their existence, there is the issue of tapping into their power of revelation as a structural principle. Acosta in fact incarnated an ideal, that of art as crime, whose variants the readers will reencounter among other Lotophagi, like the Onda writers of Mexico and those that were part of Nadaísmo in Colombia, along with the Grupo de Cali in Ciudad Solar. They were all intellectuals who searched for their identity as part of exploring their creative voice and the complexities of their heritage, not simply tapping into the most orthodox of sources, but rather by taking unconventional paths and claiming alternative legacies. Coming often from the working classes, like Oscar “Zeta” did, the sophisticated performative dynamic of these artists’ politics and aesthetics were also highly critical of the inherited national projects of their countries and of the elites that upheld them. They are thinkers who have become representative of a burgeoning mestizo culture which by the late twentieth century rejected the whitewashing of Hispanization and Catholicism and opted for an experience of citizenship that was closer to their Indigenous and Afro roots, and more connected to its territories, as it was simultaneously kindred with mass consumer culture and urban areas in an increasingly globalized, secular, and liberal world at the time. NOTES 1. “Desde mi Shorty punto de vista, el movimiento yippie ha sido el movimiento juvenil con más imaginación, con incluso más que el francés.”

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2. “1. Fusión de la mota y la política en un movimiento motopolítico de hojas de pasto.” 3. “Allí, ¡oh my beloved Chicago!, el amor de ácido se solidarizó con Black Panthers, tomando de estos primeros revolucionarios provenientes del lumpenproletariat su lenguaje para nombrar al Poder.” 4. “The cockroach, the cockroach, / cannot walk / because it is missing / because it is missing / marijuana to smoke.”

Chapter 2

Mexico

Like early chronicles and colonial sources dealing with Indigenous visionary practices, many others from the Enlightenment era, like the notes of the priest José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez on the usage of hemp flowers by Indians of New Spain, show precedents of the contentious relation between Mexicanness and cannabis when compared to other documents of the same period. A nephew of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz also born in New Spain (Saladino 2017, 85), Alzate y Ramírez exhibits some of her brilliance in rational thinking in his compiled texts Asuntos varios sobre artes y letras from 1772. A particular essay in the compendium, “Memory on the Use of Pipilzintzintlis by the Indians,”1 is perhaps one of the best examples of early critical analysis on the subject of hallucinogens in the Americas. It constitutes a definitive proof of a historical appropriation which serves as a first precedent of how even introduced raw materials can become something else altogether in new territories. By his own trial and error, the priest proved cannabis in New Spain was the very same introduced by Spaniards almost three centuries earlier and not an endemic variety. Although at that time those imports had fallen into oblivion, the priest bought seeds from a herbolaria—mestizo and Indigenous venues where many herbs were readily available, mostly local flora for medicinal purposes—and he borrowed a few more from Indians he asked himself, and planted them circa 1770 (Alzate y Ramírez 1985, 53–62). He did confirm it was the species brought from Europe once the specimens were adults; not only that, but Mexicas seemed to love it feverishly. Although the writer did ultimately accept the value of their practice, tellingly he still decided to remove the few plants he had grown as soon as they reached the peak of blooming, when the female flowers are the most hallucinogenic: “The plants that the Indians recognized as pipiltzintzintlis had to be uprooted as soon as 91

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the seeds began to ripen because they tried to get as many of them as they could”2 (Alzate y Ramírez 1985, 56). Alzate y Ramírez´s early conclusions on the religious, medicinal, and recreational use of raw materials like hemp, adopted by the Mexicas within the generic category of visionary plants and seeds—or “pipiltzintzintlis,” roughly translatable from Nahuatl as “most sacred little princes” (Campos 2012, 1–2), as was mentioned before—remain paradigmatic and full of rare insight still today. His ideas are one of the earliest examples of true cultural relativism in regard to the use of hallucinogens among sources in Spanish language. The New Spain priest dismantles the idea of Satanism held by many other authors—“in the use of the pipiltzintzintlis the devil has no more part than what we are willing to give him”3 (Alzate y Ramírez 1985, 60)—and instead experiments with the seeds. The clergyman, in fact, ultimately attributed a high medicinal and cultural value to cannabis as used by the Indians and other cultures, a value which the United Nations would reject some centuries later when it placed cannabis on its schedule of prohibited substances in 1961, denying it even had any “scientific purposes” (United Nations 2017, 1–5): “I have demonstrated the virtue of the decanted pipiltzintzintlis, so we will have to say with the language of theologians, that they are bad because they are prohibited, not prohibited because they are bad”4 (Alzate y Ramírez 1985, 61–62). As a core tension of the colonial encounter, this issue entailed the clashing of different worldviews with regard to the same substances, one belonging to the colonizers and another to the colonized. From the perspective of industry and extractivism, in Instruccion para sembrar, cultivar y beneficiar el lino y cañamo en Nueva España—Instructions to Sow, Grow and Benefit from Flax and Hemp in New Spain—also from the late eighteenth century, the Marquis de la Grúa Talamanca y Branciforte identified five royal decrees mandating the cultivation of hemp in the colony, since the plant’s fiber was used as a raw material in a number of manufacturing industries, including ropes and textiles: “the modern Royal Orders of January 12 and October 24, 1777; April 20, 779; October 26, 787, and April 12, 792”5 (De la Grúa 1796, 2). The duality of a modern transcultural legacy embedded within the antique barbarism of slavery—also present in industries like cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, and others in the Americas (Ortiz 1978, 57–58)—becomes even more complex once Indigenous communities start experimenting with hemp’s buds. The contrast of uses implicit in Alzate y Ramírez’s document and that of De la Grúa points out the distance and the entanglement between industry and culture. Brought by the colonizers as a raw material for textile manufacturers via slave labor, but ultimately used for enjoyment and ritual practices by the Mexica Indians of the eighteenth century, marihuana facilitated a bodily insurrection, an appropriation of a means of conquest and technology of the Europeans as a catalyst for a truly Indigenous practice of

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freedom and intellectual speculation. This ambivalent legacy, between a mandate and a misunderstood practice, continued well into the twentieth century and beyond, and remained a tension in the mestizo Americas. Perceived by some in the 1920s as an obstacle on the way to modernization, the notorious spread of cannabis in the country was enabled by a precolonial visionary tradition which initially incorporated a new colonial substance—along with peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, daturas, the ololiuqui, and many others—in the New World. By the twentieth century, art and the Mexican Revolution were already intertwined with the aftermath of these encounters and traditions. By embracing hallucinogenic narratives and visionary practices, many Latin Americans were in fact rejecting complicity with colonial heritage and making theirs what was an Indigenous trait of identity of a pre-Columbian past that was permeated with a fondness for hallucinogens (Sahagún 1830, 241–243; Ruiz de Alarcón 1892, 127–223; Schultes and Hofmann 1979, 27). The original terminology used for cannabis in English, the word “marijuana”—by which it became popularly known after the 1960s due to its numerous mentions by US authorities and the world media—was first used in Mexico in the 1840s, although spelled with a “g,” “mariguana” (Campos 2012, 76). The etymology attests to the Mexican and mestizo origins of its use and its transculturations. One of the principal muralists, David Alfaro Siqueiros, documented the hallucinogen on two levels in his autobiography from 1977, Me llamaban el Coronelazo. Cannabis had been used as a creative companion among fellow avant-garde of the art movement identified as quintessentially Mexican, Muralismo: It seems to me that the mistake lay in this: since we are already mariguanos by nature, the use of the plant broke the sack of our natural imaginative wealth, that is, it led us to derangement. Let’s continue with our innate mariguana and leave it at that.6 (Siqueiros 1977, 208)

The group of artists considered it a way to get closer to their Indigenous origins as mestizos, even though it set them apart from other young people from the 1920s who saw them as a blasphemous movement against god and art, a judgment Siqueiros expressed thus: “To the students, influenced by many of their old reactionary teachers, both in politics and in art, our works seemed like a kind of pre-Hispanic idolatrous resurrection and something positively ugly”7 (A. Siqueiros 1977, 190–191). In the last half of his memoirs, Siqueiros also described cannabis as a substance inseparable from Mexican prisons and the working classes, an association that resurfaces over and over in this book, and which brought closer crime and art in a performative ideal not unlike the one examined as a structural principle of Oscar Acosta’s life in the previous chapter: that of a criminal artist.

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Later in the twentieth century, users of illegal substances like marijuana, coca, and opium displayed a similar relation of resistance to traditions, militarization and capitalism in the cities as these earlier users. Following this logic, one could think of the drug war as yet another legacy from the Cold War and its nuclear project, but also as a result of the prejudices against the first drug users of the nineteenth-century, often mestizos from discriminated populations or part of criminal underworlds. By the mid-twentieth century, as Latin American urban areas grew bigger and more multicultural, in places like Colombia and Mexico, minorities of intellectuals from the recently formed middle classes increasingly began to approach those outcasts, their culture, their slang, neighborhoods, and regions, as well as their preferred substances. The critical stances toward society assumed by artistic movements like Muralismo or the Onda, and their reluctance to identify exclusively with their Hispanic heritage as national elites had, was also a result of these newly found proximities. Drug use, traffic, and distribution very early in the century had allowed for that cultural dynamism, which constituted a chance at a bottomup sort of capitalism that put capitalistic value in crisis, as is well expressed by Veronica Gago, who observed that informality also became a constituent of reality in baroque economies, even in the neoliberal turn of the region at the end of the century: “The informal as a source of i­ ncommensurability, that is, as a dynamic that puts the objective measurement of the value created by these economies in crisis”8 (Gago 2014, 21). In this chapter on Mexico, readers will see how amid such informality and crisis, the political and societal context became more repressive for Latin American writers who held a commitment to a renewal of social values, aesthetics, and psychoactive consumerism. Narcotics and their illegal industries would become, in fact, the new international enemies after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ultimately leading to the invention and deployment of the label “Narco-terrorism.” Such is the synthesis of José Agustín, a main figure in the 1960’s countercultural “literatura de la Onda” in Mexico, who made the following reflection about the years following 1968: The politically and financially dominant groups promoted a cultural counterrevolution through the demonization of drugs, the myth of drug trafficking as an international villain, by dispersing sensationalism about AIDS and the identification of communism as terrorism and of terrorism as a manifestation of the devil.9 (Agustín 1996, 100)

The wise Mazateca Aristeo Matías once told the Wassons in the 1950s that they could pursue the very same path to knowledge he did, also all by themselves: “After many experiences with the mushrooms I do not doubt what don Aristeo said. At first, the beginner is confused and lost in wonder, but with repeated experiences he comes to deal with the mushrooms on equal terms”

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(Wasson 1980, 18). There is a discipline of usage that sometimes, as much with the individuals observed by anthropologist Eugenio Gómez Maillefert in the 1920s as with the ones from the 1960s on, expressed itself via spoken and written language. Indeed, from these descriptions, readers learn how repetition allows for an act of renaming. For the next generations, authors like José Agustín, Gerardo De la Torre, Margarita Dalton, and others from the Onda group, developing a new language, will become a supreme ideal. Also inspired by mestizo criminals and their jargon, as well as by traditional minorities and tribes, their rejection of the national projects and society resulted from visions turned into speech which ultimately also led to mystic extremes and visionary experiments of meaning. WHERE LITERATURE AND ORALITY CONVERGE: EXPLORING VISIONARY TRADITIONS BEYOND RACIAL AND CLASS PREJUDICE The increasing incarceration of hallucinogen users everywhere would of course be initially exacerbated under pressures of the Nixon administration in the United States. Yet its internal escalation after the 1970s, also corresponded with an internal conflict ongoing in Mexico throughout the second half of the twentieth century, particularly after the police and army killings of young protesters in Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968. Writing on the 1960s in a 1991 text, Octavio Paz aptly dissected the ideological nature of the conflict and the zealous prosecution of the War on Drugs and its criminalization of young Mexican users: Since it is a dissidence that spreads, prohibition takes the form of a fight against a contagion of the spirit and against an opinion. Authorities manifest an ideological zeal: they pursue a heresy, not a crime. Thus, the attitude of other centuries towards leprosy and dementia, which were not seen as diseases but as incarnations of evil, is repeated.10 (Paz 1995, 261)

After comparing persecuted drug users in Mexico with ostracized lepers, a comparison which readers will in fact reencounter further ahead used by José Revueltas, Paz moved on to even suggest hallucinatory practices as a means of collective action. For him, the youth had strived to build a rite around visions but failed, since rites only rise as an effect of time and long processes. In modernity, the ritual had only been replaced by the political meeting, but “today they have become official ceremonies”11 (Paz 1995, 266), so transcendence lacked a channel and a place by then in mainstream society. Paz’s commentary spoke to the potential of the imagination to bring hallucination and politics closer through the enactment of human ritual in a

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reality in which party politics had started to turn into mere formal officialism. They had become incapable of addressing the true needs and voices of young people, marginal groups and those with alternative ways of life. Paz’s ideas also tell, mostly indirectly, of the context and difficulties faced by artists during the 1960s and 1980s in Latin America, many of them dealing with the challenge of creating written registers of their interactions with hallucination, in a textual rendering of their visions. “Knowledge, Drugs, Inspiration,” whose title is suggestive enough, introduces us to the dilemmas and challenges of authors in Mexico who would strongly advocate for revolutionary politics or stances at the margin of traditional parties. Particularly the lack of leadership and pragmatism of the Communist Party had condemned the proletariat to remain headless and without transcendence, to quote José Revueltas’s book from 1972 on the subject Essay on a Headless Proletariat.12 I treat hallucination here as a synaptic agency (between the user and the substance, but also with other users, spectators, and readers). Communities of the New World (and the Old) have not only experimented with these substances for millennia but often produced art and narratives through a creative conjunction with them. In the case of Mexico, instead of building an archive of the innumerable mentions of hallucinogens, I have chosen to collect and analyze those visionary works that make hallucination core to their structure. Although not always deemed a hallucinogenic, cannabis remains part of the pipilzintzintlis category of the Mexicas, and it is most definitely a visionary substance with its own traditions in urban and rural areas. For general context, I reference the meticulous data in the exhaustive literary compendium by Jorge García-Robles, Antología del vicio: aventuras y desventuras de la mariguana en México, Ricardo Pérez Montfort’s Tolerancia y prohibición: aproximaciones a la historia social y cultural de las drogas en México 1840–1940, the cultural analysis of Isaac Campos in Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs, and even some of the social and literary history by Juan Pablo García, writer of Manifiesto Pacheco from 1985, La disipada historia de la marihuana en México 1492–2010, and El marihuano en la narrativa mexicana del siglo XX, the most recent of a long genealogy. Books like República Pacheca by Enrique Feliciano revisit the archival information detailed in dense academic versions as the ones mentioned, and render it into a more popular format, offering a brief chronicle of this subculture in Mexico. I attempt to make a comprehensive reading of some of the authors mentioned in those analyses and others left out, and to identify the key aspects that link them to a more ample series of ancestral and new practices. Very often quoted as a picturesque memory of 1921, the article “La marihuana in México” by Eugenio Gómez Maillefert has received less analytical

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attention to its expressive resources and critical observations. For example, when describing a married couple making candles and rolling joints, a scene portraying a familiar association of proletarian labor and hallucinogenic substances which makes dull, mechanical repetition easier, language is key: The man, eternally “grifo” (under the marihuana effects) and almost without ceasing to “dárselas” (to smoke), turns the wheel to make his candles with the unconsciousness of an idiot, as the woman, in a corner of the room, also “grifa” (under the marihuana effects), “cura y espulga” the marihuana (prepares and cleans the seeds from the buds) and twists it into “moriquetos” (marijuana cigarettes) intended for sale.13 (Gómez M. 1920, 28)

“La marihuana in México” is quoted here as the earliest articulate attempt at capturing and deploying the narrative voices of urban users of marihuana in Mexico. This is accomplished not only by listing words and meanings in a short “Vocabulary” section at the end of the text but also by dynamically integrating the expressions in the descriptions throughout the field diary, giving credence to the assurance that it “contains only the vocabulary generally used among them,”14 meaning among cannabis users (Gómez M. 1920, 28). Eugenio Gómez Maillefert was a diplomat in the early twentieth century and a personal secretary of Manuel Gamio, a Mexican anthropologist considered the father of modern indigenismo studies in Mexico, briefly in 1917 (Marquina 1994, 28). He came from a Michoacán family torn between romantic and modernist values (Chowning 1999, 313–315)—the past and the present—and documented folklore among rural communities (Gómez M. 1923). Gómez’s article on cannabis was first published in Ethnos, a journal also edited by Gamio in Mexico and later reprinted for the Journal of American Folklore, edited by none other than the prestigious Franz Boas—the very anthropologist to coin the term “cultural relativism,” a concept key to these notes and narratives. The article included a brief users’ lexicon and pages with “some songs by marihuana users”15 (Gómez M. 1920, 31) and even sheet music already present in the first version from Ethnos (Pérez M. 2016, Ch. 3). Gómez applied the gaze of the ethnographer, but the voice of the article became that of the users, deploying “a particular sympathy on the part of the author for marijuana and those who smoked it”16 (Pérez M. 2016, Ch. 3). Performing out loud some of the sheet music printed in the article for this analysis found that they communicated an arrhythmic tenderness, an elusive if basic harmony. Whoever really composed the lyrics evince, avant la lettre, what some poems by Parménides García in his book Mediodía will read like many decades later: “I am so high I can’t / even rise my head / With red eyes / and a dry, so dry, mouth / A Mouth dry, so dry. / Dry, dry the mouth. / The Mouth, mouth, mouth the drought”17 (in Gómez M. 1920, 31). Marihuana, although already clandestine and illegal, was readily

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available everywhere in the city and it was effectively used by almost every social class considered in the article: “Ex-convicts, pickpockets, soldiers, prostitutes, middle-class individuals and well-to-do young people from the best society”18 (28). Gómez Maillefert observes contemporaries and perhaps even neighbors as if dealing with an urban tribe during a field experience. This allows for the text to render strange the quotidian reality of Mexico city, becoming highly expressive of hallucinatory cultures, and even turning into an ultimate example of them. We deal at all times with a mundane kind of illumination and even a constellation of influences as we read, since “All marijuana users like to initiate other people into their vice”19 (Gómez M. 1920, 30). By tracing “the use of marijuana in Mexico because of how widespread it is”20 (28) the text by Gómez becomes a brief social portrait of all levels of the Republic in the 1920s, just after the Mexican Revolution. In Gómez’s telling, marijuana users become an inescapable presence which at times borders a secret society within society. But along with this sense of being surrounded, there is an element of parody to “La marihuana en México,” as if the starting voice of the anthropologist was completely overtaken by that of the “marihuanos.” His observations made a case for the sophisticated relation between hallucination and culture very early in the century, showing its function as a salve for modern anguish and documenting how it provided its effects to all marginals, minorities, and subcultures of the time. It is clear that by themselves hallucinogens could not provide intellectual contents, but they provide a frame of meaning and instigate alternative synapses. They may become sources of new culture and exercise a creative agency by the way they lead us to rearrange our sensory input, and in the new relations they suggest in the contents already provided by language, idiosyncrasy, and tradition. By noting the direct register of the street users and other classes who used cannabis, the article by Gómez is slowly taken over by their voice and identity, as when describing a young and smart rogue at a bar that the writer deemed of low class, whose peculiar altered state of mind seemed to make a satire even of the field diary dynamic sustained by Gómez, presenting a subculture of pure parody. The description of this man, another cannabis user, becomes a caricature of itself: Once he has smoked too much, he lets everybody know by saying: “I have a red light” (referring to his blood-injected eyes under the marihuana effects), and from then on he can only speak with words whose first syllables are just similar to the words he actually means but not the same: Eg. “—¿No querétaro tomatlán un tequesquite chicorro?” (Don’t you want to have a little tequila?) and he keeps talking like that for a long time with surprising ease.21 (Gómez M. 1920, 30)

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Known words and concepts are rearranged, always transformed into something new, always “another.” Traces of an entanglement between a way of speech and hallucinatory experiences appear throughout Gómez’s observations as they reconcile literature and orality. These comments bring back the reflections of the Mazateca wise-woman María Sabina herself in regard to the first healer she saw as a child, Juan Manuel, as he worked with mushrooms in a ceremony to heal her uncle, using a singing speech full of metaphors: “It was different to the one we spoke every day. I was drawn to it, although it was a language I could not comprehend”22 (Sabina in Estrada 1979, 43). The challenges of the translator to Spanish from the original Mazatec become evidence of one of Fernando Benítez’s strongest conclusions after dialoguing with her—regarding Sabina’s speech and probably hallucinatory syntaxis in general—as an original device of her own creation (Benítez 2002, 377–378). Apparently, mestizo culture has adopted this trait from its Indigenous origins. After the proper ceremony and hunt for the peyote had been followed, and once they had ingested the hallucinogenic buttons, a rite of renaming the world, seemingly common among Huicholes from Northern Mexico started to happen. The rite of renaming involves its own profanation and satire by means of visionary humor and parody, as Benítez also realized in his book from 1968 Los indios de México (2002, 44). He had been forced on the Peregrination to Viracota after the tribe was promised transportation by the government. The renaming of all things following a peyote intake was not an introduction but the ceremony itself, which took all night and continued even a number of nights later among the Wixáricas (“Huicholes” being the Spanish term used by Benítez). The names for women alluded to corporeal features which the nicknames underlined, either scornfully or tenderly, even with an echo of the socalled Mexican “albur” or inuendo, a form of speech where the sense of words keeps a double, often erotic, gender-specific meaning. The kids being renamed as “portable sacks,” their sandals “bicycles,” and so on, develops a marvelous game which is also a form of ritual and seems to renew quotidian experience providing them with “an inexhaustible source of joy”23 (Benítez 2002, 47). MARIHUANA AND OTHER HALLUCINOGENS IN SOCIETY, ART, AND CULTURE IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY In “La marihuana en México,” Gómez Maillefert also observed how different providers and dealers made cannabis an extensive presence throughout the social body of Mexico City in the 1920s: The “soldaderas,” the legendary women of the Mexican Revolution, sold it in the barracks. It was available at the “herbolarias” in the markets, precisely the Indigenous herbal providers

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which had been instrumental for Alzate y Ramírez research on Pipilzintzintlis in the eighteenth century. The flowers could also be found at the “witches and healers,” and at the “candle shops,” as well as in prisons, where inmates trafficked with it—similar to those in El Apando, a Mexican short story from the 1960s by José Revueltas—and there were even “street vendors”24 who distributed it (Gómez M. 1920, 29). Although many hallucinogens do, marihuana in particular reappears over and over as disperse references in the whole of Mexican culture. In novels of revolutionary realism like those by Mariano Azuela, for example, it is seldom mentioned, but when it is included it is as evidence of some level of degeneration (Campos 2012, 87–88), whereas in Gómez Maillefert’s article, and in more modern writings, even by Azuela himself, it appears as a creative principle of satire and parody. Gómez also recounts an event organized by what seems like very high elites, people who would rent a big room from some very old building in Mexico and adorn it with skulls and green light effects for reading poetry and initiating neophytes in the effects of marihuana and literature (Gómez M. 1920, 29). This type of secular mass, mixing rituals and art in Mexico City, was even mentioned earlier by the poet Juan José Tablada, in a text he wrote in 1908 “A certain article of mine that, under the title of ‘The Marihuana Black Masses,’ denounced the profane and dangerous vice”25 (Tablada 1993, 208). Already in the second volume of his biography Las sombras largas— which collected his journalistic publications from 1926 to 1928 and remained unpublished until 1993—Tablada illustrated how there was a “vice slang”26 that accompanied the users and clearly originated in prisons (Tablada 1993, 212), while many intimate friends were using both the slang and the hallucinogen by then. One of them had even deployed it as an alternative to nicotine: “there is nothing more harmful than tobacco”27 (in Tablada 1993, 212), he explained to the scandalized narrator. Tablada quoted street users using expressions also deployed by the apocryphal memoirs El Móndrigo many decades later in 1969 (El Móndrigo n. d., 30) and mentioned in “La Marihuana en México”—“To give oneself a touch; to ‘take three’”28 (Gómez M. 1920, 32), meaning the three inhalations each user has when sharing marihuana with others—and in Doña Juanita (no author 1938, 12), illustrating a vivid connection between non-contemporaneous users via a continued slang: “There is no shortage of initiated friends who will give you the key to these colloquialisms: ‘mota’ is marijuana, ‘grifo’ is the smoker, and ‘darse las tres’ is to smoke it”29 (Tablada 1993, 212). With extreme preoccupation, the poet observed even close acquaintances and friends using marihuana in the 1920s all over Mexico City, with the climax of one anecdote being his unintended arrival at a party of “grifos”—at least a dozen of them his own friends—where a crowd smoked cannabis,

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hallucinated, and celebrated together. The narrator went up the stairs in “Café Colón,” one of the most renowned coffee shops in the first decades of the twentieth century in México, and found a crowd laughing unstoppably at one of the guests who narrated a made-up movie. Meanwhile, another hallucinating performer made the noises of a pretended cinematographer and other sound effects, as the former narrated a senseless series of references and collectively imagined an impossible race being projected on one of the venue’s walls, even alluding to a traditional drink-like pulque while making up a series of characters for the amused multitude: “Look, guys! Here comes the Korean dog dressed as a charro and holding a pulque leather in his hand .  .  . his staff officers include Pirrimplín, La Mariposa, Fra Diavolo and the General Lobo Guerrero”30 (in Tablada 1993, 215). What the poet calls a collective madness is soon explained by the smell and the slang of the users: “Indeed, I had stumbled in the midst of a ‘grifos’ conclave”31 (215). A playful dynamic arises where surrealism meets everyday life, and culture is appropriated via meetings like the one described. There, hallucination borders on the creative spontaneity of a children’s group game, but also has the vigor of art or participatory theater in a way that could only be imagined to happen in the Mexico of the early twentieth century, whose secular pleasures were originally permeated by visionary traditions and where hallucination was originally a social experience, even if regulated and defamed later. The inclusion of modern sites of culture-making like the cafe and the city within the mestizo field of visionary experiences suggests a more comprehensive frame for the political struggles these sites accompanied locally, nationally, and hemispherically in a context of world criminalization and repression of youth. The farce Doña Juanita: Principio de sainete por un transeúnte del siglo veinte: Circulación confidencial, impropio para gente decente y señoritas from 1938 is a bound booklet that documents a fleeting but interesting part of Mexican history. Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegras’s efforts toward legalization of a number of narcotics—as well as investigations on the topic like those by Jorge Segura Millán—stand as memories of what would be a temporary statemonopoly over psychoactive drugs, between April 23, 1937, and June 7, 1940, in México (Mejía 2019, 43). In that period, a series of Mexican enemies and supporters of cannabis came to debate increasingly more in public media, and, in fact, it was under the advice of Salazar Viniegra that substances like cocaine, marihuana, and heroin became legal and free, as well as subject to the government’s regulations. Then President Lázaro Cárdenas decreed these nationalistic measures as a way to aid addicts rather than punish them, only to remove them after a few years under pressures from the United States, which saw the initiative as narcotics distribution by the state and later suspended the exports of any medicines to Mexico. Cárdenas had to back down when the Second World War

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made it impossible to conduct commerce with Europe, the single other provider of pharmaceutical drugs at the time apart from the United States (Mejía 2019, 43). Despite being only temporary, legalization took the cultural relativism of these practices to the political agenda of the country for the very first time ever, as it contended the geopolitics of prohibition and criminalization. Besides voicing the tensions within Mexican society of the 1930s, this still largely uncommented-on twenty-four-page comedy, Doña Juanita: Outset of a Farce by a Pedestrian of the Twentieth Century, Confidential Circulation, Inappropriate for Ladies32 also allows us to grasp the growing diversity in world perceptions of narcotics and hallucinogens, both at a national and at a hemispheric level. The parodic allegory presents a house party dialogue between a middle-aged marihuana (Doña Juanita) and younger—recently invented during the Industrial Revolution—Heroin and Morphine, all female characters, accompanied by masculine versions of alcohol and opium. Both the use of the title “Doña” as a sign of respect and the emphasis on Juanita’s growing age in the brief comedy emphasize the long-standing tradition of usage in the country. Debating national prohibitions and the growing press against marihuana, Doña Juanita compares herself to another of its famous users, Diego Rivera, who had partaken of the cannabis experimentations mentioned by Alfaro Siqueiros within Muralismo. Doña Juanita claimed she had to go to New York like the painter to be acclaimed by all people and only then was appreciated back in Mexico, after being honored in jazz songs like the ones by Cab Calloway, who composed lyrics about her and triumphed by her side (Doña Juanita, n.a. 1938, 12). The allegorical “Juanita” also alluded to an interesting association between socialist revolution and hallucinogens I shall explore further: Who has ever reached “the masses” like me? This is how socialism should be preached; this is how one raises the banner of Mexico in a strange land. This is how I take revenge, by conquering the United States and taking back much more than they have invaded in Mexico. They had the oil, the mines, the railways, the agriculture and the quick-lunches, but their country’s youth is now mine, the crazy and impetuous teenagers of the Universities; the people of tomorrow, that is. In a word, I own their future.33 (Doña Juanita 1938, 13)

Albeit part of an exquisite parody of capitalism, Doña Juanita’s words make clear that the neocolonial dynamic of US meddling in Latin America intensified after the Monroe Doctrine, which justified US interventions in all of America, while some substances were enforcing cultural resistance and a national identity locally. Her lines made a case for a paranoid anxiety that remains to this day throughout policies and administrations bent on enforcing a War on Drugs that operates as yet another neocolonial device for policing the continent. Ultimately, something else can be perceived from Doña Juanita’s words, an effective antagonism between de facto interventions of power and imperialism,

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and the cultural influence of certain substances. Although on opposing fronts, both sides were included in the same dynamic processes of modernization. As societies changed all over the continent and the world, in a conjunction that inevitably pitted imperial and state violence against a number of visionary subcultures, the generational gaps got deeper. In the anonymous farce, under the guise of innocent humor, the allegory of marihuana and its markets is in fact suggesting its own usage as a form of revolt. The satire marks a relation inherited from the past, from original figures which are not mentioned directly but were part of the readers’ very context during the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, memories like those of Pancho Villa or corrido songs such as “La cucaracha,” also remembered by Oscar Acosta in the previous chapter. We also see the text relate the substance with contemporary geopolitics, aesthetics, socialism, the youth, mass consumer culture, and the future. The comic one-act play moved on to mark yet another distinction between cannabis and other psychotropic substances in the world of the late 1930s, when alcohol and opium had served imperialism and consolidated French and English conquests in China, with the growing complicity of Japan (Doña Juanita 1938, 23). For the allegorical character of Opium, who sees himself alongside heroin and morphine and in contrast to Doña Juanita, it is a fact that “All fascism is our ally”34 (24). However, Opium also notes the comforting powers of cannabis over working classes which have been abandoned by the state, adding how it is harmless and not toxic, and even a source of union, central to culture in a context with no cultural institutions: “The poor in Mexico (as everywhere) have only fantasy to account for the happiness that reality denies them. They do not have money for the cinema, nor for the theater. They do not know how to read. They don’t have libraries or sports fields”35 (20–21). Opium adds in recognition of what Doña Juanita offers: What are the poor to do? What would you want them to do? You fill them with promises. You are an illusion and a chimera, and arrive loaded with fantasy and legend. You are approachable and welcoming. You bring them together and get them ready for anything.36 (21)

The authorship of the Principio de sainete por un transeúnte del siglo veinte has been attributed to Salazar Viniegra, both because he is mentioned by name by the protagonist, Doña Juanita, and since the single copy that seems to remain of the bound booklet was found among his personal documents by the family of the doctor, which also manages his archive. One more clue of authorship comes when marihuana is described as harmless by Opio, simply “a MYTH”37 (Doña Juanita 1938, 21), coinciding with the title of an article by said specialist, “El mito de la marihuana” from 1938. There, Salazar Viniegra tells of his experiments administering varied dosages to almost all manner of subjects (Salazar 1938, 216).

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As if attesting to the relationship I explore between visions and words, the Doctor even included the titles of a number of poems and reproduced the entirety of one, all written by a young patient of his, only referred to as J. L. A., who often smoked at night before writing and seemed bent on exploring formal innovations in his writing “as a sample of his style, I reproduce some lines of a ‘CINEMA-POEM’”38 (Salazar 1938, 224). Said verses structure an impossible vision mixing the work of nature and the art of man in one, as perhaps hallucinatory writing does, describing an ecosystem as a temple carved by human hands: “Caves that appear sculpted by Etruscan specters / with gloomy and bizarre images of sailors / and shells and octopi and cuttlefish and argonauts”39 (Salazar 1938, 225). The two texts just mentioned, the play Doña Juanita and the article penned by Salazar Viniegra, provide robust materializations of something that is not merely a register of hallucinogenic rituals, jargon, or ideals, but goes beyond that, toward the suggestion of a whole hallucinated subculture even at a transnational level, one that parodied and reorganized hierarchies from whatever the society of origin of the users was, and which allowed for the encounter of Indigenous and mestizo orality and written culture in Spanish.

HALLUCINATION AND MESTIZAJE AS FORMAL AND STRUCTURAL PRINCIPLES IN THE MEXICAN ARTS RESISTING A HISPANIC REJECTION: THE WISE-WOMAN MARÍA SABINA AND POP TRANSCULTURATION With respect to hallucination as a structural creative principle beyond literature, one of the best examples comes from the text quoted at the beginning of this chapter, the book Me llamaban el Coronelazo, the memoirs of muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, another “criminal artist” who would be repeatedly held in Lecumberri for his political activism and his communist ideas. He even wrote his memoirs from that prison during his last imprisonment, between 1960 and 1964, dictating for Julio Scherer García (Arenal 1977, 7–9). The series of anecdotes retold by Siqueiros, set in Mexico in the late 1920s, become a testimony of the influences I have tried to point to in previous sections, presenting the encounter of native mestizo visionary knowledge, Indigenous legacies, and aesthetic innovations among modern artists. In the chapter “Las primeras batallas del muralismo,” the painter told of his earlier experiences creating public art alongside other young Mexican artists, like Fermín Revueltas and Diego Rivera. The search for a truly Mexican culture and aesthetics led the group to embracing mariguana as a means to

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connect with their Aztec heritage, even though most of them quit after having a number of accidents and decided to limit themselves to the effects of “our innate mariguana and leave it at that”40 (A. Siqueiros 1977, 208). Diego Rivera even brought the muralists closer to unusual characters like the one called “Chema,” described as a “Mariguana Scholar”41 (205), addressed as such in Siqueiros’s memoirs and lacking a last name. Even if Chema, the so-called “academic” of marihuana, mistakenly gave the plant a Mexican origin—though I have emphasized how the first hemp seeds came from Europe which in turn had gotten them from Asia—it is clear that the artists were involuntarily reflecting in detail on the particularities of hallucinations and art in the Americas, and on the pipilzintzintlis as a general category of visionary substances among the Mexicas, which could include even foreign plants, to quote Chema’s words: “What is extraordinary and exceptional about the art of the Toltecs, as of all the pre-Hispanic artists of Mexico, particularly the sculptors, is due to the fact that they make their creations under the influence of cannabis indica”42 (in A. Siqueiros 1977, 204). He defended arguments which, albeit not verbatim, reappeared in the search for the identity of other Latin American intellectuals later in that century in regard to hallucinogens: “Without a doubt—he began by saying—until now the only thing that is transcendent and of positively universal value given to the world by Mexico, our homeland, is mariguana”43 (206). Along with the suggestion by Fermín Revueltas to write to the president requesting that smoking the hallucinogenic plant become a mandatory practice in the country, since it was healthy to the brain functions of fellow Mexicans (206), there was also the idea, by this “mariguana scholar,” that this humble popular substance was the ultimate enhancer of intellectual inquiries and the answer for Mexico and Muralismo: Inside this small package that did not cost more than one peso and fifty cents, there is science, there is art, there is politics, there is everything we need not only for you to make that gigantic art that you want to build, but also for the salvation of our country.44 (in A. Siqueiros 1977, 206)

Chema’s words, albeit including exaggerations, mistakes, and caricatures, outline a series of ideas that are fundamental to the continental corpus of mestizo visionary works I compiled. The Sindicato de Pintores, Escultores y Grabadores Revolucionarios de México that the muralists had founded in the 1920s would in fact attempt to embrace cannabis from that moment on: “We approved smoking mariguana to thus reach the excellence of the plastic artists of Mexico’s pre-Gachupin antiquity”45 (A. Siqueiros 1977, 205). Made into a political prisoner in Lecumberri, due to his activism with the Communist Party in the 1930s and also intermittently in the 1940s, Siqueiros noted it was ever-present in the prison. Not only that, but the muralist also documented it as part of deep metaphysical dialogues, in which elevated

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aesthetics, mysticism, and philosophy became a topic among humble prisoners coming from vastly differing backgrounds. The quote remains beautiful and funny: “On another occasion, I was observing from above a conversation of mariguana users. And the theme was: ‘What color is the spirit?’”46 (in A. Siqueiros 1977, 272). Often it is the case that the influences for marihuana popularization are reduced to rock and roll and Counterculture, but, once included within a wider visionary tradition connecting different experiences, from the precolonial to the neocolonial, its mestizo traits become more visible. But perhaps the strongest example against any “pure” visionary traditions stems from María Sabina herself, the healer from Huautla in whose rituals “Catholic elements blend with the pagan mushroom rite and the Indians see no incompatibility” (Wasson 1980, xxi). Self-taught in the ways of magic, her experience as quoted by both Álvaro Estrada and Fernando Benítez (Benítez 2002, 346) shows that her shamanism is an ultimate form of self-didacticism via psilocybin mushrooms, which she had taken since childhood. After seeing which mushrooms were used by a healer as he attended her uncle, she found them alone in the fields and addressed them directly with a wish: “If I eat you, and you, I know that you will make me sing beautifully . . . —I told them”47 (Sabina in Estrada 1979, 44). Sabina’s is an example of hybridization, as she mixed Catholic and Indigenous beliefs via her own intuition and the knowledge acquired by an excessive dose of mushrooms she ingested at a time when her sister had fallen ill: Only when the sacred children are taken, the Principal Beings can be seen and not otherwise. And that is because the mushrooms are holy; they give wisdom. Wisdom is Language. Their Language is in the Book. The Book is granted by the Principal Beings.48 (Sabina in Estrada 1979, 56–57)

She actually used the word “libro,” a “book,” borrowing from Spanish, since it does not exist in Mazatec (Wasson in Estrada 1979, 15), using a term that impeccably addressed the fact that an oral tradition was transitioning into a written register. It was unexpected that Gordon Wasson, a banker, and his partner, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, a pediatrician, would become so interested in mushrooms and culture, dividing their vision of the globe between communities that punished the usage of fungi and others that held it as sacred (Wasson et al. 2008, 23). Sabina is now a strong voice in any visionary mestizo corpus after the Wassons’ publications made her well known. She became a transcultural point of reference for new generations which posed radically new interpretations for her own universe of meaning. They were not unlike the

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young travelers looking for a guru who visited Albert Hofmann in his home in Europe after he had invented LSD (Hofmann 2009, 191): For some time youngsters of both sexes with long hair and strange clothing showed up. They wore shirts of various colors and necklaces. Many came. Some of these young people were looking for me so that I could reveal myself and fast with the little one that sprouts. “We have come to look for God,” they said. It was difficult for me to explain to them that the veladas were not held with the simple desire to find God, but rather with the specific purpose of curing the diseases that our people suffered from.49 (Sabina in Estrada 1979, 112)

But these spiritual differences were part of a bigger process. A last hint at the real consequences of the War on Drugs on visionary Mexico is perfectly put in the last chapters of Maria Sabina’s account of her life as she retold it to Estrada in Mazatec language for him to translate it into Spanish. The definitive argument against a stagnant idea of visionary practices as well as an apt appraisal of the destructive capacity of the Drug War in terms of culture comes from analyzing the biases of the federal agents who took Maria Sabina in custody along with a man apprehended elsewhere, as they explained to her: “Just like you, he dedicates himself to driving people crazy”50 (in Estrada 1979, 113). They were referring to a drug dealer in Huautla. From the point of view of authorities, María Sabina and the drug dealer in town were initially confounded and detained under similar charges, during an incursion of the army and federal police: “They intervened in Huautla starting in the summer of 1969 to expel the young people, foreigners and Mexicans, who had turned the place into a center of rampant hallucinogenation [sic]”51 (Estrada 1979, 113, note 3). Sabina was asked directly by an agent whether she would provide mushrooms to him, and she answered positively, “Yes, because I’d believe you come looking for God”52 (113). Although the sage is finally let free after being taken to the Presidencia Municipal, readers find out what actually happened: “A Mazateco countryman whom the police were initially looking for, had accused me of selling to young people a kind of tobacco that drove them crazy when smoked”53 (115). For María Sabina, the accusation—which could only refer to marihuana, a plant she never used—was a deadly offense, showing her own biases against a foreign substance. She was willing to fight with her hands, with knives, or even with guns against the accuser, against whom she used words of violence otherwise unheard from her: I know him, I know that he is the son of the deceased Josefina, one of my personal acquaintances in the region, but I have never hurt this individual. This situation upsets me and I’m ready to go to blows with this man.54 (in Estrada 1979, 115)

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It is extremely important how even in the middle of a serious threat she recognized him as a neighbor, he was no stranger in Huautla but a mestizo born in the region like she was. One thing is clear from the alleged accusation, though, and it is that the dealer of marihuana and other hallucinogens in Huautla probably did think of himself as comparable to María Sabina to the point of declaring it not as an imputation, but rather as an attempt to justify himself by posing a cultural argument against his own arrest, suggesting a parallel between them. And the police indeed agreed with that mix-up to the point of taking Sabina’s statement after a short detention. Although the dealer was sent to jail and the healer released, the anecdote is mighty telling of the ambiguity that would accompany the War on Drugs even in remote regions of Mexico which were permeated at all levels by visionary knowledge. Mass consumer culture and influences from the United States and the world built up a distance with immediate national perceptions which allowed for an unprejudiced dialogue with pre-revolutionary and even pre-Cortesian traits of visionary culture. Although nationalism and “indigenismo” had already been manifested as an official effort to rescue said traditions, they did so in the logic of the museum and the archive, while the youth of the 1960s and 1970s embraced living consumptions and ways of thinking from the living Indigenous peoples. Monsiváis criticized this by stating that the Avándaro Rock Festival of 1971 resulted from imitating the United States, but did it not happen similarly with Woodstock, after it embraced Mexican hallucinogenic culture, imitating consumptions from foreigners like marihuana? “Ever since its inception, the Onda remains anti-nationalist, imitative and apolitical. Politics—seen blurrily and morally as a domain of policemen and crime bosses— is considered an ancient vice, a stranger to the beatification of the psychedelic poster”55 (Monsiváis 1977, 234). The utterly disapproving attitude of Monsiváis toward the young generation in 1968 left no doubts of his position: “the education of the senses, the adventurism of acid trips, dreams as a whim of the will. Culturally, what is heard prevails over what is read”56 (1977, 230). Although Monsiváis was horrified at how the youth embraced strange and foreign influences like Baudelaire and rock and roll, privileging the oral over the written, it is a trait shared by the writers I examine here. Outsiders to ordinary reality, which include the Wassons, Maria Sabina, and the Wixáricas observed by Benitez during the visionary ritual of the Peregrinación a Viracota, but also artists to come afterward, like José Agustín, Gerardo De la Torre, Luis Carrión, Parménides García, and Margarita Dalton, proved to be highly politicized. The sensorial for them is explored in a program of change which was committed and deeply political, if not orthodox. Could it be that rock and roll and hippie clichés were merely a trigger for a deeper national process? Instead of echoing accusations made by the

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government against the very student movement of 1968, is it possible to think of magazines like Piedra Rodante or a music festival like Avándaro in 1971, allegedly motivated by rock, as mere subterfuges for an even deeper interest in an ancestral human practice which remains vital and in constant synthesis in rural Mexico as much as in the urban one, negatively politicized by means of the War on Drugs but also a potential source of positive activism? Still, María Sabina did not and could never perceive herself on equal terms with the marihuana dealer who reported her to the police. For her, grounded in tradition, purity was not an option. The profanation by Wasson, who came to her referred by Cayetano García, the Huautla Syndic (Wasson 1980, 287), implied a decadence and a force of destruction from which her ancestral magic could not ever recuperate: “If Cayetano had not brought the foreigners . . . the holy children would retain their power”57 (Sabina in Estrada 1979, 121). For Sabina the power of the mushrooms had diminished as a whole; new casual users observed no fasting, they did not use the mediation of a wise person, and it was the same for them where they took the “children”: “Never, that I can remember, were the holy children eaten with such disrespect”58 (112). She speaks of these practices among the youth as perhaps their very religious Catholic parents or grandparents back at home would describe their other behaviors and their ways of speaking, dancing, or dressing. Regarding the influences of visionary substances among Mexican artists and intellectuals, and ultimately among the masses, it is important to realize that this has already happened the other way around; the masses have changed visionary tradition forever, as Sabina asserts when observing the decaying power of the mushrooms: “The holy children lost their purity. They lost their strength, they broke down”59 (1979, 119); and yet another healer, Apolonio Terán, tells Álvaro Estrada of a deep change: “Now the mushrooms speak nguilé (English)! Yes, it is the language that foreigners speak”60 (in Estrada 1979, 120, note 1). Although these all seem like bold transcultural assumptions, they operate within traditions which did meet and coexist for centuries, and it is Carlos Monsiváis who uses the sentence “The other family of Maria Sabina”61 (Monsiváis 1977, 241) to refer to the jipitecas (Mexican hippies drawn by Aztec traditions). He despised these contemporaries—though similar to him in many ways—despite the fact that he recognized the experimental value of their collectivity: “In the peyote of the Huicholes and in the mushrooms of the Mazatecos, the Onda finds its most national and effective means of access to a mystical communion”62 (242). For mundane as much as for ritual consumption of the aforementioned peyote and mushrooms—and even for that of marihuana, brought from Spain along with the Catholic religion—synthesis and hybridization were not mere collateral effects but whole structural principles. Each from different

