Amada’s Blessings from the Peyote Gardens of South Texas by Stacy B. Schaefer (review)

Early in her thoroughly engaging book on Amada Cardenas, the first federally licensed peyote trader, Stacy Schaefer stresses that peyote has historically been abundant in South Texas. She also notes that the indigenous peoples of the southwestern borderlands had long relied on peyote for physical and spiritual healing. Thus, the area was considered a natural “gateway for the peyote religion in the United States” (31). Cardenas’s involvement with the use of this hallucinogen by the Native American Church (NAC) evolved in the years after the federal government recognized the church in 1918.

Schaefer writes that Cardenas was well-acquainted with “the peyote gardens of South Texas” because she was born amid them on October 26, 1904, at Rancho los Ojuelos in Webb County on land her Tejano family settled in 1857. Esiquio Sánchez, her stepfather, was a peyote trader in the early 1900s.

Cardenas herself undertook the peyote trade in the 1930s with Claudio Cardenas, her spouse. They moved their operation from Rancho los Ojuelos to Mirando City in the 1940s. After his death in 1967, she continued on her own until approximately 1980.

The author recounts significant aspects of Cardenas’s relationship with the NAC through verbatim quotations from many interviews with Cardenas, her family, a multitude of church members, and lifelong friends. This structure makes the book a highly personal chronicle of Cardenas’s contributions to the NAC during her nearly 101 years of life.

The author asserts that Cardenas’s close bond with the NAC was due to her decades-long support for church members’ rights to use peyote in their religion. Her commitment led her to open her home to church members who traveled regularly to South Texas to obtain the peyote so vital to them. Besides providing lodging to NAC members, Cardenas ensured that basic physical and spiritual features, including a traditional tepee, be added to her property, allowing NAC members to practice their faith there; she also successfully challenged efforts by the State of Texas to make peyote trading illegal. Schaefer notes that as a result of these and many other heartfelt actions, a remarkable respect akin to love developed between the Tejana peyotista and the NAC members.

Together, she writes, they initiated the annual February prayer meeting on her land after her husband’s death; these meetings also allowed NAC members to spend personal time with Cardenas, who they viewed as a family member. Over time, her involvement with the NAC made hers a powerful voice of spiritual wisdom that could mediate differences that arose among church members.

Schaefer approaches her study with the understanding of an anthropologist and the warmth of a friend who grew to know Cardenas well during more than a decade of fieldwork. Throughout her book, the author provides a well-documented chronology of key episodes in Cardenas’s unique peyote trade. In addition, she discusses Cardenas’s deep connection to the local community, the Catholic Church, and the history of Tejanos in South Texas. Numerous photographs of Cardenas and legal materials relating to the NAC enhance her account.

Schaefer’s interviews, coupled with her thorough examination of Amada’s role in peyote trading, are important and original contributions to the literature on American Indian religious life. That Amada Cardenas, a Tejana, played such a vital role as a very public supporter and officer of the NAC makes the book even more significant.