Mesoamerica · Culture
Chatino
Sierra Sur, southern Oaxaca, Mexico
Southern neighbours of the Zapotec, the Chatino appear in the ethnomycological record as one of the Mexican peoples with sacred mushroom use — though the detailed fieldwork behind that record is thin.
The people and the landscape
The Chatino live in the Sierra Sur of southern Oaxaca, close kin to the Zapotec in language and long entangled with them in history. Like their neighbours, they inhabit a world of steep coffee-growing slopes and dispersed mountain communities.
A name in the record
The Chatino enter the ethnomycological literature chiefly through synthesis: Gastón Guzmán’s surveys count them among the Mexican peoples with recorded sacred mushroom use.1 What is largely missing is the close, dedicated fieldwork that gives the Mazatec, or the newly documented Zapotec case, their depth. The result is a genuine but lightly-sketched entry — a people who belong on the map of Mexican mushroom traditions, still awaiting the ethnography that would fill the picture in.
Footnotes
-
Gastón Guzmán, “Hallucinogenic Mushrooms in Mexico: An Overview” (2008). ↩
Evidence
The support for this entry, separated by kind. Different kinds of evidence carry different weight.
- Later scholarly interpretation
- Gastón Guzmán's surveys list the Chatino among Mexican peoples with recorded sacred mushroom use.
What remains uncertain
- The Chatino case rests mainly on synthesis and passing mention rather than a dedicated modern ethnography.
- Species, local names, and the current state of the practice are under-documented in the open literature.
Sources & further reading
Gastón Guzmán (2008). Hallucinogenic Mushrooms in Mexico: An Overview. Economic Botany 62(3).
Species-level overview; identifies P. caerulescens (Nahua teotlaquilnanácatl) among ceremonially used mushrooms and counts Indigenous peoples with recorded use.
Congreso de la Unión (current). Ley General de Salud (arts. 234, 245). Cámara de Diputados, Mexico.
Lists psilocybin and hallucinogenic mushrooms, including Psilocybe mexicana, as controlled substances.
Editorial record
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