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realms of human knowledge, these observers—and the ones to come—were personally involved and aimed at reclaiming for written tradition a long line of oral practices. This transition to print culture coincides with a past and seemingly vast corpus, which critics can only grasp through the evidence rescued by Wasson and many other specialists, who analyzed a number of codices from New Spain and before, including some pre-Cortesian murals and artifacts in which the presence of mushrooms and visions constituted a testimony of a sophisticated agency amalgamating the users and the substances in a creative endeavor within the visionary practice, leaving a large number of examples in material culture (Wasson 1980, 57–231). By including María Sabina (in Zaid 1991, 34–35) and other visionary healers using peyote (15–17) in the selections of his Omnibus de poesía mexicana from 1971, and a whole section of “Poesía indígena” (7–94), Gabriel Zaid appropriated Indian hallucinations within Mexican literature. Inverting that procedure, here I aim to appropriate literature within hallucination. In said process, an effort to approach visionary and printing traditions coincides with the emphasis put by Wasson on “the word” as the ultimate revelation of hallucinogens, a complex, and even totemic, entanglement of image, orality, and literature, which María Sabina explained so well, “I only trust what the children tell me; for me that is enough, my only strength is my Language”63 (in Estrada 1979, 78). Visionary language is her very practice, that which distinguished her from all other practitioners: “I am not a curandera because I do not give strange herbal infusions to drink. I cure with language, nothing more. I am not a witch because I do no evil. I am a wise woman. Nothing more”64 (66). The writers I include next, who mostly published between the 1960s and 1980s, vividly practiced this principle, appropriating a language via profanation, not only using mushrooms, marihuana, or other active hallucinogenic components but in fact abusing them. This knowledge was not inherited nor taught by humans, as María Sabina put it “No mortal can teach that Language”65 (in Estrada 1979, 60), and as it is attested with almost scrupulously similar words by wise man Apolonio Terán: “There is no mortal who knows or who can teach such wisdom. My language was taught to me by the little mushroom”66 (120, note 1). Visions and phantasmagorias still only constitute a more superficial layer of what hallucination teaches, even if they remind of pure platonic ideas, or archetypes of beauty that remained very real for the users while evocative of “the magic of supreme literary expression, especially great poetry” (Wasson 1980, 27). A key idea of the corpus I trace here comes from this ultimate association with modern art and literature, like the divinator Aurelio Carreras from Huautla stated: The neophyte from the great world associates the mushrooms primarily with visions, but for those who know the Indian language of the shaman the

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mushrooms “speak” through the shaman. The mushroom is the Word: es habla, as Aurelio told me. (Wasson 1980, 225)

Although Wasson pointed to the evident contrasts and similarities between the Holy Communion of Catholicism and the experience of mushrooms “veladas”—how the night sessions of chanting, visions, and prayers are called—as a main element of the latter’s demonization (Wasson 1980, xviii), Fernando Benitez’s words on the subject are even more incisive, and they show the intolerant moralizing impulses that truly keep Americas’ mythologies open as a colonial wound: “The difference, as regards the hallucinogenic plants, consisted in the fact that the Indians believed they were communing with gods and the Spaniards with an evil devil”67 (Benítez 2002, 72). Still, hallucinogens and the practices that put them in use are to be found all over the Americas, and they remain a definitive legacy for the world. Schultes and Hofmann traced this particularity to cultural reasons, stating that “Mexico represents without a doubt the world’s richest area in diversity and use of hallucinogens in aboriginal societies” (1979, 27). As in the vision of María Sabina, visionary creations materialize in the idea of a book, opening up a new tradition of visionary writing in twentieth-century Mexico, one that will include those revolutionary oddballs unwanted by the Huautla police and disapproved by the more orthodox revolutionaries of the Left like Monsiváis. These cockroach-freaks, eccentric liberals, drug users, and mestizo intellectuals came to contend with official memory as they got closer to visionary Mexico. Completely averse to the ideals of “nation” as enforced by the police and their monopoly on violence, and resistant to forms of revolution that had become examples of dogmatic fanaticism, hallucination opened up the new in the old and showed the possibility of a dynamic transcultural history in the country. As put in Los indios de México, “the world is merely an immense metamorphosis: the third lesson of peyote”68 (Benítez 2002, 117). NATION, PARODY, AND HALLUCINATION: LA MAFIA AND LOS JUEGOS We arrive now at what was the very center of the Mexican cultural field back in the 1960s and 1970s, and the two novels that made a satire of it: La Mafia by Luis Guillermo Piazza and Los Juegos from 1967 by René Avilés Fabila. The nickname of La Mafia fused the idea of criminals and artists while it implied the visibility in culture that illegal drug markets were already gaining. Argentinian-Mexican Luis Guillermo Piazza adopted the name “La Mafia” to reinforce a satire of the cultural elite group including himself, Fernando Benítez, Carlos Fuentes, José Luis Cuevas, and Octavio Paz. It is an appellative that retrospectively may not be altogether funny. Still, the back

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cover of the novel’s first edition made a claim that appeared to be an attempt at a pun to be read alongside the title, alluding to the neo avant-garde group of intellectuals central to the argument and the nonlinear qualities of its writing, as well as to the exacerbated public partying its members bragged about: “La Mafia is the first strictly psychedelic novel to be published in Spanish. Written as a collage”69 (in Piazza 1968, back cover). The book created truly memorable images as it played on and with the archetypes of ancestral Mexican cultures facing modern globality, like when it described the Sun Pyramid of Teotihuacán: “At the top of the Pyramid of the Sun Octavio Paz used to place a teenager who smoked marijuana, who knows what would be happening now in the pyramid, covered as it was by the middle class”70 (Piazza 1968, 82). Associating a principle of collage and psychedelia, and the avant-garde gesture of discussing hallucinogens that would be attributed to the Onda group, the novel shows they were also an ineludible presence among hegemonic artists of Mexico. La Mafia stands as a strong parody of contemporary Mexicanness and its essentialist dilemmas, and not merely as “a stupid little work”71 (Avilés 2001, 10), as it is called by the author of the novel Los Juegos, an immediate opposite of La Mafia, which parodied the very same elite group under the name the “Clan.” None of the two texts seems truly “psychedelic” as a whole, though they do transmit altered states of consciousness as a presence everywhere in the Mexican cultural field, accompanying all sorts of aesthetic paradigms. They show the concomitance of hallucinogen use and the remnants of visionary practices among the dominants, the residual, and the emergent intellectuals (Williams 1971, 121–127). Piazza in fact revisited literature from the early conquest and later centuries and mixed an element of parody at the very origin of American identity. As I have also shown, there is an element of novelty in hallucinogens used by Indians from colonial sources, but now it is the writer’s intervention of the original quotes via clarifying parentheses that adds to the appropriation of the practice, reminiscent of the graffiti of Duchamp over the surface of La Gioconda. Piazza quotes and translates to Spanish from French the text Considerations about French History and the Universalism of This Time or Consideration sur l’histoire francoise et l’universelle de ce temps from 1568, adding a number of comments obviously missing in the original document by Loys Le Roy (1568, 15–16), a French translator and intellectual living in Paris during the sixteenth century. The text comments on the legacies of the New World that would introduce humanity into modernity, entire fields of knowledge which had remained ignored by antiquity, in terms of geography and biology, terms that Piazza unpacked via his added parodic parentheses as he reproduced and translated the text by Le Roy in La Mafia. Enriched by Piazza’s marginalias, Le Roy reflects upon the discovered Americas as a source of “new lands (even of the Spirit), new types of men

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(including writers), customs (even morals), laws (even valid ones), practices (even simple ones, but showy), new herbs (hmmmmm)”72 (Piazza 1968, 130). The mere adding of a parenthesis with the interjection “hmmmmm” in regard to the “new herbs” jokes with the ironies of the colonial encounter that determined the dual Mexicanness of cannabis, and others: did it express supreme delight and curiosity or a dubious disapproval? With hallucinogenic plants and customs subtly appropriated under the shade of such ambiguities, the book also insisted on accusing a number of its protagonists of being drug traffickers, alluding to criminal charges increasingly more present in the real public life of Mexico at the time. Piazza’s mock accusations of being narco lords included Carlos Fuentes and his son (Piazza 1968, 14), and a generality of artists who attended the Mafia parties, also allegedly involved in violence and prostitution according to the narrator (25–26). Even using English at times, Piazza deployed literary resources later seen in younger writers—the so-called Onda authors mentioned by Margo Glantz—stating how at the present “you should no longer trust words, and, for example, the yellow submarine, which seems so innocent, all its words have to do with LSD or something”73 (Piazza 1968, 109). The evident had been rendered much less reliable, bringing doubt and uncertainty, and this was not strange to the US Counterculture, which Piazza saw influenced by Mexico as a physical and spiritual landscape of escape for criminals and artists: for intellectuals like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, James Purdy, but also for Capote’s killers Dick and Perry from In Cold Blood, he jokes, since they tried to escape to Mexico across the Southern border as well (Piazza 1968, 37). A crisis of reality via visions concerned aesthetics directly and implied a gap in representation and language by pointing out their limitations. Even within Piazza’s parody, the crisis was such that “If eating an orange on LSD is pure ecstasy, what’s the poor worker of the words to do with his hard-earned talent for describing sex?”74 (135). This section deals with how younger Mexican writers would deal with these limits and possibilities next. Luis Guillermo Piazza held a strong vision of the elite friends of Fernando Benítez, who were also his own—a vision characterized by a high dose of pretentiousness and cynicism, banalizing culture and celebrity at a time when the polemics over different ways of government and citizenship would accumulate many victims among diverse marginal peoples and social classes. The lack of sensibility to how crucial the times were replicated the unfortunate ambiguity and distance with which most of the cultural establishment experienced the dramatic discrepancies between new and old generations before the movements of 1968 and afterward, in México and in the world. The very same indifference perhaps motivated the indignation of René Avilés Fabila, a younger Onda writer, who criticized the “absolute depoliticization”75 (Avilés 2001, 10) of the Mafia group. This was perfectly captured by the complete

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lack of any real interest in La Mafia in the outcome of geopolitical events like the Vietnam War, which it made fun of (Piazza 1968, 161). Regarding younger writers from the Onda generation, Piazza satirized the perpetual loss of innocence that structured their novels, which were never innocent to begin with (Piazza 1968, 101–102), and he satirically put a judgment of his own in the name of Juan Rulfo, complaining about new young writers, “what do they want with those new-wavers who have not left their parents’ homes, who talk about their family, have mother issues, take lysergic acid, and then retell everything”76 (139). The satire was definitely sharp and made a point that was later touched upon in more detail by many of those young authors themselves in novels like Obsesivos días circulares by Gustavo Sainz or El infierno de todos tan temido by Luis Carrión, where teen rebels had evolved into broken dysfunctional adults who seemed to have kept the manners of their rebellious youth, inevitably turned into symptoms of mental disease and criminal inclinations after the 1960s had passed. As with Piazza’s La Mafia, in the satire of this satire produced by Avilés Fabila, Los Juegos, the emphasis on hallucination as something that belonged rather to the establishment intellectuals than among young writers, seemed devised to cast back all the parody against its maker. As if answering the accusations of “new-wavers” taking LSD and writing about it without ever even leaving their parents’ houses, Avilés Fabila insists a number of times on the exaggerated rapport between Fernando Benítez, allegedly proclaimed leader of the Mafia group (Piazza 1968, 22), and the hallucinatory traditions explored in Los indios de México that I have quoted before. The character of Benavides—no first name, and clearly a caricature of Benítez—“former clan chief”77 (Avilés F. 2001, 52), is presented constantly advocating for the use of hallucinatory fungi, even mentioning a recipe book with “One hundred recipes to cook hallucinogenic mushrooms”78 (52), which he claimed to eat daily for good writing, achieving a healthy nutrition and hallucinations (129). Readers even see him promoting them in New York (143), offering some to anyone as if it were cigarettes (241), or even ordering them for home delivery on special occasions (267), so, under his influence, “the mushrooms begin to take effect in the minds of the intellectuals”79 (269). Avilés Fabila goes one step further and connects hallucinogens with the Mexican Revolution and communism. His appreciations provide a notable sketch of the relation between them, as younger generations grew wary of nationalism, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) party, its corrupt adult members, and the common places of orthodox party politics. He described painter Miguel Regueiro as if underlining these links, a character in Los Juegos who smoked marihuana unstoppably: The revolutionary—as it was assumed to be by his whole generation—raised children and never thought of them, for you know what purpose? Beating

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women, taking drugs, smoking mariguana ad nauseam, quoting Engels, writing manifestos inflamed with revolutionary passion and fixing the world: daily activities of the good Mexicancommunist [sic].80 (Avilés 2001, 90)

Self-financed with donations, confronting the cultural hegemony and even criticizing the Gustavo Díaz Ordaz administration (Avilés 2001, 7–15), the first edition of Los Juegos is a marvelous example of how far the next generation would relate political and cultural action through art. In the Mexico of Los Juegos, for El Clan, the counter-parody of Benitez’s group La Mafia, the supreme metaphor of constant celebrations used by Piazza becomes one of indolence and absurdity (Avilés 2001, 13–14). In the abundance of cultural festivals and celebrations within the novel, some humble citizens collect the confetti to resell it at other parties for gain, while they gladly comment that their situation is improving since the paper pieces keep getting bigger, pieces in green, white, and red—the colors on the Mexican flag (Avilés 2001, 170). This served as a metaphor for events like those of October 1968, when celebrations like the Summer Olympics masked the October 2 killings, the repression by Díaz Ordaz, and the inescapable homogeneity of the PRI party politics against young dissidents. The description of the social crisis made by Avilés Fabila in 1967 represented the most serious paragraph in the novel, a dead center around which all the banality of his fictional Mexico revolved metaphorically, indifferent to the hurricane. Strangely enough for a satire, the lines describe with awful precision what the 1968 revolts would stand for in all their commitment, only a year later, while alluding to the railroad workers’ strike from nine years before in Mexico: The jailed railroad workers continued to fight, the beaten and gassed teachers insisted on their demands, the starving peasants pleaded for an authentic distribution of land (the sum of labor lands distributed since the beginning of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform doubles the total of those existing in the Republic, the poor rural teacher managed to say before he was apprehended), the students with archaic study plans took to the streets to protest and support the railway workers, teachers and peasants, the bored intellectuals supported— although only with their signature—all national demands along with the Cuban Revolution.81 (Avilés 2001, 99)

In a last level of complexity, Avilés seemed to play on the continued stigma of drug addiction that would be deployed against the student movement throughout its history, by inverting those markings to rather associate them with the police. A main example of that institutional bias was El Móndrigo, a libelous booklet published anonymously in 1969. It seemed designed to justify all the police brutality used against the students’ movement of 1968,

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describing mobs turned deliberately violent under the influence of cannabis. The alleged student leader who narrates the story, including the events of the massacre of October 2, insists on corroborating all the prejudices of the Right, even referring to marihuana as “a formidable weapon”82 (El Móndrigo n.a., n.d., 108) for the movement. Meanwhile, he was allegedly distributing it and using it to make the students more violent on July 29. The narrator, a supposed political provocateur of the youth, deployed terminology of the street slang of marihuana users—“las tres,” meaning the traditional three inhalations each smoker takes before passing the joint, called “carrujo” here: Guevara Niebla went to High School 3, got all our buddies drunk—and even gave them mariguana, which they do like and not like amateurs, since they know how to hit the “three” of rigor with the “carrujos”—and then about two hundred of them, armed with sticks and rods, attacked the grenadiers.83 (El Móndrigo n.d., 30)

Proven false, apocryphal, and libelous, the description made in this dubious testimony of El Móndrigo rather tells us about the prejudices and the strategic framing that became resources that made it easier to antagonize young Mexican activists at the time (Tasso 2016, 855–857). Even as early as 1967, Avilés seemed to have added some annotations predicting the state violence of 1968, in which the inversion of these same charges is an extraordinary countermeasure to the prejudice against young users. His description of the “granaderos,” the police corps for civil control in México, showed their excessive deployment of force under the excuse of saving the Summer Olympics. They appeared working under the effects of starvation and hallucination—“fasting for 72 hours and high on mariguana during all that time”84 (Avilés 2001, 185)—as they were sent against defenseless civil protesters and later helped by the army. Not the protesters but the cops are now identified as “marihuanos”: They were shoved into military transports. There were young people, almost children, a pregnant woman and a man with strong features. They all belonged to a single family. No one could yet recover from the surprise, from the unpleasant surprise of being arrested by marihuano soldiers, capable of anything.85 (Avilés 2001, 242–243)

The stagnation in an eternal youth of some of the novels of this generation merely underlined a particular aspect of the writing projects by authors like José Agustín and others who would be part of Juan José Arreola’s workshops on creative writing, the group later labeled as the “Onda.” Their generation had arrived at a moment of rupture and exhaustion from repressive democracies, which instead of addressing them as citizens dealt with them as patients

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or prisoners, therefore promoting an image of idle civilians which corresponds well with a metaphor of perpetual childhood under paternalistic and authoritarian governments, for which citizenship understood as a coming of age, as Emmanuel Kant had defined it, had become impossible. Along this line of thought, it is unclear if family issues and usage of hallucinogens could even continue to be seen as simple domestic problems in the 1960s, when even Piazza himself provided a vision of a complex entanglement, a nation in hallucination. Perhaps Los Juegos focused on ridiculing traditional hallucinogens as if to invert the accusations of Piazza, who associated young writers with synthetic ones like LSD, but in the process provided solid evidence of the heavy presence of hallucination on both sides of the cultural field, amid emergent and hegemonic intellectuals, among the ancestral and the mestizo, in global mass consumer culture, and for both the political activists and their repressors.

JOSÉ REVUELTAS AND JOSÉ AGUSTÍN: POLITICAL PRISONERS AND IMPRISONED USERS Many students from the revolts of the 1960s and 1970s may have embraced foreign aesthetics and ideas as a distancing means to eventually find their own Mexico, and the coming times would underline the cultural and generational nature of many of the differences that culminated in the 1968 massacre of Tlatelolco and other clashes, including the Corpus Christi ­killings of 1971 when protesting students were attacked by ultra-right shock groups with the tacit permission of indifferent police. There was increasingly more dialogue with local marginals, with communism, and a support of civil struggles throughout the continent, as well as an increasing interest in Indigenous knowledge. These local interests led José Agustín to use the term “jipitecas” as coined by his friend Enrique Marroquín, also involved in the short-lived countercultural magazine Piedra Rodante—the Mexican Rolling Stone in the 1970s—due to the undeniable proximity of these groups to hippie and Aztec values both from a nostalgic pre-Cortesian time and in a mestizo present (Agustín 1996, 76), also motivated by the intellectual inquiries into Indian worlds found in commercial literature like Benitez’s or Carlos Castaneda’s. José Agustín affirmed the jipitecas did not seem interested in mobilizing along with the students in 1968 (Agustín 1996, 82), but they became a presence in México City as they had in Teotitlán, Oaxaca, a territory populated by visionary healers and psilocybin fungi: “From 1968 to 1972, the Ef wing of the Lecumberri prison ended up like the ones in Teotitlán: with mushrooms, flowers, peace signs, psychedelic murals, and heavy rock on the courtyard speakers”86 (78–79). He also described the Sierra Mountain Range being patrolled

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by the army between 1968 and 1969 and any long-haired man being arrested if caught looking for natural hallucinogens (75). The connection of the author to these events is more than anecdotal: in fact, the best works of José Agustín have bloomed in the very ideological edge he describes here, trying to connect a gap of bibliographies, identities, world views, classes, and ultimately generations too, particularly in the extremes between mobilization and hallucination: I had discussions with my psychedelic friends so that they would try to realize the importance of social movements and of the political struggle in general; with my red buddies, on the contrary, I argued to make them see that an inner-self revolution was something that was needed.87 (Agustín 1986, 77–78)

The relationship between José Revueltas and most of the writers after 1968 mentioned here is similar to the one they had with the student mobilizations in general. Not sustained on a personal basis, most of them were not there at a precise time to participate directly in the concrete mobilizations or the meetings led by Revueltas, but still there is a very strong, undeniable historical bond, through which these young writers of the Onda have perhaps better understood some of Revueltas’s and the student movement ideas than other Mexicans after 1968. José Agustín described Parménides bragging to the police often that he had read Revueltas whereas they had not (Agustín 1991a, 25), while Gerardo de la Torre dedicated to him his first novel about the workers’ syndical complexities in México of the 1960s and 1970s, Ensayo general. Also committed to social change, Luis Carrión and Gerardo de la Torre were inevitably on the left of the political spectrum, and for them guerrillas became a metaphor of transformation, while Margarita Dalton is above all an activist and a feminist taking directly from those civil struggles as she put it herself mentioning how “in 1968, the student movements in the United States, France and Mexico. These movements encouraged deep ideological questions about colonialism, social classes and sexual roles, brought forth out of need for profound structural changes”88 (Dalton 2012, 443). The opinion held by that generation and group of authors regarding Revueltas and the student movement was extremely important as a common trait: Artistic sensibility was changing in Mexico, it was evident after a group of new narrators (Gustavo Sainz, Juan Tovar, Gerardo de la Torre, René Avilés Fabila, Parménides García Saldaña, Jorge Portilla and I) agreed that Revueltas had been treated unfairly and with a total lack of respect.89 (Agustín 1999, 11)

Los muros de agua by Revueltas deploys a literary rendering of the true experiences of its author in the Islas Marías prison of Mexico in the 1930s. The Tres Marías are mentioned with fear even by the often cynical Burroughs: “In Mexico, known thieves can be sent to the Tres Marias penal

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colony without trial” (Burroughs 2003, 100). The islands are even mentioned already in La Luciérnaga as the natural destination of any prisoner charged with trafficking “doña Juanita” (Azuela 1991, 136). Separated by the sea’s water walls, these islands were almost a physical materialization of the national unconscious, repressed far from the main social body of the continent. There, left-wing activists were held without trial and the “marihuanos” and criminals shared their luck, all removed from the broader society. In his introduction to the novel, “About Los muros de agua,”90 José Revueltas described that Mexican prison through the metaphor of a lepers’ colony he once visited in Guadalajara in 1955. He stressed that when confronting historical horrors, as Tolstoy did once forcing himself to witness live executions, one should “never refuse to see, never close your eyes to the horror or turn your back no matter how terrifying it may seem to all of us. Tolstoy saw those executed; when and how, it doesn’t matter. I had to see those lepers”91 (Revueltas 1995, 11). Such a commitment with sincerity and politicization would become structural to the Onda group as well. Just as the decaying lepers were held in a contained colony to avoid contagion, the sick bodies of society–meaning communists, activists or other political prisoners, untried thieves, dealers, and drug users–were kept at bay in las Islas Marías, on the María Madre Island. The novel Los muros de agua attempted at making visible the moral and ideological lepers which the power hid from plain view in Mexico. This imprisonment shared by activists and other criminals was not as coincidental as it may have appeared. In fact, all throughout the novel, from the instant the political militants are put in the train that takes them to the harbor where they will sail to las Islas Marías for a long and utterly destructive stay, they are described as sharing closely the same installations and routines than these criminals, killers, and criminalized drug users. From the first pages, “the ‘political ones’”92 (Revueltas 1995, 45), as the narrator calls the imprisoned communists, are put together indistinctly with the rest of the passengers, described here in the same boat some lines below: “The mariguanos remained impassive. Some had their eyes fixed on the ground, as if having fun with the infinite world that was offered to their eyes down there. Others looked at the air, discovering things invisible to ordinary mortals”93 (Revueltas 1995, 45). Together they were removed from society as part of a cleansing of any dissents and disposables, a process militarily enforcing ultra-conservatism and later neoliberalism as extreme projects of eradication that only differed by means of the strategies, generations, elites, and oligarchies they represented. Like the criminalization of cannabis users, the confusion between ordinary and extraordinary prisoners was not arbitrary. Throughout Revueltas’s writings, there was evidence of a systematic denial of the existence of political prisoners in Mexico which was definitive in the strategy against them:

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“the government theory according to which ‘no political prisoners exist in Mexico’ cannot be reduced to a simple and innocent doctrinal abstraction”94 (Revueltas 2003, 227). Deliberately deployed, denial became structural to the state’s retaliation: “Put at the same level as that of common criminals, any political enemy is in fact thrown, helpless, without protection, into the hands of the prison underworld”95 (226). Kept in jail for six months, Agustín seemed to fit an alternative profile of awkward political presences like many other cannabis users at the time, made into an ordinary criminal over drug charges, and apprehended while in possession of a medium amount of cannabis. As mentioned before, José Agustín pointed to a disagreement between hallucinogens users and communists in the political landscape of his time, appreciating the split between the activists and the Mexican hippies: “During the 1968 student movement, the jipitecas did not seem very interested in going out to demonstrate with the students”96 (Agustín 1996, 82). Corresponding with the other side of that schism, in the characterization of Revueltas, as readers see narratively with the novella El Apando and theoretically in Dialéctica de la consciencia, psychoactives appear mostly as sources of alienation for communist ideologists. Under their effect, an individualistic emphasis on sensations eclipsed the senses, even the sense of history: In the absolute negation of historical consciousness and in a new estrangement of the person who is inserted into the general alienation as a disturbed praxis that is expressed in the contradiction between the artificial paradise of the alienated senses and the natural alienated paradise of the senses.97 (Revueltas 1986, 44)

The visionary corpus of the 1960s to 1980s, hallucinogenic narratives and their authors in Mexico—some of them even affiliated for years with the Communist Party and later dramatically separated from it, like Parménides García—explored visionary substances and mestizo politics during the Cold War perhaps confronting the gap that Revueltas saw between a disturbed praxis and a true historical consciousness. In Los muros de agua, readers see an approximate answer as to why drugs were so negatively viewed by the Left and the Right already in the 1940s. A very intense stigma created by the prosecution of these practices and compounds, and by the fact that these were common among marginal populations, had already equated drug use and crime in the prejudices and imagination of Mexican society in the 1930s, even before most of the internationalization of the phenomenon. We get a glimpse of this in the novel: as all the prisoners are taken by ship to the Islas María, “knowing that personal inspection in the Islands was extremely rigorous everyone, without exception, gave themselves to the task of finishing any traces of all the narcotics they carried with them, to arrive ‘clean’”98 (Revueltas 1995, 54). This extreme frenzy of substance abuse in which almost all passengers of “El Progreso” exhaust their drug reserves simultaneously is

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a first sign that they are approaching their destination. “The Progress” (48), the telling name of the ship that takes them to the prison, is also the very ideal used by the elites to justify locking them away from society and marking them as disposable. The scene has an apocalyptic undertone that reemerges in the desperation that fills and structures the narration of the same author in El Apando, from 1969. In this work the pace of the action is propelled by the increasing intensity of drug withdrawal experienced by three prisoners. In an additional juxtaposition of drugs and jails, and as yet another approximation to the ideal of the criminal artist, it was precisely in the Palacio Negro de Lecumberri where Revueltas and José Agustín met as co-creators, when the latter left his own cell for common criminals to visit the section of political prisoners, the cellblock at the “Crujía M.” “Well, you see, they caught me with mota”99 (Agustín 1986, 113), he explained casually to Revueltas, referring to his own charges of cannabis possession. In turn, Revueltas had been detained due to his involvement in the student movement during the protests of 1968 and the perception that he was the true ideologist behind those mobilizations. Imprisoned after a highly irregular arrest at his friend Salvador Rojo’s house in Acapulco, in which some traffickers and neighbors were apprehended along with bystanders on December 14, 1970, Agustín was taken for holding 60 grams of marihuana in a can found in his room after an illegal search (Agustín 1986, 89) and was only liberated on July 10, 1971 (Campbell 1971, 24). The writer and four friends were arbitrarily detained by the police, in a clumsy operation with hilarious consequences he recounted in a non-fiction text, a source of reflection on whom were perceived as disposable and cumbersome in the eyes of the law: “Later it turned out that the five of us had made a bad impression in court for ‘mariguanos, filthy and for including an intellectual’”100 (Agustín 1986, 95). SE ESTÁ HACIENDO TARDE: A DRUG BUST TURNED INSIDE OUT A defiance toward more conservative aesthetics is present in yet another work created by José Agustín, also written during his stay in prison, titled Se está haciendo tarde. But rather than reflecting upon the compulsory economy and metabolism resulting from drug abuse and withdrawal like his cowritten script for a movie adaptation of Revueltas’s El Apando, he exploited the sensorial and philosophical itineraries of hallucination and excess as a source of creative freedom that challenged realism. Rejection of an orthodox deployment of verisimilitude was the very trait which was often criticized in Revueltas (Agustín 1999, 10). In the author’s own words, from the starting point of an aggressive realism his narration was transformed under the

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evoked effects of wine, marihuana, and psilocybin, and under the immanent imprisonment pressures he was experiencing at the time, as he put it in an interview he gave for the magazine Piedra Rodante as soon as he left prison, “José Agustín left Jail”:101 “the initial realism gradually becomes something absolutely unreal because of how real it is. It is no longer believable or there are no longer any means available to say well this is absolute realism”102 (in Campbell 1971, 25). Novels like Se está haciendo tarde (final en laguna) would truly signal a step forward toward embracing visionary traditions within the modern novel, adding to a field that searched language for means of transcendence. Agustin had only written some of the initial pages two months before his imprisonment and would finish it during his six-month confinement in Lecumberri (Campbell 1971, 24). He, in fact, observed how his immediate environment influenced his writing: “the violence, sordidness and virulence of Lecumberri was objectified in the tone of my novel”103 (Agustín 1986, 122). While previously La tumba and De perfil had been fairly popular novels by him, they were transgressive mostly in terms of their register of a neglected generation. It was only after Se está haciendo tarde (final en laguna) was published that a more explicit stance on the subject of hallucination appeared in Agustín’s writing, as if the imprisonment in Lecumberri had pushed him beyond any concealment, convincing him of a more open approach to visionary knowledge as a means to interpret Mexican society and his role as an artist of his generation. It was not merely a more open approach, but a definitive commitment to a better understanding of these searches and their ideological, ontological, and sociological importance. The stay in Lecumberri motivated what would be called “a trilogy” of novels, as the three focused on different aspects of hallucinogenic usage. This triad consisted of Se está haciendo tarde (final en laguna), Círculo vicioso, a short story made into a play, and El rey se acerca a su templo, a novel. Still, the latter two pieces focused on objective aspects of hallucinogens use and were vastly inferior, and it was only in Se está haciendo tarde that hallucination was wholly embraced by the writer as a profane way of knowledge, and even as a horizon for writing, exploring, experimenting, and experiencing. The narrative penetrated into the realms suggested by different hallucinogens, and the adventure peaked with the ingestion of some psilocybin—the active component in María Sabina’s mushrooms—capsules that turned the characters “inside out” (Agustín 1980, 207–253). Agustín is adamant in saying that his creative process changed with LSD (lysergic acid was referred to in Onda slang as “aceite”), even at the time he published the short novel Abolición de la propiedad, “I was already laying the foundations of what aceite and psychedelic drugs later taught me”104 (in Campbell 1971, 25).

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Set in Acapulco, precisely where Agustín would be arrested for possession of 60 grams of cannabis and where Oscar Acosta would visit his brother who worked as a drug dealer (Acosta 1989, 184), Se está haciendo tarde tells of Rafael’s visit to his acquaintance Virgilio. The former is a tarot reader and astrologist in a cafe in Mexico City who is worried about the growing banality of his divinations and the bad karma they may induce. He escapes to his friend’s house, a dealer of hallucinogens living by the beach, a namesake of Dante’s guide, Virgilio. The aspiring mystic simply decides to visit one day unspecifically, looking to reconnect with visions of the future he used to experience as a child, as he was advised by a reading of his future: “to solve the conflict, the master ruled: Rafael had to experience again the visions that occurred to him as a child”105 (Agustín 1980, 11). Like a bildungsroman about hallucination and visions, Se está haciendo tarde deploys a formative narrative device in which each wave of hallucination seems to exist within the next, in an endless spiral of self-contained, and sometimes deliquescent highs, particularly induced by marihuana, but including many other substances, with psilocybin leading to the climax. Rather than manifesting the violence of Lecumberri directly, Agustin´s novel appears to be a violent attempt at liberating human experience from its own fears, hypocrisies, and repression, addressing the Latin American readers in a time and context of highly authoritative states. The narration suggested a process of self-discovery through an unplanned travel which could solely conclude with the realization that this process was never-ending. The narrative plays with layers of identity and the assumptions that underlie them, as Rafael is constantly confronted by the sensorial and intellectual experience of hallucination, and pushed to clash with his own pettiness, machismos, and conservatism, gradually recovering access to the innocence of a lost gift, his lost childhood visions. The cast of protagonists becomes complete with the introduction of Francine and Gladys, two middle-aged women, and of Paulhan, described as extremely beautiful and gender-fluid, an androgynous companion who often is the wisest and most charismatic in the group, and at times even a demi-god kind of presence in their visions. This group of main characters, including the astrologist and the dealer, already set the novel completely apart and constituted an exquisite departure from anything remotely resembling Costumbrismo or the Boom literature and the patriarchal or traditional figures they often privileged. At the same time, it was unlike any of the other novels and fictions in the Onda group, mostly dealing with young men and women. Besides the unspecified and fluid sexuality of Paulhan, perhaps the most developed and complex non-heterosexual character of all the Onda works, Francine was also a fascinating character, a mature woman who led most of the action in the novel and whose powerful eroticism objectified and subjugated men and women, while displaying a force of will,

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an aggressiveness, and a foul language that were also innovations in all of the Mexican writing to that moment, and which put her in a category all her own. The sense of reality of the characters deteriorated or increased as the novel progressively implemented more and more expressive resources, and as they used more hallucinogens. There are bilingual registers, from English to Spanish, uncanny subtitles, apparently quoting The Beatles and other pop sources that seem to voice the unconscious of the characters through rock lyrics—such as “Your inside is out,” which breaks the text on the side (Agustín 1980, 234, in English in the original), or “Your outside is in” two pages later (236), among others. The novel even includes a subtitle in Latin that translates to “Knowledge of the self” (250). There are some erratic blank spaces (196–197), lines of dashes, or even long capricious series of blacked-out passages that make mysterious shapes on the redacted pages (250–251) and are unexpectedly Zen and beautiful, as if naming the unnamable and making writing—or reading—a literary and visual experience even resembling I-Ching hexagrams and verses (251). One of the final lines by Rafael expressed the peak of a journey of neverending peaks that forever changed those involved as everything flowed, precisely on a page redacted with black patterns, where the text itself became pure silence, form, and image: “You always come back from your trips, but not from that one, they had never reached such a level before and that’s why they believed they had remained unaware that when you get there, there is no escape”106 (Agustín 1980, 250). The interest this book aroused is best expressed by the article “The Drug Experience in José Agustín’s Fiction” from 1986, in which Final en Laguna is also pointed to as the best work of the author (Schaffer 1986, 136) and where most of his formal innovations are explored. The time in jail of José Agustín, charged with accusations of cocaine trafficking and cannabis possession, is perhaps the most adamant materialization of what the War on Drugs would do to the young intellectuals of the time, targeting them indirectly through criminalizing users, demonizing them, and violently inhibiting their cultural explorations, aiming to depoliticize their dissent by emphasizing idiosyncratic discrepancies rather than structural problems of the state. It also becomes indisputable how the novel evolved through a series of hallucinations, like the career of Agustín did, radically different before and after his use of hallucinogens and their abuse (Schaffer 1986, 133–144), and in fact the same conclusions extend to the generation of writers of the Onda, as their texts were, by themselves, already an experience of disorientation and altered consciousness: “Although the mystical solutions Agustín and his contemporaries originally looked for in drugs remain undiscovered, their experimentation with intoxicants did lead to new literary efforts that unraveled the outmoded fabric of established patterns of expression” (Schaffer 1986, 143).

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Still, Susan Schaffer, in her review of José Agustín, albeit touching very close to the visionary cultural field of Mexico I unpack here and deploying a very lucid method that observes all of the works by Agustín in 1986 and their interactions with hallucinogens, closes her analysis with conclusions that remain anchored to an ideal of purity that real mestizaje challenges. It should be reexamined how she sees “obvious” autobiographical equivalences: “like Agustín himself, Rafael’s search for mystical solutions fails because decadence and drugs do not open the appropriate doors to higher understanding” (Schaffer 1986, 136–137). Could I discard moral judgments and instead think of the text itself as an experience of both the mystic and the literary as portions of a single cultural device of sacredness and profanity? That in fact could be the reason why Final en laguna seems like the most complete work of Agustín in terms of harmony between form and content, leading to an overflow that formally exhausts traditional means of description and thought. Beyond this literary achievement, later it is mostly critical writings like those of Tragicomedia Mexicana and editorial initiatives like the repeated support of José Revueltas’s writing that gain the most interest, as if instead of representation, the focus was now criticism, action, and change. As if attesting to the implicit distance between left militants and hallucinated bohemians in the lack of comments on their encounter in prison and about the new generation of writers, Revueltas’s attitude toward the Onda seemed to reflect an ambiguity: “I think it made him sad, out of simple human solidarity because he never liked what I wrote”107 (Agustín 1986, 113). It was mighty telling that the Onda generation’s affection for the writer did not seem to be equally reciprocated. Despite this, it was that very group of oddballs, most of them mentioned by Margo Glantz, who managed to turn the 1968 revolts into a living philosophy that could have reconciled Latin America rather than as a mere site of trauma. They connected with the activism and writing of Revueltas as a living embodiment of those struggles. Coming from a generation accused by Monsiváis of being apolitical and lacking commitment, the trajectory of many of the writers included in Glantz’s anthologies and analyses eventually proved otherwise. In fact, Rene Avilés, Parménides García, and particularly José Agustín later rejected the terminology used by Glantz as biased: “the Onda was the rude and the vulgar, the actions of unconsciousness, the fleeting and perishable, young people, drugs, sex and rock and roll”108 (Agustín 1996, 96). Since there was no real Onda as a concerted initiative beyond Glantz’s impressions, it is perhaps more coherent to understand this generation of writers by observing the living practices and political preferences that really linked them together beyond a simplified label. This was probably the generation of authors that most sincerely and directly connected with the spirit and ideology of the young crowds of 1968 in Mexico.

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LITERATURE AND CINEMA ON VISIONARY EXPERIENCES IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY: “EL APANDO,” A PUNISHMENT CELL THAT COULD FIT A WHOLE COUNTRY Monsiváis’s assessments of the 1968 student mobilizations in Mexico pointed to how its very leaders would become complete strangers to the movement’s ideas later in their public lives. Not only did the PRI, the very establishment they were fighting, find its best minds within the Communist Party and its debate groups, but some of the worst reactionaries were once activists in the student protests. Such are Monsiváis’s final words on the subject when describing the ruling class of México in the 1970s: “UNAM student Carlos Salinas and IPN student Ernesto Zedillo belonged to the movement, but already in power they do not show any link with the ideals of the student protests”109 (Monsiváis 2008, 247). Thinking of the 1968 mobilizations as a political failure of the establishment that effected the massacre of Tlatelolco and as a traumatic national memory of impunity, destruction, and repression, should only be a starting point to identifying its deeper effects as a cultural phenomenon of change and creation, slowly transforming the everyday life of citizens and their experience of reality, democracy, and power. Rather than being about the actions of leaders or parties, the 1968 movement became a turning point for the masses and those few intellectuals capable of sharing their sensorial and intellectual explorations of citizenship and mass consumer culture. The rock festival of Avándaro, for example, held only once in 1971 amid national scandal, marked a site of sensorial excess, a particular niche for dissent that would remain after the 1968 revolts, an extreme alternative for the heavily depoliticized and disappointed youth of hippies, rockers, and average young Mexicans from all social classes. As Parménides stated, inhalation of glue or “cement” for hallucination was as distinctive of the poor Mexicans who signaled their presence in the Avándaro concerts as their political distance from ultra-right wing civilian paramilitary urban groups and gangs such as “los halcones,” “the Falcons,” which had used violence against pacific protests in Mexico like the Hell’s Angels had in the United States, as I mentioned in chapter 1: “The fact that glue was consumed indicates that part of those people who live in the slums do not want to be alone, nor do they want to be fans of the Halcones”110 (García S. 1971, 36). Sublimated by state denial, the concrete political struggle of 1968 as repressed by President Díaz Ordaz seemed to regress to a more domestic and bourgeois character with the administration of Luis Echeverría, originally Ordaz’s Secretary of the Interior and subsequently president

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from 1970 to 1976. Echeverría implemented a protective and paternalistic approach which brought the conflict back into the domain of family values while the institutions remained authoritarian (Monsiváis 2008). The debate came to be centered on superficial aspects of culture that postponed more meaningful discussions: the acceptable length of the hair, sexuality, and paraphernalia. Rather than addressing them as citizens and political individuals, the state dealt with the youth as second-class Mexicans, even though it deployed a rhetoric of acceptance. The presidential periods of Díaz Ordaz and Luis Echeverría unexpectedly managed to progressively politicize the last of the most indifferent youth by means of enduring repression. Most of the texts in these sections are definitively visionary narratives. Operating within the semiotics of secrecy and revelation which confronted authors and their works with that which ordinary perception blocked or denied, these works of art also assumed strong and clear political views which channeled both the mystic and the secular drives of the late twentieth century. As Paz expressed so well, while discussing the reason why drugs are abused in modernity, they helped in the search for a modern ritual and a myth once politics had been exhausted as praxis of social transformation: “The first half of the century saw a substitute for traditional rites: political meetings. Today these have become official ceremonies”111 (Paz 1995, 266). These writers were not merely searching for god, as was the adduced motive to consult María Sabina among jipitecas, white strangers and hippies (Sabina in Estrada 1979, 112). Less abstract, these visionary texts and works search mestizo culture for divine intensities as practical means to heal wounded and conflicted legacies today. Many in these decades suffered imprisonment, as did Siqueiros, Agustín, or Revueltas, and others were close to the victims of police brutality in events like the Tlatelolco massacre. Some were marked by the influences of guerrilla struggles, as was Gerardo De la Torre, author of La línea dura, or Margarita Dalton’s characters in Larga Sinfonía en D. There are also those who suffered psychological abuse by physicians, like Parménides García or Luis Carrión, kept in institutions for mental illness. By assuming politicized and ethical stances, and at the same time constituting complex sensorial and spiritual experiences, these novels suggested a renovation of politics via hallucination and a strong criticism of their national context. Being also a set of corporeal symptoms, offering an incarnated experience, and a body discipline of sorts, these works of art embraced catharsis as a physical process, in a duality of remedy and poison. Such is the case with Jose Agustín’s Se está haciendo tarde: “the novel not only grapples with the ambivalent nature of intoxication, but also makes the text a source of intoxication for the reader” (Schaffer 1986, 137).

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These hallucinated narrations confront opposing national and revolutionary ideals, and even contend with what is to be considered real, as the visions they describe become aesthetic heterotopies and parodies where Mexican utopias and dystopias can dialogue and clash, creating new means of expression through an encounter of classes and races: “The teenagers of the Middle Class talking like the punks from the Colonia Buenos Aires neighborhood— just across-the-Piedad-River—which is full of thieves and murderers and marijuana users! Boys with an education, talking like pickpockets, mariguana users, murderers, barbarians!”112 (García S. 1972, 60). In a passage of Parménides García Saldaña’s Pasto Verde dealing with a climax in which everything is juxtaposed in a cultural delirium, a complex vision suggests just how much the local and the national influenced and obsessed the youths of the 1960s and 1970s, who dealt with the global influences of consumer cultures and industry as much as with the psychoactive compounds of ancient ancestors. The description includes not only foreign rock and roll but also Mexican history, a made-up band “Los dientes macizos,” with “macizo” being another slang term for “mariguano,” and Rolling Stones lyrics, a lovestruck Cortés crying for Malinche—calling for her using the Hispanic given name “Marina,” in the ultimate mestizo conflict of embracing the enemy’s language—and even Cuauhtémoc plotting revenge, the last of Aztec Emperors; materialist dialectics and pre-Hispanic heritage are all presented as part of consumer dynamics in Pasto Verde as much as in other works here. The montage nature of mestizaje itself may only become truly accessible through the simultaneity of hallucinated visions. Free love and colonialism meet in a single image. Lived as a mestizo whole, a continuum of hallucination, fusion, and montage reappears in these works, all parodies of reality but also realizations of truth that reveal a cultural market in which almost everything became available, accessible to experience as pastiche: Alternating images of Dalia Marina and Angélica singing Going out of my Head. A family of the Thirties assisting Mass. A political rally. The Pot-head Teeth in a meeting for the worship of Quetzatcóatl. Marx posing with his book The Holy Family. Engels with The Family, The Private Property and The State. Lenin with The Emancipation of Women. The Pot-head Teeth sing Let’s spend the night together. Saint Carlos Fuentes and Saint Carlos Monsiváis are dressed as Quevedo on some pillars in the background of the scene where Dalia Maria sings going out of my head Cortés is crying under a tree give me your love again Marina give me your love again Marina, and Cuauhtémoc in a hut plans the destruction of the Spanish who conquered his women.113 (García S. 1968, 43)

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Like the chants of Maria Sabina, these writers and artists embrace visions as text, action, conflict, game, therapy and representation, prayer and song, in a sensorial experience of culture, ancestral history, and politics. Even if via a profanation of excess—often the very path of the shaman in the search for a language that could not be taught by humans but directly by the ingestion of substances—these novels bring ancestral visionary practices into modern art. To read them implies an encounter both with a Mexico often repressed but existent—one of sensuality and revolution which rejected receiving a national identity passively from institutions—and with a hallucinated Mexico that never ceased to be. To think of the representative republics that appeared from the nineteenth century with the wars of independence in the Americas as “imagined nations,” to use the concept of Benedict Anderson (Anderson 2006, 1–7), leads us to reflect on those intakes which may somehow change the process of imagination itself. The presence of many traditional markets and substances, though early criminalized in the twentieth century, had allowed for hallucinations to remain a massively available possibility as it had been among the pre-Cortesian Indigenous empires when they structured plenty of different worldviews and societies of the Americas. What were the visions and intuitions of these “hallucinated nations” that made many of the utopias and poetics of the 1950s to the 1980s, and of Counterculture as a hemispheric phenomenon? In a transition to the cinema, it was also in Lecumberri prison that both José Revueltas and José Agustín would set the story of their single known creative collaboration in writing, an adaptation of a script based on the short novel El Apando by Revueltas. Dealing with drug trafficking and addiction—both in the singular bodies of the prisoners and in the collective one of society—El Apando (Cazals 1976), whose title alluded to Lecumberri’s punishment cellbox called the same, tells of two drug dealers, Polonio and Albino, themselves seemingly addicted to heroin. Forced to become associates with El Carajo—approximately translatable to “the Fuck”—also a heavily addicted and unstable inmate, they convince him to get his own mother to bring the drug hidden inside her genitals. The destructive climax of the novel and the film adaptation make spectators reflect on the true forces of addiction, how they structure consumer culture, capitalism, and society, and raise questions about the state’s strategies of prosecution and punishment. From the first pages, society is clearly presented as the true prison, trapping the unsuspecting guards and all the free citizens, as Polonio reflects while immobilized in the “apando”: “They were so stupid as not to realize that no one but them were the actual prisoners, including everyone else, their mothers, their children, and the parents of their parents”114 (Revueltas 2001, 13). The almost verbatim fidelity between the script and the short story is a

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testimony of the admiration Agustín had for Revueltas and shows in the finished 1976 movie El Apando directed by Felipe Cazals. Nevertheless, by virtue of certain emphases, the exacerbation of confinement, the lack of color, or the abundance of it, eroticism, subjective evocations, and because of the provocative rhythm of editing suggested by Cazals, it is as if Revueltas’s writing had become subtly contaminated by the aesthetic of younger generations of the 1970s (an atmosphere visible in figure 2.1). In particular, a silent dreamy scene where we see two of the separated lovers naked in an allegorical and unearthly red pool, surrounded by whiteness and blue plants, brings symbolism and uncanniness to the language of cinema, peeking into the Albino’s intimate visions. “If we had money we could smuggle a good high with that damn guard”115 (in Cazals 1976, 01:01:28), he says before evoking his erotic dreams (in figure 2.1) some seconds later in the film, as if they simultaneously expressed the desire for the much-needed drug. ​ A few elements missing in the short story are added in the film. We see a couple of young male adolescents smoking what seems like a cigarette of cannabis they take turns at, while watching a Lecumberri guard from a distance, as we follow him outside, into the prison of life. Similarly, a very long digression discussing typical charro culture playing on the TV in the guard’s house, referencing the preference for popular Latin American music genres

Figure 2.1  The Characters Experience Withdrawal Symptoms That Turn into Visions Which Evoke “A Good High.” Source: Cazals, Felipe (Dir.). 1976. El Apando. López, H. y Macotela, F. (prods.). Motion picture. México: Conacite Uno, 1:02:34.

