Intoxicated Writing: Onda Writers and the Drug Experience in 1960s Mexico

Abstract

Among the signifiers that codified 1960s counterculture, the psychedelic drug experience opened possibilities for social and literary experimentation. Mexican Onda writers imported the international counterculture into their writing, as a counter-hegemonic strategy—an attempt to question conventional paradigms of self, representation, and language. Through altered states of consciousness, these writers construct a subjectivity rooted outside national boundaries and projected onto an alternate reality. The drug experience in these works constitutes an aesthetic device that questions the 1960s Mexican polity. In this paper, I present four processes connected to the psychedelic drug experience—“initiations,” “intoxications,” “translations,” and “reproductions”—that culturally and aesthetically frame a selected corpus of Onda texts.