Coffee, Psilocybin, and Xka Pastora: Ecological Imaginaries in the Sierra Mazateca, Northern Oaxaca, 1898–1993

This paper will examine the environmental history of three plants in an Indigenous territory in Northern Oaxaca, and the ways in which Mazatec (‘Enna)-speaking communities have responded to hegemonic visions of Nda’a Kjua A’o (Sierra Mazateca) as “coffee land” from the late Porfiriato onward past the 1960s, when the region became internationally known as the origin of so-called “magic mushrooms.” My dissertation research as a whole aims to revise historical understandings of this region, which appears frequently in the literature on psychedelics, by trying to show how institutionally supported research into Mazatec sacred flora. Presenting this research as a poster will both allow me to put forward revisions to long-accepted chronologies in the historiography of psychedelics, and to engage in conversations with a wide range of historians who may have revealing insights into or questions about my project. It will also provide me an exciting opportunity to put together and get feedback on two maps which I plan to make for my dissertation.

The top half of my poster will include three columns, one for each plant. For the coffee column, I will use images from the Chicago History Museum of Cafetal Carlota, a coffee plantation purchased by investors from Chicago with the support of Mexican President Porfirio Díaz in 1898. The other two columns will rely on relevant photos taken over the course of 7 months of fieldwork in the Sierra Mazateca. Each column would be accompanied by a bullet-point summary of a given substance, followed by a review of its regional history, broken into three text panels. The middle third of the lower half of the poster will contain a map of the region using Indigenous place names, accompanied by two smaller maps: one showing the location of the region in Oaxaca and Mexico, and the other showing important centers of research in psychedelic science in the Americas. Three timelines will appear underneath these maps regarding important events in the Sierra, the history of Mexican Indigenismo, and the history of psychedelic science. These timelines will focus on events that have been generally overlooked in the historiography, while also allowing people with different levels of familiarity with the context to place the events in the other text sections in a wider context.

Three paragraphs on the lower left will provide an overview of the history of hegemonic, coffee-centric development visions of the Sierra Mazateca, leading up to the collapse of the coffee industry in the late eighties. I interpret the efforts of Porfirian modernizers and later Mexican Indigenistas to transform the region into a coffee producing region as part of what Neshnabé intellectual Kyle Powys Whyte calls the “Inscription of settler ecologies.” A corresponding set of three paragraphs will consider how research into Xka Pastora and psychoactive mushrooms relates to this broader structural process, while also opening space for Indigenous resistance to state-directed assimilation projects. At the bottom right, a pair of QR codes will provide a link to a map key and the paper.