Out in the Tamaulipan thornscrub of South Texas, Mario Garza has spent years looking for something sacred. To the untrained eye, the ranchland he visits might seem unremarkable, or even hostile — a wide expanse of mesquite and huisache thickets littered with rattlesnakes and tasajillo spines, among other natural hazards. But Garza sees it differently. This is the land of his ancestors, the Coahuiltecans, who inhabited this region for centuries, and who knew what the limestone-rich soil had to offer them. To him, the landscape is dotted with Lophophora williamsii — a small, bluish-green cactus better known as peyote.
“Sometimes it hides from people,” the 81-year-old tells The Barbed Wire. “You could walk around and not see a single thing, but if the peyote wants you to see it, the whole ground is covered in medicine.”
Bulbous and plump, with blush pink or white flowers that bloom each summer, the pincushion-shaped cactus grows nearly flush with the ground, often sprouting up from the gravelly dirt beneath the shade of surrounding shrubs and bushes. It ranges from 1.5-4 inches in diameter, but don’t let its diminutive size fool you. Its psychoactive properties have made it one of the country’s most sought after, and highly-regulated, native plants — currently classified by the federal government as a Schedule I drug, along with marijuana, heroin, and LSD.
For thousands of years, Native Americans like Garza have used peyote for ceremonial and medicinal purposes. It grows primarily in South Texas and Northern Mexico — what Garza calls “the traditional homeland” of the Coahuiltecan Indians — with archaeological findings suggesting peyote use in the region as far back as 3,700-3,200 B.C.E.
“You just have to wonder if it’s the peyote, the prayers, or God himself. It’s a very spiritual plant and it shows you things that sometimes you can’t fully understand.”
Today, Native Americans across the country rely on the plant for their ceremonies. But over the last decade, its numbers have dwindled, endangered by increased land development, poaching, and poor harvesting practices that put the survival of the tradition at risk. For Garza this is far from the first threat he’s faced. He was participating in peyote ceremonies long before it was legal.
“There are people who romanticize the idea of having a great, great-grandmother who was Indian, but the reality was very different,” he says. “We had to go underground to do our ceremonies and pray in our language. We had to hide all of those things.”
Garza serves as a Cultural Preservation Officer for the Miakan-Garza Band and founder of Texas’ Indigenous Cultures Institute. For more than half of his life, peyote ceremonies were practiced out on remote ranches, hidden from view, in a time when getting caught meant potentially being taken to prison. This interrupted a crucial practice for the Coahuiltecans, who traditionally embark on a yearly pilgrimage to honor the peyote. This has meant traveling to four of the state’s sacred water sites: Austin’s Barton Springs, San Marcos’ Aquarena Springs, New Braunfels’ Comal Springs, and the San Antonio Springs (also called the Blue Hole). After absolving themselves in these waters, they would make their way further into South Texas, to the “peyote gardens,” located within Starr, Jim Hogg, Webb, and Zapata counties, where the cactus has historically grown.
Garza made his first pilgrimage in his late 20s with friends from El Paso. After visiting the Sacred Springs, they went searching for “buttons” (the crown of the cactus) and began their ritual. Typically an all-night affair, the ceremony lasts from sundown to sunrise, and includes four songs that speak to the power of water. Decades earlier, participants had also danced as part of their prayer.
“That’s how we had always done it, but we had to do away with it because we didn’t want the government to know that we were praying, and we didn’t want to get killed,” he says. “This is in a country that was supposedly founded on religious freedom.”
Federal and state laws have banned or restricted peyote since at least the 1880s. Garza was 51 when, in 1994, Congress amended the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to federally protect Native Americans’ use of peyote for religious purposes. By that time, Garza had served in Vietnam and begun using the cactus to treat his PTSD.
Today, many of the indigenous practitioners of “peyotism” belong to the Native American Church, an intertribal organization with more than 300,000 members in chapters spread out across the country. For decades, many of these groups have traveled hundreds or even thousands of miles to the peyote gardens, relying on a handful of “peyoteros,” or peyote harvesters, who have become increasingly rare.
“A lot of them are worried that the peyote supply is going to run out,” Garza says. “But Texas Indians have never worried about that. I’ve always felt that God was going to keep providing for us.”
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At 77 years old, Salvador Johnson is one of only four active licensed peyoteros in the country, harvesting the cactus for more than six decades. He got his start as a teenager in his hometown of Mirando City — a small, no-stoplight town 35 miles east of Laredo. Though it experienced a short-lived stint as a South Texas boomtown in the early 1920s, the city has earned more lasting notoriety as the heart of the country’s peyote trade, Johnson told The Barbed Wire.
Firsthand accounts from the late 19th Century point to a reliable network of peyoteros who would harvest and sell dried cactus to Native Americans in the area, and to those who made the journey from other parts of the country. Among them was Amada Cardenas, who picked up the trade from her father in the 1930s, and carried on the business with her husband, Claudio Cardenas.