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like boleros and rancheras as part of Mexican masculinity, seem like critical instances of the essentialisms of national idiosyncrasies. These criticisms of national identity were in fact a determinant aspect of the art produced by Jose Agustin’s generation. Rather than drugs, in the prison of society, it was mass media, the cultural industry, and the market that created metabolic dependencies and alienated the senses. The television appears as the apando of the world. The opioid of the inmates is equated with the televised opium of the masses, and perhaps the distance between the prisoners of the inside and those outside is solely expressed in a distinction which structures the narrative of El Apando and its experiments over representation, making the only difference between the inside and the outside of Lecumberri to be in: “the contradiction between the artificial paradise of the alienated senses and the natural alienated paradise of the senses” (Revueltas 1986, 44). It is on that very border of contradictions that the oeuvres observed here thrive. While Revueltas had become a symbol of political coherence and social struggle, Agustín was highly representative of the youth’s dissents and criticisms of national realities from the points of view of pop and local visionary aesthetics. The premiere of the movie El Apando in the San Sebastián Film Festival in 1976 came to an abrupt end when the actress Dolores del Río, officiating as president of the jury, stood up to talk right after the projection. Felipe Cazals remembered her words in a video interview, “she said that this movie was an indignity and asked how could we wrap the Mexican flag with such rubbish”116 (Cazals in Canal 22 2014a, 0:30–0:52). This scandalous attack would be initially fatal for the popularity of the movie and reflected a rejection in mainstream culture of the peoples and social problems that it focused on and which the government had wanted to make invisible in the first place by resorting to prisons. The strategy was well put in a metaphor I mentioned before, used by Octavio Paz in “Conocimiento, drogas, inspiración” and by Jose Revueltas’ introduction to Los muros de agua: that of social or moral lepers cast aside. Cazals explained how the movie El Apando critiqued multiple layers of ambitions and expectations about modern Mexico as they revolved around the penalization of drug abuse, compulsive consumerism, repression, and addiction, along with its economic exploitation and its criminalization. In the 1960s and 1970s, these were now structuring factors of the society both inside and outside Lecumberri prison, even sublimated in the erotic dreams of Polonio that introduce surreal visions in the film, or the fears of El Carajo that impose his paranoid rhythm. Additionally, a main character of the prison administration at the time who assisted Cazals in envisioning the movie, a Major Palacios from the army, former subdirector of Lecumberri during Revueltas’s imprisonment, gave even more information on the true architect behind the mechanisms of punishment that made the Mexico of those years:

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“he began by telling me that it had been Díaz Ordaz’s idea to build the apandos before 1968”117 (Canal 22 2014b, 2:40–2:48). The “apando” defines a restricted jail within the jail, where solitary confinement becomes a metaphor of an authoritative society and in which—much like for Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer—a state of exceptional punishment is revealed to be instrumental to constricting and controlling everyday reality. Locking activists in the apandos became a preventive measure implemented as a precaution before the 1968 Massacre of Tlatelolco and connected to the entire strategy of then President Díaz Ordaz. Because of sickness, Revueltas kept himself distant, while mostly Cazals and Agustín worked in the making of the screenplay, but many of his ideas influenced the context of the finished movie. In terms of reception, the young public of the 1970s went to see this movie massively (Cazals in Canal 22 2014b, 6:27–6:33), and its premiere even accelerated the destruction of the real “apandos” and the inauguration of new and modern confinement cells for punishment in the famous prison (Canal 22 2014a, 5:20–6:06), which in the present has been turned into the Archivo General de la Nación and made into a site of memory. Darcie Doll noted that Revueltas’s critics at the time insisted on rejecting his works under the false charges that they professed a kind of exhausted realism, reminiscent of socialist narrations (Doll 2016, 31–32). At the same time, with the opposite argument, Graciela Montaldo presented El apando as the exploration of a suture between realism and experimentation (Montaldo 2016, 4). This “suture” is exploited by Cazals’s version. Although Los muros de agua and El apando—as La Luciérnaga by Mariano Azuela did many decades before—maintain many conventions of realism, they definitely approach something completely different by virtue of their proximity to drug users and marginals, capturing traits of their visions, their psychology, and their lives in prison. As the narrator enters and exits the anxieties, desires, and fears of the characters’ abstinence syndrome and the ordeal of withdrawal, their internal drives reshape their experiences of reality, and this core particularity becomes formally intensified in the film adaptation by Cazals and José Agustín. Besides such collaborative example between generations, there is a complex variety of audiovisual materials, of which I mention only a few, leaving out of the timeline most works of Alejandro Jodorowsky, epic cinematographic pieces like El topo or La montaña sagrada, examples from very late in the century. It is worth including some glimpses of his comic strips from the 1970s, though, Fábulas pánicas. These were published in such a conservative journal as El Heraldo de México, during definitive times for hallucination, between 1967 and 1973. Among them, there is one example in which drugs are seen as a social stigma and a way to demonize with the social mark of a “Drug-addict! degenerate!”118 used against what seems like the cartoon

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of a zen master or a hippie on March 14, 1971 (Jodorowsky 2006, 181). The reflection on the scandalous Avándaro Rock Festival integrated in a cartoon from October 10, 1971, invited Mexicans to realize that the youth were also a vital part of the social tissue (209). The strange contrasts, the heavy magentas and elongated shapes, the unpredictability of the episodes and their surrealism, everything in the Fábulas Pánicas seems directly inspired by hallucinogenic aesthetics and atmospheres, just as future projects of the director would be, as he stated regarding his failed project to adapt Dune to cinema: “My ambition was tremendous, I wanted to make something sacred. A movie that produced LSD hallucinations without taking LSD. To change the young minds of all the world”119 (in Jodorowsky 2014, 00:10–00:23). Other examples in cinema include Sergio García Michel, an important countercultural director in Mexico who made films like Ah verda!, inspired by yippies and quoting Abbie Hoffman in the opening seconds with a sheet on the protagonists’ typewriter: “To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral”120 (García M. 1973, 00:02). With a runtime of twenty minutes, the short film presents a naive but elaborate conjunction. We see the complex entanglement of hallucination, urban imaginaries, religion, humor, and sex as a single tragicomic construct. With a brief cameo from José Agustín, whose car gets stolen by the protagonists, the short film follows a terrorist couple, compulsive smokers of marihuana, who even make an attack on the offices of El Heraldo, the newspaper that printed Fábulas Pánicas. The female role (seen in figure 2.2) is a strong, independent, and dangerous character, capable of confronting society and men. Once he loses her partner, the female terrorist moves on from their joint attacks with explosives to synthesizing LSD secretly by herself (García M. 1973, 14:53), effectively progressing from de facto violence to a hallucinogenic strategy, dosing the drinking water of a small congregation of monks without their knowledge. Taken over by the effects of the drug, the secluded monks become half-mad and uninhibited. They end up spotting the protagonist and pursuing her through the convent in a fast-motion Benny-Hill type of chase, which seemingly ends in a consensual orgy off-screen. We see only the sunrise the following day as they awake together. The movie concludes with the apparent mixing of massive quantities of liquid LSD prepared by the subversive in the public water reservoirs: The terrorist, dressed up as a priest now and leading the group, helps carry the buckets of hallucinogen. The monks—who abandoned the church and now follow her in the final scenes—pour it into the public water tanks. She makes the symbol of the cross for the camera (in figure 2.2) alluding to the Holy Communion (García M. 1973, 19:44). ​

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Figure 2.2  A Profane Blessing by the Female Protagonist Breaks the Fourth Wall. Source: García M., Sergio (Dir.). 1973. Ah verda! Short film. México: Taller Experimental de cine, 19:45.

Naive and with no dialogues, the movie makes a point of how female leadership, LSD, and hallucinogens in general were full of a subversive and innovative potential that confronted conventional institutions and thinking, while Catholic priesthood and religion remained off limits for most transformations. This film and others in Latin America show that in addition to literature, there was a growing audiovisual corpus around these experimentations. THE WORKING-CLASS NOVELS BY GERARDO DE LA TORRE AND THE HELL OF THE INTELLECTUAL AS DESCRIBED BY LUIS CARRIÓN: TWO EXAMPLES OF VISIONARY GUERRILLA WARFARE An exploration into proletarian struggles and defeats seems to structure the novels by Gerardo de la Torre as they gave form to the neoliberal Mexico of the late twentieth century and on. In 1998, he wrote an article tracing the few oil workers’ mobilizations supporting the students in joint protests “Los petroleros en el 68.” All the historical events in that critical text had also been included in a faithful literary recreation of 1968, in his novel from 1980 Las muertes de aurora, and in Ensayo general from 1971. Las muertes de Aurora was a novel occupied with the historical events surrounding the protests of the 1960s and

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1970s, as the protagonist identified the death of the title character Aurora with other conflicts of the globe at different times as lived by harmless civilians. The killings of October 2, 1968 (De la Torre 2014a, 12–15), introduced reflections about the Mexican railroad workers’ strike of 1958 and a sense of solidarity with students and striking workers (38–39), also connected to the presence of Aurora, whom the protagonist sees dying in nightmares every night. With his first novel, Ensayo General—dedicated to José Revueltas (De la Torre 1970, 7) and somewhat reminiscent of his critical realism, also condemning the traditional left along with the establishment—De la Torre delves even more deeply into the inner debates of the workers’ struggle than in his other works, or in those by other writers of that generation. The tone of the narrator and some extraordinary resources give us flashes of plasticity which are not characteristic of realism and rather become aggressively hyper-real. Such is the case, for example, with the progressive erasure of a revolutionary graffiti, made by Jesús—who will also be a main protagonist later in Las muertes de aurora—insulting the employers and the union leaders: “THE EMPLOYERS ARE ASSHOLES AND THE LEADERS ARE CABRONES”121 (De la Torre 1970, 111), which next is painted over progressively from both sides of the sentence by two employees. The lines repeat on the printed book and banish progressively, gradually losing meaning and syllables until only a few letters are left: “AND THE L”122 (112). In the middle one can read only small pieces of the original message, which iteration makes more significant and expressive of a frustration among young working classes of the 1950s to the 1970s, a feeling they shared with the students of 1968. The masses had been betrayed by orthodox politics and their leaders and became united against capitalism, the official revolutionary party PRI, the Communist Party, and even the venal union structures. Capturing this shared disappointment, De la Torre implemented formal innovations which derived from insights gained from his proximity to both workers and students. With De la Torre embracing the genre of parody and the aesthetic resources of hallucination as creative corollaries for the first time, The Hard Line123 from 1971 challenged the more conventional realism of his other works. It is in this second known novel by De la Torre that readers experience the true forces that constitute a visionary narrative. A group of friends who make up the biggest part of this book’s body of analyzed work—José Agustín, Parménides García, René Avilés Fabila, Margarita Dalton, and Gustavo Sainz—are unquestionably the “sect” that De la Torre portrays as embodying most of the absurdities and a potential for social change in the satire La línea dura. In fact, the author introduces a brief prologue in recent editions in which he explained how he had to “suppress the names of some friends who appeared as members of the Blood Drinkers sect124” (De la Torre 2014b, 5). What makes La línea dura so noteworthy is that, rather than mock someone else’s

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ideological extremes, it is a parody by De la Torre of himself and his friends in the 1970s. Readers uncover a background of deep political disappointment after the Tlatelolco massacres and other examples of utter repression by force, as well as the depoliticization of the working class when confronted with the insufficiencies of the Communist Party as documented by Revueltas himself in Essay on a Headless Proletariat125 (Revueltas 1987, 44–45). The narrator and protagonist Horacio Taciturnus, a tailor with a robot assistant, is even given some cannabis against his will in an episode in which he spends time with his sect friends. Concealed from him in beet juice he drinks, it allows him to “see God” later on, before leaving for an imaginary war resulting from the very real class struggles of Mexico and the exhaustion of traditional politics (De la Torre 2014b, 146). According to the author’s words in a brief testimony added to a new edition, “News from the author,”126 “I wrote this novel in four weeks in October and November 1968, still shaken, in many ways, by the Student Movement and the October 2 massacre”127 (De la Torre 2014b, 5). Initially imagined as a satire of guerrilla warfare, it mutated with the events, and the intent of the tailor protagonist to turn into a guerrilla fighter became more sincere, as if the indignation of De la Torre made it more of a dual testimony, ambiguous between making a satire of revolutionary excesses and one about the excesses by the very state that ultimately would make it almost natural to join the extreme activism of Latin American guerrillas. The original parody gives under the pressures of exasperation and frustration, so it mutates into a hilarious testimony of hallucination and uncertainty which simultaneously mocks society and revolution. Anger and laughter structure the visionary series of images that connect in the narration of this outsider of society, who chooses to start an armed resistance by himself, in the not-sorural or remote town of Xochimilco, a few minutes away from México City. There is an echo of a last supper with his hallucinated friends from the sect Bebedores de Sangre, and it is accompanied by excessive amounts of marihuana, an aid in the extreme points of experience where the novel develops, using Onda slang like “carrujo,” to refer to a joint: “Horacio lied on the carpet, put the hat aside, seized the first carrujo that came within his reach, and took three deep puffs”128 (De la Torre 2014b, 42). It is in reunions of the sect that heated ideological debates on hallucinated citizenship conclude with the promulgation of caricatured mottos like “Bravo! Long live the lumpen! Death to the bourgeoisie and its proletarian allies! Long live the revolution! Come on marijuana!”129 (55). There are also reflections on hallucinated materialism, debt, and geopolitics, like in a quote that seems to confuse the STPC founded in 1958 (Union of Cinema Production Workers of Mexico130) with psychoactive substances, cinema, and hallucination after the 1960s: “the excessive consumption of LSD, STPC, cacahuamine and other psychedelic drugs used for similar purposes and processed in laboratories abroad, has

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come to endanger the balance of our balance of payments”131 (De la Torre 2014b, 139). With Revueltas himself having been accused of a pessimistic existentialism in politics and literature, the brotherhood of “Blood Drinkers,” a parody of the circle of friends who had met in the Colonia Narvarte of Mexico City and in Juan José Arreola’s literary workshops, José Agustín and friends, all of them leaning toward the political left, are a very interesting incarnation of the political exhaustion and radicalization of the times that followed. Their marginality also resulted in a decadent self-exile from society and the nation as it had happened to some for whom hallucinogens were used as a means of alienation. Still, these writers are opposite examples of those cases, who conceived hallucination as a force of awakening, pointing to other realizations that would take each one of them through processes of activism and intellectual criticism. In the case of the satire in La línea dura, the conclusion was not only awfully funny but also a distressing example of how lonely and isolated the initiatives that promoted any energetic response to Tlatelolco’s political context really were. Readers also get a measure of how absurd, yet not so unthinkable, an extreme armed response via guerrilla warfare would have been at that time, at least as an alternative for young writers and the non-conformists in the cities. The discussions of the Blood Drinkers’ sect are truly ridiculous, but they cut through the contradictions of Mexico at the time, making them visible and laughable. Their debates expand in the midst of excesses and orgies which indistinctly interrupt or underscore the theoretical and political arguments they maintain, while smoking, drinking, partying, and describing the depoliticization of the working classes: “Along with them, Horacio concluded as soon as he took a bottle, now empty, out of his mouth. ‘The only existing revolutionary class has renounced its class status and the lofty tasks that constitute its responsibility’”132 (De la Torre 2014b, 45). The core nature of this group and its metaphoric connotations operate as structuring factors that elaborate on a series of critical visions both of the nation and of the communist revolution from the viewpoint of excess and hallucination, particularly marihuana, which reappears all over the book, with the sect described as “Drinkers of Blood and dear friends, unbroken revolutionaries, dipsomaniacs and drug addicts, stateless people, poets and practitioners of all kinds of perversions of the flesh and the spirit”133 (136). The parodic forces of the novel progress to the point of hallucinogenic conspiracy, as Horacio sees huge and suspicious alfalfa plantations all around his friends’ commune, uncovering what is in fact a mutated strain of cannabis next, produced by the sect: I asked them why there were so many alfalfa fields and by way of answer they took me to go through the plantation inch by inch. Hidden under the bushes I

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discovered a multitude of small marihuana plants, a dwarf variety that had been obtained through genetic manipulation.134 (De la Torre 2014b, 142)

Celebrating the margins of society while ridiculing bohemian intellectuals, the end of the novel parodies concrete common places of armed struggle. It follows Horacio into Xochimilco, where he simply takes over an unattended “chinampa,” an artificial floating patch of soil for growing vegetables and flowers: “I declare this chinampa in Xochimilco, Mexico, the second free territory of America”135 (De la Torre 2014b, 156), and lies idle there very early in the day, fatalistically imagining how the indifferent workers will casually start passing by, rowing in their “trajineras,” the long boats typical of Xochimilco, going toward the river pier and the market, bringing flowers and vegetables. There is a satiric absurdity also to the fact that such a floating piece of soil, not even real land, the chinampa, is promulgated but the “second free territory of America,” without the readers ever coming to know which one was the first, does he mean Cuba? Horacio merely stands frozen as a statue, a mock version of Demetrio Macías in the ending in Los de abajo by Azuela, when the revolutionary freezes in time like a monument pointing his weapon to the horizon. The tailor holds a last note in his pocket, addressed to the “lumpenproletariat”136 and more informally “to all the ñeriza”137 (De la Torre 2014b, 157), a community of “ñeros,” the youths of working-class neighborhoods in Mexico often stigmatized as habitual criminals. “Ñero”—a slang word also used indistinctly in Colombia and strange to many other Spanish speakers—named a subculture also admired as an aesthetic ideal by Parménides García, and precisely the most representative of marihuana users in México City and Bogotá, not very different in some traits from the vatos locos among the Chicanos from LA that interested Oscar Acosta and Hunter Thompson. The protagonist expects his message will be found by the army after he resists and dies in a hypothetical confrontation romanticized a priori. The novel makes us laugh out loud and by means of that sensorial experience points to the quirks of a revolutionary discipline that never managed to be orthodox, instead setting an example of political commitment through heterodoxy. La línea dura manages a beautiful balance that remains indisputable, considering armed struggle as an unthought-of source of humor, but simultaneously inviting us to mobilize, to act, in the most meaningful of paratextual ways, embracing the readers as “toda la ñeriza”—approximate to “all the thugs,” with them having little say on the matter, in the unilateral tone of a manifesto or a testament used by the tailor—and addressing them directly on the last note: It is time for us to rise and start a good brawl with the bourgeois, who keep us workers like the plates at a diner, always facing down and washed away. I stop here, I will say no more. If I am killed, let’s not even mention it. But my

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example will remain and others will come to re-whack the bourgeoisie’s balls.138 (2014b, 158)

If through the words of De la Torre I have found humor, there is also pain and conflict in heterodoxy. With Luis Carrión, another close friend of José Agustín, whom he would call the night of his suicide (Binzhá 2013, 221), the image of failure and conflict with society intensifies. It is interesting to observe the principle of reality in a narration like El infierno de todos tan temido, particularly as it evolved into a cinematic adaptation with Carrión’s script, the movie with the same name from 1981 directed by Sergio Olhovich. In regard to the novel, the previous years had implied a series of tensions between Carrión and the institutions of culture. Inside the story, other, yet similar, tensions were presented in the concrete danger of electroshocks and being locked up in mental institutions. With an explicit animosity, Carrión refused a proposal of the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) to receive his award as the only winner of the literary contest Primera Novela of 1974 from the hands of the Mexican president Echeverría, who was associated with the Corpus Christi killings of 1971 and had remained a Minister of Díaz Ordaz after the Tlatelolco massacre. As retold by Francisco Gabriel Binzhá in a meticulous article, the refusal of Carrión would motivate a boycott that postponed the payments of the award and also led to its publicity being neglected (2013, 232): “‘I will not receive anything from a character as sinister and deplorable as Luis Echeverría’ were more or less his words”139 (231). Unlike the other authors, rather than open sensorial explorations, the writings by Carrion developed on his dark visions (as in figure 2.3) and pointed to the growing demonization of marihuana, ideological awareness, and intellectuals, while his movie adaptation experimented with a narration about Mexico’s contradictions and its mental and emotional marginals. Eventually, the Mexico of presidents like Echeverría and Díaz Ordaz became unlivable for him. Some of the events of El infierno de todos tan temido—The hell so feared by all—revolve around the realization of being equally useless to the establishment of society and to the revolution. Jacinto, the novel’s protagonist and presumably a double of the author himself, falls drunk and stunned while his friend reproaches him: “The revolution, Jacinto, cannot be made with a marihuano like you or a drunk like me”140 (in Olhovich 1981, 55:00–55:10). Carrion’s depictions of Jacinto’s prose constitute the most metaphorical and visionary figurations of the film besides the irregular timelines also emphasized under the direction of Sergio Olhovich. Picturing what the intellectuals would become in a society that held them as dysfunctional, the film went over and over to the image of a young girl resulting from

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endless incestuous and endogamic class relations that secured isolation: “lived among the incest that has been crawling for a century, procreating one and a thousand monsters”141 (Carrión in Olhovich 1981, 12:03– 12:08). There are visions of a tainted generation (see figure 2.3): “At nine months her deformity and mental stagnation began, deaf-mute, retarded, deformed”142 (01:32–01:39). The character is born misshapen, blind, even resurrecting after suicide, lacking language, disconnected from the world, and enclosed in an inner experience whose speech references nothing: “huge paranasal sinuses, exaggeratedly large and uneven cheekbones, instead of a nose, only two holes that constantly snort; toothless, enormous and grotesque inner jaw”143 (in Olhovich 1981, 01:40–01:55). ​ Carrion’s thoughts with regard to some of the dynamics discussed here become more manifest in the photo book Avándaro, published by Editorial Diógenes, with his text and the images of Graciela Iturbide (Carrión 1971, n.p.). In it, viewers are shown the leftovers of the musical event of 1971, attended by almost a hundred and fifty thousand young people, which create the best context to reflect upon the relation between landscapes and consumer culture, the masses and the outcomes of collective hallucination in a context

Figure 2.3  The Metaphor of an Alienated Generation Becomes a Vision of Monstrosity: “Toothless, Enormous, and Grotesque.” Source: Olhovich, Sergio (Dir.). 1981. El infierno de todos tan temido. Motion picture. Script by Luis Carrión. México: Corporación Nacional Cinematográfica (CONACINE), 1:45.

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of neoliberalism and fossil fuel industries. Carrión saw the Mexican youth as an uncritical cult massively seduced by dubious quality rock, using secret words which he underlined were not secret anymore and had been included in novels; he saw the detailed specificity of their fashion, accessories, and clothes. But simultaneously, he felt their ancestral drives and their search for sensorial awareness resulted in a sort of awakening ritual rather than in mere alienation: The sale of drugs and their use to the point of autointoxication correspond to many of the vestiges, of the mysteries of ritual and ceremony, sacrifice and selfsacrifice, secret identification and other psychosocial expressions of primitive groups that can be discovered in today’s gangs.144 (Carrión 1971, n.p.)

Carrion identified capitalism and rock as the real sources of alienation in the music festival. Rather than being an evasion, marihuana and alcohol usage had also forced violent confrontations between the author and his society. If the rock music of Avándaro had been mediocre at best, a foreign display of culture, perhaps the hallucinogens, whose primary world source at the time was Mexico anyway, were better quality than Woodstock’s? In that sense, massive visionary usage was much more authentic than the interest in rock and the discovery of a young market. Since it was indeed a mystery of rite and ceremony, the official positions were as reactionary as the ones from leftist political orthodoxy, with the high secretary of government even trying to frame the festival as violating the right of assembly “to condemn the events in Avándaro and try to identify them with the violent repression of Tlatelolco in 1968 or that of June 10, 1971”145 (Carrión 1971, n.p.). In the El infierno de todos tan temido movie, adapted alongside other two writers, Carrion’s final work before committing suicide, there are signs of these reflections as well. A patient with dwarfism asks Jacinto compulsively for the reasons for his admittance, as he is put into a mental hospital due to his excesses, self-inflicted injuries, marihuana usage, alcoholism, and sudden changes of mood. Before Jacinto is thoroughly searched for drugs by the nurses and medic, the small man asks him half a dozen times if he was brought for marihuana abuse, employing the expression of the Onda generation for such heavy smokers, macizo: “Did they bring you here because you are macizo? They put you here because you are a macizo, right?”146 (Olhovich 1981, 4:42–5:23). Jacinto finally answers with camaraderie near the end of the movie, much later, when he stumbles upon the short patient displaying a shaved head and all the effects of heavy electroshock treatment: “Yes, I was brought here because I am macizo”147 (1:02:38–1:02:42). These terms and limits structure the inside and the outside of the mental hospital.

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The conclusion of the movie consists in an armed revolution with pretended wood rifles made at the workshop of the hospital: “It is for my nephew, he wants to become part of the guerrillas one day, so he must start training”148 (in Olhovich 1981, 1:18:15–1:18:23), Jacinto explains to the instructor as he makes his own gun model, bringing closer parody and guerrilla action like Gerardo de la Torre does. ​ At the end a performance evoking a guerrilla operation is put into action, an armed coup d’état to bring justice to the mental hospital. Under the leadership of Jacinto, the patients take over the clinic, and then all are allowed to take turns applying electroshocks to the director, for which they form a long line. In the most refined of materialist dialectics that was also reminiscent of Revueltas’s writings about political prisoners and jails, El infierno de todos tan temido, which premiered in 1981, allows for an undeniable parallel between the inequalities of mental health and those of a Mexican nation which approached some of its citizens as patients or criminals. Both in the narration of De la Torre and in that of Carrión, guerrilla warfare became a visionary praxis so distinctly inspired by hallucination and performance that their revolutionary characters used toy firearms merely as dramatic props (as it is literally visible in figure 2.4).

Figure 2.4  Guerrillas and Performance Fuse as the Pretended Revolutionaries Manufacture Prop Rifles in the Hospital’s Workshops: “It Is for My Nephew, He Wants to Become Part of the Guerrillas One Day.” Source: Olhovich, Sergio (Dir.). 1981. El infierno de todos tan temido. Motion picture. Script by Luis Carrión. México: Corporación Nacional Cinematográfica (CONACINE), 1:18:23.

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PARMÉNIDES GARCÍA: THE MORE CHALLENGING TO THE WELL-BEING OF SOCIETY A NEW LANGUAGE IS, THE MORE SECRETIVE IS THE CIRCLE OF THOSE INITIATED INTO IT This section header comes from Parménides García Saldaña’s En la ruta de la Onda—“the greater the challenge to the well-being of society, the more hermetic will be the circle of initiates in a new language”149 (García S. 1972, 51)—and makes a defense of the variations in language deployed by young hallucinating Mexicans by presenting it as an act of subversion that decolonized Spanish, while also wondering alongside them “What came first in the Onda, language or drugs?”150 (66). A main generational difference with regard to language materialized in visions that turned into words, channeled by cannabis for a portion of the young people described by Parménides García, divided into high classes and the cannabis users from the lower middle classes, “fresas” and “grifos,” respectively: “Mota is words. Words are the grifa. The words of the fresas are concrete, square, univocal, empty, without secrets. On the other hand, the words of the grifos are equivocal, ambivalent, ambiguous: always rolling, always moving”151 (García S. 1972, 66). According to José Agustín, García crashed a party of author Carlos Fuentes and started a fight and a chase all over the place, attacking other intellectuals. He seemingly was growing more dysfunctional after embracing LSD (Agustín 1991a, 25). The writer would be kept sporadically at a number of mental clinics, which had a worse effect on his health and exacerbated his delirium, and he was even sent to jail twice for trying to kill his mother (27). According to his friend, Prison shattered him. His greatest feat was going to a congress of the PSUM [United Socialist Party of Mexico] where he started shouting “phonies, fakes!” He had been possessed by the fantasy that his father was a great friend of Stalin and that Stalin was the real light of Marxism.152 (Agustín 1991a, 27)

Capable of embracing culture only as action and transgression, Parménides García challenged the boundaries of what was acceptable both in art and in life, going half-mad in the process of attacking the utter exhaustion of orthodox politics, morals, and aesthetics in modern México. Meanwhile, other authorial figures held a cultural authority that made them accomplices to the hegemonies of the 1960s and 1970s, as the novels La Mafia and Los Juegos confirmed it. As testified by their mutual friend José Agustín, Parménides García was in fact very close to the “not less crazy Luis Carrion, author of El infierno de todos tan temido”153 (Agustín 1991a, 27) from the previous section. They experienced

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a kindred strangeness in the society of the time—as perhaps they would in any society. This discomfort was countercultural, belligerent, and fraternal, and often came followed by a declaration of resistance even beyond México: “Are we going to let them put the labels of outsiders, lost and expired on us? No no no we have to howl to scream to howl like Ginsberg like Norman Mailer like Kerouac like William Burroughs we have to howl howl howl [sic]”154 (García S. 1968, 14). In the first paragraph of the novel, it is already made clear, on a full-name basis, that there is a spiritual proximity to Baudelaire and Rimbaud while economist Silva Herzog is also recommended (7). Like the works of Agustín, those by Parménides García are divided between formative narratives—like Pasto Verde, first published in 1968, and El rey criollo, in 1970—and those with a more critical and mature stance with regard to form, content, and experimentation. In this category, readers find his later books, Mediodía, from 1975, consisting of radio-like poems, and particularly En la ruta de la Onda, from 1972, essays which follow the elaborate complicities between mass markets, imperialism, rock and roll, Marxism, and hallucinogenic inquiries by the Mexican masses. Half as a mockery and half seriously, García established a seven-point structure for an Onda course which in itself showed the complexity of visionary traditions once fragmented into fields of knowledge from the Western world and the cities: “1) Language of the Wave 2) Hagiography of the Wave 3) Geography of the Wave 4) Sexology of the Wave 5) Pharmacology of the Wave 6) Musicology of the Wave 7) Phenomenology of the Wave”155 (García S. 1972, 47). Like in a secret organization, communication was maintained via a street slang learned from “el ñero” (57), a Mexican concept he shares with Gerardo De la Torre to define young people from popular neighborhoods and from the world of crime and prisons. Accompanied by a slang of “forbidden words, they seemed to form the language of a terrorist, of an anarchist, of a revolutionary of nothingness”156 (García S. 1972, 48). Something was being channeled through this tension in speech, an ongoing tradition including the collective cannabis parties described by Juan José Tablada in 1908 and particularly by Eugenio Gómez Maillefert in 1920, who added a glossary in his article, captured from an increasingly urbanized Mexico, but also including a vast pre-Cortesian legacy which was also potentially transcultural even then as now, like the syncretism produced by María Sabina in Oaxaca. Published on July 1968, Pasto Verde was very early the crowning point in a series of novels which developed on the “ondero idiolect”157 of the Onda Generation (Monsiváis 1977, 244), capturing not only mannerisms of speech but also a way of life and thinking. Due to its directness and the strength of its convictions, Pasto Verde—even more than Gazapo by Gustavo Sainz, from 1965, and La Tumba, published a year earlier by José Agustín—resounded as a truly generational manifesto of the 1968 youths. In July of that year, the novel openly addressed many of the generational and political contrasts that would blow up

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by early October, lamenting from the point of view of the youths the existence of “all these damn people, all these people that deny us a life, imposing their damn stupid rules, their pinches traumas”158 (García S. 1968, 16). Its original title was in fact La Onda, until Margo Glantz deployed the label to apply it to the entire Onda generation, and Parménides changed it (Agustín 1991a, 26). Unlike the other two initiatory novels by Agustín and Sainz, Pasto Verde constantly dealt with hallucinogens explicitly as part of the protagonist’s daily life. A characteristic exchange starts many of Epicuro’s interactions with friends, as the protagonist makes sure there is marihuana: “—¿Do you have any? / —Algodóon [sic]”159 (García S. 1968, 24); the man’s answer is a combination of the Spanish words for “some” and the Spanish title of respect for proprietors used in the colonies “don,” as well as the word for gift “don,” but when combined they add up to the word for “cotton,” all in a delicious plurality of meaning: “Algodóon.” “Hey, do you have any on you?—Some, flaco”160 (162). And so it is cannabis rhythm and grammar that many times structure the narration in a stuttering logic of lows and highs, as it is the case with the hallucination that puts together Marx, San Carlos Fuentes, and San Carlos Monsiváis alongside a crying Cortes and a Cuauhtémoc with a love vengeance (García S. 1968, 43), which I mentioned earlier in this text. Perhaps only hallucination could render the complex chaos of cultural influences and presences of twentieth-century Mexico visually comprehensible: “Now I’m hallucinating. You look like an Aztec, an Aztec Tlamemeh, a feather is coming out of your head .  .  . / —Hey, you always see strange things, I’ve never been able to see strange things like you . . .”161 (García S. 1968, 36). In fact, Epicuro explained how, along with visions, smoking brought on verbosity in him that he could hardly remember later on: “whenever I smoke weed, this happens to me I talk and talk and talk and then I don’t remember everything I say, don’t pay attention, it’s my vibe”162 (36). In fact, he uses the verb “tronarse” in Spanish to mean he gets high, slang alluding to a sort of “thunder” within. These meanderings and circumlocutions build the novel. Visiting the Faculty of Economics, precisely where Parménides García studied for some time, Epicuro observes and narrates as a group of student activists attend a speech by a leader who speaks the rhetoric of the Left and ultimately crashes a Coca-Cola bottle on the ground as a gesture against imperialism. Epicuro stares at the pieces of the bottle, as he utters a premise that has long kept divided the Left from any serious hallucinogenic experimentation, supporting Wasson’s conclusion that both on the Right and on the Left visions had been demonized and misunderstood by political orthodoxy (Wasson 1980, 227). In this case, it is a caricature of Monsiváis, a wellknown marihuana user and a blue jean-wearing intellectual: “Bah! I am sure that all these people are incapable of sympathizing with drug addicts .  .  . bah . . . bah . . . surely they would send Carlos Monsiváis to a concentration camp”163 (García S. 1968, 61).

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Cynical and frivolous as it is, Pasto Verde is also an affirmation of a concept of Mexican citizenship and struggle in which welfare and mental health should not solely be restricted to well-being, but should also include the autonomy for sensorial searches which are part of our present intellectual life and of our history. Thought of as wild and adventurous, what most of the young citizens’ aspirations showed in the 1970s was the clash between a heavily codified traditional society like that of middle and high-class Mexico, and the expectations brought forth among the new generations by the innovations of rock and roll aesthetics, globalization and the values they promoted, along with the recognition of many other cultural legacies in their Latin American identity, besides their Hispanic heritage. Expressed in brutal terms throughout this literature, readers find not a debate but an open battle of genders, with womanhood as a main receptor of violence, and it is through the sincerity of writers like García or Agustín that readers can glean how their generation—coming from even more heavily hierarchical and traditional societies—dealt with the sexual revolution and its unprecedented sudden expansion through cinema and rock and roll and mota, weed: “Thanks to the mota—which shook the brains of the middle class and in part certain superstructures—the girl also understood that the issue of sex is not that complicated”164 (García S. 1972, 105). The texts by many of the Onda writers dealing with sexual inequality and the objectification of women, most of them indirectly, remain a very hard experience to read through due to their brutal sincerity even in regard to their own blatant machismo. Such writing makes it close to impossible to simply naturalize patriarchy. Like Oscar Acosta, the sheer honesty of these authors helped make explicit how heteronormative and misogynistic Mexican society really was; in addition, because of their openness and hyperboles, one can easily identify their own machismo and learn from their shortcomings. Paradoxically, due to their exhibitionism and constant hyper sexualizations, it is through many of these authors that one learns about the real magnitude of the gender problem by the 1960s in modern Latin America as structured within society and at its margins. En la ruta de la Onda, On the road of the Wave, makes a case for the complex social dynamics that have made the market of rock a determining factor in hallucinogenic massification. Created by the establishment and fed by Anglo rock figures, Parménides García juxtaposed Marx’s notion of a bourgeois revolution and the cultural provocations of hippies: “Was he perhaps thinking of the Hippie Revolution, which was just another bourgeois revolution?”165 (7). Simultaneously, En la ruta dismantles the myths and figures of rock, denouncing their false consciousness and their greed. Besides defending excess as a way of life, Parménides García offers his own understanding of visionary writing as a chasing of the limits and the edge, the Onda itself being that edge, which reminds of Hunter Thompson’s ideas on Counterculture as a wave:

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When the wave ascends to the transcendental level, traveler you have reached mysticism; the excess of alcohol in the body, of weed in the body, of sex in the body, of acid in the body, lead to God and the Devil: the constituents of the laws of mysticism and the Onda.166 (García S. 1972, 14–15)

García ponders carefully on the undeniably historical Mexicanness of marihuana and its part in the colonial heritage, but also upon the consequences it would have once confronted with the War on Drugs and the massive desire to smoke whatever the Rolling Stones were having. An encounter of classes becomes possible through the unexpected influences of mass consumer culture and old Mexico, as he quotes lines from the revolutionary corrido of La Cucaracha and rock and roll culture: The vice of the valiant soldiers of the Mexican Revolution—the cockroach, the cockroach can no longer walk, because it lacks marijuana to smoke—the Mexican pepenadores, the Mexican thieves, the Mexican murderers! And from the middle class, the first followers of the forbidden grass finally emerged. Where to buy the grass that their “idols” consumed?167 (García S. 1972, 52–53)

Because of the criminalization of users of all social classes, particularly heavy consumers were often prosecuted by authorities as drug dealers when caught holding big amounts, so the very marginality of the ghetto, where the substances often had to be acquired, would communicate some of its subaltern lucidity and bitterness to the buyers as soon as they took the package: “When completing a marijuana purchase or sale deal, you are immediately like the inhabitant of a lost city, you are outside the law like him”168 (García S. 1972, 53). Perhaps not completely serious, this vision of Parménides García takes the narratives of health and the War on Drugs and puts them on their head. An ideologist, García inverted the caricature of security and hyperbolically stated that, like The Odyssey’s Lotus Eaters forgetting their homeland, “since the first marijuana cigarette we consumed, we have separated from the family, the country, the society that surrounds us”169 (1972, 53). The ridiculous prejudices which marginalized an increasingly popular substance forced a strange and interesting politicization of consumption at the time. Pushed outside of the acceptable image of society, the users hallucinated a whole new one, some of which they channeled into narratives like the ones singled out here, experiencing a transcendence that Octavio Paz mentioned that politics were missing at the time (Paz 1995, 266): “Since marijuana is illegal, its use and abuse require a ritual”170 (García S. 1972, 53). García opposed the social and class sensibility of national folklore, was against the rebellious and apolitical capitalism of rock (García S. 1972, 33), and defined yippies as ideologically aware and in contrast to the fad of hippie identity: “Psychedelia had not taken them off the ground but had externalized all the imagination existing in their brains. Imagination mobilized by

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reading Marcuse, McLuhan, Bakunin, Lenny Bruce”171 (37). The author even recognized the immense alienating capabilities of the same hallucinogens whose awakening potential he had explored so much, and he disapproved of Leary to a degree that amounted to violent dissent: “After Leary, who promoted the aceite? The Beatles declared to the press the therapeutic wonders of acid. Then, the authorities, kept imprisoning the kids for drug addiction, their fans. Luv n’ Peace”172 (34). He doubted that this was magical or unilateral. Of course, ambiguity persists and the visions are solely revelation, an invitation which is taken of free will, so he wondered with an open question on LSD which closed that passage: “To what level has this counter-alienating subterfuge been effective?”173 (105). These substances implied a risk beyond superfluous fads and the marketing of the Onda, and even revived the colonial and neocolonial wounds in the concept of nation: “I’m not talking about those who read William Blake, Aldous Huxley, The Book of the Dead. I’m talking about those who have always been sacrificed for the illusions of leaders, egomaniacs, geniuses”174 (García S. 1972, 76–77). Beyond what visions could reveal in terms of our own inhibitions, it is productive to think of those they let us see in others, and even in the reality of democracies and their concerted models of citizenship. The experiences of these authors intensified the subtlety of daily chauvinism and made it more shocking, allowing the reader to take a more critical instance on her or his own identity, although in those times this realization also marked a social stigma: “a young smoker does not want to be imprisoned for smoking mota, he does not want to be imprisoned for taking mushrooms in the Sierra, and have his hair cut”175 (García S. 1972, 164). The wildness and wantonness of the Onda metaphors brought them closer to popular culture, allowing for more sincere narratives, although less embellished as well, in contrast to the “real maravilloso” suggested by Alejo Carpentier and other Boom writers. Rejecting a reconciliation of aesthetics and beauty in these authors, readers see the open wound of gender, class, and ethnic inequalities. The fact that they employed intense energies, substances, and ideas in the process is perhaps shown in the outcome of some of their lives. Parménides Garcia’s experience with mental health institutions marked him forever: But they confine me to a psychiatric clinic where, thanks to freaking Dalila, I lose my long hair but not my sense of humor, and since they suspect that every shaggy long-haired is insane, they lock me up in a cell.176 (García S. 1968, 163)

If Pasto Verde reminisced from a present immediately before Tlatelolco’s massacre, its tensions and context, the book Mediodía recreated its image as a close past by 1975. The retelling that García made of the events of 1968 in his book of poems subverted Tlatelolco’s remembrance. Through a non-sequential series of pieces which disperse their lines discontinuously

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throughout Mediodía, made of prose and verse, living and loving ghosts resurface as teenagers and young women and men. The very titles of these poems are a perfect testimony of how personally García, his close friends, and his generation lived through the loss of many contemporaries in the massacre: “Tlatelolco,” “I Left My Love in Tlatelolco,” “It Was a Hard Year,” “Last Night,” “Tlate Is in My Memory,” “But . . . We Are All One.”177 Simple and direct, there is a powerful minimalism to those poems in Mediodía which address the student mobilizations and the killings by means of evoking them from a living and loving legacy. Building a continuum of ridicule and seriousness, García Saldaña develops a poetic voice capable of a hallucinatory montage of different polyphonies within a single poem, that of 1970s México, precisely with lines like “it is me I am him you are us we are one,”178 he states, adding all concrete properties to that solidarity principle and becoming hyperbolic once more, suggesting satire but also a commitment that would necessarily conflict with the capitalistic sense of ownership, a generosity beyond an individual sense of property, “your house and your car and your clothes / and your money are mine”179 (García S. 1975, 71). For García Saldaña, a real social experiment to redefine Mexico entailed such a depth of anarchic acceptance that neither the Left nor the Right could ever completely materialize a cohesive nation during the twentieth century. Connecting verses like “we are mariguanos / like the soldiers,”180 with the social traumas of the times, complete a complex portrait of the crisis of modern institutions and traditional ones. Relating marihuana and cocaine users in another poem of the book Mediodía, “mariguanos” and “cocaínos,” he then completes the past lines with two more about how we all are “like policemen, they are too much; / like cocaíno politicians”181 (García S. 1975, 71), the poem titled “But . . . indeed we are all one”182 presents the diversity of the social tissue deploying a brief enumeration that synthetizes the nation: “just as one is one and two is two / and you and me at the time of solidarity.”183 The time of crisis reveals the repressed “over there in Tlatelolco.”184 Substances and scars become metaphors, as another fragment puts it—“we kept speaking about peace every time we smoked mota”185—while the closing lines emphasize a loss and a trauma: “you are living for him and he died for you”186 (García S. 1975, 72). The other poems do seem to follow a logic of “parody of parody”187 (Glantz 1979b, 118), in which the rhetoric and presumptions of the rock revolution are made into pure satire. A high quality and a humble naivety, which the rest of Mediodía’s pieces perhaps lack, presents in these politicized passages the schism of that youth, whenever the verses touch upon the politics of the senses, repeatedly divided between ideals of revolution which have not yet materialized today but renew their promises with the generations and the new content they supply for new visions.

