![]() ![]() Nationwide, a University of Connecticut analysis over a 25-year period found that only 2.5 percent of participants in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy studies were Black, 2.1 percent were Latinx, and 1.8 percent were Asian. This article appears in the Winter 2022 issue of Alta Journal. As it stands, the dismal statistics documenting access to legalized psychoactive medicines look no better than employment statistics for people of color at Facebook, Twitter, and other Silicon Valley companies whose employees and investors are (again) putting the Bay Area in the vanguard of the next movement. The fate of the psychedelic underworld hangs in the balance. The growing and largely white business of blowing minds adds to the economic distress of poor, non-white communities while denying them access to the powerful mind-altering substances that might help them. What for centuries has been a largely taboo or prohibited experience is on the verge of becoming fully legal in majority-minority California and other states. Yet, as beneficial as Obregón Matzer and her friends’ informal, community-based psychedelic use is, it’s threatened by the aboveboard mainstreaming of their medicina by pharmaceutical, medical, and psychological interests. “Doing shrooms gives me a sense of liberation and belonging,” says Obregón Matzer, who is a singer and musician with Inti-Batey, a Latin American rock band of nine self-described “immigrant hipsters” who came together to practice their “decolonizing music.” Seven years after her first trip, Obregón Matzer has become a San Franciscan force of anti-gentrification nature-a force powered, in part, by her medicina. Chanting to birds and nature, singing Latin American folk songs, and playing guitar and other instruments made the experience with the medicina a positive and unforgettable one. Years later, when she was questioning whether her love of music and song was serious enough for her to declare herself an artist, a group of immigrant hipster musician friends from Mexico, Venezuela, and other countries invited her to drink psilocybin mushroom tea and walk up one of the city’s hills. This article was featured in Alta Journal's free Weekend Read newsletter. “They brought me to knowing that I am an artist, that I can manifest my reality and manifest love.” “The shrooms allowed me to feel more empowered in my roots,” she says of that first experience. All she knew was something her mom had said about hearing “the screams of people being abducted by the military at night.” Her relatives, she says, “have a reluctance to say ‘Somos indios.’ ” ![]() She says she knew “things were dangerous” in her family’s hometown of San Juan Comalapa, Chimaltenango, but dinner table conversation about why her family had moved from Guatemala left her questions about Indigenous identity unanswered. Prior to her first psychedelic experience, Obregón Matzer had the ambiguous feelings about her identity shared by many Latino youth growing up in the United States. I came down from the hill feeling so grateful and thinking, ‘Wow, I’m on this meeting place where so many people from the past have gathered, and somehow I ended up here to have this experience.’ I finally felt at home.” Then I opened my eyes, and my friends and I saw each other and felt awe before this moment with the frogs, like the earth was giving us a hug and protecting us. The frogs eventually quieted down and went completely silent again. We felt like we were entering into trance guided by frogs. “As the mushrooms started taking their effect,” she says, “we heard a bunch of frogs croaking. In search of healing, she joined some of her friends in San Francisco for a psychedelic journey. I got so depressed, I started asking myself, ‘What’s the value of my work if there is no way I can change things?’ I started questioning whether I even wanted to live.” Obregón Matzer recalls, “I felt helpless and powerless to help people like this 70-year-old woman who reminded me of my abuelita in Guatemala. The stories they told moved her deeply, sometimes too deeply. ![]() She was in her mid-20s, a recent college graduate working with renters in crisis and unhoused people living on the streets-victims of gentrification-in the Bay Area. Lucía Obregón Matzer remembers crying every day and calling her mom and telling her the stories she was hearing. ![]()
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