Intoxicated Writing: Onda Writers and

the Drug Experience in 1960s Mexico

Hugo M. Viera
Westfield State University

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 conven­
tional paradigms of self, representation, and language. Through altered
states of consciousness, these writers construct a subjectivity rooted out­
side 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,” “transla­
tions,” and “reproductions”—that culturally and aesthetically frame a se­
lected corpus of Onda texts.

n the late 1960s, as the Latin American Boom masters exported magic re­
I alist narratives to the international literary market, young Mexican Onda
writers, such as Jose Agustin and Parmenides Garcia Saldana, imported
the international counterculture into their writing in an attempt to ques­
tion the paradigms of self, representation, and language. Among the sig­
nifiers that codified the 1960s counterculture, the drug experience, along
with rock music, opened possibilities for social and literary experimentation.
Critics such as Margo Glantz and Carlos Monsivais have written about the
emergence of rock music and drugs in the works of Onda writers. However,
while Glantz’s work (1979) clearly establishes the influence of rock music on
la Onda's literary aesthetics, critics have largely ignored the parallel impact
of the drug experience on this same group of writers. For example, Ann
Duncan (1986) does not address the topic and Carol Clark D’Lugo (1997)
mentions drugs only briefly as a literary theme. In this essay, I will attempt
to fill in this gap in the scholarship of Onda writers. I contend that the psy­
chedelic drug experience goes beyond a thematic convention and constitutes
an aesthetic device that opens up the national literary canon to subjectivities
and modes of representation that question the 1960s Mexican polity.

Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Vol. 33, 2015

© 2015 by the University of Texas Press
DOI: 10.7560/SLAPC3310
 Hugo M. Viera 147

Onda writers such as Margarita Dalton, Parmenides Garcia Saldana, and

Jose Agustin use the drug experience as a method to pry open the national
canon, to test the limits of literary representation, and to shake up culturally
upheld conceptions of selfhood. Through altered states created by the drug
experience, they construct a different subjectivity, one of countercultural
youth, which is rooted outside national boundaries and which projects an
alternate reality within their intoxicated writing. In order to delineate the
way in which the drug experience extends beyond a literary trope and al­
lows for representational experimentation, I will present four processes—
“initiations,” “intoxications,” “translations,” and “reproductions”—that
culturally and aesthetically frame the following texts: Larjya sinfoma en
D y habia una vez . . . (1968) by Margarita Dalton, Pasto verde (1968) by
Parmenides Garcia Saldana, and Se estd haciendo tarde (final en lajyuna)
(1973) by Jose Agustin. Examining this corpus will allow me to explore
Onda writers’ incorporation of the 1960s countercultural ethos, via the
drug experience, as a counter-hegemonic strategy.
As with similar contemporaneous movements in parts of Europe and the
United States, la Onda sprang out of youthful rebellion against the establish­
ment. Inke Gunia indicates that in the 1960s, 40 percent of the population
in Mexico were fifteen years old or younger, and the mass media—cin­
ema, television, newspapers, marketing, and music—had begun to turn
“juvenilismo” into a commodity for consumption (“<Que onda broder?”
22). She explains that this represented a sharp turnaround from previous
decades in Mexican cultural history, during which adolescents, as a social
segment, were largely marginalized (23), subsumed in the conservative dis­
courses of the ideal family—“el padre autoritario, la ‘madrecita santa,’ los
hijos buenos y obedientes”—religion, and the nation (21). By the end of the
1950s, however, official discourse could hardly contain the youthful dissat­
isfaction with the status quo by imposing traditions and customs from years
past (Gunia, “<Que onda broder?” 22). In an ironic twist, Mexican youth
started to develop a collective social awareness not only through their par­
ticipation in the labor movement, as demonstrated by student and worker
strikes, but also through the images projected by the entertainment indus­
tries that were trying to exploit them. Eric Zolov states that “the business
of appealing to the demands of the youth market [was] dramatically affect­
ing the attitudes of media executives and record agents” (112). As market­
ers recognized the demographic shift in the population and started to target
middle-class youth as potential consumers, the young in turn pushed back at
the national cultural establishment by adopting new ways of dressing, speak­
ing, listening to music, reading, and, eventually, writing. La Onda rose out
of the rejection by middle-class youth of their parents’ values while simulta­
neously appropriating the mores of the international counterculture, partic­
ularly through the embrace of rock music and psychotropic drugs.
The term la onda literally means “the wave” or, as defined by the Span­
ish Royal Academy Dictionary, “each one of the elevations that are formed
148 Studies in Latin American Popular Culture

when the surface of a liquid is perturbed.” It is also defined as “wavelength”

