We Have Come to Be Destroyed traces how indigenous ritual use of peyote shaped colonial conflict, religious persecution, and cultural survival in New Spain

Peyote use in colonial Mexico sits at the center of a long conflict over indigenous religion, healing, and power. Justin Jennings' We Have Come to Be Destroyed follows how Native communities used peyote in ritual and medicinal settings while Spanish authorities treated those practices as threats that justified surveillance, punishment, and religious repression. The history connects psychoactive plant use to conquest, evangelization, and the policing of spiritual life in New Spain. Peyote becomes more than a substance here - it marks a struggle over cultural continuity, sacred knowledge, and who had the authority to define legitimate medicine and religion. That framing makes the subject matter relevant well beyond colonial history. Peyote's record in the Americas shows how drug control, missionary violence, and indigenous resistance became tightly entangled, and how psychoactive traditions survived despite sustained attempts to eradicate them.