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MARGARITA DALTON: URBAN VISIONARY PRACTICES ON LSD Previous to many other books of that generation, and being the one that more precisely and openly appropriated the intake of modern artificial hallucinogens like lysergic acid, the focus and secularity of Larga Sinfonía en D y había una vez . . . from 1968 by Margarita Dalton make it a special case, an ultimate example of visionary politics and aesthetics, even dedicated to a potential reader in a perpetual state of hallucination: “For you with dilated pupils, always arriving on time”188 (Dalton 1968, 9). She also related old and new hallucinogens as part of human evolution and its neurochemical interactions with much older substances: “Who can say that the first leap of humanity was not due to a mushroom? And I know what’s in your head . . . but no, the first leap of fungi wasn’t due to man. I ASSURE YOU”189 (151). Dalton did not write any more novels. After publishing Larga Sinfonía, she transitioned to activism. Along with the transnational net suggested by the complex national identities of the characters, with the action set in London, the book by Margarita Dalton presents a triangle of lovers trying the effects of LSD. Two of them are initiated under the guidance of Martin, an Australian who is a firm believer in hallucination as a revolution of the mind. From the beginning, time is disorganized, but in a gentle harmonious whole which requires no linearity. I present Dalton’s work as an ultimate example of mestizo visionary narratives today, thriving in the gaps, dilemmas, and sensations of a bygone time which nevertheless is always the present. The text follows Ana, a Hungarian, as she confronts Roberto, a Mexican, who is about to travel and join some Latin American guerrilla, and the aforementioned Martin, who is a firm believer in hallucination as a revolution of the mind capable of challenging relations of production after Marxism. —Martín! Do you think this is the way to change the world? Roberto asks incredulously. /—This, undoubtedly, is one of the greatest of modes! /—Do you think this is the solution to bring to a factory where the workers are on strike? Will this be a solution to their daily problems? /—I wouldn’t give it to the workers alone, I would let them and the factory owner take it at the same time, I would simply make them realize their stupid relationship and the absurd game that keeps them in such a situation.190 (Dalton 1968, 26)

The novel builds on the excitement of a first-time consumption of LSD and transmits its adventurous uncertainty, as well as those of youth, love, and social unrest. With chapters consisting of different hours of the same day, the timeline also offers discontinuities of space, changes in the objectivity and

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in the subjectivities of the narrations, and an altered diegesis. The dialogues between the three main characters seem to happen both inside and outside of them. This uncertainty is similar to the way José Agustín, married to Margarita Dalton for a few years, wrote Se está haciendo tarde (final en laguna), a common trait of these visionary experiments appears in his description of his own novel and applies to Larga Sinfonía and others: It tries to rescue old traditions, discover new literary resources and obtain a clear and effective artistic vision, in which the characters become (numinous) archetypal images without ceasing to be (living) characters and reveal themselves as determining parts of a totality that advances to take self awareness.191 (Agustín 1980, back cover)

The ordinary becomes extraordinary, and everything is read under the light of this altered state. Martin defends pop art as communicating a present made of many antique layers. In commerce he sees a Prometheus surrounded by plastic: “In a super market one finds everything. Every moment of humanity’s development is enclosed in the cellophane bag that squeezes the chicken”192 (Dalton 1968, 40–41). Contemptuously called “a manual for the first-time LSD user” (1986, 135) by Susan C. Schaffer in her article about Se está haciendo tarde, “The Drug Experience in José Agustín’s Fiction,” Larga Sinfonía en D is much more than that. It makes the most precise incursion from the Onda generation into the particular definition of hallucinogenic rituals in a secular society and in a context of real gender equality, even reimagining the concept of a romantic relationship in 1968. The notion of hallucination as a game places an emphasis on humor and exploration, which for Martin implies to rediscover the world. For criminals, sex workers, and middle classes, but also among Indigenous communities—as the Wixáricas observed through the eyes of Fernando Benitez, or the Tukanos studied by Reichel Dolmatoff— and mestizos from cities and from the countryside, and for many others from all over the world alike, hallucination turns culture into a playground, connecting the nomad pasts and the sedentary present into visionary uses and art: THIS IS A GAME to the one we all bring our own history, culture, idiosyncrasies, all factors that add up, in short, to make our personalities and that will surely control the psychological stages we have to go through next. Above all, there is nothing to fear. The first time is one of the most beautiful. Today we are going to discover the world . . . !193 (Dalton 1968, 60)

As the trips to outer space and the landing on the moon in 1969 brought a planetary level to how people thought of their own existence in the 1960s and 1970s, the massification of hallucinogens in consumer culture seemed to bring that planetary scale into the realm of the mind and the senses, to the

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inner spaces. In the words of Martin, and more generally in Margarita Dalton’s novel, as it also happens with La línea dura by Gerardo De La Torre, revolutionary guerrillas and revolts coincide with the growing popularization of substances like LSD, marihuana, peyote, and psilocybin mushrooms, among others. It is, at least, indicative of a link that they cover similar timelines in world history, as if marking the words of Martin with regard to their own visionary trance, itself part of a bigger reflection on cultural and political revolutions seen as closely related: “Look, if we start to elucidate these global problems looking for a large-scale solution now, it is because it is part of our journey”194 (Dalton 1968, 139). Martin recognizes for Roberto the urgency of a revolution, in that they can agree, but he disapproves of guerrilla practices and forceful means: “We coincide in what should change, yes, but not in the means. I don’t think killing each other will lead us to solving the problem”195 (140). The reflections on the relations between capitalism, the supermarket, and our ancestral drives penetrate the fiction and turn it into a truly fruitful series of insights on the means of production and dialectical materialism. The single problematic consumption of LSD appears as a problematization of all others, of consumerism and desire as a whole. It prematurely suggests the anachronism of libraries that readers know of now, due to the linearity of books and the context of digital repositories taking their place as Ana puts it, predicting our technologized present as defined by the sensorial searches of the twentieth century: “The industry that is going to be needed around this will be fabulous!”196 (Dalton 1968, 133). As the novel suffers formal transformations, something is suggested in Ana’s reflection on industry, a complicity between fossil fuels and hallucinogens, since the colors, forms, and juxtapositions of LSD could not have been materialized in a material other than plastic and other synthetics. Readers have seen the exponential growth of audiovisual technologies as our senses demand more and more hallucinated properties from reality itself as seen through the lens of the cultural markets. Dalton’s text becomes a visual message, an enigmatic window to figures that reveal our inside in a free association not unlike that of a Rorschach test, invoking paratextual surprises, like the cockroaches in Oscar Acosta’s book or the I-Ching likeness in that of Jose Agustín. The novels in most of the visionary corpus satisfy that urge by means of an interior search which does not exclude formal metamorphoses and experiments, as the pages and their layouts often suffer unpredictable visual twists. We have discussed earlier the possibility that the cavities dispersed in the irregularities and imperfections of form and content in these literatures could be truly part of a device in which the readers install their own body discipline of reading and completing an embodied ritual of symptoms, signs,

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and interpretation. In the case of Larga Sinfonía en D, there are some literal holes throughout the writing in which pieces of the blank page shape the text beyond meaning (Dalton 1968, 101, 96–97). Similar but different to the blacked-out lines in the last psilocybin pages by José Agustín in Se está haciendo tarde (final en laguna), here there are blank spaces on the page that make an indefinable figure in the background. Calligrams but also plain mutations of meaning, exchanges between the physical object of the book and the soul of its style and content, the novel and narrative. Most of the silences of Maria Sabina as she chants are one of the few aspects one misses on the recordings by Wasson released in 1957 in the album, Mushroom Ceremony of the Mazatec Indians of Mexico, by Folkways Records. Those are clearly there as the night progresses but most have been edited out for the continuity of the recording, so audiences only hear a different track for each song in the long play disc. It is only along with those silences that the ceremony could be completed, moments during which the chant turns to hallucination in the lowlights inside the usually secluded and silent house of the traditional healer and their place of work (Wasson 1980, 33). Moments in which one should look to the inner self, and then, as the attendants hear their own breathing, their pulse, symptoms and body sounds, the silence of their own music, the hallucination transforms again in a new passage of chanting for the healer and visions for the guests, something that in the original recording by Wasson was determined by the moments in which he proceeded to register Sabina’s voice and those when he considered each song was finished so he would pause the recording. In contrast, when the mestizo visionaries of younger urban generations achieved complete control of the means and the message, it happened otherwise. Some of the books I have examined do contain such blanks and introspective silences, and that is the case with the Rorschach test shapes in Larga Sinfonía en D, in which one is forced to pour its own images. Sometimes one even finds doors, passages. These holes and figures of emptiness which start to show up in the pages’ layout, create forms that strive to communicate an enigma, to signify beyond communication, and perhaps even offer us the sensorial intuition of a “new language” and of a New World. The word rearranged on the page reads “evolve” as much as “love,” in English, or “veil” and “see it”197 in Spanish (Dalton 1968, 149). For the character of Roberto, only concrete violent revolution can change the world, so he rejects the effects of acid as artificial, but Dalton clearly challenges that image of purity via the answer of Martin: “A scientific discovery is artificial, everything that surrounds you and is part of your environment, what is it? What are the frontiers or limits between the natural and the non-natural?”198 (Dalton, Larga Sinfonía 136). Still, often apolitical and non-violent, as criticized by Parménides García, hallucination seems to fall short of compensating for the scale and pace of the urgency of the world’s

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problems in the nuclear era. For Roberto, a president in the White House would not make a difference if he was on acid (135): “The Assyrians seem like children in comparison with contemporary technocrats who want to turn us into cosmic dust . . . Sorry but I forgot . . . Do you think that LSD is going to stop them? No, Martin, it won’t!”199 (134). Although not explicitly reflecting upon gender, Larga Sinfonía en D presents a coherent criticism of heteronormativity by means of developing a love triangle between three adults. It is truly telling that the elements of excess and wantonness in the male narrators from other Onda authors, which make a call to sexual freedom in the key of violence and transgression, are deeply transformed in Dalton’s approach. By suggesting that there is no purity, no naturalness, in the artificiality of culture, the novel makes a “natural” transition to a threesome, which we find in media res from the first pages. Furthermore, it is Ana who brings the situation forth, being the character who at times seems to display the most decisiveness compared to the uncertainty of Roberto and Martin, and being the one who pushes for experimentation: “Girl, because of you the three of us got into bed and made love together, while you repeated that everything was ‘Biological!’ ‘Very natural,’ ‘what’s wrong with it?’”200 (Dalton 1968, 159). Sister of poet Roque Dalton, the evolution of Margarita Dalton to social activism as a feminist and an academic should be seen as a progression of her experimentation with conscience and aesthetics. Readers can consider her in a similar way to how she thinks of the second wave of feminism of the 1970s as a consequence of the student movements and searches, along with the historical milestone of the Cuban Revolution and earlier feminist reflections like Simone de Beauvoir’s: “These movements encouraged deep ideological questions about colonialism, social classes and sexual roles”201 (Dalton 2012, 443). Recognized as “the first countercultural novel in Mexico”202 (Agustín and Casasús 2006, 29) by José Agustín, probably even more in terms of its quality than for being first in time, Larga Sinfonía from 1968 is the only one within Glantz’s category of Onda writing to dismantle the hegemony of male narrators (Glantz 1979a, 104). In fact, the novel has been largely ignored, with a review by Charles Piano from 1969 being openly derogatory, and like Schaffer, deeming it an LSD manual: “the failure of the novel is largely one of technique” (Piano 1969, 383). Still, the final judgment of the reviewer made clear what was really at stake in what he considered a failure: “The defect here is that the individual scenes are like photographic negatives: unprocessed raw material for which the reader-reviewer is asked to do the developing” (Piano 1969, 383). It is this quick dismissal of Danton’s biggest achievement without even denying it that perhaps best signals a bias on the part of the reviewer, who understood novels as a technical achievement that could fail. The paradox is that the reviewer stated the novel was a technical

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failure, but simultaneously described that he did experience the “unprocessed qualities” which were the very technical goal of the author—so intensely, in fact, as to provoke authentic frustration at his own lack of creativity, which the novel confronted him with by demanding his active participation. Along with Ana and Roberto, the reader is under the guidance of Martin, a regular user but even more, an ideologist of LSD, and even a public lecturer giving interviews on the subject as a form of activism. Readers get pieces of some of his press declarations in the novel. The writings by Dalton, whose book was published just a couple of months after the Tlatelolco killings, in December 1968, are also part of that corpus which captured the spiritual violence and urgencies of that generation of the student movement, and the social struggles of those years, but also their ideology and their intellectual legacy. Often presented as leading wholly different—and at times opposite—searches, the discussions between Martin and Roberto, the mystic and the leftist guerrilla ideologist, remain challenging today as they integrate a search into how to change society and what constitutes a revolution. Even though both guerrilla warfare and hippie values are now mere anachronisms, the novel by Dalton remains exquisitely current by means of its exploration of those debates within a visionary speculation that also exists as a live tradition in the present, closer to the prime drives, doubts and questions of 1968 and the debates on what constitutes the most humane and apt activism. How to change the world? Visionary from start to finish, the novel and the experience of hallucination are a single one in Larga Sinfonía en D y Había una Vez . . . The progression toward its ending is also a crescendo of collective revelation. The narrative personas become both means and ends, leading us and them to a conclusion in which, as I mentioned before, “the characters reveal themselves as determining parts of a totality that advances to become aware of itself” (Agustín 1980, back cover). The layout of the pages changes rapidly during the last chapter (Dalton 1968, 161–170). In the last sections, format and meaning seem to overflow, and the text is divided into three long columns, presenting the thoughts of all three protagonists now extricated from a whole and delimiting all their three individual experiences on a single page. The ending of the text at 10.00 p.m. presents a definitively altered layout over the page, in which the characters become fused after the three columns had brought them apart. Like Ulysses by James Joyce, the novel’s actions develop throughout a single day. To frame these productions within visionary tradition allows for a number of realizations that point to how the usage itself was a cultural legacy, even without ritualistic paraphernalia. By keeping this particularity in sight and reframing this ancestral hallucinogenic legacy of use as a practice capable of structuring written language as it did orality, one manages to see an ongoing living tradition passed on from the Old World to the entire globe. At the

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same time, the visionary field connected territories in a single transnational dynamic, including the United States, Mexico, and Colombia as a circuit of ideas and substances. Beyond this, it linked pop culture and local traditions in a more comprehensive way than the “Onda” label applied to the generation, which has been repeatedly criticized and rejected by some of the authors it aimed at categorizing. Once readers see the pan-American complexity of these practices, it is more visible how the War on Drugs and other government strategies antagonized and prosecuted a form of knowledge, at the local, national, and continental level. Recognized writers from the late 1960s, like Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, or Mario Vargas Llosa, conquered novels as an ultimate aesthetic object, a technical consecration in which the reader was a mere contemplator. Indeed, the “so-called Boom, was the cool ending of an entire era, which after all had been extremely fine because a kind of protective unconsciousness always prevailed, the atmosphere of a dream that had kept going until then”203 (Agustín 2002, 293–294). Agustín developed this idea in the short story “A day in life,”204 which tells of a single day in his marriage with Margarita Dalton, and the friendship with Parménides García and Gerardo de la Torre, which concluded with his impressions on the contrasts between the past of Latin America and the Boom aesthetics after spending the whole day with them and others. In contrast to those days, he sees Dalton, himself, Parménides García, De la Torre and their people as the ones who had to awake at a much more somber, naked reality, full of storms and dangerous circumstances that could no longer be mediated by the dreamy perfections of Boom literature: “In my generation there were already many who came to be like lightning rods, minefields; we had our feet in one epoch, and our spirits in another”205 (Agustín 2002, 294). The generalized admiration for Revueltas, a political commitment that was on the left spectrum but not orthodox, the will to subvert form and content of what was habitually understood as Latin American culture, as well as a deep engagement with hallucinatory intakes and therefore with visionary practices are all particularities which push the learning of a language that no human could teach, as it is often put by traditional healers. A hallucinatory exploration of “the word” as transmitted by experiences and experiments with hallucinogens, language, and narratives constitutes the praxis of these writers: The psychedelic revolution was frankly a utopia, and not many could buy it in Mexico after 1968, but the important thing was the myth in which they all converged because it gave a transcendent meaning to life; what was important were the ideals, the exploration of the mind and the pointing out of a cultural reality that needed to be corrected.206 (Agustín 1996, 99–100)

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Given such a proximity to a popular and ancestral Mexico, one could state that it was not Carlos Fuentes, Fernando Benítez, or Octavio Paz who truly connected with the student mobilizations of 1968 and inherited their pain and some sequels of their struggle, but the so-called Onda artists. Albeit, their sincere support for the youth—Benítez from the pages of Siempre! and Paz by quitting his diplomatic charge and publishing his now-famous poem about Tlatelolco (Monsiváis 2008, 210–211)—was indispensable for the whole of Mexico to start reacting to what the students’ deaths implied. Octavio Paz’s gesture of distancing himself from the administration of Díaz Ordaz signaled a dignity that set a precedent for other dissidents. But even among the most solidary members of Piazzola’s La Mafia—those who responded with energy to the victims of October 2 like Benítez and Fuentes—being cultural and social elites kept them safe, distant, and legitimized. It was certainly not them who most suffered the neuroses and dysfunctionality resulting from the national trauma of 1968 and the 1971 killings under Luis Echeverría’s administration. No incarcerations exist on the records of the Mafia elite as they do on those of José Revueltas, Parménides García, José Agustín, or the many young men held under drug charges for experimenting with hallucinogens. No psychiatric ward held them hostage due to a national denial which often resurfaced at a domestic level, as a conflict against the paternalistic and authoritarian institution of traditional families that often replicated the structure of the nation, labeling many hallucinogenic users as psychiatric patients. Most of these consequences were not even experienced by many of the very leaders of the student movement, as it is so aptly put by Monsiváis, who commented on how monstrously distant from the dignity of that heritage and those values they got to be later in time. Unexpectedly, it is the alleged hedonists of the “Onda” who actually appropriated the events of 1968 and what followed, learning from them and turning their memory of those years into a living political statement about the present, the same way they embraced the recognition of José Revueltas as a seminal figure of Mexican literature and history. José Agustín prologues Revueltas’s complete works and edits an anthology of his short stories, La palabra sagrada, that posthumously brought him back into the public eye and literary tradition. They even co-wrote the screen adaptation of El Apando. Additionally, besides expressing support for the students as they protested, Agustín was deeply marked by them, and one can find testimonies of that throughout his critical works on Mexican culture and history, like Tragicomedia Mexicana or La contracultura en México. Gerardo De la Torre developed his second novel, dedicated to José Revueltas, Ensayo general, about the unfortunate gaps between the workers and the students during the 1968 mobilizations, while a work like La línea dura parodies the political extremisms that became popular in those years, with many advocating for guerrilla revolutions as a result of the profound political repression and

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state violence, while marihuana and other substances were a common consumption among many activists. Avilés Fabila made a satire of the banality of the government as a never-ending party of cultural and political elites, in the context of political prisoners, repression, and state killings (Avilés 2001, 14). Margarita Dalton, also an explorer of visions and hallucination, moved on to feminist activism as a coherent consequence of her support of the 1968 mobilizations. Parménides García made a detailed criticism of the capitalist spirit behind the rock and roll culture in La ruta de la Onda. Truly honoring his communist ideals and his academic background as an economist, he attempted to make a critical dismantling of the rock and roll myth and craze, using Marx’s conceptualizations from Brumario the 18th to characterize the initiative of a rock revolution as a bourgeois one and therefore destined to betray its own ideological premises. Later on, the poems in Mediodía by Parménides García touched upon Tlatelolco as a site of love and loss, localizing a heartbroken youth in an impossible romance, longing for a political change it could never effect. Luis Carrión’s hero in El infierno de todos tan temido, like Polonio in his cell in Revueltas’s and Agustin’s El Apando from 1976, experienced his stay at the psychiatric ward as a reflection of the inequalities of the bourgeois society outside. The psychiatrists were presented on the side of the exploiters while the patients, solely owning their own dysfunctional labor force, incarnated the exploited. With a life similar to that of his characters, Carrion seems to have suffered personally for his political convictions and drug use, a declared leftist and an outsider. The fact that the Avándaro festival was never reorganized, that the magazine Piedra Rodante was closed under anonymous threats aligning with the government and with the censors after only eight issues, or that publications like Diario de un narcotraficante and El tráfico de la marihuana by Ángelo Nacaveva and other narco-narratives would become much more popular editorial initiatives than the visionary and hallucinogenic poetics explored here, are all evidence that stress the crucial importance of visionary topics and portray the War on Drugs as an attack on culture. Often approaching substance abuse from the specter of traffic and production, and objectivizing substances as merchandise and fetish, a mere means to capital accumulation, narco-novels eclipsed the immense ambitions of the narrative projects by hallucinogen users, interested in ritualistic, philosophical, or intellectual aspects of their effects. Their careful and detailed metaphors within hallucination, indeed cultural devices of experience, end up being subsumed under drugs’ characterization as a business and a crime which would catapult other authors and corpus to success. Of the experiments and of the experiences with hallucinogens, much less will be visible in the twenty-first century’s mass consumer culture than it was between the 1950s and 1980s. Still, visionary searches and hallucinogen usage persist with similar passion and intensity

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now that rock and roll has decayed, reduced to another apolitical and commercial music genre, and guerrilla warfare is rare. In fact, now both are usually thought of as anachronic and ineffective, while visionary practices among Indigenous communities and mestizos in rural areas, as much as the secular ones in big cities, become renewed with each generation’s aesthetics, metaphysics, and authors.

NOTES 1. “Memoria sobre el uso que hacen los indios de los pipiltzintzintlis.” 2. “Las que los indios reconociendo por pipiltzintzintlis, fue necesario arrancar las plantas luego que comenzaron a madurarse las semillas por cuanto procuraban pillar toda la que podían.” 3. “que en el uso de los pipiltzintzintlis el diablo no tiene más parte que la que se le quiere dar.” 4. “He demostrado la virtud de los decantados pipiltzintzintlis, por lo que habremos de decir con el lenguaje de los teólogos, que son malos por prohibidos, no prohibidos por malos.” 5. “las modernas Reales Órdenes del 12 de enero y 24 de octubre de 1777; de 20 de Abril de 779; de 26 de Octubre de 787, y de 12 de Abril de 792.” 6. “Me parece que la equivocación radicó en esto: como nosotros ya somos mariguanos por naturaleza, el uso de la planta rompió el saco de nuestra natural riqueza imaginativa, esto es, nos condujo a la desórbita. Continuemos con nuestra mariguana innata y basta.” 7. “A los estudiantes, por influencia de muchos de sus viejos maestros reaccionarios, tanto en política como en arte, nuestras obras les parecían una especie de resurrección idolátrica prehispánica y algo positivamente feo.” 8. “Lo informal como fuente de inconmensurabilidad, es decir, como dinámica que pone en crisis la medición objetiva del valor creado por estas economías.” 9. “Los grupos dominantes, políticos y financieros, programaron una contrarrevolución cultural a través de la satanización de las drogas, la mitificación del narcotráfico como villano internacional, el amarillismo sobre el SIDA, la identificación del comunismo como terrorismo y del terrorismo como manifestación del demonio.” 10. “Puesto que es una disidencia que se propaga, la prohibición asume la forma de un combate contra un contagio del espíritu, contra una opinión. La autoridad manifiesta un celo ideológico: persigue una herejía, no un crimen. Se repite así la actitud de otros siglos ante la lepra y la demencia, que no eran vistas como enfermedades sino como encarnaciones del mal.” 11. “hoy se han convertido en ceremonias oficiales.” 12. “Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza.” 13. “El hombre, eternamente ‘grifo’ (bajo la acción de la marihuana) y casi sin dejar de ‘dárselas’ (fumar), voltea con una inconsciencia de idiota la rueda de sus velas, la mujer, en un rincón del cuarto también ‘grifa’ (bajo la acción de la marihuana), ‘cura

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y espulga’ (prepara y limpia de semillas la marihuana) la marihuana y tuerce los ‘moriquetos’ (cigarros de marihuana) destinados a la venta” (Gómez M. 1920, 28). 14. “Sólo contiene el vocabulario usado generalmente entre ellos.” 15. “algunas canciones de los marihuanos.” 16. “una particular simpatía de parte del autor por la marihuana y sus fumadores.” 17. “Marihuano estoy que no puedo / Ni levantar la cabeza / Con los ojos colorados / Y la boca seca, seca. / Seca, seca la Boca. / Boca, boca, boca la seca.” 18. “Expresidiarios, rateros, soldados, prostitutas, individuos de la clase media y jóvenes acomodados de la mejor sociedad.” 19. “A todos los marihuanos les gusta iniciar en su vicio a otras personas.” 20. “el uso de la marihuana en México por lo extendido que se encuentra.” 21. “Tiene la siguiente particularidad: ya que ha fumado demasiado la manifiesta diciendo: ‘traigo luz roja’ (refiriéndose a lo inyectado de los ojos por el efecto de la marihuana), y no puede hablar sino con palabras, cuyas primeras sílabas tengan parecido con las de aquellas que desea emplear: vg.,’—¿No querétaro tomatlán un tequesquite chicorro?’ (no quieres tomar un tequila chico) y así se está hablando durante largo tiempo con una facilidad sorprendente.” 22. “diferente al que nosotros hablábamos en el día. Era un lenguaje que sin comprenderlo, me atraía.” 23. “una inagotable veta de regocijo.” 24. “curanderas y hechiceras,” “velerías,” “vendedores ambulantes.” 25. “Cierto artículo mío que con el nombre de ‘Las misas negras de la marihuana’ denunciara el soez y peligroso vicio.” 26. “caló de vicio.” 27. “No hay cosa más dañina que el tabaco.” 28. “Darse un toque: Lo mismo que darse las tres.” 29. “No falta un amigo iniciado que os dé la clave de la germanía: ‘mota’ es la marihuana; ‘grifo’ el que la fuma; ‘darse las tres’ es fumarla.” 30. “¡Miren, muchachos! Allí viene el Perro de Corea vestido de charro y con un cuero de pulque en la mano . . . Su estado mayor lo forman Pirrimplín, La Mariposa, Fra Diávolo y el general Lobo Guerrero.” 31. “Había caído, en efecto, en medio de un cónclave de ‘grifos’ . . .” 32. Doña Juanita: Principio de sainete por un transeúnte del siglo veinte. 33. “¿Quién ha llegado como yo ‘a las masas’? Así se predica el socialismo; así se levanta el pendón de México en tierra extraña; así tomo yo la revancha conquistando en E.U. más de lo que ellos han conquistado en México. Porque si tuvieron el petróleo, las minas, los ferrocarriles, la agricultura y los quick-lunchs, yo tengo allá su juventud, su loca, su impetuosa juventud de las Universidades, es decir, la gente del mañana; su porvenir, en una palabra.” 34. “Todo el fascismo es nuestro aliado.” 35. “Los pobres en México (como en todas partes) tienen que cargar a cuenta de la fantasía la dicha que la realidad les niega. No tienen para el cine, ni para el teatro. No saben leer. No tienen bibliotecas, ni campos deportivos.” 36. “¿Qué han de hacer los pobres? ¿qué quiere usted que hagan? Usted les promete. Usted es la ilusión y la quimera. Llega cargada de fantasía y leyenda. Es usted accesible y acogedora. Los congrega dispuestos a todo.”

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37. “Un MITO.” 38. “Como muestra de su estilo reproduzco algunas líneas de un ‘CINE-POEMA.’’” 39. “Cuevas como esculpidas por espectros etruscos / con imágenes lóbregas y estrambóticas nautas / y abulones y octopus y sepias y argonautas.” 40. “Nuestra mariguana innata y basta.” 41. “Catedrático de marihuana.” 42. “Lo extraordinario, lo excepcional del arte de los toltecas, como de todos los artistas prehispánicos de México, particularmente de los escultores, se debe a que realizan sus creaciones bajo los efectos de la cannabis índica.” 43. “Sin duda alguna—empezó diciendo—hasta ahora lo único que es trascendente, de valor positivamente universal que México, nuestra patria, le ha dado al mundo, es la mariguana.” 44. “Adentro de esta petaca que no ha costado más que un peso cincuenta, hay ciencia, hay arte, hay política, está todo lo que necesitamos no solamente para que ustedes hagan ese arte gigantesco que quieren construir, sino la salvación de nuestra patria.” 45. “Aprobamos fumar la mariguana para llegar así a la excelsitud de los plásticos de la antigüedad pregachupina de México.” 46. “En otra ocasión, estaba yo observando desde arriba una conversación de marihuanos. Y el tema era: ‘De qué color era el espíritu.’” 47. “Si yo te como, a ti, y a ti, sé que me harán cantar bonito . . . —les dije.” 48. “Cuando se toman los niños santos, se puede ver a los Seres Principales. De otra manera, no. Y es que los hongos son santos; dan sabiduría. La Sabiduría es el Lenguaje. El Lenguaje está en el Libro. El Libro lo otorgan los Principales.” 49. “En cierto tiempo vinieron jóvenes de uno y otro sexo de largas cabelleras, con vestiduras extrañas. Vestían camisas de variados colores y usaban collares. Vinieron muchos. Algunos de estos jóvenes, me buscaban para que yo me desvelara con el pequeño que brota. ‘Venimos a buscar a Dios,’—decían. Para mí era difícil explicarles que las veladas no se hacían con el simple afán de encontrar a Dios, sino que se hace con el propósito único de curar las enfermedades que padece nuestra gente.” 50. “Al igual que tú, se dedica a enloquecer a la gente.” 51. “Intervinieron en Huautla a partir del verano de 1969 para expulsar a los jóvenes, extranjeros y mexicanos, que habían hecho del lugar un centro de alucinogenación [sic] desenfrenada.” 52. “Sí, porque creo que vienes a buscar a Dios—le dije.” 53. “Un paisano mazateco a quien la policía buscaba inicialmente, me había acusado de vender un tabaco a los jóvenes que al fumarlo, los enloquecía.” 54. “Lo conozco, sé que es hijo de la finada Josefina, paisana nuestra, pero jamás le he hecho daño a este individuo. A mí me enoja esta situación. Estoy dispuesta a liarme a golpes con este hombre.” 55. “Desde su gestación, la Onda es antinacionalista, imitativa y apolítica. A la política—entrevista brumosa y moralmente como órbita de policías y caciques—se le considera vicio antiguo, ajeno a la beatificación del poster psicodélico.” 56. “La educación de los sentidos, el aventurerismo de los viajes en ácido, lo onírico como capricho de la voluntad. Culturalmente, predomina lo oído sobre lo leído.”

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57. “Si Cayetano no hubiera traído a los extranjeros . . . los niños santos conservarían su poder.” 58. “Nunca, que yo recuerde, los niños santos fueron comidos con tanta falta de respeto.” 59. “los niños santos perdieron su pureza. Perdieron su fuerza, los descompusieron.” 60. “¡Ahora los hongos hablan nguilé (inglés)! Sí, es la lengua que hablan los extranjeros.” 61. “La otra familia de Maria Sabina.” 62. “En el peyote de los huicholes y en los hongos de los mazatecos halla la Onda sus vías más nacionales y eficaces de acceso a la comunión mística.” 63. “solamente confío en lo que los niños me dicen; para mí eso es suficiente, mi única fuerza es mi Lenguaje.” 64. “No soy curandera porque no doy a tomar agua de hierbas extrañas. Curo con lenguaje. Nada más. No soy hechicera porque no hago la maldad. Soy sabia. Nada más.” 65. “No hay mortal que pueda enseñar ese Lenguaje.” 66. “No hay mortal que sepa o que pueda enseñar tanta sabiduría. Mi Lenguaje me lo enseñó el honguito.” 67. “La diferencia, por lo que hace a las plantas alucinógenas, consistió en que los indios creían comulgar con dioses y los españoles con un diablo maligno.” 68. “el mundo es sólo una gran metamorfosis: la tercera lección del peyote.” 69. “La mafia es la primera novela estrictamente sicodélica que se publica en castellano. Escrita como un collage.” 70. “En lo alto de la pirámide del Sol solía colocar Octavio Paz a algún adolescente que fumaba marihuana, quién sabe lo que ahora estaría ocurriendo en la pirámide cubierta como estaba de clase media.” 71. “una obrita imbécil.” 72. “nuevas tierras (incluso del Espíritu), nuevos tipos de hombres (incluso escritores), de costumbres (incluso morales), de leyes (incluso válidas), de usanzas (incluso sencillas, aunque vistosas), nuevas hierbas (hmmmmm).” 73. “ya no hay que fiarse de las palabras y p. ej. el submarino amarillo que parece tan inocente que tiene que ver sus words con la LSD o algo así.” 74. “Si el comer una naranja bajo los efectos del LSD resulta un puro éxtasis, ¿qué irá a hacer el pobrecito trabajador-de-las-palabras con su arduamente aprendido talento para describir el sexo?” 75. “absoluta despolitización.” 76. “qué quieren con esos nuevaoleros que no han salido de su casa, que hablan de su familia, tienen problemas con su mamá, toman ácido lisérgico y después todo lo cuentan.” 77. “ex jefe del clan.” 78. “Cien recetas para guisar hongos alucinógenos.” 79. “los hongos comienzan a hacer efecto en las mentes de los intelectuales.” 80. “El revolucionario—suponía su generación—echaba hijos a pasto y jamás pensaba en ellos ¿para ya sabes qué? Dar golpizas a las mujeres, drogarse, fumar mariguana hasta la náusea, citar a Engels, escribir manifiestos inflamados de pasión

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revolucionaria y arreglar al mundo: actividades cotidianas del buen comunistamexicano [sic].” 81. “Los ferrocarrileros encarcelados continuaban luchando, los maestros apaleados y gaseados insistían en reivindicaciones, los campesinos hambreados suplicaban un reparto de tierras auténtico (la suma de las tierras laborales repartidas desde que se inició la Reforma Agraria Integral, duplica el total de las existentes en la República, alcanzó a decir antes que lo aprehendieran el pobre maestrito rural), los estudiantes con planes de estudio caducos se lanzaban a las calles a protestar y a apoyar a los ferrocarrileros, maestros y campesinos, los intelectuales aburridos apoyaban, aunque sólo con su firma, todas las demandas nacionales y a la Revolución Cubana.” 82. “un arma formidable.” 83. “Guevara Niebla fue a la Prepa 3, emborrachó a los cuates—y hasta les dio mariguana, que les gusta y no son novatos, pues saben darle ‘las tres’ de rigor a los ‘carrujos’—y cosa de doscientos de ellos, armados con palos y varillas, atacaron a los granaderos.” 84. “sin comer durante 72 horas y mariguanos durante ese mismo lapso.” 85. “A empellones fueron subidos en los transportes militares. Eran unos jóvenes, casi niños, una mujer embarazada y un hombre de facciones recias. Pertenecían a una sola familia. Ninguno podía reponerse de la sorpresa, de la desagradable sorpresa que significa ser arrestado por soldados marihuanos, capaces de cualquier cosa.” 86. “De 1968 a 1972 la crujía Efe de la cárcel de Lecumberri acabó como la de Teotitlán: con hongos, flores, signos de la paz, murales sicodélicos y rock pesado en los altavoces del patio.” 87. “Con los amigos sicodélicos tenía discusiones para que trataran de darse cuenta de la importancia de los movimientos sociales y de la lucha política en general; con mis cuates rojos, por el contrario, discutía para hacerles ver que una revolución interior era algo que hacía falta.” 88. “en 1968, el movimiento estudiantil en Estados Unidos, Francia y México. Estos movimientos alentaron cuestionamientos ideológicos profundos sobre el colonialismo, las clases sociales y los roles sexuales, lo trajo la necesidad de profundos cambios estructurales.” 89. “La sensibilidad artística estaba cambiando en México, como se pudo ver cuando un grupo de nuevos narradores (Gustavo Sainz, Juan Tovar, Gerardo de la Torre, René Avilés Fabila, Parménides García Saldaña, Jorge Portilla y yo mismo) coincidimos en que se trataba a Revueltas injustamente y con una definitiva falta de respeto.” 90. “A propósito de Los muros de agua.” 91. “no negarse jamás a ver, no cerrar los ojos ante el horror ni volverse de espaldas por más pavoroso que nos parezca. Tolstoi vio a esos fusilados; cuándo y cómo, no importa. Yo tenía que ver a aquellos leprosos.” 92. “Los ‘políticos.’” 93. “Los mariguanos permanecieron impasibles. Unos tenían la vista fija en el suelo, como divirtiéndose con el mundo infinito que ahí abajo se ofrecía a sus ojos. Otros miraban el aire, descubriendo cosas invisibles para el común de los mortales.”

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94. “la teoría gubernamental de que ‘en México no hay presos políticos’ no se reduce a una simple e inocente abstracción doctrinaria.” 95. “Puesto al mismo nivel carcelario que el de los delincuentes comunes, el enemigo político de hecho es arrojado, inerme, sin protección, a las manos del hampa penitenciaria.” 96. “Durante el movimiento estudiantil de 1968 los jipitecas no parecían muy interesados en salir a manifestarse con los estudiantes.” 97. “En la negación absoluta de la consciencia histórica y en un nuevo extrañamiento del hombre que se inserta dentro de la enajenación general como praxis perturbada que se expresa en la contrariedad entre el paraíso artificial de los sentidos enajenados y el paraíso natural enajenado de los sentidos.” 98. “Sabiendo que la inspección personal en las Islas era extremadamente rigurosa, todos, sin excepción, se entregaban a la tarea de ‘dar el mate’ a los estupefacientes que llevaban consigo, para llegar ‘limpios.’” 99. “Pues ya ve, me agarraron con mota.” 100. “Después resultó que los cinco habíamos causado una pésima impresión en el juzgado por ‘mariguanos, mugrosos y un intelectual.’” 101. “José Agustín salió del tambo.” 102. “A partir de ese realismo se va convirtiendo en una cosa absolutamente irreal de lo real que es. Ya no se cree. O ya no hay medios disponibles para decir bueno esto es realismo absoluto.” 103. “se objetivaba la violencia, la sordidez y la virulencia de Lecumberri en el tono de mi novela.” 104. “ya estaba como poniendo las bases de lo que después me enseñó a mí el aceite y las drogas psicodélicas.” 105. “Para solucionar el conflicto, el maestro veredictó: Rafael tenía que experimentar nuevamente las visiones que le ocurrían cuando niño.” 106. “Siempre se regresa de los viajes, pero no de ése, nunca antes habían llegado a semejante nivel y por eso creían que ignoraban que cuando se llega allí no hay escapatoria.” 107. “Creo que le dio tristeza, por simple solidaridad humana porque nunca le gustó lo que yo escribía.” 108. “la onda era lo grosero, vulgar, la inconsciencia de lo que se hacía, lo fugaz y perecedero, jóvenes, drogas, sexo y rocanrol.” 109. “a ella pertenecen el estudiante de la UNAM Carlos Salinas y el estudiante del IPN Ernesto Zedillo, que ya en el poder no manifiestan vínculo alguno con los ideales del movimiento.” 110. “Que se haya consumido cemento indica que parte de esa gente que habita los barrios bajos, tampoco quiere estar sola ni quiere ser fan de los halcones.” 111. “la primera mitad del siglo conoció un sucedáneo de los ritos tradicionales: las reuniones políticas. Hoy se han convertido en ceremonias oficiales.” 112. “¡Los adolescentes de la Clase Media hablando como los pelados de la colonia Buenos Aires—nomás across-the-Piedad-River—que es de puros rateros y asesinos y mariguanos! ¡Muchachos con educación, hablando como rateros, mariguanos, asesinos, barbajanes!”

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113. “Imágenes alternadas de Dalia Marina y Angélica cantando Going out of my Head. Una familia de los treintas yendo a Misa. Un mitin político. Los Dientes Macizos en una reunión adorando a Quetzatcóatl. Marx posando con su libro La Sagrada Familia. Engels con La Familia, La Propiedad Privada y El Estado. Lenin con La Emancipación de la mujer. Los Dientes Macizos cantando Let’s spend the night together. San Carlos Fuentes y San Carlos Monsiváis vestidos de Quevedos sobre unos pilares en el fondo de la escena donde Dalia Maria canta going out of my head Cortés está llorando bajo un árbol dame otra vez tu amor Marina dame otra vez tu amor Marina y Cuauhtémoc en una choza planea la destrucción de los españoles que conquistaron a sus mujeres.” 114. “Tan estúpidos como para no darse cuenta de que los presos eran ellos y no nadie más, con todo y sus madres y sus hijos y los padres de sus padres.” 115. “Si tuviéramos lana podríamos conectar un buen pase con ese pinche comando.” 116. “dijo que esta película era una indignidad y que cómo podían arropar la bandera mexicana con semejante basura.” 117. “él me comenzó a contar que había sido idea de Díaz Ordaz construir los apandos antes del 68.” 118. “drogadicto! degenerado!” 119. “Mi ambición fue tremenda, I wanted to make something sacred. Una película que diera las alucinaciones del LSD sin tomar LSD. To change the young minds of all the world.” 120. “Robar a un amigo o a un hermano es inmoral. No robar a las instituciones es aun más inmoral.” 121. “LOS PATRONES SON OJETES Y LOS LÍDERES CABRONES.” 122. “Y LOS LI.” 123. La línea dura. 124. “suprimir los nombres de algunos amigos que aparecían como miembros de la secta Bebedores de Sangre.” 125. “Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza.” 126. “Noticia que ofrece el autor.” 127. “Escribí esta novela en cuatro semanas de octubre y noviembre de 1968, conmocionado aún, en muchos sentidos, por el Movimiento Estudiantil y la matanza del 2 de octubre.” 128. “Horacio se dejó caer en la alfombra, puso a un lado el bombín, se apoderó del primer carrujo que estuvo a su alcance y dio tres profundas fumadas.” 129. “¡Bravo! ¡Viva el lumpen! ¡Muerte a la burguesía y sus aliados proletarios! ¡Viva la revolución! ¡Venga marihuana!” 130. Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Producción Cinematográfica de la República de México. 131. “el desmedido consumo de LSD, STPC, cacahuamina y otras drogas sicodélicas usadas con objeto semejante y procesadas en laboratorios del extranjero, ha llegado a poner en peligro el equilibrio de nuestra balanza de pagos.”

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132. “—La única clase revolucionaria ha renunciado a su condición de clase y a las altas tareas que constituyen su responsabilidad—concluyó Horacio apenas despegó la botella, vacía ya, de su boca.” 133. “Bebedores de Sangre, amigos entrañables, revolucionarios sin quebranto, dipsómanos y drogadictos, apátridas, poetas y practicantes de toda especie de perversiones de la carne y el espíritu.” 134. “Pregunté por qué tantos alfalfares y a modo de respuesta me llevaron a recorrer palmo a palmo el plantío. Ocultas bajo las matas descubrí multitud de pequeñas plantas de marihuana, una variedad enana que habían obtenido mediante manipulaciones genéticas.” 135. “Declaro esta chinampa en Xochimilco, México, segundo territorio libre de América.” 136. “lumpenproletariado.” 137. “a toda la ñeriza.” 138. “Es hora de levantarnos y arrimarnos una buena zoquetiza con los burgueses que todo el tiempo nos tienen como platos de fonda, bocabajo y bien fregados. Aquí le paro, ya no digo más. Si me matan, ni hablar del peluquín. Pero queda el ejemplo y otros vendrán a repapalotearle las verijas a la burguesía.” 139. “‘Yo no recibiré nada de un personaje tan siniestro y deplorable como lo es Luis Echeverría’ fueron más o menos sus palabras.” 140. “La revolución, Jacinto, no se puede hacer con un marihuano como tú o un borracho como yo.” 141. “vivido entre el incesto que repta desde un siglo atrás, procreando uno y mil monstruos.” 142. “A los nueve meses empezó su deformidad y su estancamiento mental, sordomuda, retrasada, deforme.” 143. “senos frontales enormes, pómulos exageradamente grandes y desiguales, en lugar de nariz, sólos dos huecos que resoplan constantemente, desdentada, mandíbula interior enorme y grotesca.” 144. “La venta de drogas y su empleo hasta la autointoxicación, corresponden a muchos de los vestigios, de los misterios de rito y ceremonia, sacrificio y autosacrificio, identificación secreta y otras expresiones sicosociales de los grupos primitivos que se pueden descubrir en el pandillerismo de hoy.” 145. “para condenar los sucesos de Avándaro y tratar de identificarlos con los de Tlatelolco en 1968 o los del 10 de junio de 1971.” 146. “¿Te trajeron por macizo? .  .  . ¿A ti también te trajeron por macizo, verdad?” 147. “Sí, me trajeron por macizo.” 148. “Es para mi sobrino, que quiere ser guerrillero, ¡para que se vaya entrenando!” 149. “entre mayor sea el reto al bienestar de la sociedad, más cerrado será el círculo de iniciados en el nuevo lenguaje.” 150. “¿Qué fue primero en la onda, el lenguaje o las drogas?” 151. “Mota es palabras. Palabras es grifa. Las palabras de los fresas son concretas, cuadradas, unívocas, vacías, sin secretos. En cambio las palabras de los grifos son equívocas, ambivalentes, ambiguas: siempre rodando, siempre en movimiento.”