in an electromagnetic field. Thus, it connotes movement, communication,
and change (Zolov 113), Elena Poniatowska shows that la onda had become
part of the youth vernacular by the mid-1960s by listing a series of conversa­
tional phrases from the era that use the term: “<Que onda? Quiubole, <que
onda? Oye, jque mala onda! Agarra la onda, ,;Cual es la onda? |Que onda
mas padre! Entrale a la onda, date un toque. El chavo entro en onda. ;Que
onda mas gacha, gachisima esta la onda! jEsa onda no me pasa! Que buena
onda. Los onderos” (176). Thus, when Glantz established the dichotomy
Onda/escritura, those writers labeled Onda were the ones she considered to
be more preoccupied with the changing, chaotic, vernacular, mass-mediated
landscape of 1960s urban youth, while the escritura writers were less caught
up in the social fray, so to speak, and were more concerned with formalist
literary issues. In other words, in Glantz’s view, Onda writers’ output was
considered “popular” literature, while escritura writers’ texts were “high
art.” Specifically, la Onda came into being as a social phenomenon in Mex­
ico between 1966 and 1972 (Poniatowska 176). As a societal label for youth­
ful rebellion, la Onda was already in currency by late 1967 (Zolov 113). By
1969, after the 1968 massacre of student protestors in Tlatelolco, cultural
intellectuals such as Monsivais mocked la Onda for its failed attempt at so­
cial change (Monsivais 118). Finally, in 1971, Glantz put forth her influen­
tial dichotomy Onda/escritura, thus establishing the paradigm under which
Latin American critics have since analyzed the literary output of the young
writers of the era.
Then, how popular was la Onda literature? First, we have to consider
that, according to a source cited by Gunia, only 2 percent of the Mexican
population in 1977 both knew how to read and had the economic means
to access books and other cultural forms (“<Que onda broder?” 26). There­
fore, Gunia concludes that the literary field was restricted to the upper and
middle classes that had been the beneficiaries of the economic development
of previous decades (QQue onda broder?” 26). The Mexican literary critic
Emmanuel Carballo, who co-founded Editorial Diogenes in 1966—where
two of the texts that I will analyze were published—echoes this conclusion
in his official web page:

Pensar que la literatura entre nosotros llega al pueblo es una mentira:

el pueblo no sabe leer, y si sabe aun no puede ir mas alia de los comics
y las fotonovelas; ademas, el libro es caro, casi un objeto de lujo. En
definitiva, la literatura mexicana se desenvuelve dentro de un circulo
vicioso burgues: la escribimos los burgueses, la leemos los burgueses y
la criticamos los burgueses. Todo queda en familia. (n.p.)

In short, the Mexican literary scene was a closed circuit, upheld by eco­
nomic privilege, given the prices of books and other cultural venues, as well
 Hugo M. Viera 149

as by literary pretensions. However, the appeal of Onda writers to a new

reading audience, who were concentrated in the urban centers and coming
of age in the mid-1960s, opened up this rarefied circle.
As mentioned earlier, the youth segment constituted an important per­
centage of the total Mexican population in the 1960s. Just as media ex­
ecutives had noticed the growth in that social segment, so did the literary
establishment begin to perceive a change in the reading public. This is at­
tested to not only by the decision of the culturally prestigious publishing
house Joaquin Mortiz to publish Gustavo Sainz’s first novel, Gazapo (1966),
and Jose Agustln’s second novel, De perjil (1966), and subsequent texts, but
also by Mortiz’s decision in 1963 to create an exclusive line within its cata­
logue, called Serie del Volador, which became “an ideal showcase for [Onda]
writing” (Anderson 15). Danny Anderson concludes that this move was one
of Joaquin Mortiz’s strategies to accumulate symbolic capital within the
Mexican cultural industry, as it emphasized the publication of contemporary
narratives and the support of beginning or unknown writers. Despite its ad­
vantage in the cultural marketplace, other competitors popped up in the
1960s and 1970s—Costa-Amic, Editorial Libro-Mex, Novaro, Diogenes,
Jus, Diana, Grijalbo, among others-—though none were as successful as
Joaquin Mortiz (Anderson 10). Thus, the proliferation of these smaller pub­
lishing houses that were taking chances on unknown writers speaks to the
desire of this younger audience that was hungry for cultural products that
represented them.
Young Onda writers incorporated a new sensibility into their writing and
were able to attract a wider readership. Gunia asserts that the commercial
success of Agustln’s and Sainz’s first texts indicates a shift in the Mexican
literary scene. She concludes that these authors broke through the barrier
that had been erected between elitist and consumer literatures:

El exito de los textos de Agustln y de Gustavo Sainz revela el cambio

funcional que iniciaron en la literatura mexicana. La tumba y Gazapo
contribuyeron a que se abriera la barrera que se habla erigido entre
la literatura elitista, o “emancipatoria,” que no respeta las necesida-
des de la gran mayorla de lectores, y la “literatura de consumo,” que se
rige sobre todo por las expectativas de la mayorla, ofreciendole mode-
los con que identificarse y armonizando contradicciones. (“(Que onda
broder?” 26-27)

Gunia then counts among the factors that may have contributed to their
commercial success the incorporation of various strategies of consumer lit­
erature: an adolescent first-person narrator who confesses his most inti­
mate feelings, albeit in a highly stylized vocal tone; constant references to
an extra-literary reality well known by the urban upper and middle classes,
without being weighed down by historical and political polemics; and the
150 Studies in Latin American Popular Culture

use of colloquial, contemporary language (“<Que onda broder?” 27). Simi­

larly, Poniatowska maintains that from the social phenomenon of la Onda a
literature emerges that offers young readers, for the first time, reading mate­
rial that is accessible and immediate, thereby generating a new reading pub­
lic (176). At the same time, she also recounts that Onda literature opens
the previously closed-off, elitist arena of writing to members of the lower
classes:

Se da un fenomeno nuevo muy alentador y que mucho tiene que ver

con la lectura de la obra de Agustfn y Sainz, el hecho de que mu-
chachos de estratos muy bajos, chavos que provienen de Tepito, de
Peralvillo, y de Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl (que cuenta ya con dos millo-
nes setecientos mil habitantes) narren, ahora sf que por sf mismos, su
mundo, el de las condiciones mas miserables. (Poniatowska 192)

