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This essay analyzes the unique features of Estudios: Revista Ecléctica (Valencia, 1928-1937), a Spanish libertarian cultural magazine that had a significant international presence and strong link with the American continent. Estudios was particularly important because of its diffusion and prestige among the libertarian working class, and the freethinking milieu on both sides of the Atlantic. Through its coverage of a broad range of modern topics (birth control, eugenics, sexual reform, naturism, and so forth), Estudios was part of a transnational network that connected militants, writers, scientists, doctors, and anarchist propagandists, and those who held revolutionary and progressive sensibilities. It had a stable and solid readership in the United States, with regular points of sales and distribution, and connections with propagandists, centers, and publications close to its main topics of interest.

We return to Mexico in this chapter, exploring the particular fallout for the psychiatrist Salvador Roquet after peyote was outlawed in Mexico in 1971. This ban grew out of circumstances that mirrored those in the United States: a growing fear among conservatives that non-indigenous youths were increasingly consuming drugs, as well as a sense that this marked a civilizational crisis. Hippy sensibilities offended older, middle-class Mexicans, who often rendered their disgust by lamenting that Mexican youths were, in effect, becoming Indian through their embrace of psychedelics. Dr. Roquet, who was himself no fan of the hippies and who insisted that many of his patients were former drug abusers, became a victim of this anxiety. Continuing to work with these drugs after they were banned, he relied on the goodwill of friends in the government to keep his practice viable. This arrangement collapsed in 1974, after an article in the magazine Tiempo accused Roquet of being a drug-pedaling degenerate (Roquet insisted that the article was a hit-piece, placed by enemies in the psychiatric profession who were jealous of his success). Roquet would spend several months in jail after being arrested in November 1974, but he was ultimately released without charge.

Between 1962 and 1971, a total of fifty-four composers from all across Latin America went to Buenos Aires to study classical music composition at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales, part of the Di Tella Institute. This chapter demonstrates that the practices, sounds, ideas, and attitudes that this community of creators and connoisseurs were calling “experimental” were a sign of not one thing but a cluster of things that included at least four different associations: electroacoustic music, unfamiliar instrumental compositions, live improvisations, and most importantly, a lived, embodied experience of being avant-garde in a way felt as authentic, valid, and truthful. Participation in the musical avant-garde meant not only composing within certain aesthetic ideals but also extending these ideals to everyday practices that directly affected the body. The four snapshots presented create a picture of the complex indexical cluster that was known as “experimental” at the time.