Maria Sabina: Selections (review)

In 1981 Ross-Erikson published an English translation of Alvaro Estrada's La Vida de María Sabina, written by Estrada (a member of María Sabina's community) but in the first person voice of the famous Mazatec "wise woman" from the mountains of Oaxaca, whose healing practices involved the use of psychedelic mushrooms. The publisher shortly went out of business, and the book went out of print, unread except in drug culture and drug studies circles for which the book was primarily meaningful as an exploration of shamanism and cross-cultural psychedelia.

That is a shame, for the book's significance went far beyond that narrow reading. María Sabina's life story embodies themes that should be of interest to anthropologists, historians, and literary critics—from the Mexican revolution to the relationships between indigenous communities, tourists, and the state. In the stark, beautiful translation of Henry Munn (Estrada's brother-in-law), María Sabina's powerful voice resounds as she describes a series of husbands, a life of poverty, the bewildering arrival of powerful foreigners drawn by her reputation, and, most importantly, her own experiences with the "child saints." "The Life of María Sabina" is now the heart and soul of a new anthology published by the University of California Press that brings her story to a new generation that should read it in a new way, as one of the best examples of Latin American testimonial literature.

The book also includes translations of her mushroom-enhanced chants, displaying the poetic skill and audacity of this little woman, who dared to speak as an equal with all the incarnations of power, from the Virgin of Guadalupe to Benito Juárez. These chants are made more intelligible by an essay by Munn, who demonstrates how María Sabina deploys tropes and images meaningful to her Mazatec audience, even as she clearly manifested a special, rare mastery of her genre. The other essays accompanying the biography and chants are less useful—personal essays by writers and poets about their experiences meeting the great shaman, and poetry inspired by her. These essays show how, twenty years after her death, María Sabina survives as a powerful, multivocal symbol, inspiring people locally, nationally, and around the world with her complex, remarkable story.