Poniatowska clarifies that even though the lower classes had appeared in
Mexican literature before la Onda, those representations had been written
by members of the upper classes, Los de abajo, published serially in 1915
by the physician, writer, and critic Mariano Azuela, being a paradigmatic
example. Thus, Onda writers initiated a wave of readers and writers who
had been previously excluded from the consumption and production of
texts. Although, as Carballo notes, publication sales in Mexico are confi­
dential, and therefore it is not possible to come up with concrete numbers,
the surge of manuscripts that crossed the editorial desks at Joaquin Mortiz
by the mid-1970s (Anderson 19-20) and the testimonials of intellectuals
like Poniatowska—“Los libros agustinianos son agiles, legibles, hacen refr;
se encuentran en las terminales de los autobuses, en el aeropuerto, en las
tiendas de autoservicio” (195)—bespeak the ripple effect that the first Onda
writers created in the 1960s Mexican social fabric.
The reception of la Onda, however, was far from homogeneous. For ex­
ample, Glantz and Monsivais indicted this movement for a poverty of lan­
guage and a hunger for the contemporaneous, inferior to a more fully
realized cultural phenomenon (Glantz 98-101). However, the literary pro­
duction of Onda writers constitutes a “minor literature,” that is, a point of
resistance within a major literature. With regard to this classification, Onda
texts comply with the three characteristics delineated by Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari in their essay What Ls a Minor Literature? These character­
istics are “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the indi­
vidual and the political, the collective arrangement of utterance” (18). First,
Onda writers use the argot of teenagers, which is marginal to the “paper
language” and which extends beyond the national territory by appropriat­
ing English colloquialisms. Second, the Onda writers’ concern with deliver­
ing a sense of immediacy to their readers corresponds to the countercultural
connection of the individual to the political, as explained by Tom Robbins:
“In the Sixties virtually all political activism was connected, directly or in-
 Hugo M. Viera 151

directly, to the ingestion of psychedelic drugs and therefore was shaped by,
if not centered in, ecstatic states of being” (1). Last, the emergence of these
young writers constitutes a collective enunciation of a new aesthetic. In
short, although they stand in the cultural margins, these works adopt a rev­
olutionary pose, as they refuse “to offer their services as the language of the
state” (Deleuze and Guattari 27).
The schism between this collective enunciation of rebellious youth and
the discourse of the Mexican establishment is evident in the 1971 edition
of an anthology of young writers titled Onda y escritura en Mexico: Jovenes
de 20 a 33, compiled by Glantz. In this anthology, the body of literature
produced by young writers is textually framed by her prologue. As the ti­
tle of the anthology suggests, Glantz presents a binary opposition between
“Onda” and “escritura” (“writing”), whereby the first term denotes a tem­
porary fad, youthful scribbles, while the second one points to a transcenden­
tal literary art form. For Glantz, escritura implies an aesthetic preoccupation
with language and its structures, while Onda represents another type of re­
alism, or testimony (108), lacking the self-referential nature of highbrow lit­
erature. In Glantz’s eyes, as in the view of much of the Mexican cultural
establishment, la Onda does not constitute an original, autochthonous
movement but merely the attempt of Mexican youth to enter modernity
by repeating fashionable beliefs and gestures of the North American youth
counterculture (Gunia, Cudl es la onda?” 161). From this perspective, la
Onda serves only as the reproduction of foreign codes of language and so­
cial behavior.
Nonetheless, Onda writers’ adaptation of a different aesthetic repre­
sented a break from Mexican canonical literature. For the Mexican liter­
ary establishment, which was comprised of highly influential individuals,
such as Carlos Monsivais, Octavio Paz, Fernando Benitez, and Jose Emilio
Pacheco, among many others, who were inclined to protect their own cul­
tural capital, Onda writers may have fallen short of the modernist project
of autonomous experimentation. However, Garda Canclini questions the
ability of modernism to provide a viable social impetus: “Is it possible to
continue to affirm with Habermas that modernity is an inconclusive but re­
alizable project, or should we admit—along with disenchanted artists and
theorists—that autonomous experimentation and democratizing insertion
in the social fabric are irreconcilable tasks[?]” (27). Thus, we can re-evaluate
the Onda writers’ contribution as a democratizing insertion of the rebel­
lious, drug-altered, rock-music-listening adolescent psyche into the Mexican
literary marketplace.

Initiations

Onda writers based their narratives on the drug experience not only to break
free of the Mexican literary canon, but also to question their individual
152 Studies in Latin American Popular Culture

