In the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca, the Niños Santos rise from a territory marked by colonial histories of agriculture, land conversion, and extraction. Even here, these sacred mushrooms emerge through relations of care and respect that connect the land, the spirits, the ancestors, and the Mazatec community.

This sacred world now faces a deepening environmental crisis. Climate change disrupts the natural rhythms by which mushrooms return with the seasons. Colonial agriculture and its contemporary afterlives have reorganized land around production and extraction rather than reciprocity. Agrochemical contamination and changing land-use regimes further alter the fragile conditions through which sacred fungi live.

At the same time, the global psychedelic economy converts psilocybin into a commodity for clinics, retreats, tourism, and wellness markets. The result is a new extractive frontier in which mushrooms, Indigenous knowledge, and spiritual authority risk being removed from the worlds that sustain them.

This research project begins where the sacred mushrooms appear and with the Mazatec people who continue to care for and respect them as sacred beings. Through collaborative fieldwork, it follows the changing lives of the sacred fungi and the transmission of ecospiritual knowledge across generations, tracing the historical changes and continuities that bind ecological and social justice into a single struggle.