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.

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