and social immediacies. Just as the 1950s Beat writers—such as William

Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg—looked outside their na­
tional boundaries, particularly southward to Mexico (Tytell 51), young
Mexican writers turned their gaze abroad, especially to the north, to find
their place within their own culture. By establishing a literary genealogy
linked to the Beat writers, Onda writers like Parmenides Garda Saldana
reshaped the literary landscape, liberated from national hegemonic struc­
tures. This appropriation of US countercultural heroes, however, was inter­
preted as a form of cultural colonialism by Mexican cultural observers like
Monsivais: “It is a Derived Generation, which shouldn’t surprise us given
the semi-colonial conditions of the country. It doesn’t possess its own idols
or engender its own autonomous styles” (qtd. in Zolov 111). Nonetheless,
their use of the drug experience, and the chain of signifiers accompany­
ing it, can alternately be seen as a rite of initiation through which Onda
writers and their audience enter the cultural scene through a transnational
affiliation.
The drug experience is itself introduced in these texts by displaced for­
eigners, who bring news and ideas from abroad. For example, in Garcia
Saldana’s Pasto verde (1968), a girl from San Francisco, a 1960s counter-
cultural matrix, initiates the protagonist, Epicuro, into the psychedelic ex­
perience. Through their interchange at a record store in Mexico City, while
listening to Bob Dylan, the young narrator’s self-conscious lens is directed
toward the political and social conventions around him; and, in the face
of his initiator’s cosmopolitanism, Epicuro portrays his native network
with a patina of provincialism: “Y aqui en Mexico (EL VALLE DE LAS
M IL TRANSAS) nosotros vivimos como un pueblo todas pero casi todas
las nenas son unas rancheras” (90). Exposure to other cultural, psycholog­
ical, or sexual realities broadens the young narrator’s sphere of experience,
leading him to denounce governmental corruption and outmoded civic re­
lations. Epicuro intoxicates both his body and his writing, thus altering his
gaze and countering the nation’s attempt to construct a cohesive, homoge­
neous narrative out of the experiences of its citizens.
In the 1960s, both political radicalization and mind-altering drugs dis­
rupted the generational flow of young people to take their places in a uni­
fied, technocratic society. Both leftist radicalism and drugs provided avenues
of escape from this assembly line: one revolutionary and the other hedo­
nistic. Although both student protestors and “jipitecas”—young Mexi­
cans who “emulat[ed] the modernizing aspects of foreign hippies . . . and
reappropriat[ed] as their own the hippies’ turn to indigenous spiritual and
cultural traditions” (Zolov 134)—ran counter to mainstream society, the
first path represented political engagement against the state, while the sec­
ond disengaged from the discursive practices employed by the middle and
upper classes to preserve their privileged positions in society. The splintering
of these two pathways is represented in Margarita Dalton’s Larga sinfonia
 Hugo M. Viera 153

en D y habia una vez . . . (1968). The first letters of the title words spell
the acronym “LSD” in reference to the potent psychoactive drug lysergic
acid diethylamide, a key element in the 1960s countercultural movement.
In Dalton’s text, Martin, a young Australian painter, initiates Roberto, a
young Mexican revolutionary, into the psychedelic experience. The young
men debate throughout the text how to best change the world: whether
through inner contemplation mediated by a highly personal, psychedelic
experience or through political, revolutionary action, organized around
a collective enunciation. Toward the end of the novel Roberto proclaims:
“Manana me perdere en la montana con el fusil en la mano, pero esta noche
quiero levitar” (162). Instead of drawing a line in the sand between these
two stances, Dalton reconciles both positions by splitting time into a present
and a future, thereby creating a turned-on guerrilla fighter. Roberto’s words
capture the power dynamics between the two predominant discourses of
protest in the 1960s international counterculture: the contemplative stance
proselytized by the psychedelic movement as postulated by Timothy Leary
(1968) versus the active stance of student movements encouraged by the
successes of the civil rights movement in the United States and the Cuban
Revolution. Through Roberto’s initiation, Dalton focuses on the nexus be­
tween these two discourses as being outside the homogeneous official dis­
course, capable of transformative power, of altering the way people think of
reality. After Roberto’s drug experience, during which he literally steps out­
side of himself, the young narrator will not return to a place in mainstream
society but will seek refuge in the mountains, in the margins, reproducing
the gestures of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in the Sierra Maestra, as he
attempts to de-stabilize the state through armed conflict.
Dalton and Agustfn placed their characters’ initiations into the drug ex­
perience both in the hands of foreigners and on foreign soil in order to dis­
place the social stigmatization of the intake of drugs onto foreign entities.
This represents a reversal in the transnational flow of images, as Mexicans
have been traditionally portrayed as “infecting” the body politic of their
northern neighbor (Escohotado 322-23). For example, in Dalton’s text
Roberto’s initiation takes place in London under the auspices of an Aus­
tralian painter. In Agustfn’s Se estd haeiendo estd tarde (final en laguna)
(1973), tourists, expatriates, and a US-culture-loving jipiteca introduce the
main character, Rafael, to the drug experience. All of the characters in the
novel are, in one way or another, placed outside national, cultural, or social
axes. Francine and Gladys are two middle-aged Canadian women who go
from one Mexican beach to another in search of pleasure and sensual stimu­
lation, be it in the form of sex, alcohol, or drugs. A Belgian youth, Paulhan,
enunciates the psychedelic mantra that drugs are not good or bad in essence
but that it all depends on the setting of the subject (184). Virgilio is Rafael’s
main guide to Acapulco’s drug scene. Although Virgilio is a Mexican na­
tional, Agustfn portrays him as a jipiteca who is completely affiliated with
154 Studies in Latin American Popular Culture

