The Brooklyn Rail

María Sabina Magdalena García was born in 1894 in Huautla de Jiménez, a town in the Sierra Mazateca region of the Mexican state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. She eked out a living as a subsistence farmer while moonlighting as a sabia (a “wise woman” shaman, a term she preferred over the commonly used curandera), a role in which she would heal villagers through sacred ceremonies using hallucinogenic mushrooms, while chanting, singing, and reciting poetry. Unlettered, and speaking only the local Indigenous Mazatec language, Sabina is nevertheless regarded by many, including one of Mexico’s foremost poets Homero Aridjis, as “the greatest visionary poet in twentieth-century Latin America.” Outside of Mexico, if she is known at all, it is for introducing the psilocybe mushroom (specifically, Psilocybe caerulescens) to the West in a famed 1955 encounter with an American investment banker and amateur ethnomycologist, Robert Gordon Wasson. That fateful meeting, and its ensuing Life magazine article,¹ jump-started the 1960s psychedelic counterculture. While Wasson, Timothy Leary (founder of the Harvard Psilocybin Project after his experience with “magic mushrooms” in Mexico in 1960), and other Westerners were catapulted to fame thanks to Sabina’s stolen Indigenous knowledge, she was vilified and harassed by villagers who were angered by the sudden flood of American jipis [hippies] invading their village. Believing she had desecrated her culture’s sacred ceremonies by catering to foreigners, the locals imprisoned her, burned down her house, and murdered her son. She died in poverty, ostracized and alone. Sabina’s story is a classic tale of the colonial biopiracy of Indigenous knowledge and resources.² Most accounts of her, both north and south of the Rio Grande, paint her tale in tragic tones, tarring her as a victim³—a label that, in my view, robs her of her agency, adding insult to injury.

My own initial encounter with Sabina occurred a few years ago, during my fledgling forays as an amateur mycologist. Seeking out feminist and Indigenous mycological histories to provide a counter-narrative to what has historically been, and remains to a certain extent today, a Northern Euro-Americentric discipline, all roads kept leading to Sabina. But those roads perpetually hit impasses: further digging always directed me to Wasson’s colonizing account in Life, or led me down rabbit holes of New Agey or neo-psychedelic-tinged vlog/blog homages to “la curandera” inevitably steering me to a mushroom cultivator’s merchandise page.⁴ Eventually, a few months ago, I chanced upon an obscure 1978 ethnographic film, María Sabina, mujer espirítu, by Nicolás Echevarría. Despite Echevarría being one of Mexico’s most important documentarians and Sabina one of its most significant Indigenous cultural figures, to my knowledge, this film has screened in NYC only once—at least in recent years—in 2023 at the Spectacle Theater.⁵ Ostensibly, the only serious cinematic work⁶ available on Sabina, the egregious disregard of this film and its subject spurred me to promptly program a public screening for a few weeks later on Indigenous Peoples’ Day.⁷ News of the screening elicited a surprising outpouring of appreciation, solidifying my sense that a broader reconsideration of Sabina’s life and legacy, if not a reckoning, was long overdue.

One of the reasons for the film’s obscurity undoubtedly owes to its genre: María Sabina, mujer espíritu—with its techniques of embeddedness and observation, and long takes of unscripted events—is an ethnographic film, a genre problematic due to its origins in anthropology’s colonial gaze. Arguably, that is the vantage point in which Echevarría is situated—a Mexican filmmaker with a predominantly Spanish heritage. Yet, as a lifelong advocate for Indigenous rights and a whistleblower on cultural appropriation (most notably in his film Echo Of The Mountain), Echevarría’s gaze is demonstrably far more empathic than exploitative. For viewers accustomed to slickly produced documentaries and rapid-fire social media reels, ethnographic films can pose further challenges: María Sabina, mujer espíritu is intentionally unvarnished, with a pacing—like that of a Frederick Wiseman durational documentary—requiring some patience for its truths to unfold.