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152. “La cárcel lo hizo añicos. Su mayor hazaña fue ir a un congreso del PSUM [Partido Socialista Unificado de México] donde se puso a gritar ‘¡farsantes, farsantes!’ Había sido poseído por la fantasía de que su padre fue gran amigo de Stalin y que éste era la verdadera luz del marxismo.” 153. “no menos loco Luis Carrion, autor de El infierno de todos tan temido.” 154. “¿Vamos a dejar que nos pongan letreros de outsiders perdidos y vencidos? No no no tenemos que aullar que gritar que aullar como Ginsberg como Norman Mailer como Kerouac como William Burroughs tenemos que aullar aullar aullar.” 155. “1) lengua de la Onda 2) Hagiografía de la Onda 3) Geografía de la Onda 4) Sexología de la Onda 5) Farmacología de la Onda 6) Musicología de la Onda 7) Fenomenología de la Onda.” 156. “palabras prohibidas, parecían formar el lenguaje de un terrorista, de un anarquista, de un revolucionario de la nada.” 157. “idiolecto ondero.” 158. “toda la pinche gente, toda esa gente que nos niega vivir, que nos está imponiendo sus pinches reglas pendejas, sus pinches traumas.” 159. “—¿Traes? /—Algodóon [sic].” 160. “Oye ¿traes?/—Algo, flaco.” 161. “Ya ya me estoy alucinando pareces azteca tlameme azteca de la cabeza te está saliendo un penacho . . . / —Oye siempre ves cosas raras yo nunca he podido ver cosas raras como tú.” 162. “siempre que me las trueno me pasa esto hablo y hablo y hablo y después no me acuerdo de todo lo que digo no te fijes es mi onda.” 163. “¡Bah! Estoy seguro que toda esta gente es incapaz de compadecerse por los drogadictos . . . bah . . . bah . . . de seguro mandarían a Carlos Monsiváis a un campo de concentración.” 164. “Gracias a la mota—que sacudió los cerebros de la clase media y en parte a ciertas supraestructuras—la chava también entendió que el patín del sexo no es tan complicado.” 165. “¿Estaría acaso pensando en la Revolución Hippie, que fue una revolución burguesa más?” 166. “Cuando la onda asciende hasta el nivel trascendente, viajero has llegado al misticismo; el exceso de alcohol en el cuerpo, de mota en el cuerpo, de sexo en el cuerpo, de ácido en el cuerpo, conducen a Dios y al Diablo: los constituyentes de las leyes del misticismo y la onda.” 167. “El vicio de los valerosos soldados de la revolución mexicana—la cucaracha, la cucaracha ya no puede caminar, porque le falta mariguana que fumar—los pepenadores mexicanos, los rateros mexicanos, los asesinos mexicanos! Y de la clase media, por fin salieron los primeros adeptos a la yerba prohibida ¿Dónde comprar la yerba que consumían sus ‘ídolos’?” 168. “Al realizar el trato de compra-venta de la mariguana, de inmediato se es como el habitante de la ciudad perdida, se está al margen de las leyes como él.” 169. “Desde el primer cigarro de mariguana que consumimos nos hemos desvinculado de la familia, la patria, la sociedad que nos rodea.” 170. “Siendo ilegal la mariguana, su uso y abuso requieren de un rito.”

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171. “La sicodelia no los había despegado de la tierra sino exteriorizado toda la imaginación existente en sus cerebros. Imaginación movilizada por la lectura de Marcuse, McLuhan, Bakunin, Lenny Bruce.” 172. “Después de Leary, ¿quiénes promovieron el aceite? Los Beatles declarando a la prensa las maravillas terapéuticas del ácido. Luego, las autoridades, encarcelando a los chavos por drogadictos, sus fans. Luv n’ Peace.” 173. “¿hasta qué nivel ha sido efectivo este patín desenajenante?” 174. “No estoy hablando de los que leen a William Blake, Aldous Huxley, El libro de los muertos. Estoy hablando de los que siempre han sido sacrificados por las ilusiones de los líderes, los ególatras, los genios.” 175. “el chavo macizo no quiere que por fumar mota lo metan a la cárcel, no quiere que por ir a la Sierra a atacarse de hongos lo metan a la cárcel, le corten el pelo.” 176. “Pero me recluyen en una clínica siquiátrica donde, gracias pinche Dalila pierdo la melena más no el humor, y como sospechan que todo greñudo está insano me encierran en una celda.” 177. “Dejé mi amor en Tlatelolco,” “Fue un año difícil,” “La noche anterior,” “Tlate está en mi memoria,” “Pero es que todos somos uno.” 178. “soy yo soy él es tú eres nosotros somos uno.” 179. “tu casa y tu coche y tu ropa / y tu dinero son míos.” 180. “somos mariguanos / como los soldados.” 181. “como los policías, pasados; / como los políticos cocaínos.” 182. “Pero . . . es que todos somos uno.” 183. “así como uno es uno y dos es dos / y tú y yo a la hora de la solidaridad.” 184. “por allá por Tlatelolco.” 185. “hablando de paz / cada vez que fumábamos mota.” 186. “tú estás viviendo por él y él murió por ti.” 187. “parodia de la parodia.” 188. “Para ti de pupilas dilatadas siempre llegando a tiempo.” 189. “¿Quién puede afirmar que el primer salto del hombre no se debió a un hongo? Y se lo que está en tu cabeza . . . pero no, no se debió a un hombre el primer salto del hongo. TE LO ASEGURO.” 190. “—¡Martín!, ¿crees que éste sea el modo de cambiar el mundo?—Roberto pregunta incrédulo. /—Éste, indiscutiblemente, ¡es uno de los grandes modos! /—¿Crees que sea la solución a traer en una fábrica donde los trabajadores estén en huelga? ¿Será ésta una solución a sus problemas diarios? /—Yo no se lo daría a los obreros, se lo daría a ellos y al patrón a la vez, simplemente los haría darse cuenta de su relación estúpida y del absurdo juego que los mantiene en tal situación.” 191. “Trata de rescatar viejas tradiciones, descubrir nuevos recursos y obtener una visión artística neta y efectiva, en la cual los personajes resulten imágenes arquetípicas (numinosas) sin dejar de ser personajes (vivos) y se revelen como partes determinantes de una totalidad que avanza a tomar conciencia de sí misma.” 192. “En un súper uno encuentra todo. Cada momento del desarrollo de la humanidad está encerrado en la bolsa de celofán que presiona al pollo.”

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193. “ES UN JUEGO donde todos traemos nuestra historia, cultura, idiosincrasia, factores todos que suman, en fin, nuestras personalidades y seguramente controlarán las etapas psicológicas por las que debemos pasar. Sobre todo, no hay nada que temer. La primera vez es una de las más bellas. ¡Hoy vamos a descubrir el mundo . . . !” 194. “Mira, si nos ponemos a dilucidar estos problemas mundiales y buscamos una solución a gran escala es porque forma parte de nuestro viaje.” 195. “En el contenido del cambio sí, pero no en la forma. No creo que el matarnos nos llevará a la solución del problema.” 196. “¡La industria que se va a necesitar alrededor de esto es fabulosa!” 197. “velo,” “lo ve.” 198. “un descubrimiento científico es artificial, todo lo que te rodea y forma parte de tu ambiente, ¿qué es? ¿Cuáles son las fronteras o límites de lo natural y lo no-natural?” 199. “los asirios se quedaron chiquitos, si los comparamos con los tecnócratas contemporáneos, que nos quieren hacer polvo Cósmico . . . perdona pero se me olvidaba . . . ¿Crees tú que el LSD va a detenerlos? ¡No, Martin, no!” 200. “Chicuela, por ti los tres nos metimos en la cama e hicimos el amor juntos, mientras tú repetías que todo era ‘¡Biológico!’ ‘Muy natural’, ‘¿qué tiene de malo?’” 201. “Estos movimientos alentaron cuestionamientos ideológicos profundos sobre el colonialismo, las clases sociales y los roles sexuales.” 202. “la primera novela de contracultura en México.” 203. “so-called boom, eran el fin chingón de toda una época, que a fin de cuentas había estado a toda madre porque siempre predominó una suerte de inconsciencia protectora la atmósfera de un sueño que había funcionado hasta entonces.” 204. “Un día en la vida.” 205. “En mi generación ya habíamos muchos que veníamos a ser como pararrayos, campos minados; teníamos los pies en un tiempo, y el espíritu en otro.” 206. “la revolución sicodélica era una franca utopía, y en México después de 1968 no se la tragaron muchos, pero lo importante era el mito en que convergían todos porque le daba un sentido trascendente a la vida; lo importante eran los ideales, la exploración de la mente y el señalamiento de una realidad cultural que requería corregirse.”

Chapter 3

Colombia

For Schultes and Hofmann in Plants of the Gods, there is a vast disparity between the New World and the Old World, specifically in areas like Central and South America, particularly Colombia, whose region is “a close second to Mexico in the number, variety, and deep magico-religious significance of hallucinogens” (1979, 27). This difference in numbers is not due to more abundance of flora, and it seems even counterintuitive, since there are more varieties of peoples and ecosystems in the Old World, so Hofmann and Schultes concluded it had a cultural basis (30), which they associated with a hunter–gatherer heritage, preserved even among agriculture practicing Indians of today’s Americas. More than hallucinogens, it is hallucination, a living agency including spoken consultations, sculpturing, painting, drama, epics, music, and even humor and parody, that is a heritage of America, a legacy that is mostly lost now in Europe, although usually there is at least one hallucinatory agent per culture everywhere, with very few exceptions around the globe (Schultes and Hofmann 1979, 26–29). In Colombia, the debates over the use of these chemical compounds are as intense as ever today and add to the complex colonial and neoliberal history of cannabis and hallucinogens in general. With various attempts to penalize the minimal dose by the presidential party, and as part of the conservative platform of Iván Duque Márquez in 2018, a political puppet of his predecessor Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the country has also confronted massive protests of students, Afro-Colombians, mestizos, Indigenous communities and various workers demanding increased state funding for public universities bankrupted all over the country and better working conditions. In that context, cannabis possession was often redeployed as an accusation useful to present those in popular opposition as criminals or to harass them at different levels. Biased and exclusionary measures by the government allowed for the 171

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consolidation of a veiled strategy to stigmatize young people from popular classes and to militarize protest policing it locally and nationally in the last two decades. This could be seen as the pharmakos or scapegoat facet of the pharmakon, a Greek concept for a poison and remedy that includes modern and ancestral drugs and hallucinogens, identified by Hermann Herlinghaus (2013) in his critical work Narcoepics: A Global Aesthetics of Sobriety as a useful means to create a public enemy and a “drug problem,” instead of a real social agenda for the institutions. This third chapter on Colombia deals with two connected cultural groups that were crucial in the late twentieth century, Nadaísmo and the Grupo de Cali en Ciudad Solar, constellations of intellectuals and artists who, like Chicanos in the United States and the muralistas or the Onda writers, adopted visionary substances and practices, particularly cannabis, as a means to reject their Hispanic heritage. And although it is true that marihuana came with the Europeans, hallucination was wholly Indigenous. Even if this did not lead to a complete transculturation of their national episteme, nor did it end immediately in the popularization of concrete Indigenous values and aesthetics, it certainly opened a path to recognize other presences in Latin American cultural heritage, like that of Afro-descendants and Indigenous communities, as structural to our modern art and identity. The fact that this single subject can include so many different key actors and moments of culture in Colombia, particularly intellectuals prone to learning from the masses and addressing them directly, attests to the ideological and class biases behind the criminalization of hallucinogens and hallucination. One could even say that they constitute a sort of reverse of the Homo sacer by Agamben. They are exceptional liminal states of consciousness whose characterization in society, nevertheless, defines how sobriety and daily routines are experienced and surveilled. Film director Carlos Mayolo describes the high obtained from cannabis under slang words like “torcido,” crooked, or “trabado,” stoned—the term most used in Colombia to name the marihuana high, similar to “stoned”— emphasizing an altered state in which consciousness perceives the quotidian reality within other symbolic dimensions and life appears organically connected to politics. What one sees torcido takes on a symbolic dimension and everything escalates to its best. I have always gotten trabado, even for [Communist] party meetings. Things without getting torcido lose their shine. That is why one insists on getting trabado in order to see everything much better, more beautiful and meaningful.1 (Mayolo 2002, 91)

The invitation for readers to stop being citizens which are really psychiatric patients is not only the conclusion of the retrospective by Carlos Mayolo in his “short-story-therapy”2 “Pharmakon” but also that of the lives of Porfirio Barba

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Jacob, Gonzalo Arango, Dario Lemos, Andrés Caicedo, Luis Ospina, Oscar Campo, Fanny Buitrago, Patricia Ariza, Guillermo Lemos, Sandro Romero, and so many others, including the protesting students and those who have stood against the criminalization of the minimum dose, the fumigations of the War on Drugs, and the police and military deployment to cope with social problems.

INDIGENOUS AND OTHER COINCIDENCES AROUND HALLUCINATION AND THEIR ECHOES IN THE MESTIZO SENSIBILITY OF EMERGENT COLOMBIAN INTELLECTUALS: “ENTONCES LES HABLA EL DIABLO” A disowned tradition in Latin America and even a public enemy at times, long before Lautréamont, Baudelaire or Rimbaud did it via their poetry, meeting the devil had been related to non-Christian practices and to the usage of certain substances by witches and gentiles (Schultes 1976, 22). We stumble upon innumerable echoes that remain in the present, since for arts and culture, “Nothing ever ends, nothing ever begins. Everything is presence. Everything exists in the process of revelation. Also what does not exist exists in the infinite possibilities of nothing”3 (Arango et al. 1963, 5). By the sixteenth century, the devil had become particularly linked to the New World. Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, also quoted by the anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff on this subject, was a Spaniard officer who would live for some years in Santa Fe de Bogotá, in the New Kingdom of Granada. He made an apt synopsis of those customs that disturbed him particularly as a catholic European in the Magdalena region and in Santa Marta, but also in the Andes, and in America as a whole. In his Armies and description of the Indias4 from 1599 he stated: They are people who in general get drunk on chicha of corn, azua, or pulcre, which are the drinks they use in the three Kingdoms. They chew hayo, or coca, and jopa, and tobacco with which they lose their judgement, and then the devil speaks to them. This happens more among Indian sorcerers, moanes, and santeros, who represent the devil in a thousand various figures, and according to the form in which it appears to them they make the figure of gold, or clay, or cotton, which they adore with reverence: and today much of this happens secretly among the people who are already Christian, since it is already very publicly practiced by the idolaters.5 (Vargas Machuca 1599, 133)

Including a hallucinogenic snuff like yopo, “jopa,” alongside alcoholic drinks as chicha and pulque, ”pulcre,” in the description, Vargas gives a

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measure of how much these substances as a whole originally structured life in the Americas and in the “Three Kingdoms” of early colonization—referring to the three Indigenous empires absorbed by the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru: Aztecs, Incas, and Muiscas—but he also makes it clear that even converted Indians kept loyal to said customs, already suggesting signs of transculturation and mestizaje in hallucinatory practices very early after the Conquest. Another key feature in the words of Vargas Machuca as he describes the generality of the Americas is the insistence on the variety of figures and representations that resulted from their trances and visions. Made with a wide multiplicity of materials, as ample as the variety of their visions, even cotton, these thousands of figures—“mil varias figuras”—attest to a close entanglement of religion, myths, philosophy, aesthetics, artisan work, and hallucination in the idiosyncrasy and daily life of the original inhabitants of the New World. Less touched by both psychedelic influences and an overarching Indigenous empire—but rather by a number of smaller ones—in Colombia the relation between culture and hallucination has been fragmented. Still, the extraordinary richness of multiple Indigenous groups has become, through time and transculturation, a heritage of common truths passed on to mestizos, and a layer of folk knowledge that informs the relation with the landscape, with magic and with raw materials even today. Many centuries later after the declarations of Vargas Machuca, an intellectual like Gonzalo Arango, born in 1931, established a strong rapport with the real and multiracial Colombia, and with the substances that the elites kept at bay from culture. This contact produced new values and revitalized aesthetics, but it also became a means for evoking a cultural resistance at a continental level and for identifying with the suffering of the Native and the Afro-American communities even against the geopolitical control of the United States, whose influence was perceived almost as a form of neo-colonialism in the Americas. The poet denounced this situation using his usual prose, overrun by metaphors and exaggerations “In the name of the Redskin Indian angels and blackskin black demons exterminated by the Hooded White Fascism of the White House”6 (Arango 2017, 62). Equally, movie makers from the next generation, like Carlos Mayolo, from the Grupo de Cali also known as de Ciudad Solar, became much more aware of the real needs and the vast knowledge and heritages of popular classes by means of their political activism. Mayolo had started a “Workers’ Film-Club” in the 1970s, projecting soviet films for free across the territory of the Valle del Cauca Department while harassed by the police (Mayolo 2002, 123). Besides making fiction series like Azúcar in 1989, which made of mestizaje and of racism against black Colombians in the Valle del Cauca its very subject, he also worked in the making of documentary films for TV, registering the richness of Afro-Colombian culture in the coastal regions of the country: “The

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people of the coast live with their myths. It is a culture of silence because the whole country ignores them and makes them invisible”7 (Mayolo 2002, 253). He recounted recording at least thirty episodes of documentary shows about the Pacific region, while he mentioned a number of its sounds and instruments, and expressed his proximity to their music and idiosyncrasies: Living with this marginalized community left me with the strength of their identity, which they highly care for, since it is their own reason for being. The fact that I lived in the Pacific region made me love the marimba, the cununo, the guasá and the cantaoras.8 (253)

The close relation between hallucination and traditional substances as a true intellectual influence was also mediated by a bond with the territory and its people after the independence, which allowed many young artists to embrace, for the first time in the country’s history, the real complexity of Colombian legacies. They celebrated mestizo culture in a politically active manner that brought some of their way of life and worldviews closer to the real readers and spectators of the Colombian cities. In regard to their relation to the generality of visionary knowledge, it is important to underline that in the itineraries of many of these modern artists hallucination remains socially relevant as it has in past centuries in Latin America, to the point that its practice is still perceived as a danger to totalitarian projects attempting to militarize and to police culture, as it is unpacked in this chapter. The expressions alluding to “talking with the devil” and its variables resurface all over in early chroniclers of the New World, but also much later in the history of the continent. Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación de los naufragios, from 1542, described the existence of a creature as it was retold to him by the Indians of present-day Florida: “Mala Cosa,” or “Bad Thing” in English, came from a hole in the ground sporadically, removed the guts and other organs of random Indians, and then returned them into their bodies and proceeded to revive its victims, as if in a surgery that healed them back to perfect health. Was it friend or foe? It is key how this demonic creature showed up often to the communities’ dances and celebrations attired in sexually ambiguous manners, providing a narrative in which the natives effectively rocked with the devil and were even healed by it: “and it placed its hands on his wounds and he told us that they were healed afterwards: and many times when they danced it appeared among them in the habit of a woman, and sometimes as a man”9 (Cabeza de Vaca 1555, Ch. XXII, fol. 32-recto). Bernardino de Sahagún, informed by old native people in New Spain, in fact traced an etymology of the name “Mexicas” or “Mexcicác” as supposedly deriving directly from the diabolical activity of talking to the demon as performed by a priest and leader named Mecitl, who was related to maguey since birth, precisely the plant from which pulque drink was made:

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His name was Mecitl, as they say, a man raised in that maguey stalk. And when he was already a man, he was a priest of idols, who spoke personally with the devil, something held in high regard, and he was highly respected and obeyed by his vassals.10 (Sahagún 1830, 139)

Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon, although from the corner of surveillance and horror, provided some words on the issue in his introduction to his bestknown book, in a foreword titled “Al ilustrisimo Sr. Don Francisco Manso de Zuñiga.” The front matter of Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentilicias que hoy viven entre los indios naturales de esta Nueva España11 from 1629 opened up a link between the present mestizo trends of these practices in the culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and those of a vast pre-Columbian past. Ruiz de Alarcón lamented the figures of speech and language of his Indigenous informants, particularly those pushed to recount their experiences with some of Central America’s strongest natural hallucinogens and a type of tobacco, “ololiuhqui,” and “peyote” (Ruiz de Alarcón 1892, 134–137). His critique applies almost perfectly to the complexity of this heritage as it reappears in the writing and audiovisuals of modern authors from the 1950s and forward in Latin America; Agustín, Dalton, Parménides García, Arango, Caicedo, Buitrago, Mayolo, and so many others vividly linked to the consumption of hallucinogenic substances known since the beginning of civilization. Overtaken by allegory and its symbolic dimensions, the convoluted speech of Alarcon’s informants, inspired by hallucinatory visions, allegedly mimicked that of the devil: What among such people is found written on this matter is all in difficult language, and almost unintelligible, both because the devil, its inventor, with the difficulty of language found in all invocations and charms, affects their veneration and esteem, as well as because the more figures and tropes the language has, the more difficult it is to understand; and the one I refer to is nothing more than a continuation of metaphors, not only in verbs, but even in nouns, substantives and adjectives, and perhaps it will pass into one continued allegory.12 (Ruiz de Alarcón 1892, 127–128)

The expression in fact becomes a trope throughout the centuries, as the reports grow, stating how “the Indians ‘talked with the devil’” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 5). Prone to a language similarly altered and secretive in its metaphorical excesses modern artists in Colombia still engage in a “talk with the devil.” Colombian Nadaísmo, a school of poetry, plastic arts, and literature, was initially created by the Antioquia natural, Gonzalo Arango, influenced by the works and life of Porfirio Barba Jacob, and a precedent of the Cali Group in Ciudad Solar that would later renew the Colombian cultural panorama throughout the late twentieth century, by making possible a reflective local

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cinema. It was, in fact, Arango who first demanded a stop to the rhetoric of fear of Satan and love for Catholicism altogether, in a country whose elites had used them over and over in complicity with religious authorities, both in our colonial past and still after the twentieth century: “enough of morals based on the fear of Satan, enough of trading with eternal life, enough of allying with military and bourgeois dictatorships, enough of attending the banquet of the industrialists”13 (Arango 2013, 114). Such were the demands on the pamphlet titled “Manifesto to the Congress of Catholic Notaries”14 that the Nadaístas threw around as they sabotaged a public act of catholic writers in 1959. Appearing mainly between the 1950s and 1980s, there is a parallel cultural phenomenon to the trends of thought of Nadaísmo and the Grupo de Cali, de Ciudad Solar, or Caliwood. As it happened in México with Fernando Benítez, or Gordon Wasson, back in those decades there was also a big wave of scientific works focusing on the Colombian territory, its local ethnobotany, and its Indigenous diversity. Starting with earlier botanists from the nineteenth century like Humboldt, Alfred Russell Wallace, and Richard Spruce, this trend would gain a depth that revealed altered states of consciousness and Indigenous knowledge over hallucinogenic plants as a cultural patrimony of the whole world, once authors like Richard Evans Schultes, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Albert Hofmann, Wade Davis, Tim Plowman, or Michael Taussig, among many other scientists, drew a bigger picture connecting ancestral and modern Indigenous practices and knowledge in the late twentieth century: “Though trained at the finest botanical institution in America, after a month in the Amazon Schultes felt increasingly like a novice. The Indians knew so much more” (Davis 1996, 219). It is precisely in these territories and searches that the influence of visionary traditions first allowed for the later appearance of psychedelics in pop culture, through the influences and life experiences of authors like Schultes “as the world’s leading authority on hallucinogenic plants, he sparked the psychedelic era with his discoveries” (Davis 1996, 12). Alfred Wallace was the first white man to witness the Yurupari ceremony with capy or yagé in the Vaupés as performed by the Tukano in 1851, calling the rhythms of its ritual flutes and trumpets—only to be heard by males—“devil music” (in Davis 1996, 391). By 1851 Spruce had also seen the performing of the ritual and later tried half a dose of yagé, after which he had to leave the ceremony and drink a cup of coffee by himself (Davis 1996, 391–392; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 27). With its name ”Yurupari” translating directly to “Born of the fruit”15 (“La leyenda del Yurupary” 1983, 184), the myth of Yurupari told of a Tixáua—title for an Amazonian political leader—who was a descendant of a raw material himself—a palm tree—with the poem even describing a divine impregnation by means of the drops of juice of its forbidden fruits, the pihycans, on Yurupary’s future mother as she ate them: “They were so succulent that part of the juice ran down between her breasts, wetting the

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most hidden parts, without her giving it the slightest importance”16 (1983, 184). Spruce noticed yagé being taken during the Yurupary ceremony, from which La leyenda del Yurupary, collected from tribes on the Brazilian and Colombian Amazon, is the first printed reconstruction, perhaps the earliest written example of visionary narratives in the territory of Colombia prior to the authors I explore here. Taken from the multilingual Tukano communities of the Amazon by the Indigenous informant and researcher Maximiano José Roberto and the Brazilian Barbosa Rodrigues, it was ultimately handed to the Italian Ermanno Stradelli who would publish it in Rome in the Bollettino della Società Geogràfica Italiana in 1890 as “Leggenda dell’ Jurupary” (Orjuela, Ch. V). Initially taken from oral sources but heavily mediated by subsequent authors and translators, the most trustworthy passages of the poem are probably those addressing “capy,” the actual name given to the hallucinogenic vine among the Tukano people of the Amazon, a main ingredient which in other areas includes other strains and formulas. It is referred to by the Quechua name “ayahuasca”—meaning “Vine of the soul” in English (Schultes and Hofmann 1979, 61)—in the mountain areas of Peru and Ecuador, and “yagé,” a word from the Tupi language, in Vaupés, Guainía and Río Negro in Colombia referred mainly to the concoction, usually including other plants, as the one called chacruna (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 31; 1978, 7). The written legend describes the taking of the drink intertwined with dancing and erotic innuendos before women were banned from the Yurupary ceremony, with the most interesting occasion being perhaps one in which even animals were attracted by the harmonies of the celebration as people ingest chicha, and another alcoholic drink made of manioc called “cachiri,” as Yurupari addresses his people: “And he said:—Even the animals come here to listen to our music. They drank the cachiri and the capy, and the music began again with new performers”17 (“La leyenda del Yurupary” 1983, 228). We witness an ultimate visionary montage, articulating both the music of the ritual and its later narration, a living ensemble of art, party, society, myth, and nature. In regard to later scientists, it is indispensable to keep in mind that they, like Richard Spruce did in the nineteenth century, often shared the knowledge of the Indigenous communities directly, with no other intermediaries than their informants and the substances in question, taken in situ with the tribes that used them. They would turn these trances into integral parts of systematic Western knowledge, transmitting what they had learned in the Americas within the conventions of the scientific method. One of the few direct interactions between both groups of intellectuals, figures in the Yagé Letters from 1963 by Burroughs and Ginsberg, but it is telling enough. A Harvard doctor in Bogotá showed Burroughs a dried sample of

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the hallucinogenic vine while answering all his questions, making it clear to the poet that inducing telepathy was not one of the plant’s real properties but only a belief, adding, “Yes he had taken it. ‘I got colors but no visions’” (Burroughs and Ginsberg 1975, 8). As confirmed by Wade Davis, a direct pupil, it was Dr. Schultes—named Dr. Schindler in the Letters—who actually pointed Burroughs toward yagé after meeting him in Bogotá, and it was only later, in an expedition they took together to the Putumayo, that Burroughs actually tried the drink for the first time (Burroughs and Ginsberg 1975, 21; Davis 1996, 153–154). Read along with the fictional writings of Arango, Caicedo, and others, this scientific corpus should be seen as complementary in the process of understanding visionary art of the late twentieth century in Colombia, since even today these narratives become spaces to relive our myths. In the book The Shaman and the Jaguar: A Study of Narcotic Drugs Among the Indians of Colombia, originally from 1975 and contemporary of the Grupo de Cali en Ciudad Solar and Nadaísmo, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff observes hallucination as an element of continuity between the Americas. A snuff that provokes intense reactions among the users but whose actual composition remained uncertain for a while is listed by Reichel-Dolmatoff from different accounts: Bartolomé de las Casas and Oviedo observe it in Haiti (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 7). The Muisca in the Highlands of Cundinamarca, with many turned into mestizo communities, used to be a very differentiated people from those of the Sierra Nevada and the generality of the Caribbean, “but one thing they had in common with the natives of the coast–they used narcotic snuffs” (11). Reports of different hallucinogens, both pre-Columbian and colonial, and even many others popularized after the existence of the New Kingdom of Granada and in the present, “cover the entire Colombian territory, from the Caribbean Coast to the Andean highlands, and from the Orinoco Plains to the Western Cordillera” (48). Although the relation between pre-Columbian and contemporary Indigenous communities and hallucination is palpable, the one with artists and intellectuals from the cities may be less obvious. The first reason for it is that transculturation, rather than acculturation, has left remnants of all kinds among modern mestizo users of hallucinogens, with hallucination being a habit closer to the low worlds of working-class areas of cities like Cali, Medellín, Santa Marta, Cartagena, Barranquilla, Manizales, Bogotá, and others. Additionally, in regard to cultural elites of urban centers, it is clear from the anecdote between Burroughs and Schultes that not only were these scientists exchanging knowledge with Indigenous communities, but they were also bringing it back to big cities and their social scenes in the form of their substances. After many field experiences, anthropologist Reichel-Dolmatoff also concluded that although old beliefs were often questioned in the present, and

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younger Indians would commonly state that ancient traditions were wrong, there was more to it. Usually those very same people, healthy and mature adults, would react a short time after to a “bush spirit” and shiver as they talked about it over and over with others, or they would use concoctions and cast hexes on their enemies: “No, that is not acculturation. Nor is the world interpreted then in realistic terms” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 74). In the same hybrid vein, the anthropologist identified healers and divinators as “being sober, level-headed people, quite normal members of their society. What distinguishes a payé from others is that he is an intellectual” (107). A capacity for philosophical inquiries, performance, and abstraction makes the magic and medicine man an intermediary for the concrete questions and tribulations of its patients, an ally against disease, a rival, or confronting an event-causing expectation. If Reichel sees the payé as an intellectual, I consider here, even if only tentatively, the possibility of some intellectuals being payés. The repetitive psalmody implicit in the style of many modern mestizo works mimics the aura of chants and prayers. In fact, the young age of their authors, potential readers, and protagonists, often evokes a ritual of initiation, a Bildungsroman which introduces the reading into a realm of restricted secret knowledge. Many other signs of transculturation exist, the innumerable venues to promise magical filters and readings of the future all over Colombia and Mexico, the strong superstitions regulating life in rural areas, the endless variety of folk culture, the daily language, naming otherworldly concepts and entities, and even every meal, are all permeated of flavors, sensations and ideas inherited from Indigenous realms. Perhaps the most accurate way to perceive the transition between the Indigenous visionary traditions and the practice of hallucination among artists and urban dwellers is by comparing the visit of one professor and the arrival of his student to the same town thirty years later. In 1941 Schultes discovered around 1.600 brugmansia trees in a very small region of the Putumayo department in Colombia, alongside many other hallucinogenic species, to the point of saying that “perhaps nowhere in the New World does the importance of hallucinogens in native magic and medicine acquire such significance as in the Valley of Sibundoy” (Schultes 1976, 148). When Wade Davis visited the valley decades later, in the 1970s, he recounted how he “felt the disappointment that invariably arises when one comes face-to-face with a place that cannot match expectations” (Davis 1996, 167). Since his anticipation drew on the stories and images of the Indigenous Sibundoy suggested by Schultes, he expressed he felt let down, showing a curve of feelings correspondent with how visionary practices are highly esteemed when observed in their ceremonial purity among Indians but despised as an expression of decadence when they fusion and change within the forces of transculturation and time.

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Wade Davis explained the nature of his disappointment as he observed the skin colors and attires of everybody in town: “all of them were mestizos. Sibundoy had become an Indian town without Indians” (1996, 167). Rather than engage in a racial discussion debating if a mestizo is no Indian at all, the purpose of this work becomes more visible if the rhetorical purity and determinism naively and unintendedly displayed by Davis at that first encounter are taken apart along with the idea that the transit from one moment to the other can only lead into acculturation. I want to emphasize the transcultural potential of hallucination in Colombia, a country which, like the region of Sibundoy itself, is a world center of visionary knowledge, customs, and substances that have turned mestizo.

MARIHUANA IN THE BLACK CARIBBEAN AND IN THE MODERN PROSE OF FANNY BUITRAGO: VISIONARY AND RACIAL STIGMAS Indeed, hallucination as a ritual and as an aesthetic and creative practice is clearly an Indigenous heritage but cannabis used as a secular hallucinogen has been strongly linked to Afro-Colombians of the Caribbean. As early as 1789, a “Description of the Kingdom of Santa Fe de Bogotá”18 by Francisco Silvestre—document found by Ricardo Pereira in Seville, in 1887—situated hemp in Nueva Granada, and envisioned the possibility of producing it in many regions of the Viceroyalty as an industrial asset, taking advantage of the cheaper labor of the Caribbean: “Hemp and flax, if planted beneficially, would grow abundantly in the cold lands of Santa Fé; and spun or in branches, it could be taken to Cartagena or Santa Martha”19 (Silvestre 1888, 74). In Colombia as a whole, the public appearance of this substance as a hallucinogen rather than as a source of industrial fiber was more recent and remains historically linked to the Eastern coast, in the Caribbean area of the country. Often used by prisoners and sex workers in the 1920s in the regions close to the Atlantic Sea (Sáenz 2007, 209; Ruiz H. 1979, 111), after the 1960s it was perceived as a cultural trait of the area, with Burroughs also confirming in 1953 there was “a little weed among coast-side Negroes” (Burroughs and Ginsberg 1975, 34). Used by many working men, it was even seen as a stimulant for heavy labor. The investigator William Partridge had a field experience in Colombia in July of 1972, where he observed the working class population of a small town on the north coast of the Colombian Atlantic. In the region, some even pointed to him that the substance allowed for heavier work sessions (Partridge 1979, 164). Many smoked three times a day and were functional members of their community, and usually hard-working parents (163–165). He also added, “While the presence of cannabis among coastal people seems

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traditional, it is probably a market-induced phenomenon among the highlanders” (161). As his suggestion points out, in the Atlantic region there is a very important geographical and cultural distance with Bogotá, an area of “highlanders” that has been the capital of Colombia since the sixteenth century, far up on the heights of the Andes, cold, very religious, white, conservative, and often racist. Although nowadays the city is more liberal and ethnically hybrid, its elites have been prone to reaffirm more emphatically their Spanish and Western heritage, rather than the other influences that meet in our identity, coming from Afro-Colombians and also from a multitude of Indigenous ethnicities. The historical change of name from “Santa Fé de Bogotá,” kept in the 1990s, to just “Bogotá,” attests to some recent change, privileging its Indigenous precedent “Bacatá.” Perhaps only the objectivity of a stranger could have allowed Burroughs to describe the capital city of Colombia so accurately, in a letter from January 25, 1953, while searching for yagé: “In Bogota more than any other city I have seen in Latin America you feel the dead weight of Spain sombre and oppressive. Everything official bears the label Made in Spain” (Burroughs and Ginsberg 1975, 9). In fact, it is very important that none of all the authors included in this whole corpus, be it from Nadaísmo or from the Cali group, came from Bogotá. The Primer Manifiesto Nadaísta from 1958 established a tension with Eurocentric traditions which would continue well on into the twenty-first century, assuming an open opposition against the eugenics of Hispanism in a mestizo country that did not correspond with the homogeneity that informed its education and laws: “and the Colombian man lives, because of education, adjusting to retrospective systems, drowning in the myth of the Hispanidad, in educational systems of a medieval, confessional type, with limited and sporadic liberal and rationalist variations”20 (Arango 2013, 35–36). Whereas the use of marijuana was an integral part of the colonial clash, prohibition seemed like a modern legacy. By aligning against it and Hispanism, nadaístas were also rejecting a homogeneous cultural genealogy in defense of their actual cultural and ethnic complexities. Before Nadaísmo, in 1938, a year after passing of the Marihuana Tax in the United States, the substance was first prohibited in Colombia. For Sáenz Rovner there is a direct causal relation, and the US legislation actually inspired Colombia’s (Sáenz 2007, 209). Penalties to users and dealers would become harsher after the “Ley Consuegra” passed in 1946 in the tropical country (Sáenz 2007, 212). Marihuana was commonly used in the Atlantic region of Colombia— mostly populated by black communities—initially by low classes or soldiers around 1925 (Sáenz 2007, 209; Ruiz H. 1979, 111). It was later embraced by the wider working classes in the area (Ruiz H. 1979, 193; Partridge 1979, 165). Marihuana prohibition, though, was established from the administrative nucleus of the capital city, Bogotá. These measures seemed to mark

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hierarchies of geography, race, and culture in a centralized republic, and they were perceived as imposed by intruders in the Atlantic area (Ruiz H. 1979, 117; Partridge 1979, 155–158). An apt biographic and lyric image of the increasing paranoia regarding drug trafficking after the 1960s is suggested in an anecdote by the writer Gonzalo Arango. It provides a glimpse at the identity conflict of the country, torn between the official prosecution of traditional substances, and the sovereign legitimacy of trafficking and of consumptions which at some levels were owned and perceived as idiosyncratic. Nadaístas brought back sophisticated cultural cargo and life experiences from their travels and interventions all over the Colombian territory. For example, when Arango returned from three months in San Andrés Island after a series of articles in Cromos magazine in 1967. On the island, counterfeit and tax-free merchandise were common, and brand-new machinery was as available as natural and artificial psychoactives, so Arango had a problem at the Bogotá airport. They questioned him after finding out he had a bag of white dust that appeared to be cocaine, as he confessed to fellow nadaísta J. Mario Arbeláez in a personal letter: “I didn’t buy a typewriter, but I brought a kilo of white sand from Johny Key, which was almost confiscated at customs in Bogotá, due to suspicions. These customs officials don’t understand poets”21 (Arango 2011, 158). A very thorough private research published in 1979 was sponsored by the National Association of Financial Institutions (ANIF in Spanish). The researcher Hernando Ruíz Hernández provided exemplary findings while calculating that throughout the 1970s the economic survival of 40.000 families had depended on marijuana exports that summed up to an income of 1.4 million dollars a year at that moment in the country (Ruíz H. 1979, 206)—around 7.5 percent of the Colombians’ GDP then (215)—the researcher also made a case for the relation between culture and hemp in the Atlantic region of Northern Colombia: “For the inhabitant of this part of the country, marijuana, like contraband, also means a specific way of conceiving their destiny, the product of a system of social values consistent with a cultural past”22 (Ruíz H. 1979, 203). Although salsa and other musical genres did bring up the subject, earlier in the century there seemed to be a lack of exponents of marihuana as a Caribbean trait in Colombia in literary culture. An example from the 1960s of such a case was a former nadaísta, Fanny Buitrago. Another strong intellectual woman, still vocal about her own connections to the movement, Patricia Ariza, firmly related the author from Barranquilla to Nadaísmo as she remembered her first novel: “El hostigante verano de los dioses, the first novel by the Nadaistas that was written by a woman who one day will have to be recognized as one of their greatest writers: Fanny Buitrago”23 (Ariza 2010, 223). Being perhaps the most prolific prose writer ever linked to the movement, Buitrago is also an important author in the Atlantic region. Even if she

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distanced herself from Nadaísmo after the earlier years of its foundational stage, her first novel, translatable to The Harassing Summer of the Gods published in 1963 could not be dissociated from it. Dealing with complex issues of identity and authority, and offering multiple layers of narration and narrators, the text described a group of avant-garde intellectuals as they confronted their national reality, and at times also reproduced it. Even if not visionary in the sense of explicit consumptions that structure the narrative, marihuana was a key character, and the text developed an elaborate and surreal plot in which the reader reencountered over and over the impossibility of stating if the literature produced within the group of protagonists, and the novel by Buitrago itself, were individually or collectively created. Conceived under values like a shared interest in hallucination, the ideas of authorship and identity within the novel were alluded to as an aesthetic mind-melding upon whose mystery the characters kept on debating as an open question: —Also, the novel was written by only one person, but he’s either too scared to admit it or he’s amused by watching everyone suspect everyone. —In the journal where I work they assure that it was a collective work. You may be right . . .24 (Buitrago 2016, 9)

Besides these insights into the problem of authorship and her own relation to Afro-Colombian culture of the Atlantic, Buitrago is capable of showing the deep social stigma of marihuana and the divides it underlines in Colombia in a nutshell. In the short story from a different book, “Ese otro,”25 it is precisely the otherness of black culture that explains the conflict of race and class between the narrator and the protagonist, a distance which reappears from El hostigante verano. The narrator is closely related to the white elite of the city, while the man she describes is a black musician who prostitutes himself to older white female tourists, and “simulates” being black in the sense that he over-exoticizes his original Afro-Colombian persona to appeal to their prejudices and desires. The final image of this short story, originally from the book Las distancias doradas, published in 1964, is one of denial and segregation: Although you used to sing, pretending to be black, in that cabaret on the pier, I shared you with sluts in red silk and rolled my eyes when you ignited glowing marihuana lightning bugs. But I deny knowing you to whoever asks me. It would be ridiculous for me, a descendant of the city’s founder, to even hold you in low esteem. And I love you.26 (Buitrago 2015, 57)

Similarly to the denied love in the tale by Buitrago, due to the clandestine and spontaneous nature of these influences, one certainly cannot pinpoint

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names and authorities as with Europeans like Baudelaire or De Quincey: In the Americas these affects have been kept clandestine. An unevenness which ultimately replicated the distance between the colonizer and the colonized, guaranteed that these practices were passed on to the next generations anonymously and subsumed as a stigma. Popular among those perceived as racially, sexually, or socially deviant, it is only gradually that intellectuals brought hallucination to the core of their criticisms of the nation. Although Fanny Buitrago may have not abused cannabis herself, her novel captures how these substances evidenced a divide in Colombian society and structured the cultural dynamic of Nadaísmo, which had many aspects in common with “The Authentic Liberals,”27 the group of intellectuals in the novel which at the climax see themselves as gods (Buitrago 2016, 158). It is to these kinds of bohemian influences that she dedicates El hostigante verano de los dioses as a whole: “To my friends alongside coffee afternoons: because they taught me to confuse love with boredom and boredom with creative leisure”28 (Buitrago 2016, ixxx). In the novel, Buitrago engaged with all that the nadaístas were, but also with all the atavisms they opposed. She depicted the group “Los auténticos liberales,” intellectuals from the coastal area, as guilty of racial prejudice while attempting to affirm new aesthetic values. They were related to the political and economic elites, unlike Nadaísmo, which was made of middle-class artists and whose only members from the coastal areas were Álvaro Barrios, a black pop painter from Cartagena, and Buitrago herself (Valencia 2010b). The conceptual scheme underlying discrimination in the short story “Ese otro,” where the marihuana dealer is a black man from popular classes, was used originally in El hostigante verano de los dioses. There, one of the main protagonists, Leo, a musical prodigy who keeps lovers of both sexes, was described as a son of a wealthy banana exporter and an assiduous cannabis user (Buitrago 2016, 16), even recriminated by other characters: “rumours come to me about a continuous destroying-your-consciousness and those dark circles under your eyes, a tribute to marihuana”29 (121). Parallel to the privileged elite, the novel follows the love child of another wealthy white man of the unnamed city in the novel, partially unrecognized and black, described as a poor “mulato” of blue eyes who was never taught to read (Buitrago 2016, 191), abandoned to his black mother who was a domestic worker for his unrecognized white father and his wife. He lives in the very last house in the literal margins of the city and is also the local cannabis dealer, even leaving it at half price often and being well-known because of it (44). Some of the “Liberals” even go publicly after him and for his product: “Leo crossed the street, without saying goodbye, after Isaías Bande, his marihuana supplier”30 (43). Including another character, Abia, who is later revealed to be allergic to the cannabis sold by Isaías and in danger of death when using it (128), the hallucinogen’s presence is subtle but it becomes a marker that allows seeing

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the contradictions of the society that populates the city in the story, strongly resembling Barranquilla and the Caribbean, where Buitrago was born. A conflict comes from the fact that Isaías Bande is not accepted among “Los auténticos liberales” due to the color of his skin, yet they chase him for his merchandise. He swears to take vengeance in a twist that brings forth the last episodes of the novel: “That club vetoes the blacks, the handicapped, the .  .  . I’m going to teach them a lesson they’ll never forget!”31 (Buitrago 2016, 115). Being mestizo and black herself, Buitrago shared these tensions, albeit, unlike Bande and the ”Authentic Liberals” she was fully embraced by nadaístas, It is a perfect example of how many orthodox intellectuals, artists, and mainstream culture in general would often embrace popular substances, knowledge, and practices while racially or socially excluding the peoples who had an actual historical or ethnic relation to them. Ultimately, Isaías leads a mob of exploited black workers of the banana industry against the hacienda owners, arriving at the front gate of the manor owned by Yves Patiño, a descendant of the city white founders and leading member of the intellectual group, the so-called “Authentic Liberals.” Yves notices how Isaías grabs his house’s gate with his left hand as he addresses the irate workers, and then promises him he will never forget touching it (Buitrago 2016, 215). Although next the revolt disperses in a peaceful manner with no consequences for the Patiño family, later Isaías shows up lying unconscious on a street and missing his left-hand fingers (233), perhaps alluding not only to Yves’s gate but also to the most immediate parts used to roll and hold a tobacco or cannabis cigarette: his fingers are cut from the phalanges. The fact that he, the mestizo marihuana dealer, is the one to suffer some of the worst consequences of the inequities in a divided society is underlined by how, some pages later near the story’s ending, the episode repeats itself with the other hand: “A woman who was going to church found Isaías Bande passed out in an alley, someone had removed his remaining fingers, cutting them off at the phalanges”32 (297). While “Los auténticos liberales” are projected to fame as part of the novel’s conclusion, and Colombian art and culture turn allegedly modern via their innovations, society itself is left unchanged with its monstrous pre-modern racism and exploitation of workers. Isaías Bande’s mutilations are left in complete impunity and without even him daring to mention or denounce Yves’s threat to his hand. All the missing fingers of the marihuana dealer become the sole memory of the bananeros’ suspended revolt and a definitive marker of the abandonment of the state and the hatred of the elites, as his body becomes a receptor of all the specters of violence sublimated in the narration and its society. The presence of cannabis in the Caribbean was also emphasized by Wade Davis at a transnational scale, evoking the times when the international War on Drugs and its ecologically disastrous strategy of fumigations, with the restricted herbicide paraquat, in Mexico put Santa Marta at the center of the cannabis

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trade: “the Nixon administration blanketed the Mexican plantations with paraquat, ruining the market and sending enterprising smugglers to Colombia, Santa Marta was the dope capital of the world” (Davis 1996, 29). By the 1960s, the presence of marihuana in the region had changed from a local practice among Afro-descendants to a consolidated and internationally recognized denomination of origin (Britto 2020, 89–146). These modern geopolitics added even more layers to a series of traditions that themselves resulted from an older past, since The Indians, Schultes realized, believed in the power of plants, accepted the existence of magic, and acknowledged the potency of the spirit. Magical and mystical ideas entered the very texture of their thinking. Their botanical knowledge could not be separated from their metaphysics. (Davis 1996, 218)

We penetrate now into a modern cultural context marked by these national and international influences, and also defined by ancestral visionary traditions for which it is still impossible to separate botany and metaphysics; a threshold where biochemistry and culture meet. THE DELIRIOUSLY PASSIONATE, THE BEWITCHED, AND THE INVERTED IN POETRY AND LIFE In terms of proper names and individual artists, for the mestizo and white Colombia it was the poet Porfirio Barba Jacob, born in the year 1883, who would pass on visionary poetics and politics to future generations via the literary tradition, shortening its gaps with highbrow culture. Gonzalo Arango compared the poet’s legacy to Jean Genet’s and stated he had defined the weekly encounters of nadaístas in the 1960s and 1970s (Arango 1991, 122). Originally called Miguel Ángel Osorio Benítez, Barba Jacob went to Central America as a self-exile and resided briefly in New York. The poem “Balada de la loca alegría”33 traced a whole continent when added to its author’s biography: “My glass full—with Anáhuac wine— / my efforts in vain—fruitless my passion”34 (Barba Jacob 1997, 30). It is this very poem that Carlos Mayolo, a filmmaker in Grupo de Cali, quoted in his autobiography so many generations later, to celebrate life and dance, “‘Let’s drink and dance to the sound of my song’ Porfirio used to say”35 (Mayolo 2002, 105). These verses and Barba Jacob’s biography connect all the Americas, in a way not totally different to how Captain Vargas Machuca had done it at the end of the sixteenth century: pulque and hallucination, the Anahuac Valley where Mexico City is located, a first-person experience of the metropolis of New York, and Colombian intellectual tradition. “I’m a loser—I’m a marihuano— / Let’s drink and dance to the music of my song”36 (Barba Jacob 1997, 30).