the English-speaking popular culture; in other words, he speaks English,

listens to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, dreams of going to San Fran­
cisco, and earns a living by selling marijuana and other hallucinogenic drugs
to friends and tourists. Through their use of foreign initiators, Onda writ­
ers reversed the flow of hegemonic discourse, turning the northern neigh­
bors into the contaminating influence. Moreover, the displacement of this
act of transgression provides a critical distance. Amidst the historical milieu
of 1960s Latin America, with its particular pressure on writers to produce a
socially engaged body of work, Onda writers used this displacement to free
themselves of the social stigma of drugs, so that they could explore alterna­
tive strategies of identity formation.
Through their initiation into the drug experience, these young charac­
ters become aware that their identities are not immanent but instead so­
cially constructed. For example, in Garcia Saldana’s text, Epicuro becomes
alienated and takes refuge in his imagination as a strategy to escape from so­
cial conventions: “Fuera de mi fuera de mi fuera de mi fuera de mi Dentro
de mi propia fantasia” (169). In Dalton’s text, the drug-altered Roberto
becomes aware of the artificial constructs through which a society orga­
nizes its citizens: “;Todo tan claro! Se va reflejando en la mente, al igual
que en una maquina cibernetica y la memoria administra las estructuras y
organizaciones artificiales que hemos creado. jLo absoluto inimaginable!
Creamos cosas con las que, despues de todo, debemos identificarnos” (106).
Last, in Agustin’s text, after an experience with psilocybin mushrooms,
Rafael perceives himself to be an empty vessel: “Rafael se habia vaciado se
habia convertido en oscuridad” (268). By magnifying the interior mental-
scapes of their protagonists, Garcia Saldana, Dalton, and Agustin encourage
their readers to question the discursive practices that have been passed down
through generations.
As they remove the shackles of their immediate social conditioning,
Garcia Saldana’s, Dalton’s, and Agustin’s protagonists reach for alternative
bonds in the counterculture. Up to this point in time, the Mexican state
had rigidly codified the role of the adolescent in the family structure: “The
idealized family of the postrevolutionary order was one in which the fa­
ther was stern in his benevolence, the mother saintly in her maternity, and
the children loyal in their obedience” (Zolov 4-5). In the intensity of drug-
fueled interior displacement, an adolescent character excavates the layers of
signification that have constituted him up to that moment to find not fulfill­
ment but emptiness, absences, and artifices. Therefore, the drug experience
in these narratives encourages not only the young fictional characters but
also the audience to perceive the world differently. As the psychiatrist R. D.
Laing (1967) explains:

The “ego” is the instrument for living in this world. If the “ego” is
broken up or destroyed (by the insurmountable contradictions of cer­
tain life situations, by toxins, chemical changes, etc.), the person may
 Hugo M. Viera 155

be exposed to other worlds, “real” in different ways from the more fa­
miliar territory of dreams, imagination, perception or fantasy. (97)

Thus, the drug experience dismantles the layers of social significations that
help construct the ego. Hence, Onda writers initiate their narratives into the
drug experience in search of languages and characters located outside the
local hegemonic structures of nation and the traditional family and insert
themselves into the flow of signifiers of the international counterculture.

Intoxications

The altered state of the subjectivities presented in these narratives is not sim­
ply juvenile escapism, but rather it represents a questioning of the traditional
discourse, which is predicated on family values and obedience to the state.
This questioning is achieved by “intoxicating” the narrative voice. In Pasto
verde, the drug experience destabilizes the narrator—as Epicuro exclaims,
“Going out of my head Wow!” (Garda Saldana 7)—and opens the narrative
to the polarized countercultural discourses of the 1960s described earlier:
the psychedelic revolution that emphasized a disengaged, personal mystical
experience, as per Leary’s 1967 catchphrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out,”
pitted against a political militancy that emphasized collective, sometimes vi­
olent, action. For example, in the United States this militancy was apparent
in the discourses of such organizations as the activist New Left movement
Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, the radical organization the
Weather Underground, and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. In
Mexico, the revolutionary stance of the student movement became orga­
nized as the Central Nacional de Estudiantes Democraticos and the Comite
Nacional de Huelga, both taking to the streets to demand political reform
(Zolov 119).
Although the counterculture itself was divided between these two dis­
courses, the contemplative and the revolutionary, both pathways required
the subject to drop out of traditional society into the countercultural world,
to move from what Leary calls the “overground” to the “underground.” In
his essay “Drop Out or Cop Out” Leary posits that the “overground” and
the “underground” together form two halves of all societies:

It’s always been that way, and it will always be that way. There are
two societies, two symbiotic cultures uneasily sharing the planet, two
intertwined human structures, mirror-imaged like root and branch.
The overground and the underground. The drop-outs and the cop-
outs. (160)

Leary goes on to say, however, that this duality can only be seen from the
underground. In order to acquire the underground perspective, you need to
156 Studies in Latin American Popular Culture

be in the know, loosened from the social fasteners of the establishment; in

other words, you had to be initiated into an alternate reality. As Leary ex­
plains, “this knowledge is experiential, whispered, word-of-mouth, friend
to friend and rarely written down” (161). The intoxication of the writing
and the use of a coded language, which separated them from other gener­
ations, became passwords for their young audience. In order to accomplish
the initiation into this subversive knowledge, their narratives had to be in­
toxicated, alienated from established forms, because as Leary points out, the
underground is known through “the chemical secretions of life” (161).
In the 1960s, the two main narratives to legitimate the self were reiterated
and debated in the countercultural sphere. As John Kirk recounts in “The
Development of an Ondero'” (1986), these concerns played out in the real
lives of the writers as well as in their fiction. In 1961, Dalton and Agustin
went to revolutionary Cuba, where they participated in Castro’s literacy pro­
gram, “thereby accomplishing a socially useful mission, and ridding them ­
selves of their existential anguish” (Kirk 13). In this way, Castro’s revolution
presented itself to Mexican urban middle-class adolescents, who had experi­
enced the economic prosperity of the “Mexican Miracle” and lived through
the ruling party’s co-opting of the revolutionary narrative (Zolov 7), as a lo­
cus to confer meaning upon their privileged yet unsatisfying lives. On a fic­
tional level, Dalton uses the character of Roberto in LSD to posit that it is
necessary to break from the establishment through action, even through vi­
olent insurrection, in order to create something new and that this rupture
cannot be accomplished through “a pacific conversion to a new religious
sect” (26). Agustin presents the conflict between these two countercultural
discourses in one of Virgilio’s interior monologues. Virgilio earns a living
dealing drugs but yearns for participation in a guerrilla movement:

En realidad no deberia vender mota, para evitarme esos pedos. Claro

que alguien tiene que vender la mota, pero <por que yo? Primero,
cuando me prendi y empece a dilerear a madres, a dark al canijo pe-
trolero, me senti un mesias regular: estaba pasando la onda a tochos,
segun pensaba yo, el aliviane por una corta feria. Pero si ahora estoy
seguro de algo es de que no se debe comerciar con estas ondas, ondas
que prendan la mente, por eso Francine agarro en falso a Rafael con
lo de la cobrada del tarot. Esas son puras jaladeces, deberiamos hacer
la revolucion. Ratatatat, ;abajo, perros azotadores, envenenadores de la
mente del pueblo! jChinguen a su madre burfresas! Aguantaria la re-
volucion, pero todos somos unos culeros y muy habladores. (163)

In this passage, written while Agustin himself was imprisoned on drug

charges, the reader perceives the writer’s change in attitude toward the
countercultural discourse on psychoactive drugs. Although they can light
up the mind, even the drug-dealing, stoned Virgilio values them less than
he does revolutionary action. Susan Schaffer sees in this novel Agustin’s re-
 Hugo M. Viera 157

evaluation of the drug experience: “As a result of this dramatic turn in his
personal life, Agustin no longer strove to explore the merits of intoxication,
but rather began to question the ultimate outcome of dependency on ine-
briants” (136). Nonetheless, in the same passage, Agustin also questions the
youth’s resolve to engage in armed conflict: The revolution would hold out,
but we all are a bunch of wimps and loudmouths. In the previous passage, the
balance seems to tip toward a revolutionary pose as Agustin appears to be
disillusioned with drugs and indicts young people’s retreat to psychedelic
contemplation, especially after the 1968 massacre in Tlatelolco. He implies
that, despite the brutal repression and the deaths, the revolution would have
held out, had the student movement been more courageous.
In order to confront increasing government repression and to allow access
to both the contemplative and the revolutionary discursive practices, what
Fredric Jameson calls “buried narratives of legitimation” (xi-xii), Onda writ­
ers disseminated underground knowledge through their intoxicated texts.
After the Tlatelolco massacre, the Mexican youth changed strategies: from
political rebellion to desmadre, or the overt rejection of traditional social mo­
res (Zolov 132). In Dalton, the characters debate these two narratives, but
the impasse is resolved in the end by taking pleasure in the drug experience
in the present and taking up arms in the future (162). In Agustin’s novel,
neither narrative offers an ontological grounding for the characters. Instead,
they remain adrift in the immediacies of their senses. Garcia Saldana’s text,
however, unapologetically establishes the contemplative narrative as the only
way out (169). The young protagonist Epicure does not integrate himself
back into the social context to become a productive member of society after
his drug experience but instead takes refuge in his own imagination.
Both armed revolution and the drug experience represent consciousness-
altering processes. They propel the subject out of his social, psychological,
or cultural orbits through a rite of initiation and throw him to the margins
of society. Here, on the sidelines, both the young narrators and the reading
audience can see the hegemonic structures that have defined them: family,
church, and state. Theodore Roszak saw this radical assault on subjectivity
as a juvenile exercise in perversion (55). In these Onda narratives, however,
“perversions” of literary, grammatical, or linguistic forms, made as the au­
thors attempt to translate the drug experience to their readers at a sensory
level, have a more important purpose than mere juvenile escapism. By in­
toxicating their narratives, these authors destabilize their characters’ voices
and open up their texts to a discursive mirroring through which the under­
ground master narratives of liberation become transparent to their readers.

T ranslations

Garcia Saldana, Dalton, and Agustin attempt to convey, or translate, the al­
teration of cognitive processes caused by drugs, ranging from the mildly
158 Studies in Latin American Popular Culture

hallucinogenic, like marijuana, to the powerfully psychoactive, like LSD

and psilocybin mushrooms. As R. E. L. Masters and Jean Houston (1966)
maintain with their research on psychedelic drugs, the world “is experi­
enced as a physical extension of oneself, of one’s own nervous system” (15).
These Onda writers want to bridge the gap between their texts and their
readers, want to initiate their readers into a lived experience, and thus con­
form their writing to reproduce, not describe, such an experience. There­
fore, in these narratives the plasticity and physicality of the written text is
emphasized as well as the visual and aural dimensions of writing. Also, as
these writers translate their experiences, they adopt other modes of enun­
ciation that stand outside national and linguistic limits. These Onda writ­
ers manipulate their writing, following Allen Ginsberg’s precept in Howl,
“to conform to the rhythm of thought” of their characters’ “naked and
endless head[s]” (lines 209-10). Words and sentences tend to agglutinate
in Garcia Saldana’s text. Dalton’s text splits into columns on the page as
the characters experience the intersubjectivity associated with LSD (165-
66). In Agustin’s text, one-word lines, ellipses, silk-screened black pages,
and empty white pages graphically reproduce the dissolution of self and lan­
guage that comes at the peak of a psilocybin experience (256-68). They use
graphic manipulation; they ignore syntactic rules; and they look to other
literary canons, mainly to the north, to translate the experience of altered
perception.
A literary consciousness, a self-awareness of its own strategies, is ev­
ident in these writers. In Dalton’s text a character in the midst of the
LSD experience questions the nature of language: “,;Que son todas estas
palabras escurridizas, escapadas, pintadas en papeles y paredes? <Que son
ellas dejando de existir por si mismas como pensamientos para convertirse
en simbolos, o viceversa? Oscuro resulta pensar con ellas, dificil es usarlas
como instrumento, pero dejarlas es perderse en imagenes sin sentido” (119).
Symptomatic of the psychedelic experience, with its disassembling of the
ego, and of the counterculture, with its denunciation of the establishment,
this text lays bare those structures that buttress the edifice of literature. The
young character becomes conscious of the age-old problem of the insuffi­
ciency of language to represent ideas, the gap between signifier and signi­
fied. Garcia Saldana carries out a similar critique of language by altering the
representation of the voices of parental figures. For example, his intoxicated
narrator hears the voices of mothers who are talking about their progeny.
However, their discourse is then visually distorted as the spaces between the
printed words are omitted, thus becoming a chain of undifferentiated text:

