Lucía Obregón Matzer remembers crying every day and calling her mom and telling her the stories she was hearing. 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. The stories they told moved her deeply, sometimes too deeply. 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. 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.”
In search of healing, she joined some of her friends in San Francisco for a psychedelic journey. “As the mushrooms started taking their effect,” she says, “we heard a bunch of frogs croaking. We felt like we were entering into trance guided by frogs. The frogs eventually quieted down and went completely silent again. 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. 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.”
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. 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. 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.’”
“The shrooms allowed me to feel more empowered in my roots,” she says of that first experience. “They brought me to knowing that I am an artist, that I can manifest my reality and manifest love.”
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. 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.
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. “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.”
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. What for centuries
