Yanaguana, or "Land of the Spirit Waters," known to indigenous groups, was renamed San Antonio in 1691 and named after St. Anthony of Padua, a Catholic saint when we were still part of Mexico. Hispanics were among the original Texans, comprised of various thriving Native American communities before the Spanish conquest; our cultural roots are Mexican.
As with psychology, any discipline that has to do with human behavior, like economics, needs to consider how humans think and how society, history, and context shape this thinking.
Indigenous groups in South Texas, referred to by the Spanish as 'Coahuiltecans,' felt the effects of colonization; alongside being impacted by restriction of resources, land, water, and food, their very culture and practices were targeted and diminished. With the abundance of resources in the American continent, psychoactive plants and fungi, specifically Psilocybin, is no exception. Psilocybin holds a rich history of use among indigenous Mexicans for spiritual growth, healing, and divination.
Native Americans learned to live in concert with Nature, appreciating the unfamiliar and powerful advantages of sacred inspiration Earth provided through plants and fungi (Carod-Artal 2015). For example, the Aztecs and Mayans in Central America called mushrooms teonanácatl, meaning "flesh of the gods," because ingesting them helped them to "see god." However, when colonial powers began to overtake native lands and infiltrate the cultures of Indigenous people, the new religion, Christianity, regarded their ancient indigenous ways as evil, ignorant, and abhorrent to "civilized" ways. Natives were punished, tortured, or killed for practicing their ancient traditions (ALA 2021). So began the modern distrust of hallucinogens.
In addition to the historical context of the distrust of hallucinogens by outsiders, hallucinogens incited more fear among government officials and law enforcement when they became associated with the counterculture, the anti-war movement, and the drug epidemic in the 1960s. The movement fought the law, but the law won. Government and legislative forces declared Psilocybin mushrooms, alongside marijuana, LSD, peyote, and other psychoactive drugs, as Schedule 1 drugs and illegal to use by the general public (DEA 2020). With changing cultural mores and the legalization of marijuana across many states, the benefits of psychoactive drugs are revisited. It is striking to observe that while psilocybin plays a leading role in the so-called renaissance of psychedelic research, the anthropological research carried out in Mexico throughout all these years is not mentioned. In most publications, the cases of the historical and cultural roots of this substance are left out, as well as the current practice of using sacred mushrooms as part of the health care systems of different Mexican indigenous peoples. The current trend in western society is to present psilocybin as a drug in the context of clinical research, detached from the practices and knowledge of indigenous traditional medicines (Gonzales-Mariscal 2022).