Puesdentrodepocotendrem oselprim ercontadoryelprim erarquitecto

tantosacrificarnosporellos ellos mas tarde entenderannuestrosdesve-
los pero yave comosonlos jovenes un poco locos cosas de la edad se-
nora no hay que tratarlos a la antigua son otra generacion uno les da
 Hugo M. Viera 159

todo y ya ve como pagan ya recapacitaran algun dia algun dia sabran

valorizar todos nuestros esfuerzos porque sean hombres de bien uno
les da educacion dinero yo ai mio ya le prometi su valiant si entra en
la universidad yalnuestrounviajeaeruopasisalebienesteanoyalnuestro-
lovamosamandar-aespecializarsealosestadosunidoscuandoacabesuca-
rrerayalnuestroleprometimosyalnuestroleprometimosyalnuestroledi-
mosyquebonitanoviatienemihijosivieraquesevelamuchachatandebue-
nafamiliabuenafamiliabuenafamiliabuenafamiliiiiabuenafamiliaaaaaaa
. . . ( 17)

Keeping in mind the cultural context, as we read this passage, it is as if the

altered subject hears an LP record (33 rpm) being played at a higher speed
of 78 rpm, that is, the enunciation becomes garbled. As words agglutinate,
meaning falters, and the reader is forced to spend time decoding an ut­
terance composed of signifiers of social class. This passage transcribes the
parents’ voices as they are heard within the adolescent mind. The coagula­
tion of the words points to the emptiness of the familiar discourse. Garda
Saldana stages a protest, through the drug experience, against the values of
middle-class parents: their sacrifice to send their children to college in order
to get “the first accountant” or “the first architect” in the family; their brib­
ery of their children with cars or trips to Europe in exchange for enrolling at
the university or doing well in school; their desire for their children to have a
girlfriend or boyfriend from a “good family.” The intoxicated text points to
the wearing out of the axes of the midcentury middle-class project—educa­
tion, family, social mobility, and integration into the nation—and proclaims
Id Onda as an alternative to the established social order. Garcia Saldana rid­
icules the mother’s speech by rendering it almost unintelligible through dis­
torted graphic representation. He bluntly suggests the countercultural ethos
that being high on drugs is a form of resistance against parental discourse.
Altered, the young subject does not accept parental rhetoric as unmediated
truth. As the mothers’ discourse is disseminated, and the meaning deferred,
Epicuro and the reader become conscious of the gap between signifier and
signified. What were held as impenetrable fortresses of obvious truths be­
come monolithic objects that crumble under their own weight. The young
narrator invites his readers to perceive the intergenerational mediation that
transpires through time, as members of a particular social order desire to
replicate their own or a higher status in their progeny.
Agustin carries out a similar critique of discourse. This time, however,
the critique is directed toward the language of the hippie movement. As
Rafael traverses a paranoid episode in his hallucinogenic trip, he internally
discusses the 1960s slogan “Peace, Love and Understanding”: “Por eso los
hippies han de haber inventado aquello de pazamorcomprensionhumildad,
para salir del infierno, para no quedarse girando y girando en los tormentos
(chirriar de dientes) de la mente” (90). Agustin mockingly invents a new
160 Studies in Latin American Popular Culture

etiology for the slogan within the psychedelic experience as a way of calm­
ing an altered subject during a bad trip. The coagulation of the words “paz,”
“amor,” “comprension,” and “humildad” empties the anti-war slogan of its
original rallying cry and turns it into a packaged sound bite. In other words,
it points to the commercialization of the counterculture and its importation
to Mexico “on the wings of transnational capital” (Zolov 112). The trans­
lation of the drug experience to the written page not only places Mexican
literature within a contemporary context but also questions the discursive
practices that construct such contemporaneity.
Nonetheless, these Onda writers are not just producing transitory art of
the immediate experience. By reducing writing to its graphic elements, they
deconstruct language to a degree such that readers can literally see the nexus
between ideology, language, and self. In order not to do a bad translation of
the drug experience, through mediated discourse they “lovingly and in de­
tail incorporate the original’s mode of signification” (Benjamin 78), which
is a sensory experience. They pinpoint the malleability of the self as well as
the discourses that shape it into being by altering the way that narratives are
ordinarily printed. As writing is brought to graphic distortion, these texts
emphasize the physical dimensions of literature on several levels. They call
attention to the participation of cognitive processes in literature’s inception
and consumption. They also emphasize the physicality of the text: the way
the book, as a product of print design, frames the act of reading.