Although effectively silenced by her lack of access to Spanish and English, as well as to American media channels, Echevarría highlights language as central to Sabina’s identity. María Sabina, mujer espíritu opens with Sabina’s lilting otherworldly chant in Mazatec, drifting over the landscape like the clouds over the magnificent Oaxacan mountains:

I am the woman who was born alone.⁸
I am the woman who fell all alone.
I am the woman who waits.
I am the woman who seeks.
I am the woman who looks inward.

She proceeds in summoning a pre-Hispanic animist world into being:

I am the star woman, because I have been traveling through the places since their origin.
I am the woman of the breeze.
I am the woman of the fresh dew.
I am the woman of dawn.
I am the woman of twilight.
I am the woman who blossoms.
I am the woman who was uprooted.

The enunciatory aspect of her chanted poetry is unmistakable: she may be unlettered, but vocally, in her veladas (literally, “evenings”—her healing mushroom rituals), she writes herself into being, inscribing herself as a central character in an ancient ceremony as foundational to her culture as the bedrock upon which her hut stands. In the original Mazatec, the verse often ends with “says,” such as “I am the woman who was born alone, says,” and “I am the woman of the sky, says,” and so forth, the “says” referring to the mushroom speaking. Sabina was adamant not to take credit for the poetry, insisting she was simply the “interpreter” or medium through which the niños santos—the “holy children” or sacred mushrooms—spoke.

Much of the film takes place within a dirt-floor shack with interiors that, twenty-three years later, look unchanged from the 1955 photos in Wasson’s Life magazine article. Despite the ascetic mise-en-scène, the images, shot on film, are beautifully rendered: the bright and colorful handiwork of the women’s huipiles; the lush expanse of the Sierra Mazateca mountains; the verdant fields from which Sabina forages for her niños santos; the dramatic chiaroscuro of her candlelit nocturnal veladas. Whereas Wasson was merely interested in Sabina’s use-value, his photos myopically focused on the room of the ritual, Echevarría takes care to show the amplitude of Sabina’s life and the complexity of her character. We witness startling sequences of Sabina smoking cigarettes—an eighty-five-year-old brazenly proclaiming that she drinks and smokes—initially aligning with Sabina’s particular brand of tough swagger. But before imposing a Western reading of “bad girl” archetypes, one is reminded that tobacco is sacred to many Mesoamerican cultures, used in rituals for prayer, purification, and protection since ancient times. These moments of gusto are interspersed with the quietly domestic: tender moments of younger women combing and braiding Sabina’s long gray hair—presumably daughters or granddaughters, though the kinship is never specified.

This feminine and familial intimacy carries over into the veladas, which we are privileged to witness in real time. Though open to both genders, the sacred ceremony captured on film foregrounds the females, rendering the event in effect a women’s space—akin to a women’s sewing circle or post-partum lying-in. On this occasion, Sabina’s friend seeks healing for her burned foot. So the women are seated together in the small chamber, singing and chanting, sharing gestures of nurturing and soothing: the comforting massage of a woman’s knee, the sororal pat of a neighbor’s back, the gentle rubbing of a ceremonial ointment onto a filial forehead. These minute gestures of care, implicitly understood by the participants, reveal the sisterhood that binds la sabia with her female relatives, friends, and neighbors, and how intimately interwoven the veladas were with the Mazatec community. Such scenes also reinforce how the rapacious rush of foreign and predominantly male “psychonauts” in the 1960s, in their quintessential transactionalism, was its antithesis—a violent rending of the deeply relational fabric of the ceremony itself.

