27 February 2026
Hijas del Sur: A Latin American Network of Psychedelic Women is Born
By: Paulina Valamiel, Ph.D, Keronlay Machado, MA, Satya Rodrigues, MA, Anna Strunck, MD, Valéria Araújo
MAPS Bulletin: Volume XXXVI
Many claim that, within the context of globalization, we are experiencing a new “psychedelic renaissance”. Despite the ongoing international War on Drugs—intensified after the 1971 Vienna Convention—scientific, commercial, and spiritual interest has grown around the therapeutic and spiritual potentials of criminalized substances. MDMA, ketamine, LSD, DMT, psilocybin, mescaline, and Ayahuasca have become central vectors of this new moment, with scientific and cultural impacts of global reach.
This movement articulates transnational networks composed of Indigenous peoples, shamans, scientists, healthcare professionals, journalists, entrepreneurs, religious leaders, psychonauts, people seeking treatment, and civil society organizations. However, the so-called “psychedelic renaissance” is deeply rooted in the Global North. Is it not telling that the leadership of the United States in psychedelic research, regulation, and psychedelic-assisted therapies is directly linked to the search for MDMA treatment for military veterans suffering intensely from PTSD after serving in wars led by the United States itself? Debates about social justice and reciprocity have been raised particularly by Indigenous peoples, queer communities, and actors from the Global South, revealing the colonial logics that sustain this “renaissance.”
The story of María Sabina synthesizes these contradictions: her wisdom was appropriated without reciprocity, producing harmful consequences for her community. Asking how gender, ethnicity, and territory shaped the encounter between the Mazatec healer and Gordon Wasson highlights dimensions often erased in psychedelic narratives. More broadly, it exposes a systematic silence regarding women—particularly non-white women—within the contemporary psychedelic field.
The history of the erasure of the female body in medicine helps explain why we know so little about the effects of cannabis and psychedelics on feminized bodies. Naomi Wolf (2013) demonstrates how the clitoris, identified in 1559 by Realdo Colombo, was repeatedly omitted or minimized over the centuries, resulting in an epistemicide concerning female sexuality. A similar process occurs when pains related to the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, postpartum period, or menopause are dismissed as “in your head.” This erasure is also present in the drug field: the “War on Drugs” disproportionately harms racialized and feminized bodies—Black mothers who face police violence, mothers fighting for access to medicinal cannabis, women systematically excluded from research and public policy. In response to these silences, initiatives such as the book Women and Psychedelics sought to foreground women’s voices and experiences within the psychedelic field. However, as the field expands globally, it becomes increasingly clear that this conversation must move beyond a universalizing framework and engage more directly with Latin perspectives, histories, and struggles, in order to challenge not only gendered exclusions but also the colonial and geopolitical asymmetries that shape contemporary psychedelic knowledge production.
Ain’t I a psychedelic woman?
Critiques posed by Black feminists to the early waves of feminism taught us that there is no such thing as “woman” in the singular. Women’s experiences are multiple, shaped by race, class, sexuality, and territory. In Latin America, these differences are amplified by the pluriethnic nature of Abya Yala and the lasting harms of colonial violence.
María Lugones (2014) reminds us that under colonialism, Indigenous and enslaved African bodies were recognized only through sexual dimorphism, not as fully human subjects. Colonized women thus occupied the lowest stratum of the social hierarchy. This legacy continues to structure contemporary experiences with plants and psychoactive substances: for some, they represent healing, spirituality, and identity; for others, violence, marginalization, and risk.
The “global psychedelic moment” is far from homogeneous. In Latin America, traditional practices, urban reinventions, diverse spiritualities, alternative therapies, and scientific research coexist and collide, revealing colonial tensions and persistent inequalities. Even so, spaces of resistance, agency, and reinvention emerge—cracks through which women reconfigure epistemologies, demand protection, and reinvent the meanings of care, body, territory, and community.
Psychedelic Feminism vs. Latin American Psychedelic Feminisms
The concept of “psychedelic feminism,” created by Zoe Helene, highlights the transformative potential of psychedelic experiences for women’s empowerment, in dialogue with Eurocentric third-wave feminism and romanticized strands of ecofeminism. While it offers relevant contributions, this framework does not address the material inequalities, structural violence, and plurality of women’s experiences in the Global South. It often reproduces essentialism and orientalism while overlooking situated forms of relating to plants and substances in Latin American contexts.
Furthermore, romanticized discourses frequently ignore that ayahuasca-related contexts are also marked by gender-based violence. The global psychedelic renaissance exposes asymmetries between psychedelic feminists of the Global North and Latin American women—even within a region from which many of the plants and fungi used worldwide originate. How many of these women participate in the formulation of research protocols or political decision-making? How many are recognized beyond care work, historically naturalized and rendered invisible?