R eproductions

Onda writers translate the drug experience and its effects on their charac­
ters’ way of thinking and representing reality. As they inscribe themselves
on the contemporary scene, they introduce mechanical modes of repro­
duction into their texts. Cinematic projections, tape recorders, and record
players appear in their writing, signaling the somatic states one experiences
under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. Voices are disembodied and
distorted. Words are repeated over and over again, until they become acous­
tic reverberations. Vision is conceived as mechanized, as the self becomes
conscious of its own gaze, its mode of production. In Garcia Saldana’s Pasto
verde, for example, Epicure conceives of his life as a movie during his drug
trip (168). In Dalton’s LSD, the acid-tripping characters discuss how cinema
has affected their conception of their lives and their interpretation of the im­
age: “Es una extension de nosotros, una extension de nuestra realidad, pero
que es y no es nuestra realidad” (37). Finally, in Agustin’s Se estd haciendo
tarde (final en laguna), the characters’ vision alternately becomes Tech­
nicolor (255), blacks out, or whites out, corresponding to their stage of ego
dissolution. As these media devices appear in the texts, they are used as lit­
erary ones to alter not only narrative linearity but also the act of writing,
 Hugo M. Viera 161

as both a mode of representation and a visual product for the eyes of the
reader.
At the same time, the textual proliferation of these audio-visual devices
points to the way that these new tools for mass communication facilitated
the formation of a collective consciousness across national boundaries in the
1960s. As information and images could be more easily reproduced across
the globe, so were the seeds of protest more readily spread and the signifi-
ers of a cultural ethos more rapidly consumed and shared by a wider audi­
ence. Thus, Onda writers use audio-visual reproductions of the psychedelic
experience to expand their narratives and literary genealogies. For example,
Garcia Saldana’s narrator, Epicure, confronts the social mechanisms of con­
trol by advocating to his audience the salutary effects of aligning with a lit­
erary lineage of foreign writers: “jVamos a dejar que nos pongan letreros
de outsiders perdidos y vencidos? No no no tenemos que aullar que gritar
que aullar como Ginsberg como Norman Mailer como Kerouac como
William Burroughs tenemos que aullar aullar aullar” (14). In the wake of
Tlatelolco, Epicure’s call-to-arms against the establishment’s branding of
Mexican youth as defeated and lost outsiders rests on the appropriation
of US countercultural literary figures from the previous Beat Generation.
Agustin similarly establishes a psychedelic genealogy with members of the
international youth culture:

Y la silocibina, cuando es pura y neta, camara camarisima con la silo-

cibina, pone tan jaizote como los hongos. Y las que acabo de conectar
son las meras efectivas, no mamadas, de San Panchito, de los cuates de
Owsley y de la ex plana mayor de Timothy Leary: Richard Alpert que
el mamon ahora se llama Baba Ram Dass o Algo asi y Metzner. (152)

The character ofVirgilio legitimizes his drug purchase by rattling off the
names at the epicenter of the psychedelic movement of the US counter­
culture: Owsley Stanley, an underground chemist, who was “revered
throughout the counterculture for making the purest form of LSD ever to
hit the street” (Greenfield 1); Timothy Leary, famed LSD proselytizer; and
Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, “two of Leary’s closest associates” at
Harvard (Lee and Shlain 84). Virgilio, on the periphery, appropriates the
center of the psychedelic counterculture to legitimize his drug experience.
In their texts, these writers reproduce the sensory experience of the hal­
lucinogenic trip, street jargon, clashes with social conventions, and interac­
tions with an international counterculture with its own set of signifiers, as
a way to disrupt Mexican literary tradition. Although, as mentioned ear­
lier, Glantz and Monsivais dismissed Onda writers as a petty disturbance, a
rupture in the chain; nonetheless, la Onda's lack of literary artifice helps us
to better examine the interplay of social and cultural forces in the era, dis­
seminating the youthful resistance to a paternalistic discourse. Monsivais
162 Studies in Latin American Popular Culture

maintained that la Onda carried out, stubbornly and poorly, a renovation

project in the corruption of language and in the language of corruption, on
the frontier and in jail (103). That is, he considered Onda writers to be cor­
rupting the national language by using slang and English and by adopting
street jargon, “or the language of corruption,” that only initiates into the
counterculture could understand. Although Onda writers’ defiance toward
the literary sensibilities of the ruling cultural elite marginalized their work,
their appropriation of the youth vernacular helped generate a new reading
public. By claiming literary space in the periphery, la Onda attempted to in­
sert itself into an international current that traversed urban centers in the
United States, Latin America, and Europe.
In summary, Onda writers’ use of the drug experience, a 1960s signifier
of an international counterculture, goes beyond the thematic level and be­
comes an aesthetic device that challenges the literary status quo. Through
their texts, Garcia Saldana, Dalton, and Agustin initiate their readers into
the concept of alternate realities. They intoxicate their writing in order to al­
low access to underground narratives of legitimation. They translate phys­
ical, psychological, and cultural aspects of the drug experience onto the
page. And they reproduce altered states of being in order to oppose the op­
pressive quality of a national discourse that dictates how citizens should be­
have. In an act of resistance to the established social order, these young
writers affiliate themselves with textualities and literary genealogies that re­
side outside their national and linguistic borders. At the same time, they
look inside, inscribing their bodies onto the text, reveling in the realm of
the senses while opening it to new modalities of representation. Thus, the
drug experience provides Onda writers not only a ludic, literary theme, but
also a visceral means to question the relations between identity, language,
and the discursive construction of reality.

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