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All seems linked, insinuating a continuum of hallucination in the continent which finds correspondence with actual and material traffic between Mexico and Colombia, secretly observed by US authorities as early as 1945, when they informed through classified channels that the Mexican ship Hidalgo had traveled three times in six months packed with cannabis seeds and plants from Central to South America (Sáenz 2007, 211–212). With cannabis itself being a heritage of colonization and the result of early industrialization and its need for raw matters, the market of these contraband hallucinogens created shared continental conditions. The dynamics of capitalism and prohibition, along with the appearance of consolidated cultural industries including television and cinema, like many of these illegal crops, were not the result of “natural” circumstances, but hybrid traditions produced by sophisticated interactions of the plurality of the Americas and its markets, like hippies, beatniks, the Onda, Cocacolos and the nadaístas would be. These also touched on gender. When questioned on the subject of homosexuality, Gonzalo Arango gave a clear statement reproduced in “La traición del nadaísmo: refutación al humanista”:37 “We preach absolute sexual freedom, free love (freedom not only from conventional contracts, but freedom to choose whoever your loved one is)”38 (Arango 2017, 241). Although the political and cultural relevance of visionary knowledge today in urban areas may seem secondary to the one it has for Indigenous communities, there are plenty of evidences of the crucial tensions which these practices still arise at the core of citizen life and class struggles. A good measure of this comes from a pervasive image of what is often excluded from the national project in some verses of Barba Jacob from the poem “Canción Delirante”:39 “We are the delirious, / the delirious of passion”40 (Barba Jacob 1997, 59); such are the verses that introduce us to “the bewitched,”41 who describe themselves surrounded by “Pain, anxiety . . . open doors: marihuana, temptation”42 (59). In the same poem, there is also “the inverted”43—precisely a category from the nineteenth century even used by Marcel Proust to address homosexuality—who define themselves in terms of a infertile sensual passion “Our poor flesh was captive / Of a nefarious active deity”44 (60), with the final verses describing a sensuality made of “what blush prohibits naming”45 (60). Barba Jacob, homosexual and a user of cannabis himself, creates an image of two kinds of marginals forced to run away to hallucinations and extremes, beyond the faraway mountains of their place of origin, ultimately finding the same blue under a different sky. The “inverted,” seemingly those of different sexualities, show sick bodies and blisters, while the “embrujados,” the bewitched, appear caught in the relentless tremors of marihuana visions, surrounded by images of ghosts and infertility. They all are “wanderers,”46 (59) strangers, and travelers like Barba Jacob was, taken far away by delirious passions, and forced to a self-exile. This image of restlessness finds a

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counterpart with one of peace and completion as the poem “Sabiduría”47 describes what Barba Jacob expected of his last days, underlining his priorities as a person and a poet, and describing an entanglement of life and art, a duality in which working on his oeuvre and enjoying his vices appeared as part of a single dynamic process: “in extensive tremendous solitude / to burnish my work and to cultivate my vices”48 (Barba Jacob 1997, 64). Banished bodies and citizens resulted from a mismatch between the realities and the ideals of Colombian and Latin American identities in regard to sexuality and morality, a discomfort which in fact carried on from the mestizo life experience as a whole, forced into the culture of the colonizers while kindred to the colonized, and later passed to the verses of other artists, who would struggle for a more sincere approach to both legacies. From Barba Jacob, it continued to Nadaísmo and the Grupo de Cali or Ciudad Solar as a shared conflict beyond singular generations. Perhaps in another territory, with a less conflicted history, the unease migratory rush of those bodies given to hallucination and sexual excess would be solely anecdotal to Barba Jacob’s poem, unfortunately that is not the case of Colombia, where policing of sexuality and substances remains a definitive trend of conservative violent forces. After the alleged demobilization of the paramilitary organizations Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) in the early years of the twenty-first century, fragmented fronts started to deploy threats and warnings all over the country, with the “Águilas Negras,” the “Black Eagles,” being the most visible, and even becoming a generic pseudonym to sign violent threats. Black Eagles Montes de María Front 07/11/2019 Information for the entire community of Sucre University: We announce our presence. Cleaning time has begun in this nest of marihuaneros and guerrilla sons of bitches. You attend university to study, not to sell drugs or to buy them. We know who you are, who uses it, and who sells it. We have the stadium stands surveilled. Don’t try to be heroes or we will put you in body-bags. Women are for cooking and raising children, not leading movements. Women belong to their households and men in the mountains.49 (in El Universal 2019, n.p., and El Tiempo 2020, n.p.)

There are plenty of other examples and variations of these flyers available, and the group has even been deemed a mere formula for anonymous threats all over the country, as it was stated in the article I just quoted from January 20, 2020, in El Tiempo. The threats mark the characterization of the public universities and their campuses as the very site of encounter between the revolutionary Left, sexual and gender liberation, and hallucinogens, while

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announcing a homicidal cleansing targeting both types of undesirables. Barba Jacob’s exiles and Buitrago’s marihuana dealer, Isaías Bande, and his lost fingers are but a literary rendition of these very real conflicts. The prejudice from the colonial encounter reappeared in a neoconservative rhetoric of fear and capitalism. The inclusion of communists and female activists along with marihuana users and sellers, signals a link that updates the idea of deviants already described by Barba Jacob, the ones using substances, the “embrujados,” and those with alternative sexualities, the “invertidos.” The fact that hallucination has remained socially relevant throughout the centuries in Latin America, to the point that it is still perceived as harmful to society and as a danger to the projects of paramilitary groups, is the other side to the link between identity, activism, and hallucination I explore from the perspective of visionary art and culture. In contrast to those reactions, with a modern sensibility toward plurality, the nadaístas were also very active at the front of sexual liberation. Patricia Ariza, a writer and theater actress briefly appointed Minister of Culture, in 2022, remembered some of those years in the anthology Bodas sin oro: Cincuenta años del Nadaísmo. In her text, tellingly titled “Una mujer en el Metropol,”50 alluding to the novelty that it was for women to gain representation and recognition for their role as main protagonists of culture in Colombia, particularly in the coffee saloon El Metropol in Medellín, she emphasized the corporeal importance of the movement in such a chauvinistic society: Once it even was denounced in a pasquinade that Nadaísmo women had a pact with the Devil and that our outfits were the clothing of witches . . . Today, years later, I have learned that Nadaísmo was not only a movement of poets, it was also a bodily attitude, a way of being and existing in life, in the street and in the public square, not wanting to be simply at home or under the system.51 (Ariza 2010, 217)

Ariza’s insistence on the fact that in such a male-centered society the nadaístas were very close to their mothers as intellectual influences and prone to mention them often is secondary only to her own presence in the movement. People were critical when she was seventeen years old, and many remain very critical of their stances today: “They cannot understand the fact that five seventeen-year-old girls frequented night bars in the sixties, designed exclusively for men by patriarchal culture, nor how it anticipated a wider female rebellion”52 (Ariza 2010, 222). For this generation and group, the cultural industry, pop, and the markets in general became spaces to reflect upon gender, identity, class, and race, and even to attempt at deconstructing them.

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GONZALO ARANGO: UN PRESIDIARIO NADAÍSTA From their differences, but also because of the similarities that remain between how the colonial chronicles mentioned contacts with the devil and how the nadaístas appropriated Lucifer as a foundational figure, a repressed cultural tradition becomes more visible in the Colombian intellectual landscape of the 1960s. Such is the case with the “Manifiesto nadaísta al homo sapiens”53 from 1963: “We are atheists by aesthetics, but if we were to replace God with another myth, we would adore Lucifer, the angel of rebellion, the prophet of creative destruction”54 (Arango 2000, 97). One of the most interesting aspects of the first Nadaísta manifesto was probably its approach to the youths of the 1950s in terms of their historical potential within mass consumer culture, on the subheading “XII—El nadaísmo y los Cocacolos.” Such an appellative, obviously derived from “Coca-Cola,” was used in the decade of the 1950s to address the Colombian youth—more and more drawn to rock and US idiosyncrasy and markets. Borrowing from the magazine Semana, a short note from 1955 in Time magazine defined these youths by using their slang with the title “The Cocacolos”: “Around convertibles, mambos and soda fountains, reports Bogotá’s weekly Semana, Colombian teen-agers are building ‘a fresh, good-natured society’— the ‘Cocacolos.’ For inspiration, youth draws more and more on the US” (Time Magazine 1955, 42). Between the hemispheric and the local, for Arango’s manifesto, although seemingly alienated, these young people were right in their instinctive attitude of not accepting the world as it was but as they wanted it to be, and for him it was for this reason that they had been granted the historical chance to embrace Nadaísmo (Arango 2013, 46). The group actually printed another document, the “Manifiesto al congreso de escribanos católicos” addressing the Congress of Catholic Writers55 being held in 1959 in Medellín (Arango 1991, 12). The leaflets were accompanied by a performative attack with stink-bombs made of iodoform and asafoetida all over the auditorium of the event. After fumigating the congress, Arango hid, but he was captured as soon as he returned to one of his familiar places in Medellín and later was threatened with getting his hair cut—an attack against his long-haired hippy look of the time (25). A surreal site of learning and terror in terms of visionary practices made lumpen, any prison of Colombia seems to open up uncertain encounters, as Elmo Valencia indicated in a nadaísta anthology of letters, Arango’s is only one of many stories about the imprisonment of their group of poets: “they kept me in the Prison Yard 2 of the Villanueva Jail (the one for criminals and kidnappers) for 15 days with their corresponding nights and moons, and I smoked marijuana because there is more smoking in the inside than outside”56

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(in Arango 2011, 396). In turn, Gonzalo Arango described Elmo Valencia’s career in terms of a criminal artist, after commenting he had smoked marihuana with Allen Ginsberg in Habana in 1965 when both of them had collaborated as juries of the Casa de las Americas award, “he dedicated himself to making literature a perfect crime”57 (Arango 1993a, 198). Put in jail for the asafoetida attack, captivity for Arango soon becomes a site of encounter and revelation: “As it was a Saturday night, the audience for common criminals grew, and my cell was opened to host a fauna of knaves whose guilt ranged from cantina busts, to robbery and marijuana”58 (Arango 1991, 26). The imprisonment of Arango could be seen as the symbolic punishment of a whole generation: I was the dangerous and visible symbol of a nonconformist generation that had risen up with scandalous and convulsive gestures against the myths, coercion, serfdom and falsifications of the respectable and decrepit tables of values of a colonial culture . . . living resignedly and peacefully on the margins of contemporary history, and whose balance of obscurantist practices in all orders had left a red total of 500,000 Colombians dead for nothing.59 (Arango 1991, 88)

This site of public example, through which authorities punished a whole generational attitude in the single body of the young poet in 1959, is turned little by little, via Arango’s lucidity and his writing, into a shore, the threshold of an unseen Colombia. In 1965 he sold the memoirs to the magazine Contrapunto, and delivered Memorias de un presidiario nadaísta in sixteen episodes. Being a Saturday night, the jail started getting filled “with the worst of the criminal underworld”60 (Arango 1991, 27–27). He complained of how soon they all smoked his cigarettes, while someone in the cell used the empty pack to roll a marijuana cigarette (27). While criminals disregarded Arango as a “gentleman” (27) and throughout the book he kept mostly away from cannabis, this was not the case from the authorities’ perspective, which did link Arango with marihuana and crime. As in the case of Mexico, with José Revueltas and José Agustín, inside prisons drug use and abuse became one of the few means of both transcendence and entertainment. After providing some money for marijuana for an inmate he had just met, “Comején”—the termite—who offered to protect him, Arango was suspected by some military guards in the yard and accused of providing money for drugs to other prisoners (Arango 1991, 65–66). After he reacted quickly and aligned himself with the inmates, the suspicious guard— here addressed as “tombo,” slang for cop, “button,” in Spanish “botón,” said backward—became exasperated by this attitude of complicity and yelled at everyone in the yard, cursing the reluctance of all prisoners to accuse each

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other. It is important to note the comic attitude of one of the inmates, who reacted with an offended dignity that attested to the extreme social stigma that the word denoted, even in prison where its use was ubiquitous. The guard calls the prisoners “marihuaneros,” assimilating cannabis use and insult: —Dirty marihuaneros—the tombo insulted the others. —Who’s a marihuanero here?—Protested one of the inmates with offended dignity. —You are all a stinking shitty bunch.61 (Arango 1991, 68)

In La Ladera prison, where Arango was put, substance trafficking could even become a sign of love between the prisoners and their romantic partners, “food for their souls”: “feelings that materialized in chocolates, cigars, and an apparently hermetic papaya, which, if opened, revealed a pregnant belly with seconal ‘seeds,’ benzedrine, and marijuana cigarettes, food for the prisoners’ souls”62 (Arango 1991, 75–76). The prophet realizes he had become a symbol of how, as Nadaísmo attempted to universalize culture in the region, authorities and elites would fight for “a more antioqueñanized Antioquia”63 (Arango 1991, 91). In relation to the “Blusas Rojas” or “Red Shirts” manifesto, alluding to the color privileged by the group, probably due to its communist connotations, Arango exaggerated, saying all red shirts in the Paisa region had been liquidated very cheap, “since what for us was an emblem of revolutionary dignity, for the paisas became synonymous with homosexuality, marijuana, insanity and parasitism”64 (102). Nadaísmo promoted the rejection of national heroes and symbols and embraced Desquite and Águila Negra, two infamous criminals on different sides of the bipartisan violence in the country, precedents of guerrillas and paramilitaries, in whose honor Arango would publish tributes included in Prosas para leer en la silla eléctrica. Marihuana even appeared as the complete reverse of inherited culture, suggesting a different cultural genealogy that embraced rock rather than regional culture, music and Costumbrismo: Our choice had no alternative: we preferred marihuana to culture; the Beatles to the author of “Antioqueñita”; “Aguila Negra” to the Condor of the Antioquia hymn, and finally, we’d rather have “Desquite” than the maternal heroine Doña Simona Duque de Marinilla, who sacrificed her five small children and sent them to heaven to defend the glorious conservative party.65 (Arango 1991, 90)

The Nadaístas itinerary through the cities was one of partying, alcohol and smoke, despite not having money even to buy cigarettes they remained surrounded by satanic popular pleasures: “Drunk on marihuana and cheap

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alcohol after a tobacco-filled, pagan and turbulent night. Capital nights of pleasure and demonic rites, in which even the Devil was scandalized by our insane excesses and defiance of reason”66 (Arango 1991, 171). Still, the experience of prison brings a series of realizations for Arango, and for Nadaísmo, probably refining and sharpening his social awareness. A glimpse at the novelty of the experience is suggested in the first and only time that Arango actively attempts at smoking marihuana in the whole account of his imprisonment, under the argument of forging “a complicity in the realm of the forbidden to make them understand that there is a bottom of perversion in me, that my soul is a secret nest of unspeakable vices, that I am not a miserable intellectual prisoner”67 (Arango 1991, 166). In a hilarious passage, he approached the prison dealer in the final pages of the memoirs and requested to be sold some cannabis, breaking all protocols of clandestinity and therefore failing to obtain any. The poet even uses the wrong slang word for it, “Mariabonita,” approximately “Pretty-Maria,” instead of “marihuana,” bringing even more confusion to the frustrated and coded transaction: “Don Trinidad—I said almost in a whisper—please, sell me a reefer of ‘Mariabonita’”68 (166). A common practice between intellectuals and criminals had consolidated. In a chronicle from 1967, some years after, cannabis still appeared as a spiritual link between Arango and the prisoners. Walking around Medellin with a friend, the poet remembered his stay in La Ladera, as some volunteers collected money on the street for the prisoners to celebrate Christmas, he made a donation before stating, “deep down, I did it so that any of those stubborn lowlifes can buy a joint of marijuana with my money on December 24 and smoke it at midnight in my name”69 (Arango 1993b, 19). With a payment of 500 pesos per article in 1963, it is clear that the serialized memoirs were a success, and opened a channel that could also connect Arango with a mass audience, as his work in Cromos magazine did too. Beyond that, his Memorias de un presidiario nadaísta in Contrapunto was a chance to get readers and prisoners closer via a narrative of the artist-delinquent. The intervention of Alberto Zalamea on August 25, 1959, turned the incarceration into a national event which brought the public figure of Gonzalo Arango closer to the public problem of prisons, drug abuse, and new social values: “reader and friend, how do you feel when you know that a boy like Gonzalo Arango is today a victim of a society that wants to take revenge on him for his disrespect and irreverence through its worst criminals?”70 (Zalamea 1991, 217). The publication and the experience marked an encounter of Arango’s writing with marginal and mass consumer culture simultaneously and showed how the times were changing as intellectual culture approached a definitive crisis by the 1960s. Shortly after, with only nineteen issues, sixteen of which included the narration of Arango and many other authors,

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the newspaper Contrapunto got canceled and declared itself in bankruptcy (Arango 1991, 206). Alberto Aguirre, an old friend of Arango prone to condemn him intellectually, mentioned he had plagiarized his prison memoirs from the book La Ladera, by the poet Mauro Álvarez Atehortúa, also imprisoned there (Aguirre in Arango 2006, 51–54). But Aguirre accused Arango of plagiarizing a story that was written only after Arango’s memories of imprisonment became public on June 17, 1965, when its first episode was printed in the periodical Contrapunto. Besides immense agreement in the fact that cannabis and drugs were ubiquitous in La Ladera prison, the style and episodes of the two memoirs, both written by imprisoned criminal poets, could not be more different. Arango brought a level of dread, humor, poetry, and humanity to the experience of jail, along with such a richness of language that no other example in Colombian literature could compare. Additionally, Álvarez’s memoirs could only have been published after Arango’s since his last words in La Ladera book retell the New Year of 1965, when Arango’s memoirs had already been published in Contrapunto: “We acquire new sleep habits, so as not to be deprived by the stench of our cells until the guard shows again. Loneliness until the end (December 31, 1965)”71 (Álvarez n.d., 108).

TRADITIONAL HALLUCINOGENS AMONG URBAN ARTISTS: 13 POETAS NADAÍSTAS AND OTHER EXAMPLES OF TRANSCULTURATION In their first collective book of poetry as a movement, 13 poetas nadaístas, a foundational anthology from 1963 edited by Arango, all of the social coordinates of hallucination were duly noted, not only its mestizo versions in the cities but also the recognition of its powerful place in an ancestral cultural legacy strange to white elites. Subtle, appearing in few instances, the allusions to traditional and post-colonial hallucinogenic plants are, however, constant throughout the collective volume and explicit in the spirit of the movement it presents. In the piece “Poem of Invented Loves,”72 Gonzalo Arango celebrated the existence of marihuana as part of the lumpen experience in the cities, mentioning imaginary women with names he claimed were “listed in the phone book”73 (Arango et al. 1963, 20), mixing up Fuman Chu—a racist and orientalist evil character from US police novels of the early twentieth century who resembled the Eastern origin of cannabis—and the plural form of the verb for smoking in Spanish, “fuman”: “Fu-man-chú smokes marijuana and invites me / to dangerous games with the underworld”74 (22). The cautionary tales against cannabis were also visible in the uncanny imagery that fusioned the violence of an injury and a windy metaphor of dance when

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naming a Patricia, who broke her spine: “Due to marijuana seizures / and an extended liberation”75 (25). The descriptions made by J. Mario Arbeláez, the second of the thirteen poets, included in the anthology after Arango, added another element of close sympathy for the knife-wielding underworld of urban lumpens that grew in Colombia while the state followed an elitist and ecocidal concept of progress after the 1950s. Not only that, but the text was also a testimony of the link between crime and hallucination inherited from the racial divide of the colonial world, subsumed now in a class society. Perhaps the best moments of J. Mario’s writing are also the most sincere ones in regard to the nadaísta experience of the city, as in the poem “La Policía de Manizales (Bala da)”76 (J. Mario in Arango et  al. 1963, 32–33), which from the title makes a pun between the poetic genre of “balada,” ballad, and, “bala-da,” meaning the police “shoots-bullets” in Spanish, a double entendre that becomes the structural principle of all the composition. In the text, a strong and fundamental antagonism confronting artists and young people against institutions and state violence is clearly underlined. Some verses mark how “during the last period of my desperate cogitations / of my unheard-of readings,”77 (32) and after “my initiations in Freemasonry”78 (32), while gaining insight into his own identity, and delving “in magic / in marihuana”79 (32), the poet also came to meet the authorities, which he then describes lyrically: “the Manizales Police is the less police-like of all the Police in the world,”80 closing with a climax “it is a robust and hallucinated Police / wholly possessed by poetry”81 (33). With Manizales distinguished as a very conservative city in a country plagued with extrajudicial executions, the dark humor was not missed by Colombian readers. This hilarious and ironic contrast, of policemen juxtaposed with complex poetic figures, continues on until the climax of the last lines. There, the violence of a militarized public life, in a country full of state abuses— whose perpetrators were often left unpunished—is confronted with the sublime irony of the poet’s metaphors in the last verses on the Police: “now I sing about Manizales, / and about its firing-squad of metaphysical executioners”82 (J. Mario in Arango et al. 1963, 33). The third poet of the collection, Amilcar Osorio, included as Amilkar U., alluded to a more cryptic substance. In the poem titled “Fundación de la fiesta”83 (in Arango et al. 52–53), his poetic persona searched for the very origins of the fiesta: “the story on the coagulation of Partying”84 (52). There is a single line, which nevertheless remains provocative and enigmatic as it refers to what seems like the symptoms and visions resulting from an Indigenous hallucinogen: “dusty evenings hold still with the leaves of anjico [sic] in the banished parks and at the border of the many roads crossed with a forehead burning in a continuous fever, in delirium”85 (52). Misspelled by Amílkar, with a “j” instead of a “g,” the angico tree, or anandenanthera colubrina,

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is endemic to Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil. It is a medicinal shrub with powerful hallucinogenic properties common in tropical areas (Monteiro et al. 2006, 1–3). It contains dimethyltryptamine, like the mix of the ayahuasca vine and the chacruna bush does, and it is a main ingredient in the making of a snuff, a dust, a variant of yopo—mentioned by Vargas Machuca as “jopa” and quoted before (Vargas Machuca 1599, 133)—with equally psychoactive properties (Schultes and Hofmann 1979, 119). Descriptions of the landscape inevitably acquired visionary resonances in mestizo poetry like that of Nadaísmo. In the section written by Alberto Escobar, the verses tell of sailors and vagabonds bringing their stories from far away for the poets, along with merchandise from all over the world. Brief and as obscure as the angico reference by Osorio, we find an allusion to the lotus flower—“They brought a lotus flower from Egypt”86 (in Arango et al. 1963, 69)—along with another to “revolvers from New York”87 (69), and finally “cacao sabanero”—“From the mouths of the Amazon / they brought the Cacao Sabanero formula”88 (69)—also named borrachero, drunkenness tree, a type of brugmansia that seems ubiquitous in the Andes rituality as well as in the higher Amazon, as mentioned by Schultes. This is also a source of scopolamine, a mind-altering substance used by criminals all over Colombian cities to subdue mugging victims, the very same substance taken by Pedro Manrique Figueroa for entertainment, the fictional artist of the movie Un tigre de papel by Luis Ospina I analyze in further pages. The borrachero—also approximately translatable to “the inebriating”— or “cacao sabanero” is commonly used in a hallucinogenic snuff among the Kamsá Indians of the Sibundoy Valley, in the Putumayo, and it is known by many other communities in other regions. In the aforementioned poem “Los sinónimos de la angustia,”89 Escobar joins together the image of a “formula” and “cacao sabanero,” directly touching on the idea that there is a previous preparation and a manufacturer to these substances. Thus, the poet is pointing to a concrete technique and a technology, and there is, in fact a snuff, as I mentioned before, used among locals of the Putumayo region which know variables and mixtures to the recipe and where Schultes found the highest number of planted individuals of that species (Schultes and Hofmann 1979, 128–131). The juxtaposition of the revolver from New York, as an ultimate manifestation of destructive material culture in industrialism, and the formula of “cacao sabanero” of the Amazon region in two contiguous verses, makes a subtle case for a contrast that proves the awareness nadaístas had of the sophistication underlying these visionary practices as alternatives to orthodox progress, and the certainty that a mestizo legacy could challenge the roles and ideals of industry. As Timothy Plowman, a late student of Schultes and a celebrated ethnobotanist himself, put it in the

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memoirs of Wade Davis, discussing the dangers and enigmas of the plant mentioned so directly by Escobar: “The borracheros are real mysteries,” he continued as we pulled back onto the road. “They’re always found growing near people, in fields, by houses, often in cemeteries, never in the wild. The seeds are infertile. The Indians grow them just by sticking a cutting in the ground. They’re native to the Andes, but no one really knows how they came into being. It’s the one hallucinogen that Schultes has never tried.” (Davis 1996, 145–146)

The landscape for Nadaísmo was never a passive setting, but a complex web of meanings and legacies that could also be read. With flowers resembling inverted calyces, the shrub of borrachero or cacao sabanero is a visual particularity of tropical landscapes, but besides marking a territory and a tone, it maintains implications as a substance whose use has the potential to resignify any descriptive paragraph where it is included, as it happens in Escobar’s poem and in the generality of Nadaísmo works. The fact that Nadaísmo members had a high awareness of the legacies included in the ritual of yagé was also evident in two other documents. In a letter to Eduardo Escobar, Gonzalo Arango told him about two young women, “hippies” he interviewed for the article “Reportaje a dos terrícolas” in El Tiempo from November 1971. He casually mentions these foreigners searching for yagé in the Amazon (Arango 2011, 435), as if the substance was a well-known subject for him and Eduardo Escobar. As he explained in the letter, he had in fact quit the literary supplement “Lecturas Dominicales” of the well-known newspaper El Tiempo after their censors removed the word “shit”90 from that very article, “Reportaje a dos terrícolas.” In a particular passage related to another sacred substance and its principles of knowledge, one on hallucinogenic mushrooms, he retold his resignation with the very hallucinogens’ metaphor he had tried to use in the censored chronicle: “Everything is one, an ouvre of light. And from the shit sprouts the mushroom, like the flowery beauty of a journalistic report”91 (2011, 435). Many decades after these letters, there is a probably fictional tale which nevertheless accounts for the obsession of all Nadaísmo with these consumptions. In a column he wrote in 2017 for the newspaper El Tiempo titled “Recuerdo con villancico,”92 Eduardo Escobar told of an alleged travel to the city of Mitú in the jungle, in the Vaupés region at the Amazon region, with Gonzalo Arango (who died in 1976). In this written account, which lacks clear details and dates, not only do they casually eat some psychedelic mushrooms they find in the jungle, but the narrator distinctly states that “we had gone in search of a taita who would initiate us into yagé, and of the makú, the last remnant nomads of prehistoric innocence”93 (Escobar 2017, n.p.).

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Even if only as ideals in some of them and not as practices, an acute awareness of the depth of hallucinatory knowledge in Colombia is visible in the nadaístas’ writings, as well as the complex interactions intellectuals and youths were having with their local and territorialized heritage and simultaneously with world culture of the time, especially in the countercultural hemispheric circuit I underline in these pages. As the novel by the nadaísta Humberto Navarro, El amor en grupo94 from 1974, based on the movement, put it, they were well informed and interested by these subjects as part of their creating endeavors, speculating on the “natural tv” of imagination and “telepatina,” a name coming from the word “telepathy” given to one of the active components of yagé: They wrote, painted and were aware of literary novelties. That translation of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, his trip to Peru, to Machu Picchu, to look for the Banisteria Caapi, without knowing that William Burroughs would find it in the south of our country, our very yagé or yagué or ayaguasca or yaguasca. The alkaloid is extracted by means of maceration or decoction of the stems. It produces nausea, the telepatina to watch the natural TV, which happens many kilometers away.95 (Navarro 1974, 19–20)

Often criticized as uncommitted and lazy, I try to list these examples as a clear ethical positioning of the authors of Nadaísmo as a mestizo and anti-Hispanic stance through the years. They did not embrace black and Indigenous heritage as a museification of their ancestral ideals but as a living patrimony of territorialization, life experiences, art, knowledge, and sensorial searches for meaning. Hallucination has been one of the thresholds through which nadaístas abandoned an idea of culture as a whitewashing of mestizaje through Spanish and Hispanism. Still, beyond style, whenever it was necessary to take a clear position, they reacted as a coherent group, capable of self-criticism and real political compromises, which is much more than can be said about any other artistic group of Colombia in the twentieth century, except perhaps the Grupo de Cali en Ciudad Solar, which they influenced. In the ninth entry of 13 Poetas nadaístas, Dario Lemos also told of an urban experience, but now in the key of a conflict with the city, demanding “extensions of peaceful and salty sea / for all the holy crazy prophets,”96 but it was the next line that turned these poetic images into an argument against cities, as he adds, “Oh rotten city gods!”97 (in Arango et al. 1963, 125). He also presented a conflict with how daily life was surrounded by war, progress, and the atomic menace after the 1950s: “I am marihuano / I feel scorpions and matches of war in my stomach”98 (125). The following verse makes these images of anxiety a promise of destruction: “I hope to commit suicide after I finish this cigarette”99 (125). Although his written poetry may not be the most fluid, his life was a whole commitment to the true matter of it, becoming the

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most finished form of a lumpen poet. Dario Lemos praised himself for never working since it was part of a general attitude, as it is said by J. Mario: “Gonzalo Arango loved and celebrated his phrase ‘My work is my life, the rest is just little pieces of paper’”100 (Arbeláez 2015, 14). The highly complex relationship with marihuana materializes in the most tender and scandalous of ways via a sublime metaphor suggested by Elmo Valencia in a poem included in the book Bodas sin oro: Cincuenta años del Nadaísmo101 from 2010. The image appears in the text dedicated to him by Elmo Valencia, “Sinfonía para un poeta en silla de ruedas.”102 Years after the loss of his leg to gangrene, “the leg of the poet Darío flew away like / a wounded bird”103 (Valencia 2010b, 60), Lemos himself had also passed away after living for a long time in the streets dedicated to Nadaísmo, using drugs, stealing minor items, and poetizing: “Since they couldn’t bury him in his wheelchair / his closest friends sold it”104 (Valencia 2010b, 61). As a celebration and as a lamentation over Darío Lemos, the dead weight of his abandoned wheelchair—the one he was dependent on since his right foot had been amputated—is submitted to a lyric mutation that renders it pure smoke, as they sell it and “with the money they bought a pound of grass and smoked it all, at night, in front of the poet’s tomb”105 (Valencia 2010b, 61). The poet’s handicap made into the object of the chair turns into a windy nothingness, simultaneously the most lumpen of transactions when handling stolen goods, and the most magical of transformations; a metaphor of transcendence and friendship made into a pound of cannabis. Long after his Nadaísmo experience, in 1984, in the book Sombrero de ahogado, published under his real name, Jaime Jaramillo Escobar, former X 504, one poem insinuated proximity with many of the hallucinogens and visionary agents used throughout human history. A feverish hallucinatory search became the rhythm of this later text, “El mundo de las maravillas.”106 It is is included here because of how, despite its bitter disenchantment with each substance, it tells of a protagonist who keeps searching and trying new compounds. The first references to hallucinogens usage in the poem are accompanied by geographic markings, giving an idea of their distribution and availability in parts of Colombia, and showing a real personal bond between the territory, hallucinogens, and the author. First a famous river, flowing between the areas of Caldas and Antioquia: “On the banks of the La Miel river, hallucinogenic mushrooms sprouted like manna, dispensers of joy and ecstasy. They gave me fever and vomit”107 (Jaramillo 1984, 71). Next, precisely in the Caribbean area, the text mentions marihuana: “In Barranquilla I smoked marihuana called ‘The Golden Door.’ My ears exploded”108 (71). The continuity between traditional hallucinogens and artificial modern ones comes with lysergic acid: “I took LSD and it was worse. I suffer from hallucinations. I am a hallucinated”109 (71). The conclusion of the poem goes over

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the leitmotiv of dissatisfaction, and rather suggests a contemplative content over daily life as the ultimate discovery, as well as a complex mixture of legacies—the local, the national and the global, the sacred and the profane: “I turned to black magic, mantic arts, esoterics, spiritualists, sorcerers, indigenous rituals, yagé”110 (72). These lines do not necessarily mean the author considered hallucination to be useless or degrading, but rather that life and the processes toward mental maturity could all be mediated by different understandings of similar inputs (leading to different altered states of consciousness even without using any particular substance) or by using too many. Instead of taking us away from daily life, these transits are meant to give us a different intimacy with our real states of mind. The smartest association in the poem comes from the transition it makes from consumer to producer, confronting the fact that criminalization of either one of those ends condemns both, as the War on Drugs did, and reminiscent of how the life of writer Oscar Acosta ended, mentioned in chapter 1: “I learned about drug trafficking, I jumped into the sea from a low-altitude plane. / They chased me with bullets, with remote-guided sharks, with lifeboats”111 (Jaramillo 1984, 72). THE GRUPO DE CALI EN CIUDAD SOLAR, HALLUCINATED ARTISTS, AND DRUG PARANOIAS Carlos Mayolo made hallucinogenic substances a life companion, but also a device for creation and knowledge, and admitted he had been deeply influenced by Andrés Caicedo in the City of Santiago de Cali. With Ospina and Mayolo being denied all the awards for short film in the XVI Festival de Cartagena of 1976, Caicedo complained about the bankruptcy and commercial failure of his magazine Ojo al cine along with the rejection of critical movies like La Hamaca and Asunción, made by Luis Ospina, Carlos Mayolo and Patricia Restrepo (Caicedo 1999, 400–401). At the same time he criticized Hollywood mainstream cinema. The following long quote of Caicedo, taken from one of his articles on cinema from the magazine Ojo al cine he edited, ridiculed a TV filmmaker like David Greene, director of the movie The people next door from 1970, a drama about a teenage girl portrayed as “addicted” to LSD. It is difficult to critically describe such an immediate realm, a cultural phenomena not yet defined in reality; that is, not yet transformed by reality itself. All the semi-didactic films that are made to warn young people about the use of drugs increase abuse (their outcry is nothing more than sensationalistic propaganda, selling more newspapers, more books, more films, etc.), because the young spectator ignores the moral at the end of the film, since he is more intelligent

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than, say, David Greene. On the other hand, said spectator will be touched by curiosity when watching the descriptive parts of the drug’s effects. As he knows their representation to be deceitful, the movie will lead him to verify what effects the drugs have on him. The real effects are so wildly different from anything you’ve seen in the movies (and from everything you’ve seen and felt in life itself) that they may create a self beyond life and beyond cinema, a genius.112 (Caicedo 1999, 347–348)

Caicedo concluded that the efforts to moralize drug users were much less rich in comparison to the real intellectual and sensorial trance of hallucination, “cultural phenomena not yet defined in reality”113 (1999, 347). Miguel González, curator of the Cali art museum La Tertulia and childhood friend of Andrés Caicedo, told about the single encounter of both writers in the documentary Gonzalo Arango y Andrés Caicedo: Las dos caras de la moneda from 2001: “Back then Gonzalo Arango decided to present his book Prosas para leer en la silla eléctrica at the Tertulia, and Andrés Caicedo and I met and went together to the presentation of this book”114 (in Perea and Urrea 2001, 16:10–16:22). Gonzalo Arango read the short story “Medellín, a solas contigo”115 (Perea and Urrea 2001, 16:22–16:24). This short text, included in Prosas para leer en la silla eléctrica,116 is extremely telling of the ambiguous relationship between young people and the police in the cities of Colombia to this day, as the narrator stated when addressing the Antioquia capital—“Your lack of understanding has created a new man in me”117—and ended detained by policemen for no apparent motive along with criminals and marihuana users (Arango 2000, 54). Probably after being asked directly about it by director Álvaro Perea in “Gonzalo Arango y Andrés Caicedo. Las dos caras de la moneda,” Miguel González gave his personal impressions about Caicedo as a teenager and his few approaches to Nadaísmo: “I believe that Nadaísmo was fundamental for his start in both his theatrical and literary interests. He had a very marked inclination towards it, because, for example, at the San Luis highschool, at the Literary Center, he presented an imaginary report on J. Mario [Arbeláez] as an assignment”118 (in Perea and Urrea 2001, 17:00–17.18). With Andrés Caicedo, who also died young, living from 1951—born in Cali, twenty years after Gonzalo Arango—to 1977, one sees both an exterior and an interiorized form of this anxiety, a tension over the fact that it was the bodies of young people and intellectuals that were being used to reaffirm iron fist policies, and a general sense of authority in late twentieth-century Colombia. It was Carlos Mayolo, a close friend and one of the most important directors and writers in the country, who most clearly and explicitly embraced Nadaísmo as a cultural influence and as a philosophy of hallucination for the Grupo de Cali, as when he described his youth and used the word “traba,” used to address marihuana effects in his autobiography from

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2002: “We were nadaístas, and our readings, plus the courage to change the perception of the world with cannabis, gave us a sense of superiority”119 (Mayolo 2002, 90). After a near-death experience, Luis Ospina included the reflection about disease and his own mortality in the movie Todo comenzó por el fin from 2015, as he and others evoked the creative atmosphere and times of their youth. Hernando Guerrero was also interviewed, the original owner of the house where a historic urban creative commune would be founded in Cali under his sponsorship: Ciudad Solar. As well as the Cine-Club de Cali, Ciudad Solar was a space of encounter for that generation of film-makers and artists in the city. Andrés Caicedo and his friends shared the house as a residence too. Guerrero also told of the rigid frame of mind of the revolutionaries of his time, as he commented how he was “distanced” eventually from the communist circles along with another important figure of cinema in Cali, Pakiko Ordóñez, for smoking marihuana: “They said, in that metaphorical language which comrades have, that they separated us because of the marihuana. . . . At that time, hippie culture was a form of rupture, but of course the comrades were psycho-rigid”120 (in Ospina 2015, 49:09–49:35/ 49:43–49:55) In the eyes of art director Ricardo Duque, a deeper bond between the consumption of marihuana and Colombian history was also part of the equation. Duque (seen “inhaling” Mayolo in figure 3.1) had a strong argument justifying why he got to relate to these substances. He was the art director in some of the Grupo de Cali en Ciudad Solar movies like Pura sangre, Carne de tu carne, La mansión de Araucaima, by Ospina and Mayolo, but also narco narratives like Sumas y restas, or beautiful marginal narratives with echoes of marijuana, glue, and hallucination like La vendedora de rosas and Rodrigo D. no futuro, all three directed by Víctor Gaviria with natural actors in their own marginal neighborhoods of Medellín. His own life developed in parallel to his work, with brutal violence as a daily experience. I would not have endured living in this country without marihuana. In this country in particular, though, because, for example, when I was introduced to marihuana, well, I was very affected by all the phenomenon of violence that had been happening. . . . So what is it? We all had seen episodes and we had all been close to much violence.121 (in Ospina 2015, 23:05–23:46)

During the second half of the film, Mayolo, deceased in 2007, whose past footage accompanies part of the movie, becomes a strong absence. Not unlike the nadaísta tribute to late Darío Lemos, whose friends magically turned—by a quick sale—his abandoned wheelchair into a pound of cannabis so they could smoke toasting to him, there is a transmutation involving the very remnants of Mayolo (seen in figure 3.1). When dispersing his ashes, as everyone

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Figure 3.1  The Ashes of Carlos Mayolo Serve as an Occasion for Some Lines upon Friendship. Source: Ospina, Luis (Director and Producer). 2015. Todo comenzó por el fin. Motion picture. Colombia, 3:05:35.

gets a handful to spread in an open field, Ricardo Duque jokes by pretending they are cocaine, and he inhales some lines out of them in front of the camera (Ospina 2015, 3:05:25–3:05:35). ​ Todo comenzó por el fin from 2015 and its reflections on death and time during the last stage of the twentieth century marked an increase of darkness. We get closer to the other sides of substance use and abuse and observe the aftermath of problematic personal lives and shattered hopes of social change and peace. Subjected to the criminalization of hallucination and the appearance of more addictive compounds, these narratives are also a particular result of the indiscriminate pairing of very different substances under the same stigma by authorities and media.