From a decolonial feminist perspective, we ask whether it is possible to think in terms of Latin American psychedelic feminisms—and why we should rely on colonial nomenclature rather than Guarani, Pano, or Yoruba terms. We know that words carry epistemic disputes. “Psychedelic,” “women,” and “Latin America” are colonial categories, yet they may be strategically reappropriated. Just as Indigenous Bolivian women named themselves feminists to dispute constituent spaces, naming ourselves today is a political gesture: occupying the vocabulary of power without surrendering our critique of it.
It is within this colonial fracture that Hijas del Sur is born—a collective of Latin psychedelic women oriented by decolonial and community feminisms. Not as adherence to a label, but as a response to the historical urgency of contesting narratives and correcting erasures. Here, psychedelic experiences are political, embodied, and historical—shaped by patriarchy, capitalism, racism, coloniality, and also by diverse forms of life and resistance. To affirm Latin American psychedelic feminisms is to claim the centrality of Indigenous, Black, mixed-race, quilombola, peripheral, migrant, lesbian, trans, mother, and working-class women in the construction of plural psychedelic futures.
A political, feminist, decolonial, community-rooted Latin American perspective on psychedelia
We welcome and call upon womanhoods across Abya Yala, the Afro-diaspora, and the Global South: Indigenous women, caregivers, healers, herbalists, midwives, healthcare professionals, scientists, artists, spiritual leaders, educators, and many others. Although rendered invisible by colonial and patriarchal structures—both ancient and contemporary—these women are essential to practices of healing, territorial protection, knowledge transmission, and political resistance.
The history of psychedelics in the Global South is marked by epistemicides, biopiracy, racism, material and symbolic extractivism, gender inequality, and recurrent violence in therapeutic, ceremonial, and religious settings. To understand these dynamics, a feminist and decolonial perspective is necessary—one that illuminates the colonialities of power (Quijano, 1991), knowledge (Mignolo, 2000), being (Maldonado-Torres, 2008; Fanon), and gender (Lugones, 2014) expressed in the psychedelic renaissance: abuses of power, irresponsible practices, lack of care, exploitation of women’s labor, religious racism, and symbolic manipulation—yet does not end there.
Decolonial feminisms guide us ethically to recognize the agency and power of psychedelic, “entheogenic,” or “medicine” women of the Global South through their lived experiences and struggles related to territory, community, self-determination, spirituality, holistic health, rights, anti-racism, anti-prohibitionism, access to education, bodily autonomy, and political participation.
From this perspective, it becomes possible to rebuild the psychedelic field based on principles such as reciprocity, justice, diversity, resistance, care, territorial protection, and the construction of hope for healthier psychedelic practices. It is within this context that Hijas del Sur emerges.
We are guided by a feminist ethics of care, which understands relationships, interdependence, and mutual responsibility as the foundations of social life. In the Psychedelic Renaissance, this means recognizing that sustaining life—not profit, markets, or therapeutic promises—must be the core of any practice.
Toward a Future of Freedom and Community
We believe in feminine autonomy as a fundamental principle, defending women’s bodily, spiritual, and political autonomy in all spaces of action, as well as their right to community, safety, and well-being. We commit to honoring and strengthening traditional knowledge, recognizing the importance of ancestral, Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, and popular wisdom related to the use of plants, fungi, and other psychoactive substances.
Our work is guided by the pursuit of social justice, understood through a decolonial lens and articulated with gender, race, class, and territory. We understand care as an ethical and community-based practice, promoting a co-consubstantial form of care, understood as the recognition that oppressions such as racism, sexism, coloniality, and heteronormativity are inseparable and mutually constitutive rather than additive. This approach acknowledges that experiences with psychoactive substances, beyond subjective and individual dimensions, are deeply entangled with social markers and structural inequalities.
We advocate for the decriminalization and regulation of plants, fungi, and psychoactive substances and their cultural, spiritual, and therapeutic uses as a pathway to reducing harms, managing pleasures, protecting communities, and guaranteeing rights. We value integrated dialogue among science, spirituality, and human rights, recognizing and honoring multiple ways of knowing.
Lastly, we work toward transnational solidarity, contributing to the construction of support networks among women across Latin America and beyond, strengthening bonds and coordinating efforts toward a more just, plural, and emancipatory future.
Hijas del Sur in Practice
Our mission is to serve as a reference in strengthening Latin American women who engage with psychedelic substances and sacred plants and fungi through the promotion of research, critical training, support networks, and health and educational practices grounded in harm reduction and pleasure management. We aspire to culturally rooted practices that contribute to a more just, plural society connected to the knowledge of women from the Global South.
Our agenda integrates research, education, study groups, and the dissemination of knowledge about women and psychedelics within the dimensions of culture, health, and territory; community initiatives and regional networks; advocacy for gender-sensitive drug policy; partnerships with universities, organizations, collectives, traditional communities, and professionals from diverse fields.
Our work includes producing and disseminating knowledge about psychedelic use among women and practices conducted by women in Latin America, through a co-consubstantial perspective—recognizing that psychedelic experience does not occur in a social vacuum nor apart from markers such as gender, race, class, and territory—guided by harm reduction and pleasure management, articulating Western sciences and ancestral sciences.