Though she was far from the only peyote dealer in town, her kind smile and generous spirit made her one of the most well-known. Amid attempts from the federal government to ban peyote use, Cardenas and her husband continued to ensure that members of the Native American Church could still have access to the cactus.
“Peyote has become a part of my soul, so I want my family to carry on what I’ve built.”
In the late 1950s, Johnson got his start working for Amada and Claudio Cardenas as a teenager. Like many of his classmates, harvesting peyote was the most reliable way to make money in their small town. In the summers, he would go out in the early hours of the morning before the heat crept into the day, and search for buttons, making $1 for every thousand harvested.
Later, when the Texas Department of Safety began regulating peyote trade for the federal government in the 1970s, Cardenas became the state’s first officially licensed peyote dealer. “She was a beautiful woman who loved the Native American people,” Johnson says. “Her doors were always open because she believed in the church and what peyote represented to them.”
After serving in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, Johnson returned and acquired his own license. He had learned to appreciate the significance of the plant during his time working for Cardenas, and as he began to draw in his own clientele, he began to witness the importance of peyote firsthand.
“What I’ve seen the Native people do with peyote will blow your mind,” he says, explaining that he’s watched the plant used as a treatment for people struggling from a variety of illnesses and ailments, including AIDS, addiction, and exposure to agent orange. “You just have to wonder if it’s the peyote, the prayers, or God himself. It’s a very spiritual plant and it shows you things that sometimes you can’t fully understand.”
Since the pandemic, Johnson says he’s noticed a drastic decline in customers — a problem that’s exacerbated by the other threats to peyote. “Right now, the market is just not there,” he says. “I have so much peyote that we’ve dried, and we just can’t cut anymore right now.”
But business isn’t the concern. For Johnson and Cardenas, it’s survival.
“It’s been a fight for Native Americans from the beginning, and it still is,” he says. “To me, it’s embarrassing and a shame that we have a group of people that go to church and pray to God, who don’t know if they’ll be able to practice their ceremony, because the federal government is regulating their sacrament.”
At his age, it’s getting harder and harder to go out and harvest peyote. “I can’t move as fast as I used to,” he acknowledges. He gets help from his family — his children, his grandsons, and his nephews — who he hopes will carry on his mission when he’s ready to retire.
“Peyote has become a part of my soul, so I want my family to carry on what I’ve built.”
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Earlier this year, Keeper Trout, an ethnobotanist with the Cactus Conservation Institute, traveled to South Texas to collect data on peyote and star cactus in Starr County. “What we saw when we got there was horrifying,” he says.
Once-thriving peyote gardens nearing a cacti-filled nature preserve were uprooted from the soil, scraped clean by a bulldozer, and subdivided into future housing plots.
“It was just heartbreaking to see the level of destruction that occurred,” he says. “The brush county is immensely beautiful, and there it was razed flat without a shrub or tree to be seen. It left my mind reeling.”
Peyote is an easy plant to grow from the seed. It’s naturally tough and resilient, and it’s resistant to drought and high heat. Even trampling over one doesn’t do much harm, but what does endanger peyote is overharvesting and uprooting it. “In Texas, there’s a vast amount of peyote land being destroyed every year,” Trout says. “Harvesting and consumption patterns are substantial factors, sure, but they pale in comparison to root plowing, because if you root plow a piece of land, peyote does not come back.”
The process of root plowing makes the surface of the soil less hospitable to the reestablishment of the plants — something that interrupts the cacti’s natural life cycle and takes geological periods of time to undo. “In Hidalgo County, we say peyote will never come back because the soil has been root plowed so many times it’s not a place where peyote can thrive anymore.”
In response, the Native American Church launched the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative in 2017, purchasing more than 600 acres of land in Jim Hogg County in order to foster their own means of cultivation. Trout is in support of their efforts, but without solid information on how much peyote is being harvested (a figure he says the DEA won’t provide), he worries that even their attempts won’t keep up with demand. Trout estimates that members of the church consume hundreds of thousands of buttons each year, far outpacing the plant’s growth.
“As a conservationist, I want to be respectful of everyone in the picture,” he says. “But I also want to be respectful of peyote and its right to survive. It would be a horrible tragedy if 20 or 30 years from now, there was no peyote available in Texas or in Mexico.”
Trout says that he’s proud of what the Cactus Conservation Institute has done to provide more information on peyote, but he knows they’re just one small part of the puzzle. “The world needs a lot more people doing the same thing,” he says. That’s why he’s excited by the development of the conservation initiative. In the last few years, he’s also observed a rising movement of Native American youth pursuing careers in biology and environmental science.
“I anticipate in the next few years, we’re going to see a generation of Native American scientists,” he says. “That’s exciting because they actually have a personal stake in these issues being solved. At the CCI, we’re just observers — people who are interested in seeing peyote continue to be here longer than we are.”