ANDRÉS CAICEDO AND THE GRUPO DE CALI EN CIUDAD SOLAR AND THEIR VISIONARY SEARCHES IN CINEMA For Carlos Mayolo, the ideal of the criminal artist was a definitive truth which applied to his own search and connected him to nadaísta ideals and to Counterculture of the Americas in general: “Doing Art at that time was like being a

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criminal. The artists, poets, always oddballs, were put next to thugs. There were no spaces for art. Being different implied believing one knew about the night and the dark. To think after 1950 was to commit a crime”122 (Mayolo 2002, 98). When Andrés Caicedo described his circle of friends, the presence of the female flower of cannabis—which he sometimes called the crooked, “la torcida”—is underlined as a distinction of the times and a shared—failed?— hope for new knowledge: “And already all of them smoked marihuana. And I believed, deceived as always, that a new gap was opening for a new knowledge, brother. That which could not be said before, I was going to say it now helped by the torcida”123 (Caicedo 1999, 36). The visionary and psychedelic experiences went through a sort of interdiction after the 1950s, increasingly prosecuted by authorities in search for social scapegoats. Caicedo clearly manifests this through different somatizations related to marijuana, presenting strange symptoms that nobody else seems to mention in the drug bibliography observed in this book, such as a skin rash and others, showing he had associated cannabis usage to disease: “Another symptom of the habit is that the substance has to go to one’s kidneys, because it burns the next day when I urinate”124 (Caicedo 2008, 168). Caicedo interiorized the blame as a user in the form of a love and hate relationship–one of pleasure and pain—with the “torcida” or “torcis,” the “crooked one”: “The rash appears when I have stopped my habit and also when I have two or three torcis in the day: proof, in my opinion, that my organism and some intricate modality of the psyche ask for the substance, but at the same time reject it”125 (Caicedo 2008, 168). Throughout his trips to the United States, Caicedo confirmed this was not an isolated issue and progressively connected many points of the American continent, Colombian identity, and his own insecurities “I am here in the USA, with no friends”126 (Caicedo 2008, 53). Suspicions followed him everywhere: “They stopped me at customs / they frisked me for being a Colombian”127 (53). This was clearly visible in some verses dated in Miami, in May 1973, lamenting a universal stigma suffered nationally and personally as well: “as a drug trafficker / I have managed to get out” (53).128 Even Mexico was added to the itinerary: “I was also in Mexico, in Laredo, a border town, when we went through they made us remove all our things from the car, and they brought in a dog that sniffed us for marihuana”129 (Caicedo 2008, 72). In terms of symptoms on the bigger social body, the comment made by Andrés Caicedo in 1970 about the projection of Easy Rider (1969) in Colombia, in the “Magazín Dominical” of the newspaper El Espectador, gives an idea of that which was perpetually delayed and resisted via the censorship of substances and their criminal prosecution in those years, and what topics the national establishment tried to reject from mass consumer culture narratives:

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In Busco mi destino [Easy Rider] there is a fifteen-minute cut between the taking of LSD in the cemetery and the penultimate sequence. Indeed, it seems that the most image-rich part of the film, which was the long acid sequence around some tombs, with the protagonists accompanied by two young prostitutes, has been censored and cut off for the Colombian viewer, seriously reducing and altering the structure of the film. Hopper wanted to do of the “trip” a whole cleansing ceremonial, a preparation for death. And we couldn’t see that here.130 (Caicedo 1999, 53)

Beyond an anecdotic mutilation, this effort by the Colombian censorship to remove LSD from cinema, tells about what was progressively rejected from the 1950s to the 1980s in local imaginaries and the nation’s experience of pop and consumer culture. In tension with this the “Short-story-therapy” “Pharmakon” from 2005 featured a monologue, a dialogue between Mayolo and his memories, and a few times included consultations with his ubiquitous doctor, who clarified the situation for the reader of the short story, and later for viewers of the play enacted by Alejandra Borrero after the author’s passing. The actress fabulously impersonated an old Mayolo, mentally and physically falling apart, and the theater adaptation was made by Sandro Romero, following each line of Mayolo’s short story almost verbatim. Romero played the voice of the doctor who read Mayolo’s medical file in relation to drugs. The patient started taking alcohol at thirteen, marijuana at eighteen, and LSD at twenty-eight, although he did not like mushrooms, and as a sixty-year-old remained a regular smoker (Mayolo 2005, 35). As a direct counterpart, the voice of Mayolo puts the effects of hallucinogens and others as a crucial source of knowledge that could be interiorized even without dependence on a particular substance, even bareta and its traba, other slang words for cannabis and its effects: I think an effort should be made to redeploy the effects of drugs. You can’t take away from your memory the feelings you had under their influence. The courage to change the perception of the world with cannabis gives us an air of superiority, of living in the traba, where one gets confused. With the bareta you forget what you are talking about, but then you invent something new. There is always something unusual that crosses your mind. Such mental state must be reclaimed and everyone should be able to experience it with or without marihuana.131 (Mayolo 2005, 38)

For Mayolo an epoch of simulacra like the present could be fought only by learning to navigate the waters of memory, experience, and illusion, since “every citizen is almost a psychiatric patient”132 (Mayolo 2005, 41). For him, hallucination is an integral part of the search for historic and personal truths that may help us dream on a future, even without any need to abuse the experience:

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Remembrance is an instrument to understand the present and the emotions of the past, that means memories, and even the nostalgia of drugs, can be therapeutic. It is like evoking a perfume without actually having it or while keeping it capped. Everybody has the right to be delirious in the present and to know how to fill themselves with arbitrariness, to surround themselves with elements of digression and make the absurd a truth. It is therapeutic to use the uplifting and brilliant effect of the perception of drugs, to know that with their use you can and will create. They produce a will in people that leads them to the effects of joy, because the brilliant effects of hallucination allow you to create an imaginary world that can become a fairy tale or even a utopia.133 (Mayolo 2005, 39)

Received with such tension, territorialized expressions—as the cultural dynamic around hallucinogens both sensorially and creatively was—were labeled and criminalized from afar. Still, it is Mayolo who better expressed how hallucinogens promoted important transitions locally and nationally, in the aesthetics and politics of his generation, as he adopted the legacy of Gonzalo Arango, “I started to become a philosopher, a nadaísta and an eccentric”134 (Mayolo 2002, 80). Mayolo even entered into an experience that made hallucination a single practice along with dialectical materialism, an idea not unlike the ones expressed in The Uncollected Works of Oscar Acosta in regard to his intellectual and political life and LSD: “My mind blew up, I became a communist, I understood the other religion, The Left. Being a materialist was very difficult when you were a hippie and you used acid, a substance that made you spiritual. I became so materialistic in acid that I could even catch a fish with my hand”135 (Mayolo 2002, 81). For the retrospective eye of Sandro Romero Rey, himself involved in a wide number of productions, like the adaptation of “Pharmakon” by Mayolo to a theater play and working with Werner Herzog in Colombia, this definitive association between the oeuvre and their personal lives as creators turned both into a continuous party for the Grupo de Cali. History ultimately entangled drug trafficking and the critical efforts of their generation confronting the exchange value and the use value of hallucinogens in culture. He was clear on that link when it came to the collectivity of his group, but also to particular artists like Mayolo, on whom he reflected in “Pharmakon (Notas para una puesta en escena)”: “At the end of his life, his work was his addictions. Between glasses of vodka, marihuana cigarettes and lines of cocaine, he wrote unceasingly”136 (Romero R. 2008, 75). In Todo comenzó por el fin from 2015, directed by Luis Ospina as a means to remember and think of the Grupo de Cali en Ciudad Solar, Romero made a duality clear as I have strived to present it here, now thinking of their collective works: You didn’t know when you were working and when you were partying. I think that was the great lesson of the Cali group.  .  .  .  Also, it seems curious to me

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afterwards, thinking about those years, how it was the same time period of the creation of the Cali Cartel and the whole explosion of the world of drugs, which was very intense. But we were not really thinking about it. We were involved, let’s say, in the celebration and not within the actual phenomenon.137 (in Ospina 2015, 2:03:30–2:04:02)

Next in the movie there is a song and a sequence of very fast assembly of journalistic images showing the violence of drug trafficking, air fumigations from the War on Drugs, confiscated marihuana, big capos as Pablo Escobar, Carlos Lehder, and images of the artists of the Grupo de Cali en Ciudad Solar, as a popular song repeats its choir, using the word “rumba,” Colombian slang for “party”: “We are partying as the world falls apart”138 (Ospina 2015, 2:04:02– 2:06:45). The montage sequence goes on adding images of drug traffickers like Rodríguez Gacha, scenes of the movie Pura sangre by Luis Ospina from 1982 in which the characters use cocaine and agree to have it injected on them, and many others, as the news populate the screen with headlines on anonymous deaths among civilians, military and paramilitary troops, and leftist guerrillas. Critical approaches to the historical encounter of aesthetics, visionary substances, mass consumer culture, and narco-trafficking had been attempted by Ospina himself in the past, analyzing narco-aesthetics in a documentary called Mucho gusto in 1996 (Ospina 2007, 75). He also filmed the materials for a documentary on Fernando Vallejo, who not only wrote El descabarrancadero in 2001, a novel and a brilliant testimony developing on hatred as part of Colombian national history while telling of marihuana as a family anathema, but also produced two biographical texts on Porfirio Barba Jacob, a heavy user of marihuana and homosexual in the most conservative of societies I mentioned in a previous section (Ospina 2007, 68). In contrast to how it is for US artists, hallucinogens are deeply territorialized in the experience of historically producing countries and their conflicts. In parallel to the vivid effects of the substances, there was also the trade and its effects in national spaces, as well as those of the policing and the fumigations. Even if the land was rarely mentioned by Counterculture authors in its organic relation to the cannabis trade in the cities, it becomes visible in how the bodies and neuroses of these young writers started to somatize very similar symptoms of paranoia to those of the territories intervened by the War on Drugs. It was the police and the military that dealt with the generational, social, and cultural gaps. With reality turned into a sort of narco-narrative itself, it could even be sustained that the transition from the use value of psychoactive storytelling to the exchange value that constitutes the motivation of narcos epics, also corresponded with a number of dialectical opposites that marked the trap and the enchantment of modernity, as one experiences the narcotic simultaneity of both ends in the culture of the twenty-first century.

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PEPOS, UN TIGRE DE PAPEL, AND UN ÁNGEL DEL PANTANO: VISIONARY LUMPENS AND FILM Usually put together as a stigma, I have isolated instances in this corpus in which the relation between activism, opposition, and hallucinogens has gained a positive nature, producing works of art which remain highly political today, and politics which were intensely performative in their national spheres. Further in the century, a medium-length film written and directed by Jorge Aldana like Pepos (a slang word for drug users) from 1983, dealing with young consumers and dealers of marihuana in Bogotá, included visions of Simon Bolivar, Karl Marx, and guardian angels. The young protagonists smoked and sold cannabis in the streets of the colonial neighborhood of La Candelaria: Viejo Loco and Guillo. One gets a peek at their hallucinated visions, ideologies, and consumerisms, as the movie also provides us with a social image of hallucinogens in the city and its nightlife. As the young men’s guardian angels leave to smoke a joint and forget about them (amusingly visible in figure 3.2), both dealers are surprised by the police. Spectators see the angels run away as the policemen burn the remaining merchandise (Aldana 1983, 18:32, 20:35). ​ The presence of guardian angels smoking cannabis totally inverts the devil’s metaphors from Hispanism in relation to hallucination and its demonization, demonstrating a complex heritage (the sequence of figure 3.2 would have been highly polemical in 1983). Viejo Loco and Guille are detained and forced to enroll in the mandatory military service. In a twist reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, later in the film, as conscripts, they end up trying to

Figure 3.2  Catholic Icons, Pop, and Hallucination Allow for Complex Transcultural Images, Such as That of Guardian Angels Lighting a Joint. Source: Aldana, Jorge (Director and Producer). 1983. Pepos. Medium-length film. Colombia: Mugre al ojo producciones, 18:33.

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detain two young men of Bogotá just like themselves in a similar drug bust. Similarly to Un ángel del pantano by Oscar Campo or Un tigre de papel by Luis Ospina, which I touch upon next, Pepos suggested yet another stage of the precariousness of drug users and their continuing policing on the streets, as their realms of action were pushed further and further to the margins of the inner and the outer city. With a soundtrack wholly composed by one of the earliest rock bands to appear nationally and one of the most remembered in Colombia, Los Flippers, the inclusion of homeless minors drinking gasoline directly from a pumping unit at a service station (Aldana 1983, 16:37), and other aspects of Bogotá’s night urban life like alcohol, drugs and even the experience of urban transexuals in the 1980s, a sort of young visionary lumpen comes into view just as it was in that decade, with young people of all social classes meeting at the margins and creating their own culture. The generational gap as much as the social divides reappeared in how the institutions would come to relate to the youths and try to police their consumptions back within a standard definition of culture and public health, which not only dismissed the depth of the crisis and transformations at hand but also effectively antagonized these human processes toward selfunderstanding and self-representation (made explicit in figures 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4). Meanwhile, real social problems like rural violence, addiction, and unemployment produced homeless children who were concentrated everywhere in urban centers and being dealt with mostly by the police, a series of conditions that inevitably surrounded the sensorial and formal search in narratives like Pepos. In such a sordid and complex social situation, fictions like Aldana’s seemed to channel much more than the isolated hallucinations of some users, and rather pushed us into a level of montage that made them more visible as a dark vision into the real affects of the Colombian cities, and their repressed pains and pleasures in the last two decades of the century. Through the looking glass of his fake documentary, Un tigre de papel from 2008, Luis Ospina reflects upon real visionary searches and memories of Colombian intellectuals, historically related to hippy values and the Left, but also much closer to the country’s territory and its mestizo people, not presenting one tradition but rather elaborate transculturations in many fronts. A hint at the continuity of the nadaísta legacy in Colombia comes in the form of a fictional collage artist created by Luis Ospina. This movie actually brings together a nadaísta like J. Marío Arbeláez (seen in Ospina’s film in figure 3.3) and the Grupo de Cali, since Luis Ospina directs the film and interviews the poet, along with Carlos Mayolo and other figures of Colombian culture from the second half of the twentieth century. They discuss a fictional and metaphoric character, made up for this fake documentary about a collage artist from the 1960s who never really existed, Pedro Manrique Figueroa. Ospina described how Pedro Manrique’s fictional existence was first created

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through his works of art, so a number of exhibitions were organized as an initial experiment to plant him in the collective memory, with different real artists creating his fictional pieces. The third of those events came in 1999: “In the exhibition, entitled ‘Vindication of drugs,’ a summary of Pedro Manrique Figueroa’s relations with drugs, politics and poetry was made, giving rise to what many have called his ‘surrealist period’”139 (Ospina 2007, 89). This origin makes the most sense, since hallucination in itself is montage and collage. Arbeláez claims the artist told him he had been deeply touched by Nadaísmo and that he had attempted to write under its inspiration. He reads two poems that he states were authored by Pedro Manrique Figueroa, one of them titled “La Coca,” with the verses “quit drinks that are not truly yours / Yours is the usual thing from the Taitas’s and the Zipas’s” (in Ospina 2008, 23:58–24:06), mocking the distances and similitudes between coca and coke that had marked his own generation, the “Cocacolos” from the 1950s. Arbeláez even brings out a collage piece supposedly made by Manrique against the pope and in favor of contraceptive pills, or maybe even any other pill, a pun on the words pill, “pepa,” and Pope, “Papa,” ironizing generational tensions with Catholicism and Hispanic values: “No to the Pope, yes to the Pill”140 (in Ospina 2008, 43:30–43.34). ​ Via the hallucinated Pedro Manrique, a shared symbol, Nadaísmo and the Grupo de Cali meet in retrospective (producing figure 3.3). The movie cuts from José Mario Arbeláez to the Cali director Carlos Mayolo, who takes over the narration and describes his own version of Manrique Figueroa in terms

Figure 3.3  The Cali Group and Nadaísmo Meet in Retrospective in the Movie Un Tigre de Papel; J. Mario Arbeláez Holds a Collage Allegedly Made by Pedro Manrique: “No to the Pope, Yes to the Pill.” Source: Ospina, Luis (Director and Producer). 2008. Un tigre de papel. Motion picture. Argentina: Congo Films, 43:34.

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that are reminiscent of Nadaísmo’s Satanism and their ideal of a criminal artist: “He was involved in everything that implied mobs . . . demonstrations. He was a character who had to be tolerated everywhere. He was like a prophet of the bad example”141 (in Ospina 2008, 20:15–20:37). The made-up character of Manrique incarnates a revolutionary fever and a will of action and connects even with Modernismo through visionary knowledge, as an original Latin American aesthetic. Jorge Masetti—playing himself in the mockumentary—a former journalist and guerrilla leader, arms comrade of Ché Guevara in Nicaragua and Cuba, mentions a main passion of Manrique, influenced by José Martí from his poem “Hashish.” Allegedly the composition had inspired Manrique Figueroa to start using hallucinogens, initially as an ideological interest in aesthetics: “he justified, or tried to justify his addiction to me . . . —not addiction, because hashish does not create addiction . . . —but his love for hashish—I think that hashish creates a passion . . . —through Martí”142 (in Ospina 2008, 1:38:27–1:38:41). For Masetti, it was natural that the collage artist did not fit the dogmatism of the Left, but regarding Manrique’s fascination with drugs, revolution, and art, the ex-combatant made a lucid clarification of what drugs could imply within a truly revolutionary aesthetic. He echoes the radical heterodoxy of the identities I have addressed throughout this analysis— freaks, cockroach people, Onda writers, Nadaísmo and the Grupo de Cali en Ciudad Solar—a border where politics, arts and play meet: What was surprising about him was how even surrounded by a whole context of schemes, and studying Marxism in a very serious way, he would come up with delusions like falsifying real dollars; he had the delusion that the world could only be transformed through art, and for that you have to turn to artists or make an artist out of everyone.143 (Masetti in Ospina 2008, 1:37:25–1:37:47)

Nadaísta José Mario Arbeláez, or J. Mario, is one of the constant voices of the mockumentary, and his narration in fact concludes the story. He describes how Pedro Manrique had been initiated in yagé near the time of his final disappearance (Arbeláez in Ospina 2008, 1:49:54–1:49:56), projecting some of his own group’s explorations onto his. A little after that, according to Arbeláez, Manrique was given a pill from a stash of expired medications by a homeless man: “and Pedro started a special trip”144 (1:50:17–1:50:25). When Manrique woke up, he decided to donate his work to the Museo Nacional in Bogotá, before allegedly disappearing forever. Said donation turned out to be his very self, concludes J. Marío: “When they asked him again what his work consisted of, he said that his oeuvre was himself”145 (1:51:16–1:51:23). The documentary Un ángel del pantano, from 1997, followed Guillemo Lemos as he told about his long experiences living in the streets. He was the closest friend of Andrés Caicedo by the end of the writer’s life in 1977. In

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the documentary, Lemos also described a trip on mushrooms that would mark him and Caicedo on the Renegado Valley from that story, as they swam in the river. The events called reality into question even much later: An immense force threw me to the side and I saw with horror that a huge vortex of water formed in the water as we were both drawn to it. Not being able to avoid the suction, we began to spin at a terrifying speed and were swallowed by that vortex. When I opened my eyes I saw myself spinning in the water and at the bottom of the whirlpool I could see lights. The current suddenly took us both out at the same time and something happened that I could never have imagined even in my wildest nightmares. Everything froze, the river stopped, the sky, the clouds. I looked at Andrés and I knew that what was happening was real. The countryside looked like under a pictorial effect similar to that of impressionist art. Our despair was enormous, because we were immersed in the molasses of time. I don’t know how long could it have been, because there was no flow of time, not a single sound could be heard other than our screams, and we didn’t even see our mouths open because we couldn’t move. Suddenly we heard a sound of breaking glass and the river dragged us towards its shore at terrifying speed. Although things seemed to be in order, in a natural state, I remember that I thought that I had to live with that, that I had to get used to being able to live with what had happened. I returned to Cali and the memory of that whirlpool gave me many nightmares.146 (In Campo 1997, 20:57–22:42)

This story tells of the magnitude that a vision reaches when it questions the very fabric of reality. Even the tiniest spoonful of infinity is infinite itself. Just as ominous as the hallucination in ¡Que viva la música!, Caicedo’s final novel from 1977, they both reconstruct nature as a vengeful dark force which shatters the reality of urban tourists and arrogant mestizos, visitors from the city. Along with mushrooms, Lemos shared other experiences with Caicedo, as being a young teenager in the short-film Angelitos empantanados,147 for which he states they had smoked a big quantity of marihuana and ingested valium (Lemos in Campo 1997, 7:25–7:50). It is precisely to the title of that short film that Ángel del pantano148 by Campo alludes with its own title. Lemos stated that marihuana became truly popular by 1971 when he started using it. He was introduced to heroin by a Vietnam ex-combatant, John; “he was crazy and a psychopath. He got addicted to drugs so he could withstand the hell of that war”149 (in Campo 1997, 32:44–32:53). Guillermo Lemos tells a life story which gives body and face to the “bazuko”—a Colombian equivalent of crack—-experience and to the dangers of addiction in the streets. Still, he spoke with veneration and respect about both hallucinogens and hallucination, even after the arrival of very different substances, like “bazuco.” He made a habit of it in the late 1970s. He stated he preferred it the most smoked as a mix with marihuana, “like a ripe plantain with cheese”150 (in Campo 1997, 27:23–27:25). The true costs of disputing reality and traditional values in Colombia emanate

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from his account, particularly when he names all the dead that would come later and a life pushed always to the margins. By criminalizing them equally and fomenting disinformation, it was the state that primarily had created a threshold from hallucinogens to other substances much more dangerous. At first nobody liked bazuco, but that soon changed: “We relegated it to one side, but then it spread like a wildfire”151 (in Campo 1997, 26:38–26:44). Many got addicted at the time. According to Lemos this egoistic and destructive habit dissolved the big gangs of the 1970s, some of which amounted to up to 300 hundred members, it led him to sell all he had and to rob his friends (27:28–27:41). It introduced him into a life of endless fear without a home. A brutal word like “desechable,” “a disposable,” is at times used in Colombia, and Guillermo Lemos applied it for himself: “A few times at night I was woken up by the noise of motorcycles, it was like death coming for me. My bareto was turned off, thank god. The social cleaning groups always arrive at night or at dawn, eliminating disposables, street locos, bazuqueros”152 (in Campo 1997, 29:00–29:25). With experiences passed mostly alongside drug consumers, Lemos, who passed in 2018, always was simbolically close to his dead friends, but he was also aware of the deep mysticism of their itineraries, marking a unique connection between different peoples, layers of reality, and areas of the city: “Most of my life I have lived with drug users. The ones I have loved the most are all dead: the city of druggies is different”153 (in Campo 1997, 31:30–31:38). He makes it clear that after 1983 and 1984, the pressures against all kinds of drug users became completely unbearable: “a huge police repression came about once the perception of substances had changed, the drug had already become something criminal, it had become something bad, something totally negative”154 (in Campo 1997, 38:41–38:51). He described his long stay in Siloé, an improvised neighborhood that later became an official part of Cali. After the mid-1980s, with the additional appearance of the M-19, military urban troops, in the sector of La Estrella in Siloé, all drug users started suffering pressures and threats from the army, the police, and additionally the guerrilla (in Campo 1997, 39:00–39:07). Constantly displaced in life, ultimately, there is a corpus of knowledge to Lemos’s experience as a “bazuquero,” or bazuco user, which he rescued from the streets for Colombian cinema and culture, these experiences made his whole generation more defiant: Most of my life I have spent it on the street. In the course of my dealings with drugs, in that coming and going of people passing by me, I have been charged with positive energy. I’m not afraid of going into the darkest places, meeting interesting people and going back out as if nothing had happened. This life has led me to feel increasingly discriminated against, the bazuquero is harshly persecuted.155 (Campo 1997, 46:56–47:20)

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For this ángel del pantano, the 1980s and the following decades were marked by programmed killings and massacres against populations deemed disposable. He experienced this pain along with the rest of his generation, and with other minorities in Colombia, but the message in Campo’s movie is clear (with graffiti art and cinema even coming together in figure 3.4 as subversive channels for the same generation, both as street art). We see how the mestizo bodies of transcultural Colombians constitute perhaps the most stimulated nervous systems of modernity, under the influence of innumerable substances and legacies, as he sprays a graffiti with the message, “Everything had been improved upon by the time we appeared. It was not hard to know then that our mission was to bring down the foundations of this society” (Campo 1997, 23:40–23:50). ​ Lemos expressed an ironic criticism by pointing to the many extrajudicial killings, in a country where executions are constitutionally illegal: “The death penalty is how they confront the problem of drugs and poverty in Colombia now”156 (in Campo 1997, 44:20–44:25). In a moment of the documentary, Lemos also narrated how he and Caicedo would venture into Chipayá valley to use mushrooms as if practicing a ritual: “We became fond of coming to this place; it was like a sacred site, the valley of magic mushrooms. In ¡Que viva la música! there is a scene in this area

Figure 3.4  Lemos’s Graffiti Summarizes the Contradictory Experiences of Mestizaje and Transculturation Among the Youth of the First Half of the Twentieth Century in the Americas. Source: Campo, Oscar (Dir.). 1997. Un ángel del pantano. Motion picture. Colombia: Universidad del Valle Televisión, 23:50.

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in which the protagonists assault some fungus-eating gringos”157 (in Campo 1997, 18:01–18:14). Said sequence in ¡Que viva la música! unfolded tragically when the character, a mestizo from Cali, assaulted a US tourist both physically and telepathically. Bárbaro confronted him and his female companion, a Puertorrican woman, despite their pacific disposition, high on mushrooms and harmless. The US man, simply referred to as “el gringo” in the episode, is torn apart by “Bárbaro,” one of the lovers of the narrator and protagonist, “La Mona,” a word used in Colombia for blonde-haired people. The novel seems to express the geopolitics of hallucination and the War on Drugs, symbolizing the clash of two biased archetypes, a plain nameless “gringo” completely void of a personality, and the Latin American “barbarian”—the immediate translation of “Bárbaro,” itself in contrast with La Mona, a mestizo closer to the pretentions of whiteness that marked social hierarchies and racism in the country and in Cali in particular. The seventeen-year-old character, in fact, is indirectly said to be the closest to Indigenous heritage among the narrator’s lovers, when the novel specifies how his hair straightens and stands up in the middle of the horrifying telepathic seizure that takes him over after killing and mutilating the “gringo” with his knife, removing all his teeth and then focusing all his mind power in a single point, a Lovecraftian tree near them: “(who ever saw an indian long hair completely standing on its ends?)”158 (Caicedo 2013, 207). The brutality of the scene goes beyond realism and seems to oppose two ideas of violence, an explicit one by the third-world assailant, and another implicit in capitalism and geopolitics incarnated by the seemingly harmless tourist, using mushrooms in a foreign territory. The social violence of a whole continent seemed to have overloaded the local experience of hallucination by the end of the 1970s, often tarnishing from geopolitics what could have been a transcultural encounter of different people, heritages, and places, and rather turning it into a brutal hemispheric clash.

NOTES 1. “Lo que uno ve torcido cobra una dimensión simbólica y todo se vuelve lo máximo. Yo siempre me he trabado, hasta para reuniones del partido [Comunista]. Las cosas sin torcerse pierden su brillo. Por eso uno insiste en trabarse para ver todo mucho mejor, más bello y significativo.” 2. “cuento-terapia.” 3. “Nada termina nunca, nada empieza. Todo es presencia. Todo existe en trance de revelación. También lo que no existe, existe en las posibilidades infinitas de la nada.” 4. Milicia y descripción de las Indias. 5. “Es gente en general que se emborracha con chicha de mayz, azua, o pulcre, que son las bebidas que usan en los tres Reynos. Maxcan hayo, o coca, y jopa, y tabaco con que pierden el juyzio, y entonces les habla el diablo. Esto acontece mas

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en los Indios hechizeros, moanes, y santeros, representándoseles en mil varias figuras, y de la forma que se les aparece le hazen la figura de oro, o barro, o algodón, la qual adoran con reverencia: y oy passa mucho de esto de secreto entre la gente que es ya Christiana, que entre la idolatra es muy publico.” 6. “En nombre de los ángeles indios Pielrojas y los demonios negros pielesnegras exterminados por el Fascismo Blanco Encapuchado de la Casa Blanca.” 7. “Las gentes del litoral conviven con sus mitos. Es una cultura del silencio pues todo el país los ignora y los hace invisibles.” 8. “Vivir con esta comunidad marginada me dejó la fortaleza de su identidad, cosa que ellos cuidan, pues es su propia razón de ser. El hecho de haber vivido en el Pacífico, me da ese amor por la marimba, el cununo, el guasá y las cantaoras.” 9. “y poniale las manos sobre las heridas y decianos que luego quedauan sanos: y que muchas vezes quando baylauan aparescia entre ellos en habito de muger unas vezes, y otras como hombre.” 10. “llamose Mecitl, como quien dice, hombre criado en aquella penca de maguéy; y cuando ya era hombre fué sacerdote de ídolos, que hablaba personalmente con el demonio, lo cual era tenido en mucho, muy respetado y obedecido de sus vasallos.” 11. Treatise on the superstitions and gentile customs that today live among the native Indians of this New Spain. 12. “Lo que entre los tales se halla escrito desta materia, es todo en lenguaje difficultoso, y casi ininteligible, assi porque el demonio su inventor con la difficultad del lenguaje que se halla en todos los conjuros invocaciones y encantos affecta su veneracion y estima, como porque el lenguaje quanto mas figuras y tropos tuuiere tanto es mas difficil de entender, y el que refiero no es otra cosa que vna continuacion de metaphoras, no solo en los verbos, sino aun en los nombres substantiuos y ajetiuos, y tal ves passa a vna continuada alegoria.” 13. “basta de morales basadas en el temor de Satanás, basta de comerciar con la vida eterna, basta de aliarse con dictaduras militares y burguesas, basta de asistir al banquete de los industriales.” 14. “Manifiesto al congreso de escribanos católicos.” 15. “Engendrado de la fruta.” 16. “Eran tan suculentas, que parte del jugo se le escurrió por entre los pechos, mojándole las partes más ocultas, sin que ella diera a esto la menor importancia.” 17. “Y él dijo:—Hasta aquí vienen los animales a escuchar nuestra música. Bebieron el cachiri y el capy, y la música comenzó otra vez con nuevos ejecutantes.” 18. “Descripción del reyno de Santa Fé de Bogotá.” 19. “El Cáñamo y Lino, si supiera beneficiarse, se daría con abundancia en las tierras frias de Sta Fee; que hilado ó en rama podria conducirse a Cartagena ó Santa Martha.” 20. “Y el hombre colombiano vive, por culpa de la educación, acomodándose a sistemas retrospectivos, ahogándose en el mito de la Hispanidad, en los sistemas educacionales de tipo medieval, confesional, con limitadas y esporádicas variaciones liberales y racionalistas.” 21. “No compré máquina de escribir, pero traje un kilo de arena blanca de Johny Key, que casi me decomisan en la aduana de Bogotá, por sospechas. Estos aduaneros no entienden a los poetas.”

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22. “Para el habitante de esta parte del país, la marihuana, al igual que el contrabando, significa además un modo específico de concebir su destino, producto de un sistema de valores sociales consistentes con un pasado cultural.” 23. “El hostigante verano de los dioses, primera novela de los nadaístas que fue escrita por una mujer a quien algún día habrá que reconocerla como una de las más grandes escritoras: Fanny Buitrago.” 24. “—Además, la novela fue escrita por una sola persona, pero tiene demasiado miedo para admitirlo o se divierte mirando a todos sospechar de todos. —Mi periódico asegura que fue una obra colectiva. Puede tener razón.” 25. “That Other One.” 26. “Aunque cantabas, simulando ser negro, en ese cabaret del muelle. Te compartí con golfas de seda roja y hurté los ojos cuando encendiste insectos brillantes de marihuana. Pero, a quien me pregunta, niego conocerte. Sería ridículo que yo, descendiente del fundador de la ciudad, te estimara un poco. Y te amo.” 27. “Los auténticos liberales.” 28. “A mis amigos de las tardes de café: porque ellos me enseñaron a confundir el amor con el aburrimiento y el aburrimiento con el ocio creador.” 29. “Seguidamente me vienen rumores de un continuo destruirte-tu-consciente y esas ojeras oscuras, tributo a la marihuana.” 30. “Leo cruzó la calle, sin despedirse, tras Isaías Bande, su proveedor de marihuana.” 31. “Ese club veta a los negros, a los defectuosos, a . . . ¡Voy a darles una lección que no olvidarán nunca!” 32. “una mujer que se dirigía a la iglesia encontró a Isaías Bande desmayado en una callejuela, alguien había suprimido los dedos que le quedaban, cortándoselos por las falanges.” 33. “Ballad of the insane happiness.” 34. “Mi vaso lleno—el vino del Anáhuac— mi esfuerzo vano—estéril mi pasión.” 35. “‘A bailar y a danzar al son de mi canción,’ decía Porfirio.” 36. “soy un perdido—soy un marihuano— a beber y a danzar al son de mi canción.” 37. “The Betrayal of Nadaísmo: Refutation of the Humanist.” 38. “Predicamos una absoluta libertad sexual, el amor libre (libre no sólo de contratos convencionales, sino libre para elegir el objeto amado).” 39. “Delirious Song.” 40. “Nosotros somos los delirantes, / los delirantes de la pasión.” 41. “los embrujados.” 42. “Dolor, zozobra . . . puertas abiertas: la marihuana, la tentación . . .” 43. “Los invertidos.” 44. “Fue nuestra pobre carne cautiva /de una nefanda deidad activa.” 45. “que los rubores vedan nombrar.” 46. “Trashumantes.” 47. “Wisdom.” 48. “en dilatada soledad tremenda / bruñir mi obra y cultivar mis vicios.”

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49. “Aguilas Negras Bloque montes de María 11/07/2019 Comunicado a toda la comunidad universitaria de Sucre. Les anunciamos que estamos presentes. Empezó la hora de limpieza en este nido de marihuaneros y guerrilleros hijueputas. A la universidad se va a estudiar no a vender drogas ni a comprarlas. Sabemos quiénes son, quiénes la usan y la venden. Tenemos las gradas localizadas. No se las tiren de carpos, porque los encarpamos. Las mujeres son para cocinar y criar hijos, no para liderar. Las mujeres a las casas y los hombres al monte.” 50. “Una mujer en el Metropol.” 51. “Alguna vez salió en un pasquín que las mujeres nadaístas teníamos pacto con el Diablo y que la pinta nuestra, era la vestimenta de las brujas .  .  . Hoy años después, supe que el nadaísmo no era sólo un movimiento de poetas, era también una actitud corporal, una manera de ser y de estar en la vida, en la calle y en la plaza pública, un no querer estar en la casa ni en el sistema.” 52. “No entienden que el hecho de que cinco muchachas de diecisiete frecuentáramos en los años sesenta los bares nocturnos, diseñados por la cultura patriarcal exclusivamente para hombres, era una rebelión femenina anticipada.” 53. “Nadaísta Manifesto for the Homo Sapiens.” 54. “Somos ateos por estética, pero si hemos de sustituir a Dios por otro mito, adoraremos a Lucifer, el ángel de la rebelión, el profeta de la destrucción creadora.” 55. Congreso de Escritores Católicos. 56. “me tuvieron en el patio 2 de la cárcel de Villanueva (el de los criminales y los secuestradores) 15 días con sus correspondientes noches y lunas y fumé marihuana porque allá dentro se fuma más que afuera.” 57. “se dedicó a hacer de la literatura un crimen perfecto.” 58. “Como era una noche de sábado, la audiencia de los delincuentes comunes fue creciendo, y mi celda se abrió para hospedar una fauna de truhanes cuyas culpas oscilaban entre el ‘cantinazo’, el robo y la marihuana.” 59. “Yo era el símbolo peligroso y visible de una generación protestante que se había erguido con ademanes escandalosos y convulsionarios contra los mitos, las coacciones, las servidumbres y falsificaciones de las respetables y decrépitas tablas de valores de una cultura colonial . . . viviendo resignada y plácidamente al margen de la historia contemporánea, y cuyo balance de prácticas oscurantistas en todos los órdenes había dejado un saldo rojo de 500 mil colombianos muertos para nada.” 60. “Hasta los topes con la peor resaca de los bajos fondos.” 61. “—Marihuaneros piojosos—insultó el tombo a los demás. —¿Quién es aquí marihuanero?—Protestó uno de los reclusos con ofendida dignidad. —Todos ustedes son un montón de caca hedionda.” 62. “sentimientos que se materializaban en bombones, tabacos, y una papaya hermética en apariencia, que si se abría exhibía un vientre preñado de ‘pepas’ de seconal, benzedrina y cigarrillos de marihuana, alimentos para el alma de los prisioneros.”

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63. “antioqueñizar Antioquia.” 64. “pues lo que para nosotros era un emblema de dignidad revolucionaria, para los paisas era sinónimo de homosexualismo, marihuana, demencia y parasitismo.” 65. “Nuestra elección no tenía alternativa: preferíamos la marihuana a la cultura; los Beatles al autor de ‘“Antioqueñita’”; ‘“Aguila Negra’” al Cóndor del himno antioqueño, y en fin, ‘“Desquite’” a la maternal heroína doña Simona Duque de Marinilla, que sacrificó al cielo sus cinco hijos patojos para defender al glorioso partido conservador.” 66. “Ebrios de marihuana y alcoholes baratos después de una noche tabacal, pagana y turbulenta. Noches capitales de placer y ritos demoníacos, en que hasta el Diablo se escandalizaba con nuestros excesos demenciales y los desafíos de la razón.” 67. “una complicidad en el terreno de lo prohibido para hacerles comprender que hay en mí un fondo de perversión, que mi alma es un nido secreto de vicios inconfesables, que no soy un miserable preso intelectual.” 68. “Don Trinidad—dije casi en un susurro—por favor, véndame un pito de ‘Mariabonita’.” 69. “En el fondo, lo hice para que cualquiera de esos atorrantes se compre con mi plata un pito de marihuana el 24 de diciembre y se lo fume a las doce de la noche en mi nombre.” 70. “lector y amigo, ¿qué siente Usted al saber que un muchacho como este Gonzalo Arango es hoy víctima de la sociedad que quiere vengarse en él, ante sus irrespetos e irreverencias, por intermedio de sus peores criminales?” 71. “Adquirimos nuevas formas para dormir, para no quedarnos privados en el hedor, hasta que el guardia al día siguiente abriera la puerta. La soledad hasta el final (31 de diciembre de 1965).” 72. “Poema de los amores inventados.” 73. “figuran en el directorio telefónico.” 74. “Fu-man-chú fuma marihuana y me invita / a juegos peligrosos con el hampa.” 75. “Por las convulsiones de la marihuana / y la liberación prolongada.” 76. “The Manizales Police (Ba-llad).” 77. “durante el último lapso de mis cogitaciones desesperadas / de mis lecturas inauditas.” 78. “de mis iniciaciones en la masonería.” 79. “en la magia / en la marihuana.” 80. “la policía de Manizales es la policía menos policía del mundo.” 81. “es una policía robusta y alucinada / toda poseída de poesía.” 82. “ahora canto sobre Manizales, / y sobre su pelotón de fusiladores metafísicos.” 83. “Foundation of the Celebration.” 84. “la historia de coagular la Fiesta.” 85. “pulverinas tardes aquietadas con hojas de anjico [sic] en los parques desterrados y en el borde de los muchos caminos transitados con la frente ardida en la misma fiebre, en el delirio.” 86. “trajeron un loto de Egipto.” 87. “revólveres de New York.” 88. “de las desembocaduras del Amazonas / la fórmula del Cacao Sabanero.”

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89. “The synonims of Anguish.” 90. “Mierda.” 91. “Todo es uno, obra de la luz. Y de la mierda brota el hongo, la belleza florida del reportaje.” 92. “Memories with a Christmas Carrol.” 93. “habíamos ido en busca de un taita que nos iniciara en el yagé, y de los makú, últimos nómadas remanentes de la inocencia prehistórica.” 94. “Group Love.” 95. “Escribían, pintaban y estaban al tanto de novedades literarias. Aquella traducción de Aullido de Allen Ginsberg, su viaje al Perú, a Machu Picchu, a buscar la Banisteria Caapi para desdoblarse, sin saber que William Burroughs la encontraría en el sur de nuestro país, nuestro mismísimo yagé o yagué o ayaguasca o yaguasca. El alcaloide se extrae por medio de maceración o decocción de los tallos. Produce náuseas, la telepatina para mirar la TV natural, lo que pasa a muchos kilómetros de distancia.” 96. “extensiones de mar pacífico y salado / para todos los santos profetas locos.” 97. “¡oh dioses podridos de ciudad!” 98. “estoy marihuano / siento en el estómago alacranes y fósforos de Guerra.” 99. “espero suicidarme cuando acabe el cigarrillo.” 100. “Gonzalo Arango amaba y celebraba su frase ‘Mi obra es mi vida, lo demás son papelitos.’” 101. “A Golden Wedding Without Gold: Fifty Years of Nadaismo.” 102. “Symphony for a Poet in a Wheelchair.” 103. “salió volando la pierna del poeta Darío como / pájaro herido.” 104. “Como no lo podían enterrar en su silla de ruedas / sus amigos más íntimos la vendieron.” 105. “con la plata compraron una libra de yerba y se la fumaron toda, de noche, frente a la tumba del poeta.” 106. “The World of Wonders.” 107. “En las riberas del río La Miel brotaban como maná los hongos alucinógenos, dispensadores de la alegría y el éxtasis. Me produjeron fiebre y vómito.” 108. “En Barranquilla fumé una marihuana llamada ‘La puerta de oro.’ Se me reventaron los oídos.” 109. “tomé LSD y fue peor. Sufro alucinaciones. Estoy alucinado.” 110. “Acudí a la magia negra, las artes mánticas, los esotéricos, los espiritistas, los hechiceros, los rituales indígenas, el yagé.” 111. “Aprendí el tráfico de drogas, me arrojé al mar desde una avioneta a baja altura. / Me persiguieron con balas, con tiburones teleguiados, con lanchas salvavidas.” 112. “Es difícil describir críticamente una realidad tan inmediata, unos fenómenos culturales aún no definidos en la realidad, es decir, aún no transformados por la realidad misma. Todos los films de carácter semididáctico que se hacen para prevenir a la juventud sobre el uso de las drogas incrementan el abuso (la denuncia no es más que propaganda sensacionalista, que hace vender más diarios, más libros, más films, etc.), porque el joven espectador no hace caso de la moraleja que cierra el film, ya que es más

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inteligente que, digamos, David Greene; en cambio, quedará picado por la curiosidad ante las partes descriptivas de los efectos, que además, como las sabe de orientación mentirosa lo llevarán a comprobar qué efecto producen en él las drogas. El efecto es tan disparatadamente distinto a todo lo que vio en el cine (y a todo lo que ha visto y sentido en la vida misma) que se creará más allá de la vida, más allá del cine, un genio.” 113. “fenómenos culturales aún no definidos en la realidad.” 114. “Gonzalo Arango entonces decidió presentar su libro Prosas para leer en la silla eléctrica en la Tertulia, entonces Andrés Caicedo y yo nos pusimos una cita y nos fuimos juntos a la presentación pues de este libro.” 115. “Medellín, Alone With You.” 116. “Proses to Read in the Electric Chair.” 117. “Tu incomprensión ha creado en mí un hombre nuevo.” 118. “Creo que el nadaísmo fue fundamental para el arranque de él en sus intereses tanto teatrales como literarios. Tenía un interés dijéramos muy marcado, porque por ejemplo, en el Colegio San Luis, en el Centro Literario, él presentó como trabajo del centro literario un reportaje imaginario con J. Mario [Arbeláez].” 119. “Éramos nadaístas, pues las lecturas, más el valor de cambiar la percepción del mundo con la cannabis, nos daba un aire de superioridad.” 120. “decían en ese lenguaje metafórico que tienen los camaradas, nos separaron que por la marihuana. . . . En esa época, el hippismo era una forma de ruptura, pero claro que los camaradas eran psico-rígidos.” 121. “Yo no me hubiera resistido este país sin marihuana. No, pero sobre todo este país, porque por ejemplo cuando yo conocí la marihuana, pues yo estaba muy afectado por toda esa vaina de la violencia que había.  .  .  . Entonces qué pasa, que todos habíamos visto episodios y todos habíamos tenido la cercanía con esos episodios de violencia.” 122. “El arte en esa época era como ser delincuente. Los artistas, poetas, raros siempre, estaban al lado de los malandros. No había espacios. Ser distinto implicaba creer saber de la noche y de lo oscuro. Pensar después de 1950 era delinquir.” 123. “Y ya todos ellos fumaban marihuana. Y creí, engañado como siempre, que se abría una nueva brecha para un nuevo conocimiento, hermano, que lo que no se pudo decir antes, lo iba a decir ahora ayudado por la torcida.” 124. “Otro síntoma del hábito es que la sustancia tiene que irse a los riñones de una, pues me arde al otro día cuando orino.” 125. “Las erupciones aparecen cuando he suspendido el hábito y también cuando llevo dos o tres torcis en el día: prueba, a mi entender, de que el organismo y alguna intrincada modalidad de la psiquis piden el elemento, pero al mismo tiempo lo rechazan.” 126. “Aquí en USA / sin amigos.” 127. “me han detenido en la aduana / me han registrado por colombiano.” 128. “Por traficante de Droga. / He logrado salir.” 129. “También estuve en México, en Laredo, un pueblo fronterizo, cuando entramos nos hicieron sacar todas las cosas del carro, y metieron un perro que olía la mariguana.”

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130. “Hay en Busco mi destino [Easy Rider] un corte de quince minutos entre la tomada de LSD en el cementerio y la penúltima secuencia. En efecto, parece ser que la parte más rica en imágenes del film, que era un largo viaje de Ácido por entre tumbas con las dos jóvenes prostitutas, ha sido vedado al espectador colombiano, reduciendo y alterando gravemente la estructura del film. Hopper quería hacer con el ‘viaje’ todo un ceremonial de limpieza, de preparación a la muerte. Y nosotros no pudimos ver eso.” 131. “Yo creo que hay que hacer un ejercicio sobre los efectos de las drogas. A uno no le pueden quitar la memoria sobre la sensación que tuvo. El valor de cambiar la percepción del mundo con la Cannabis nos da un aire de superioridad, de estar viviendo la traba, donde uno se confunde. Con la bareta se olvida de lo que se está hablando, pero se inventa otra cosa. Siempre hay algo insólito que te pasa por la mente. Ese estado hay que reivindicarlo y poder tenerlo con la marihuana o sin ella.” 132. “Todo ciudadano es casi un paciente psiquiátrico.” 133. “La memoria es un instrumento para entender el presente y las emociones del pasado, o sea los recuerdos, y la nostalgia de la droga puede ser terapéutica. Es como evocar un perfume sin tenerlo, o tenerlo cerrado. Todo el mundo tiene derecho a delirar en el presente, saber llenarse de arbitrariedad, rodearse de elementos de digresión y hacer del absurdo una verdad. Es terapéutico utilizar el efecto edificante y de brillo de la percepción de las drogas, saber que con ellas se crea y se puede crear, creando una voluntad en las personas que las llevará al efecto que es el júbilo, pues los efectos brillantes de la alucinación hacen que se cree un mundo imaginario que puede convertirse en cuento de hadas o hasta utopía.” 134. “me fui volviendo filósofo, nadaísta, excéntrico.” 135. “Se me ardió el coco, me comunistié, entendí la otra religión que es La Izquierda. Ser materialista era muy difícil cuando uno era hippie y metía ácido, sustancia que te volvía espiritual. Me volví tan materialista en ácido que llegué a coger un pescado con la mano.” 136. “Al final de su vida, su obra fueron sus adicciones. Entre vasos de vodka, cigarrillos de marihuana y líneas de cocaína, escribió sin contemplaciones.” 137. “Uno no sabía cuándo estaba trabajando y cuándo estaba rumbeando. Creo que esa fue la gran lección del grupo de Cali. . . . Además a mí me parece curioso después, pensando en esa época es que es toda la época como de la gestación del cartel de Cali y de toda la cosa del mundo de la droga, que era muy fuerte, pero como que uno no estaba pensando en eso, sin embargo uno estaba metido, digamos, en la celebración y no en el fenómeno.” 138. “Nosotros de rumba y el mundo se derrumba.” 139. “En la muestra, titulada ‘Apología a la droga’, se hacía un resumen de las relaciones de Pedro Manrique Figueroa con la droga, la política y la poesía, dando lugar a lo que muchos han llamado como su ‘período surrealista.’” 140. “Papa no, pepa sí.” 141. “Metido en todo lo que era tropeles, manifestaciones. Era un personaje que había que tolerarlo en toda parte. Era como el profeta del mal ejemplo, era como el ‘alter vago’ de uno, era como un ángel caído pero que se volvió antropoide erguido. Era el amigo imaginario de todos nosotros.”

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142. “él me justificaba, o intentaba justificar su adicción . . . no adicción, porque el hashish no crea adicción . . . pero su amor por el hashish, yo creo que sí, que el hashish crea pasión . . . a través de Martí.” 143. “Lo que era sorprendente en él, era cómo dentro de todo un contexto de esquemas, de estudio del marxismo de manera muy rígida, te salía con delirios como ese de falsificar los dólares verdaderos, te salía con delirios de que el mundo se puede transformar solamente a través del arte, y para eso hay que recurrir a los artistas o hacer que todo el pueblo sea artista.” 144. “y Pedro pues inició un viaje especial.” 145. “Cuando volvieron a preguntarle que en qué consistía su obra, él dijo que su obra era él.” 146. “Una fuerza inmensa me lanzó hacia un lado y vi con horror que se formaba un vórtice de agua enorme en el que los dos éramos atraídos. Al no poder evitar la succión comenzamos a girar a una velocidad aterradora y fuimos tragados por ese vórtice. Al abrir los ojos me vi girando y en el fondo del remolino distinguí como unas luces. La corriente de pronto nos sacó a los dos al mismo tiempo y ocurrió algo que nunca hubiera podido imaginar ni en la pesadilla más descabellada. Todo se inmovilizó, el río se detuvo, el cielo, las nubes. Miré a Andrés y supe que lo que estaba pasando era real. El potrero se veía como un cuadro, como un efecto pictórico parecido al de las pinturas del impresionismo. Nuestra desesperación era enorme, pues estábamos metidos en la melaza del tiempo. No sé cuánto tiempo podría haber pasado, porque tiempo no había, no se oía un sólo sonido como no fuera el de nuestros gritos, ni aún ni siquiera veíamos abrir la boca porque no podíamos movernos. De pronto sentimos el ruido de un cristal al romperse y el río nos arrastró hacia su orilla a una velocidad aterradora. Aunque las cosas parecían estar en orden, en estado natural, recuerdo que yo pensé que tenía que vivir con esto, que tenía que acostumbrarme a poder vivir con lo que había pasado. Regresé a Cali y el recuerdo de ese remolino me produjo cantidad de pesadillas.” 147. “Muddy Angels.” 148. “A Swamp Angel.” 149. “era desquiciado y un psicópata. Se aficionó a las drogas para poder resistir el infierno de esa guerra.” 150. “como maduro con queso.” 151. “lo relegamos a un lado, pero después se regó como candela.” 152. “Algunas veces en la noche fui despertado por ruido de motos, era como la muerte que llegaba por mí. Tenía el bareto apagado gracias a dios. Los grupos de limpieza social siempre llegan en la noche o en la madrugada, eliminando desechables, locos callejeros, bazuqueros.” 153. “La mayor parte de mi vida la he vivido junto a consumidores de droga. Los que más he querido están todos muertos: Es distinta la ciudad de los drogos.” 154. “una represión policial enorme porque ya ha cambiado la imagen, ya la droga se ha vuelto algo delincuencial, se ha vuelto algo malo, se ha vuelto algo totalmente negativo.” 155. “La mayor parte de mi vida la he pasado en la calle. En el transcurso de mi trato con los drogos, en ese ir y venir de gente que pasa a mi lado, he estado como

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cargado de una energía positiva. No me da ningún temor entrarme a los lugares más tenebrosos, encontrar gente interesante y volver a salir como si nada. Esta vida me ha llevado a sentirme cada vez más discriminado, el bazuquero es duramente perseguido.” 156. “La pena de muerte, es en este momento la solución para el problema de la droga y la miseria en Colombia.” 157. “nos aficionamos a venir a este sitio, era como un lugar sagrado, el valle de los hongos mágicos. En ¡Que viva la música! hay una escena en este lugar en que los protagonistas asaltan a unos gringos hongófagos.” 158. “(¿quién ha visto un pelo indio y largo completamente parado?)”