As Sabina’s story unfurls, we learn that she was not only subjected to the rapacity of Western men; she also suffered decades of abuse from Mazatec males—not just the villagers, but her two husbands as well. Forced into marriage at fourteen—to a yarn merchant who, she admits with pride, could read and write—she was left widowed at twenty with three children. She maintained her independence until, at thirty-two, she was courted by Marcial, a new suitor whom she initially resisted, confiding, “I had no necessity for a husband because I knew how to take care of myself. I knew how to work.” Ultimately, she relented but only on her terms, insisting that Marcial come to her as she had no intention of moving, “my mother, my children, my belongings, my pots, my hoes, or my machetes to his house.” Her new husband turned out to be a “shirker and a drunk” who, when not physically assaulting her, was, like her first husband, out philandering. After thirteen years and six more children—five of whom died or were murdered—her husband was ultimately murdered by the sons of a woman with whom he was having an affair. Twice-widowed by her mid-forties, Sabina vowed to remain unmarried and “pure” in order to fully devote herself to her calling as a shaman.

As Sabina recounts her harrowing experiences, the camera is fixed on her face in tightly framed shots of filmic portraiture. Weathered and withered, Sabina’s face at times hints at the once young girl, with wide watchful eyes, and the occasional flash of an impish grin. During the day, when not administering veladas, Sabina’s demeanor often seems—understandably—cantankerous, disgruntled, embittered. Echevarría’s camera strips away many myths about the “healer-shaman” as a Buddha-like sage living in lofty repose, and Sabina categorically resists catering to Western fantasies of a sweet, grandmotherly wise woman, or the agreeable, “happy native.” During the course of the film, I grew accustomed to her severe expression, seeing it as less a glower of unhappiness and more the gritty mien of a survivor. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the Korean emotion han—an untranslatable concept borne out of the trauma of Japanese colonization, the Korean War, and division of the country, combining profound sorrow, grief, regret, resentment, and anger at injustices and frustrated hopes. Buried in the dark psychic mix is a grain of hope in the form of resilience and quiet determination—qualities unmistakably present in Sabina. I am reminded of the narrator’s assertion in Chris Marker’s magisterial Sans Soleil: “All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility. And men’s task has always been to make them realize it as late as possible.” Speaking of herself and her younger sister Maríana, Sabina says, “I think our will to live was very strong—greater, greater, than the will of many men. The will to live kept us fighting day in and day out.” Her bearing conveys an inner mettle so resolute that she would keep living just to spite her malefactors.

María Sabina Magdalena García did, in fact, outlive many of her transgressors, passing away at the ripe old age of ninety-one in Oaxaca, Mexico on November 22, 1985. She died just six days before an American holiday she likely knew nothing about and which celebrates a mythologized encounter that, in reality, was an early chapter in a long and bloody saga between native North Americans and their colonizers—in broad strokes a replay of the saga that had hitherto unfolded in Sabina’s own land in different tongues and under different flags. Five years after her death, in another calendrical coincidence, the US would finally officially recognize the heritage of Indigenous peoples with a month-long November commemoration, our country’s step towards coming to terms with its fraught history with its native peoples. Echevarría’s film—a film that remains, after half a century, like Sabina, deceptively modest yet quietly extraordinary—is another step towards repair, essential viewing for anyone seeking a greater sense of Sabina without hagiography, romanticizing, sentimentalizing, or victimizing. It restores Sabina’s humanity and lays new groundwork for a more nuanced and informed assessment of La Sabi(n)a’s story, compelling us to consider how we can more equitably engage with Indigenous histories and Indigenous knowledge in a relationship of reciprocity. Echevarría has directed over twenty films known for their empathy, criticality, and independent vision; Sabina also lived a life of courage and independence on her terms. While Sabina and Echevarría may seem worlds apart in terms of gender and class—a rural sabia versus a cosmopolitan cognoscente—the subject and the filmmaker are kindred spirits, united in their uncompromising approach to their lives and work. María Sabina is, indeed, a spirit woman: both a gifted guide into the otherworldly and a survivor of the slings and arrows of the very worldly—her grand, indomitable spirit burning as bright as the votive candles of her veladas.