We hold online integration circles, webinars with Latin American women, international seminars, study groups, and courses addressing the relationships between women and psychedelics from multiple scientific and community perspectives.
It’s important to mention that Hijas del Sur is a network built by women and for women, with the purpose of weaving bridges and crossing them hand in hand, strengthening the presence and leadership of Latin American women in the “psychedelic renaissance.”
The leadership of Hijas del Sur is composed of women who honor the relevance of this cause and the responsibility of their role in guiding the institution.
References
- FANON, Frantz. Pele negra, máscaras brancas. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2008.
- LUGONES, Maria. (2014). Rumo a um feminismo descolonial. Revista Estudos Feministas, 22(3), 935–952.
- MALDONADO TORRES, Nelson. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
- MIGNOLO, Walter D. (2000). Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- QUIJANO, Anibal. (1991). “Colonialidad, modernidad/racialidad”. Perú Indígena, v. 13, n. 29, p. 11-29.
- WOLF, Naomi. Vagina: uma biografia. Tradução de Renata Laureano. São Paulo: Geração Editorial, 2013.
Keronlay Machado
Keronlay Machado is an occupational therapist, psychoanalyst, and PhD candidate at PROPSAM/UFRJ, where she investigates the integration of psychedelic experiences with a focus on women. She has worked for 17 years in the Brazilian public health system (SUS) with vulnerable populations, guided by the ethics of Harm Reduction. She is a technician, researcher, and collaborating professor at PROJAD/IPUB/UFRJ, developing activities in care, teaching, research, and community outreach; and is a full member of the Associação Psicodélica do Brasil (APB). A mixed-race Black woman of Indigenous descent, mother, and long-distance runner, she combines clinical practice, teaching, and research to promote integrated and context-sensitive models of care.
Paulina Valamiel
Paulina Valamiel is a sociologist of religion, researcher, and educator, who serves as Communications Associate at Chacruna Latinoamérica in Brazil. She holds a PhD in sociology from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and is the author of works on Santo Daime, with a focus on the transnational dynamics of ayahuasca, gender, and sexuality. As an affiliated researcher at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC) in Brazil, she is currently developing a project on women and psychedelic spiritualities from perspectives of the Global South. She is also an associate researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for Psychoactive Studies (NEIP), and a member of the ReGeSex (Religion, Gender, and Sexuality) research group. Additionally, she serves as a queer daimista representative at GIN-SSOGIE (Global Interfaith Network for People of all Sexes, Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities, and Expressions) and as co-founder of Hijas del Sur, a Latin American Network of psychedelic women.
Valéria Araújo
Valéria Araújo is a journalist, holds an MBA specialization in Branding and Strategic Communication, and is a master’s student in the Graduate Program in Collective Health at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), where she researches women activists and medical cannabis. Her professional experience includes communications advisory work for politicians and third-sector institutions. She also volunteered for five years at an ayahuasca community in the Cracolândia region of São Paulo, which works from a harm reduction perspective with people facing social vulnerability due to the abusive use of alcohol and other drugs, as well as with cis and trans women who are survivors of violence.
Anna Strunck
Anna Strunck is a physician with postgraduate training in Adult Psychiatry from the Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital, a Jungian analyst certified by the Jungian Institute for Teaching and Research (IJEP), and a clinical researcher. She holds a specialization in Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy from Instituto Phaneros and is a full member of the Associação Psicodélica do Brasil (APB). She is the clinical director of the Instituto Força Dourada, where she integrates clinical practice, research, and training in medical cannabis from a critical and decolonial perspective, recognizing territorial, popular, and ancestral knowledge as legitimate fields of care. Her work focuses on building bridges between the visible and the non-visible, integrating Jungian psychotherapy, psychiatric support, art therapy, and guidance through expanded states of consciousness. Her practice is grounded in harm reduction, anti-prohibitionist ethics, and the valorization of autonomy. She is a surfer, open-water swimmer, ocean lover, and has been an activist for the cannabis cause in Brazil since adolescence.
Satya Rodrigues
Satya Rodrigues is a psychologist, transpersonal psychotherapist, health educator, and holds a master’s degree in community health. She is currently a PhD candidate in Collective Health at the Institute of Collective Health of the Federal University of Bahia (ISC/UFBA). Since 2017, she has been a researcher with FASA – Integrated Program for Research and Technical Cooperation on Community, Family, and Health: Contexts, Trajectories, and Public Policies (ISC/UFBA). Her current research focuses on women’s care experiences in ayahuasca settings, drawing from decolonial feminist perspectives and the ethics of care. She has over 10 years of clinical experience in women’s mental health, is a psychonaut and ayahuasqueira, and works as a caregiver and harm reduction practitioner in ritual ayahuasca contexts. In her journey as a woman caregiver, she believes that care is a political and spiritual practice—one that is essential for honoring women’s body-territories, and that emerges through continuous dialogue and collective construction between scientific knowledge and traditional wisdoms.
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