Epilogue A Tradition Debating the Real

Itineraries and lives such as Porfirio Barba Jacob’s, which would traverse the Americas, connecting Colombia, the United States, and Mexico between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or the existence of Muralismo, which opened a live circuit for an exchange of practices and transculturations between Mexico and the United States during the 1920s, are precedents for the later authors I have explored, who, between the 1950s and the 1980s, were all part of formally innovative movements such as Gonzo journalism, the Onda generation, Nadaísmo, and the Grupo de Cali en Ciudad Solar, who approached other legacies rejected in written tradition until then: “Herb of thieves and nadaístas, of people outside of society and, since humanity needs everything, today it is everywhere”1 (Mayolo 2002, 91). These dynamic trajectories by intellectuals and artists who had gotten closely acquainted with visionary plants like marihuana, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, or ayahuasca seem to have a close correspondence with other exchanges and trafficking, such as that put into action among members of the Peyote Church, made up of different Native American tribes that originally imported from Mexico both the metaphysics of the ritual and the material peyote buttons it demanded on a scale that even threatened the cactus’s wild population. Equally telling are records of US intelligence from 1945 that confirmed the activities of merchant ships like the Hidalgo, which carried illegal seeds and flowers of cannabis repeatedly from Mexico to Colombia (Sáenz 2007, 211–212). We have observed how the capitalization and the criminalization of hallucinogens like marihuana in Mexico were directly related to the beginnings of its prohibition in the post-revolutionary period, while their massive popularity was a much more organic phenomenon, consequent with sophisticated transcultural processes ongoing after colonization and connecting a vast 227

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number of sources and centuries. With inventions like the Vin Tonique Mariani, made of Burdeos wine and coca extract, by Angelo Mariana in Paris in 1863, or the French Wine Coca in 1884, which mixed those two ingredients and added kola nut (López 2018, 241–242), the equivalence between intoxication and modernity became even more direct. The massive popularization of hallucinogens and stimulants was a gradual process, evolving along with the earlier beginnings of modernization during the Renaissance, whereas their prohibition resulted from a complex mix of colonial preconditions, politics, morals, economy, and the appearance of modern biopolitics and notions of public health (Mold 2007, 278–281). A much bigger social transformation marked the way in which coca was reframed in modern consumptions and predatory capitalism as Coca-Cola, a coca-free, sugar-ridden drink bad for adults’ and children’s health alike, after 1903 any coca leaf extract was removed: “eliminated from its composition and destined for medical purposes. Henceforth, Coca-Cola would abandon its therapeutic claims and emphasize its refreshing character”2 (López 2018, 242). The fact that the history of a pre-Columbian sacred entity like coca, or hayo, remains linked to the formula of Coca-Cola—itself entangled with the history of publicity, commerce, capitalism, unfair labor practices and imperialism—and that it resurfaced in that form unexpectedly among the generation of the young Colombian “Cocacolos” of the 1950s, which Gonzalo Arango addressed directly in his “primer manifiesto” should not be dismissed. One can even think of a historically passive intake of mind-altering substances, materialized in the addictive relation between Coca-Cola, sugar, and Cocacolos, and oppose it with a historically aware consumption embracing coca or cannabis as opposed to Coca-Cola. Such is the recommendation of Pedro Manrique Figueroa in Un tigre de papel, a fictional presence and an ideal voiced in words of Nadaísta José Mario Arbeláez: “banish that liquid and chew what is ours”3 (in Ospina 2008, 24:10–24:14). This is also the case with Nadaísmo, and the Onda and Gonzo writers who appropriated hallucination and substance abuse as a trait of their idiosyncrasy and politics, and as part of a shared corpus of practices within a collectivity of friends and artists, almost a ritual. It is not gratuitous that figures like William Burroughs, José Agustín, Elmo Valencia, or Andrés Caicedo would conduct similar trips between the North and South of the Americas. Equally hemispheric, Mexican initiatives like the magazine El Corno Emplumado, initially envisioned by Sergio Mondragón, allow us to perceive the continental scope of the circuit of substances and culture. The magazine “brought beatnik poetry to various Latin American poets, especially the Colombian group of the Nadaístas and the Tzántzicos of Ecuador”4 (Agustín 1996, 29). In a similar line of thought, José Agustín asserts that US Counterculture was in actuality a part of a wider tradition in the continent,

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even connecting Muralismo and pre-Columbian cultures in terms of their hallucinogenic consumptions and creative practices. He expressed this link more or less clearly, while using what has become a somewhat forced slang by the standards of today’s Spanish. An expression like “gringabachos,” mixing the slang for American “gringo,” and the one for a white foreigner “gabacho,” underlines the problem in genres like “psychedelia,” which made a cultural appropriation of ancient Indigenous knowledge: By the way, when it comes to getting high for creative reasons, the ancestors of these gringabachos were the Mexican muralists, who, in a meeting at the end of the twenties, agreed each in turn, unanimously, to smoke marijuana in order to paint better, since, according to Diego Rivera, that’s what Aztec artists did in their heyday.5 (Agustín 1996, 22)

This cultural circuit of the Americas, severed by colonization and the appearance of independent nations, was reconnected through ships like the aforementioned Hidalgo, carrying cannabis and the transculturality of hallucination. El Corno Emplumado connected the Nadaístas to US beatniks and Counterculture, a bond most manifest in their open letter in support of the Counterculture hero Neal Cassady, who in 1958 was sentenced to ten years for marijuana possession. It was published in the very last installment of Mito, the most important and renowned cultural publication in Colombia, in a special final issue of the magazine wholly dedicated to Nadaísmo. Beginning with the salutation “Dear Neal Cassady,”6 their declarations and the conclusions they offered in regard to the ideals of the criminal artist, a concept I have followed throughout these pages, juxtaposed hallucination and politics. Perhaps their words to Cassady provide the best epilogue for the ideas of this book: “Marijuana is to you like politics are to Eisenhower. And if the president of your country can get into politics, which is his pursue of happiness, why can’t you smoke marihuana, which is yours?”7 (Arango 2011, 48). They recognized themselves as part of Counterculture—“We are also beats, although we call ourselves nadaistas”8 (48)—and made it clear there could only be art in the very margins of reality: “We believe that the artist has no place in society, he is a displaced person”9 (48). They demanded freedom and a pension for Cassady, and the letter included a postscript stating that they enclosed a “pitillo de mary jane”—a marihuana “joint”—and the book Cumbia by Humberto Navarro (trafficking local substances, black musical culture, and literature simultaneously), after stressing that “Noel: We are totally in opposition to your sentence. We protest the Yankee monopoly of virtue that has you confined to the high walls of San Quentin as a scapegoat to provocke repentance”10 (Arango 2011, 48). The document also made an ultimate defense of the legitimate place these practices had in culture and life, opposing two completely different ideas of evolution, one via

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technology and progress, and another through spiritual growth, a dilemma that divided the peoples of the continent in those years as it does now, whenever modernization and extractivism threaten not only ways of life but also the very existence of communities, entities, and ecosystems. The letter alluded to moral heights that no material rocket or scientific technology could reach: Based on our personal experience, we can assure that marihuana stimulates a great mystical power in man. It raises him to such a height that he feels, by its influence, the greatest among mortals. This mystical experience, that we can label as the elevation of being to the highest peak of its essence, cannot be reached by helicopter, nor by rockets, nor even by taking an elevator to the top floor of the Empire State Building, because this energy is not atomic. Rather it is a strange creative power that marijuana multiplies in the mysterious depths of the spirit.11 (Arango 2011, 50)

Observing the inner narco-narratives hidden in any visionary narration, as the violence of the War on Drugs imposed its frame over the reality of traditional and secular users, becomes a labor of revelation that also casts light on the liminal points in which culture becomes everybody’s problem, an issue concerning democracy as a whole. Modern visionary works of art elucidate deep cultural conflicts but also remind us that it is culture which ultimately poses and reframes the debate of what freedom is and what should be possible and available within the human scope of experience. Instead of directly contrasting most of the works commented on here with a corpus of narcos’ narratives, as I originally intended, it was far more productive to observe this inner duality as it presented itself within the very core of these hallucinogenic testimonies and their figurations. The conflictive characterizations of the Onda writers, of freaks and cockroach people, of nadaístas and the Grupo de Cali in their own societies, demonstrate how the War on Drugs was inevitably interiorized by intellectuals and marginals, and affected their daily lives, while it directed older prejudices, conscious and unconscious, against users. Like Burroughs’s experience in Colombia and Mexico, or even the more casual anecdote narrated by Allen Ginsberg about smoking cannabis for the first time in his life with two Puerto Rican sailors, there is a deep and complex duality to the relationship between Hunter Thompson and Oscar “Zeta” Acosta. After reading Thompson’s account of the writing of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it is clear that one of the most memorable experiences with hallucinogens written in the English language is but the result of a necessary getaway for Thompson and Acosta from the heavy policing and the state violence endured by the Chicano community in the Los Angeles of the 1970s. As Thompson was covering the killing of Ruben Salazar, a much-respected journalist among

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the Mexican people in California, by a sheriff’s deputy, Acosta was the lawyer who was handling the case against the sheriff department. In a complex transcultural duality, Acosta’s novel The Revolt of the Cockroach People is an inseparable political counterpart to Thompson’s Gonzo journalism in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In Latin America, narco novels and other narratives on mafias and trafficking seem to result from national approaches to foreign genres, mere imitation of real-crime formats, while hallucinogens and the narrations about the sensorial searches they entail appear to be the local and historically aware responses to these same substances and to hallucination as a traditional practice. They are a precolonial field of knowledge, a colonial legacy, and a neocolonial reality. Visionary narratives emphasize use value as a multiplicity of possibilities. This aesthetic corpus even attempts to make use of the dialectical properties these substances already had for ancestral communities but within the scope of modern art, in an effort to better understand our mestizo culture from within. At their best, they are an ultimate example of syncretism and an open challenge to any notion of purity in culture, genetics or art. Visionary narratives provide an insight into the true complexities of a specific use value, that of hallucinogens, which problematizes the very concepts of value and use via hallucination. However, most narco-narratives sell well and tend to minimize the agency of these practices and usages in favor of sensationalism and drama. They are mostly crime fictions emphasizing the homogeneity of the exchange value of hallucinogens and addiction, regularly in a pastiche. Their focus on entertainment often reduces historical insights into the real phenomenon in culture and society rather than exploring them dialectically. With brilliant exceptions, like some of Roberto Bolaño’s works, narco novels tend to be formally conventional and minimize experimentation at all levels, solely corporealizing users and readers as commercial targets. As tobacco, cannabis, borrachero, yagé, chicha, pulque, psilocybin, or mescaline spread through the veins of pop, the Zeitgeist envisions a mestizo future. By putting their being, senses, and mind through unprecedented synapses, these artists have managed to make subatomic experiments in culture, forcing inner collisions that ultimately reveal the smallest particles of our presumptions, repressions, and personas, and allow us to carefully look at all the leftover pieces. Foucault’s disciplinary and knowledge societies resulted from the awakening metaphor of Enlightenment and rationalism, but now, through literature, cinema, and pop, these very same societies already started wandering back into the irrational realm of hallucinations, magic, collage, dream, montage, and visions, all made of light too, yet incorporating shadows and even communication with other forms of life within plural universes of

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meaning, uncovering infinite other cities under the foundations of the cartesian lettered cities observed by Angel Rama as a core of the colonial project. In hallucinatory visions, both for shamans and for poets, identity is posed as yet another experiment that reveals the artist, the painter, the mystic, and the bandit as possible aspects of a single individual: “Although I am not the author of Don Quixote, I consider myself a genius like Cervantes, since we were both in jail, he for being a thief and I for not believing that the Sacred Heart of Jesus will save Colombia from communism”12 (Arango 2000, 131). Authors like Gerardo de la Torre, Parménides García, Margarita Dalton, and José Agustín salvaged the memory of Tlatelolco as a living memory rather than as a memorial, a site of experience, humor, and action. They dispersed to different fronts of civil action and criticism for the rest of the century. It is not simply that they related to the students’ discomfort with the national realities and elites: they were those very youths and lived their experiments, songs, movies, anxieties, and fears while facing a political and cultural establishment that repressed them and massacred them. There is a strong heterodoxy to the true inheritors of the revolts, as Patricia Cabrera López aptly put it while commenting on the findings and career of the intellectual Humberto Musacchio—another example of these figures, to whom De la Torre dedicates his novel La línea dura about 1968: “since before the 1968 movement, those who would be really representative of left-wing journalism and literature after that year did not submit to the slightest orthodoxy”13 (Cabrera 2006, 139). Understanding different historical perceptions of psychoactive substances and drugs casts light onto the worldwide phenomena that was the War on Drugs, while speculating on their usage suggests altered experiences of time and space in practical ways that are beyond mere theory. Rather than reviewing a historicized and linear genealogy of authors, I attempted to point to different foundational stones of the heterotopia of hallucinogens as an alternative site of modern reason in the Americas, made of complex cultural genealogies and historical clashes, while observing the effects of the escalating War on Drugs on such a constellation. The fact that these authors’ bodies experience pain along with profane illuminations, resulting from both substance consumption and their penal regulation, points to symptoms which were also experienced by larger national bodies in the context of increasing global exchanges, including drug trafficking and ultimately globalization since the end of the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the War on Drugs certification of producing countries. Dialectically reconnecting the different historical and territorial levels of the psychoactive circuit in the United States, Mexico, and Colombia’s twentieth century and their literary exponents within narratives of hallucination, while observing the global and national strategy of prosecution, helps

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decipher the singularity of Latin American modernity and what may be the global outcome of some of its quirks in the new millennium. By marking a liminal position, psychoactive substances should be thought of as influences capable of expressing a will of their own, in agency with oracles and prophets as with Counterculture and poets. The fact that these compounds must be analyzed in two realms, the material one of their production and the ideological one of their effects on the mind, may already be a testimony of their complex political weight: of a body and a soul. Just as the dynamics and complexity of national reactions to these global exchanges of cultural and material goods I traced were within a hemispheric scope, a complicated web connects South, Central, and North America, sustaining a circuit for the exchange of influences, ideas, aesthetics, art, and practices. The works of authors like María Sabina, Margarita Dalton, Gonzalo Arango, Fanny Buitrago, Andrés Caicedo, José Agustín, Parménides García, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Oscar Acosta, and Hunter Thompson build on metaphors, characters, and debates which touch directly upon the relations between culture and hallucination, whether using marihuana, LSD, peyote, psilocybin, or yage. Not only do these writers and thinkers link the geography of the continent along with anxieties which are universally human, but each one of them holds a very strong bond with local and national legacies. Hallucinogens frame the moral rebellion of Nadaísmo and the creative processes of the Grupo de Cali; they feed the pop phenomenon of the literatura de la Onda in Mexico; and aid in the sensorial search of Chicanos, the Counterculture and Beat Generation. In México, an ideologist and novelist like José Revueltas opened up a dialectical-materialistic debate on the low world of drugs, jails, political persecution, and the experience of those who were marginal. We observed a moment in which a massive interest in these substances led to a philosophical opening that politicized consumer culture in ways that were soon repressed or sometimes became naturally exhausted by their own search. Still, a mass participation in hallucinogen usage led to the exploration of both the ancestral ones and their state-of-the-art equivalents as means of entertainment, healing, and knowledge, which in turn led to their characterization as a public health issue, and often as a public enemy to be dealt with through a war strategy. All throughout the late twentieth century, a robust constellation of authors made a case for hallucination as a way of knowledge, a creative principle, or even a companion of revolution, as they actively debated about their role as citizens within ethical, aesthetic, or social struggles. A long international campaign started with Nixon would never bring the circuits of drug traffic to an end, but from the bibliography examined here, it seems it did manage to accelerate a crisis that, although it could never remove neither the real practices nor their descriptions from culture, slowly discouraged more lasting

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philosophical, cultural, or political explorations of hallucination as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. By prosecuting hallucinogens, authorities in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States, among others, have effectively dismissed and delayed the cultural and social contributions of hallucination. Renegotiating and challenging the boundaries of citizen life, these narratives and their sensorial experimentations in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States before and after their foundation as nations and onward constitute a site to test the limits and push the intensity of our wildest human desires, anxieties, and fears. Parallels meet in these parable-like stories of freedom and youth, and utopias and dystopias clash in everyday life. Following some tropes in the long tradition of the Bildungsroman, these fictions, however, feed from conceptions in which chaos itself can be a supreme order, even dialoguing with the underworlds like a new Picaresca genre. Contending with the real and the possible, these writers of the Americas redefined freedom under the influence of new and ancient substances, and in global conditions unseen before their times. Turned into metaphor and aesthetics, excess borders the intensity of revelation and the discipline of mysticism. The multiplicity of their works and perceptions, full of formal innovations, allows for an epoch like no other to really be perceived as a totality by human eyes. Visionary arts offer us the image of heaven and hell as a whole. Their dark visions span a continuum and outline a continent. While Counterculture, hippies, or psychedelia now seem outdated, substances and hallucination are eternally reinvented with the visions of each generation and their arts.

NOTES 1. “Hierba de ladrones y nadaístas, de gente fuera de la sociedad y, como la humanidad necesita de todo, hoy está en todas partes.” 2. “eliminada de su composición y destinada para fines médicos. En adelante, la Coca-Cola abandonaría sus pretensiones terapéuticas y haría énfasis en su carácter refrescante.” 3. “olvídate de ese líquido, y masca lo nuestro.” 4. “llevó la poesía beatnik a varios poetas latinoamericanos, especialmente al grupo colombiano de los nadaístas y a los tzántzicos de Ecuador.” 5. “Por cierto, en eso de atacarse para crear, los antecesores de estos gringabachos fueron los muralistas mexicanos, quienes, en una asamblea a fines de los años veinte, a su vez acordaron, por aclamación, fumar mariguana para pintar mejor, ya que, según Diego Rivera, eso hacían los artistas aztecas en sus buenos tiempos.” 6. “Querido Neal Cassady.” 7. “La marihuana es para ti como la política para Eisenhower. Y si el presidente de tu patria puede hacer política que es su felicidad, ¿Por qué tú no puedes fumar marihuana que es la tuya?”

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8. “Nosotros también somos beat, pero nos llamamos nadaístas.” 9. “Creemos que el artista no tiene lugar en la sociedad, es un desplazado.” 10. “Noel: estamos totalmente en la oposición acerca de tu condena. Protestamos por el monopolio de la virtud yankee que te tiene confinado en los altos muros de San Quintín como un chivo expiatorio para conjurarte el arrepentimiento.” 11. “Con base en nuestra experiencia personal, podemos asegurar que la marihuana estimula un gran poder místico en el hombre. Lo eleva, a tal altura, que él se siente, por su influencia, el más grande entre los mortales. A esta experiencia mística que podemos llamar elevación del ser a la más alta cima de su esencia, no se podrá llegar en helicóptero, ni en cohetes, ni siquiera subiendo en ascensor al último piso del Empire State, debido a que esta energía no es atómica, sino una extraña potencia creadora que la marihuana multiplica en las profundidades misteriosas del espíritu.” 12. “Aunque no soy el autor de Don Quijote, me considero un genio como Cervantes, pues los dos estuvimos en la cárcel, él por ladrón y yo por no creer que el Sagrado Corazón de Jesús salvará a Colombia del comunismo.” 13. “desde antes del movimiento de 1968 quienes serían representativos del periodismo y la literatura de izquierda después de ese año no se sujetaban a ortodoxia alguna.”

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Index

13 poetas nadaístas, by Gonzalo Arango et al., 195–201 1840s, 93 1920s, 18, 54, 78, 93–105, 181, 227 1930s, 2, 13, 102–5, 118, 120 1940s, 39, 105, 120 1950s, 1, 18, 43, 53, 58, 227, 228; in Colombia, 158, 176–77, 191, 196, 199–206, 211; in Mexico, 94, 129, 135, 158, 176 1960s, 3, 16–18, 25, 35–43, 210; in Colombia, 181, 183, 187, 191, 194; in Mexico, 95–100, 108–18, 120, 128–36, 143, 144–49, 150–56; in US, 52–58, 72, 86–93 1968, 4, 41–42, 47, 50–54, 60–64, 73, 80, 95, 108–9, 115–16, 117–18, 121, 125, 126, 132, 135, 148–49, 155, 157, 232 Abel, Ernest, 39 acculturation, 75, 179–81 Acosta, Óscar Z., 17, 37, 45, 50, 52–53, 55–62, 63–64, 67–68, 69, 70–72, 73– 74, 75, 76–77, 78–79, 80–85, 86–88, 89, 103, 123, 152, 201–7 activism/activists, 71–72, 80–88, 104–9, 116–20, 125, 126, 145, 150–58, 174, 209; diversity, 24–26; female, 56, 190; political, 34–37, 49, 61, 132–37 Adorno, Theodor, 33–34, 35

Africa, 20, 38–39, 84 Aguirre, Alberto, 195 Agustín, José, 18, 45, 94, 95, 108, 116, 117–25, 127, 129–30, 131, 132, 133, 139, 143, 145, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 176, 192, 228–32 Ah verda!, by Sergio García Michel, 133, 134 Albur, of Mexico, 99 alcohol, 35–43, 73, 102–3, 147, 193–94, 210; alcoholism, 21, 141, 173, 206 Aldana, Jorge, 209–10 Alfaro Siqueiros, David, 93, 102, 104–6, 127 Alzate y Ramírez, José Antonio, 20, 91–92, 100 Amazon region, 3–6, 11, 23, 36, 177– 78, 197–98 American Dream, 46, 70, 72, 74, 86 Anáhuac, Valley of, 187 Angelitos empantanados, 213 Anglophone America, 33 Ansley, Frank, 67–68, 79, 80 Anslinger, Harry J., 39–40 Arapaho, 41 Arbeláez, J. Mario, 19, 183, 196, 200– 202, 210, 211, 212; poem, 228 The Arcades Project, by Walter Benjamin, 36 Ariza, Patricia, 19, 173, 183, 190

249

250

Index

army, 24, 53–57, 107, 131, 138, 214; in Tlatelolco massacre, 95, 116–18 Arreola, Juan José, 116, 137 Artificial Paradises, by Charles Baudelaire, 25, 27 Asia, 7, 20, 37–38, 105 Asuntos varios sobre artes y letras, by José Antonio Álzate y Ramírez, 91 Atlantic area, 23, 181–84 The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, by Oscar Acosta, 17, 45, 52–59, 64 Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), 189 Avándaro (rock festival), 108–9, 126, 133, 140–41, 158 avant-garde, 1, 13–18, 34, 93, 112, 184 ayahuasca, 2, 15, 178, 197, 227. See also yagé Aztec: art, 51, 67, 105–9; codices, 10; dog, 67; identity for Chicanos, 56, 60, 63; people, 81, 117, 128, 145, 174, 229 Aztlán, 69–73, 81, 85–86 Azuela, Mariano, 13, 15, 100, 119, 132, 138 Barba Jacob, Porfirio, 172, 176, 187, 188–89, 190, 208, 227 Baudelaire, Charles, 8–11, 25–27, 108, 144, 173, 185 Beatles, 124, 148, 193 beatniks, 8, 34, 37, 44–47, 188, 228–29 Benítez, Fernando, 99, 106–8, 111–17, 151–57, 177, 187 Benjamin, Walter, 8, 11, 35–37 Berlin Wall, 94 bhang, 37 Biden, Joe, 26 Bildungsroman, 123, 180, 234. See also formative narratives Biltmore Six, 61 black, Caribbean, 39, 63, 181–87 Blackfoot, 41 Black Panthers, 47, 72, 77 Black Power, 43

Blood (people), 41 Boas, Franz, 97 Bodas sin oro, edited by Elmo Valencia, 190, 200 Bogotá, 173, 178–79, 181–83, 191, 209–12 boleros (songs), 131 borrachero (tree), 22, 83, 197–98, 231 Borrero, Alejandra, 19, 206 Brazil, 11, 178, 197 Brown Power, 67, 72, 87 Buitrago, Fanny, 19, 173, 176, 181–87, 190, 233 Burroughs, William, 9–16, 50, 113–19, 144, 199, 228–33; coast-side, 181–82; in Junky, 37; after yagé, 86, 178–82 caapi, 12, 199. See also yagé Cali Cartel, 208 Caliwood, 177 Calloway, Cab, 102 Campo, Oscar, 173, 210, 213–16 capy, 2, 177–78. See also yagé Cárdenas, Lázaro, 101 Carrión, Luis, 108, 114–18, 127–39, 140–41, 142, 143, 158 Cassady, Neal, 54, 229 Castaneda, Carlos, 8, 117 catharsis, 3, 5, 12, 70, 73, 127 Catholicism, 11, 51, 52, 59, 89, 111, 177, 211 Central America, 176, 187 chacruna, 2, 178, 197 chants, 15–24, 37, 45–51, 129, 153, 180 Cherokee, 41 Cheyenne, 41 Chicago Seven, 47, 54 Chicano, 25, 34, 37, 43, 45, 55–57, 58, 60, 63–64, 69–75, 76–78, 80, 81–83, 84–85, 86, 87, 88, 138, 172, 230–33 chicha, 9, 173, 178, 231 chinampa, of Xochimilco, 138 Chippewa, 41 Chiribiquete, 23

Index

Chontaduro, 7 Cine-Club de Cali, 19, 203 Ciudad Solar (commune), 203 class struggle, 24, 36, 47, 136, 188 coca (leaf), 16, 22, 43, 173, 211, 228 Cocacolos, 34, 188, 191, 211, 228 cocaine, 21, 40, 52, 73, 101, 149, 204, 208; trafficking, 124, 183 Cocteau, Jean, 8 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 11, 32–33 colonial import, 6; stigma, 27 colonization, 9, 21, 33, 174, 188, 227–29 Communist Party, 96–105, 120, 126, 135, 136, 172 conquerors, 3, 59 Constitution, 1917’s debates, 21 Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, by Fernando Ortiz, 14, 21 Corpus Christi killings, 117, 139 corrido (music genre), 75, 78–79, 103, 147 Costumbrismo, 13, 123, 193 The Count of Montecristo, by Alexandre Dumas, 39 Cree, 41 Creek, 41 criminal underworld, 94, 192 Crow, 41 cultural relativism, 92, 97, 102 Dalton, Margarita, 18, 45, 95, 108, 118, 127, 150–58, 176, 232–33 datura, 18, 83, 93 Davis, Wade, 7, 15, 23, 36, 40–44, 177–81, 186–98 degeneration, 21, 100, 132 De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés, 91 De la Torre, Gerardo, 95, 108, 118, 127, 134–39, 142, 144, 152, 156, 157, 232 Deleuze, Gilles, 8 Democratic Convention of 1968, 47, 50, 54 De Quincey, Thomas, 8, 11, 32–33, 45, 185

251

Dialectic of Enlightenment, 33–34 Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 115, 126–27, 132, 139, 157 Di Prima, Diane, 17, 47, 52–53 disposables, 46, 119, 121, 214–15 Doña Juanita, 100–104 drug-consuming nations, 8 drug-producing nations, 8, 27, 38 Drug Revolution, 9 Drug War, 38, 63, 74, 94, 107 Duque, Iván, 26, 171 Duque, Ricardo, 203–4 Eastern Hemisphere, 20 Echeverría, Luis, 126–27, 139, 157 ecology, 65, 88, 186 El amor en grupo, by Humberto Navarro, 199 El Apando, by José Revueltas, 18, 100, 120, 121, 129–30, 131, 132, 157 El Corno Emplumado, edited by Sergio Mondragón, 228–29 El hostigante verano de los dioses, by Fanny Buitrago, 183–85 El infierno de todos tan temido, by Luis Carrión, 114, 139–40, 141, 142, 158 “El mito de la marihuana,” by Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, 103 El Móndrigo, 100, 115–16 “El Progreso” (ship), 120–21 El Sendero de la Anaconda, directed by Alessandro Angulo, 6–7, 23 embodied culture, 26 Ende, Edgar, 6 Ende, Michael, 6 Enlightenment era, 34, 91, 231 Ensayo General, by Gerardo de la Torre, 118, 134, 135, 157 Escobar, Eduardo, 197–98 Escobar, Pablo, 8 ether, 21 ethnobotanics, 36, 40, 177, 197 Ethnos, edited by Manuel Gamio, 97

252

Index

existentialism, 137 extractivist economy, 8–14, 22, 35, 69, 88–92, 230 extrajudicial killings, 196, 215 Fabila, Avilés, 111–15, 118, 135, 158 Fábulas pánicas, by Alejandro Jodorowsky, 132–33 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson, 17, 45, 70–72, 73, 74–76, 79, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88–89, 230–31 Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 39 Feminismo Chicano, 56 Fettamen, Ann, 37, 48–50, 68. See also Hoffman, Anita folk culture, 180 formative narratives, 123, 144 Fuentes, Carlos, 111–13, 128, 143, 145, 156, 157 fumigations, War on Drugs, 87, 173, 186–87, 208 fungi, 106, 114, 117, 150 Gamio, Manuel, 97 García Michel, Sergio, 133, 134 García Saldaña, Parménides, 47, 97, 108, 118, 120, 125, 126, 127, 128, 138, 143–49, 153, 156, 158 generación de la Onda, 16, 18 Ginsberg, Allen, 16, 54, 144, 178–82, 192–99, 230; first smoked, 86–88; in Habana, 192; translation, 199 Glantz, Margo, 24, 113, 125, 145, 149, 154 Gómez Maillefert, Eugenio, 95, 96–100, 144 Gonzo journalism, 45, 53, 71, 85, 227, 231 Gonzo monument, 66 Goodchild, Jon, 67, 79, 80 Green, David, 201–2 “grifo,” 13, 97, 100, 101, 143 Grupo de Cali (Grupo de Ciudad Solar/Grupo de Cali en Ciudad

Solar), 6, 16–19, 46, 89, 172, 174, 177, 179, 187, 189, 199, 201–8, 210, 211, 212, 227, 230, 233 Hallucinogenic Plants, by Richard Evans Schultes, 22 Hasheesh Eater, by Fitz Hugh Ludlow, 31–32 Hell’s Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson, 53–54, 63 hemispheric circuit, 1, 16–17, 199 hemp, 15, 18, 19–20, 21, 91, 92, 181, 183; seeds, 105 herbolaria, 91, 99 Hidalgo (Mexican ship), 188, 227, 229 Hispanization, 24, 89 Hoffman, Abbie, 47, 49, 54, 68, 133 Hoffman, Anita, 17, 48–49, 68 Holy Communion, 111, 133. See also sacred communion Holy Spirit, 25 homo sacer, 132, 172 Horkheimer, Max, 33–34, 35 Huicholes, 13, 99, 109. See also Wixárica Huxley, Aldous, 4–8, 36, 41, 42, 44, 68, 148, 233 I-Ching, 124, 152 illegalization, 16, 54 illustrations, 79 imagery, 6, 24, 195 imagined nations, 129 imperfect texts, 26 imperialism, 73, 102–3, 144, 145, 228 impressionist art, 213 Incas, 174 In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, 113 Indianism, 41, 51 “indigenismo,” 97, 108 Industrial Revolution, 33, 102 Ingano, 15 insanity, 31–33, 193 Instruccion para sembrar, cultivar y beneficiar el lino y cañamo en Nueva

Index

España, by Marquis de la Grúa Talamanca y Branciforte, 92 International Opium Convention, 21 intoxication, 25, 33, 127, 141, 228 Islas Marías, 118–19 Ithaca, 34 Jaramillo Escobar, Jaime, 200–201 jazz, 39, 58, 80, 102 Jewish mysticism, 36 jimson weed, 83 jipitecas, 34, 109, 117, 120, 127 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 132–33 Journal of American Folklore, 97 Joyce, James, 155 Judeo-Christian traditions, 42 jungle, 23, 198 Junky, by William Burroughs, 37, 45, 50 Kafka, Franz, 13 Kamsá, 197 Kant, Emmanuel, 117 Kerouac, Jack, 45, 113, 144 Kingdom of Granada, 173, 179 Kiowa, 41 kola nuts, 10, 228 Korean War, 40 La Barre, Weston, 15, 40–41 La contracultura en México, by José Agustín, 18, 157 La Cucaracha (oral tradition), 75, 78–79, 103, 147 Ladera Prison, 193–95 La Ladera, by Mauro Álvarez Atehortúa, 195 La línea dura, by Gerardo de la Torre, 127, 135–38, 152, 157, 232 La Luciérnaga, by Mariano Azuela, 13–14, 119, 132 La Mafia, by Luis Guillermo Piazza, 111–15, 143, 157 “La marihuana en México,” by Eugenio Gómez Maillefert, 96, 98–100

253

La Raza, 55, 62, 68 Larga Sinfonía en D y Había una Vez, by Margarita Dalton, 127, 150–55 late avant-garde, 1, 18 Latin American Boom, 24, 123, 148, 156 La vendedora de rosas, directed by Víctor Gaviria, 203 La ventana indiscreta rock, cine y literatura, by José Agustín, 18 Leary, Timothy, 9, 52–53, 148 Lemos, Dario, 173, 199–200, 203 Lemos, Guillermo, 173, 212–16 Le Roy, Loys, 112 lettered cities, 232 Lewin, Louis, 5, 10 living tradition, 4, 155 López Obrador, Andrés Manuel, 25 Los días terrenales, by José Revueltas, 18 Los muros de agua, by José Revueltas, 18, 118–20, 131, 132 Lotophagi, 33–34, 73, 89. See also Lotus Eaters Lotus Eaters, 35, 60, 147 Ludlow, Fitz Hugh, 31–33, 37, 45 machismo, 123, 146 Macuna, 7 mafias, 1, 44, 54, 69, 87–89, 231 Maloca, 6–7, 13 Manifiesto Nadaísta, 19, 182, 191 Mapuches, 22 Marroquín, Enrique, 117 Martí, José, 212 Marx, Karl, 26, 128, 145, 146, 158, 209 Marxism, 24, 143, 144, 150, 212 Masetti, Jorge, 212 Matías, Aristeo, 94 Mayans, 10, 67 Mayolo, Carlos, 19, 45, 172, 174–75, 176, 187, 201, 202–5, 206–7, 210, 211–12, 227 Mazatecs, 24, 109 Mead, Margaret, 4, 41–43, 55, 76

254

Index

Me llamaban el Coronelazo, by David Alfaro Siqueiros, 104 Memorias de un presidiario nadaísta, by Gonzalo Arango, 19, 45, 194 Mexican Revolution, 39, 75, 78, 93–99, 103, 114, 147 Mexicas, 91–92, 96, 105, 175 Mexico City, 14, 98–100, 117, 123, 136, 137, 138, 187 middle classes, 22, 73, 94–98, 112, 128, 143, 146, 151; in Nadaísmo, 185 Middle East, 39 modernization, 93, 103, 228, 230 Monroe Doctrine, 102 Monsiváis, Carlos, 24, 108, 109, 111, 125, 126, 145, 157 morphine, 21, 102–3 Muiscas, 174 Muralismo, 93–94, 102, 104–5, 227, 229 mushroom speech, 110–11 Nadaísmo 70, edited by Gonzalo Arango, 24 Nahuatl, 15, 92 Narcoepics, by Hermann Herlinghaus, 172 narcografías, 14 narco-terrorism, 94 Native American Church, 22, 40–42. See also Peyote Church naturalism, 13 Navarro, Humberto, 199, 229 neo-avant-gardes, 16. See also late avant-garde ñero, 138, 144 nervous system, 21–22, 215 New Spain, 15, 91–92, 110, 174–75 Nixon, Richard, 1, 16, 38, 40, 53, 63, 69, 95, 186, 233 North America, 6, 9, 11, 40–41, 72, 233 Obra negra, by Gonzalo Arango, 19 Odysseus, 33–34, 35 Ojo al cine, edited by Andrés Caicedo, 19, 201

ololiuhqui, 15, 176 One River, by Wade Davis, 36, 40 The One Thousand and One Nights, 39 opium, 21, 33, 40, 52, 94, 102–3, 131 oral tradition, 106 Ortiz, Fernando, 14, 20–22, 92 Osorio, Amilcar, 196 Ospina, Luis, 19, 173, 197, 201, 203–4, 207–8, 210–11, 212, 228 Pachucos, 60 Pacific area, 23, 175 pan-American field, 89, 156 paraquat, in fumigations, 186–87 Partridge, William, 39, 181–83 Pawnee, 41 Paz, Octavio, 95–96, 111, 112, 127, 131, 147, 157 People’s Protection Department, 64 Pepos, directed by Jorge Aldana, 209–10 Pérez Montfort, Ricardo, 96–97 Petro, Gustavo, 26 Peyote Church, 11, 227 phantastica, 5, 10 Phantastica, by Louis Lewin, 10 “Pharmakon: Cuento-terapia,” by Carlos Mayolo, 19, 45, 172, 206–7 Piazza, Luis Guillermo, 111–14, 115, 117, 157 Picaresca, 234 Piedra Rodante (magazine), 109, 117, 122, 158 Pipiltzintzintlis, 15, 91–92 Plowman, Timothy, 177, 197 poison, 21, 127, 172 police brutality, 25, 46–55, 63–64, 75, 115, 127 political prisoners, 18, 105, 117–21, 142, 158 Popol Vuh, 10 pre-Columbian, 1, 20–22, 63, 93, 176– 79, 228–29; substances, 43–51 pre-Hispanic, 93, 105, 128 PRI (political party), 114–15, 126, 135

Index

Primer manifiesto nadaísta y otros textos, by Gonzalo Arango, 19 profane illumination, 35, 232 Prosas para leer en la silla eléctrica, by Gonzalo Arango, 193, 202 Protestants, 4, 60 protesters, 25, 95, 116 Proust, Marcel, 13, 188 psilocybin capsules, 122 pulque, 9, 101, 173, 175, 187, 231 Purdy, James, 113 Putumayo region, 3, 179, 180, 197 Quechua, 178 Quetzalcoatl, 67 ¡Que viva la música!, by Andrés Caicedo, 19, 213, 215–16 racial profiling, 26, 63, 77, 87 Ram Dass, Baba, 52 Ramos, Julio, 14 rancheras (songs), 131 raw materials, 8–9, 14–19, 22, 174, 177, 188 Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo, 2–6, 10– 12, 173, 176–80 Renaissance, 15, 27, 228 Restrepo, Patricia, 201 The Revolt of the Cockroach People, by Oscar Acosta, 17, 45, 56, 58, 64, 67–68, 70, 71, 72, 73–74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 82, 86, 231 Revueltas, Fermín, 104–5 Revueltas, José, 18, 95, 96, 100, 118– 21, 125, 127, 129–30, 131, 132, 135, 136, 137, 156, 157, 192, 233 Rivera, Diego, 102, 104–5, 229 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, 28, 43 Rolling Stone (magazine), 67, 69–70, 74, 76, 79, 85, 117 Rolling Stones, 54, 128, 147 Romero Rey, Sandro, 19, 173, 206, 207–8 royal decrees mandating hemp cultivation in colonies, 95 Rubin, Jerry, 54

255

Ruiz de Alarcón, Hernando, 15, 93, 176 Rulfo, Juan, 114 Sabina, María, 13–18, 24, 37–45, 50– 52, 99, 106–9, 110, 111, 122, 127, 144, 153, 233 sacred children, 15, 106 sacred communion, 3 Saint Basil, 81 Sainz, Gustavo, 114, 118, 144, 145 Salazar, Ruben, 53, 64, 70, 71, 72, 77, 81, 82, 87, 230–31 Salazar, Viniegra, 101, 103–4 Satan, 92, 177, 212 Scherer García, Julio, 104 Se está haciendo tarde (final en laguna), by José Agustín, 18, 82, 121–25, 127, 151, 153 Seneca, 41 The Shaman and the Jaguar, by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, 179 Shawnee, 41 Sibundoy Valley, 180–81, 197 Sioux, 41 Sirens, 34 slave labor, 20, 92 smoke-ins, 49 social encounters, 20 socialist revolution, 102 “soldaderas,” 99 South America, 7, 10, 171, 188 Spanish colonialism, 72–73 Steadman, Ralph, 79, 80 Stock Exchange, 50 “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” by Hunter Thompson, 69–73, 86 structural inequality, 26 subaltern knowledge, 26 surrealism/surrealists, 6, 75, 101, 133, 211 Taussig, Michael, 11, 177 Tepecano, 19 Thompson, Hunter S., 17, 37, 45–46, 47, 50, 53–55, 57, 58, 59, 60–78, 79, 80, 81, 82–87, 88, 230–33

256

Index

Tío Taco, 72 Todo comenzó por el fin, directed by Luis Ospina, 203–4, 207 tough policing, 27 Trashing, by Ann Fettamen, 37, 45, 48, 50, 55. See also Hoffman, Anita Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 73, 81 Tukano, 2–6, 11–13, 151, 177–78 Ulysses, by James Joyce, 155 Un ángel del pantano, directed by Oscar Campo, 210, 212–16 Uncle Tom, 72 The Uncollected Works, by Oscar Acosta, 17, 58, 83, 207 undeveloped world, 8 United Nations, 26, 92 Un tigre de papel, directed by Luis Ospina, 19, 197, 209–12, 228 urban lumpen, 196 Valencia, Elmo, 191, 192, 200, 228, 229–30 Vargas Machuca, Bernardo de, 173–75, 187, 197 vatos locos, 78, 87, 138 Venustiano Carranza, José, 21, 78 Vida de María Sabina la Sabia de los Hongos, by Álvaro Estrada, 51 Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, 6

Vietnam War, 40, 53–54, 57, 63–64, 114, 213 Villa, Pancho, 79, 103 visionary montage, 178 voting, 43, 66–67 Waldman, Anne, 17, 37, 48–52 Western Hemisphere, 6, 20 Wichita, 41 Wixárica, 11, 13, 99, 108, 151 Woodstock (rock festival), 108, 141 Woolf, Virginia, 13 X 504, 200. See also Jaramillo Escobar, Jaime Xochimilco, 136–38 xoloitzcuintli, 67. See also Aztec, dog yagé, 2, 5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 18, 22, 86, 177, 178–79, 182, 198–99, 201, 212, 231 The Yage Letters, by William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, 9, 45, 178 yellow submarine, 113 Youth International Party, 47 Yurupary, legend of, 10, 177–78 Zaid, Gabriel, 110 Zalamea, Alberto, 194 Zapata, Emiliano, 79 Zipa, 211

About the Author

Juan David Cadena Botero is currently teaching as a professor in Colombia; he is affiliated with the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the Universitaria Agustiniana in Bogotá. After being awarded a Fulbright-Colciencias Scholarship directed to Colombian citizens applying for PhD studies in the United States in 2012, he pursued an MA in Hispanic studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was granted a full-tuition exemption by the Graduate College from 2013 to 2015. Later, thanks to a Dean’s Fellow at Columbia University in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures (April 2015), and the Steffa Rubinstein Endowed Fellowship (2020–2021), Dr. Cadena completed a Master of Arts, a Master of Philosophy, and a PhD in Columbia University at LAIC, the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. There, at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, he taught for a number of years. Among his courses, he included two with the shared subtitle Consumos, ciudadanos y urbes—Siglo Veinte, Cambalache, in which he dealt with the complex relationship between Latin American culture, modern international markets, and native as well as introduced natural psychoactive substances, like coca, cannabis, psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, san pedro, or ayahuasca. His research article “Una aproximación a la literatura postmoderna en la sociedad de la información: Metáfora e ideal en procesos de identidad” (2014), published in the journal Criterios: Cuadernos de Ciencias jurídicas y Política internacional, Vol. 5 (No. 2) from the Universidad San Buenaventura, explored the relationship between identity, mass media, and sexual and sensorial freedom within marginalized communities. Besides publishing some short stories and other fictions, Dr. Cadena has also authored book reviews in indexed media, both in English and in Spanish, dealing with the complex cultural landscape of modern Latin America, some of which include publications such as the Journal of Visual Culture (2019) and the 257

258

About the Author

Luso-Brazilian Review (2017). Additionally, he worked as the sole content consultant, proofreader, and copy editor for the book Desplazamiento forzado y territorio (2014), published by the Universidad Externado de Colombia and written by a team of researchers working with a huge number of informants coming from different parts of Colombia. The volume focused on the violent displacement and survival of rural communities, often to allocate terrains for the illegal drug production of violent organizations: Afro-Colombians, Indigenous communities, and independent rural women, among others, retold how they had to adapt and signify a new territory for their survival and identity after being forced to flee their places of origin. These local experiences provide a deep social context which the author links to art and culture within transcultural and hemispherical dynamics of survival and adaptation.