Huautla de Jiménez is a town in the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca, Mexico, and the home of the Mazatec healer María Sabina. The ethnologist Robert Weitlaner heard of mushroom rituals there in 1936, and a 1938 team was the first group of outsiders known to witness and write about a ceremony (Spiers et al., 2024). The Wassons first arrived on 5–17 August 1953 (García de Teresa, 2022).
Life’s 1957 article did not name the town (Haro-Luna et al., 2025), but visitors found it. A study of the mushroom trade reports dozens of foreigners arriving, rising prices, the deportation of 32 Americans in September 1967 and a 1969 operation with soldiers in helicopters (García de Teresa, 2022). By the mid-1960s it was a countercultural pilgrimage destination (Spiers et al., 2024).
The same study says mushroom tourism today is a modest income for a few families, and Wasson himself later wrote of “commercial exploitation of the vilest kind” there (García de Teresa, 2022). The town’s story is now a standard case in debates about consent and benefit-sharing in psychedelic research.
Sources
- Spiers et al., 2024
- García de Teresa, 2022, Journal of Illicit Economies and Development
- Haro-Luna et al., 2025, IMA Fungus
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