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
November 23, 2021 Cadena Botero
Twentieth-century Latin American and North American authors incorporated visionary plants and practices—cannabis, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca—as elements of their own cultural heritage, unlike European predecessors who treated them as exotic imports. These substances, central to non-Western visionary traditions, became sources of forbidden pleasures that alienated laborers while their prohibition generated fortunes, destabilized democracies, and fueled violence. Yet they also enabled survival of ethnic groups and traditional knowledge, feeding urban subcultures often misread as decadence. The dissertation examines how marginalized authors—Indigenous, Afro, rural, mestizo—used writing and film to capture mixtures, dark humor, and conflicts from low worlds of taverns and prisons, passing hallucinogens to late Avant-gardes (beatniks, counterculture, Chicanos, Onda generation, jipitecas, nadaístas, Cali group) between the 1950s and 1990s, preserving them as heritage within metaphysics, politics, and aesthetics.