The Servers and the Served

Since the 1700s, people across South America have been entranced by yerba mate (literally, herbs in a cup). First introduced to the Spaniards by the native Guaraní people of Paraguay two centuries prior, this naturally caffeinated plant became one of South America’s most important colonial commodities. Indigenous laborers toiled to produce it in swampy forests, while Spanish and Jesuit traders made it an expected part of everyday life across most of South America. People from the Southern Cone up through the Peruvian Andes regularly paused to drink it together, nearly all of them slurping the hot infusion from the same cup and through the same bombilla (or filtered tube with a perforated end). European travelers, who had recently learned to drink individual cups of coffee and tea, were fascinated by the communal nature of this unique South America ceremony. They observed how a person called a cebador/a filled the mate with the ground-up yerba leaves, inserted the bombilla, poured in hot water, and drank it themselves before refilling and passing the mate around so that each person could drain it in turn.Due to the incorporative nature of the mate ritual, contemporary mate drinkers and scholars describe it as one of the region’s most egalitarian or democratic practices. For example, in the late 1990s, a trio of authors explained in their book Culture and Customs of Argentina, “to drink mate is to engage in the most democratic of Argentine traditions, one that blurs all socioeconomic distinctions and ethnic groups” (Foster et al. 1998: 41). Uruguayan scholar Daniel Vidart likewise expressed, “Mate, in its way, makes the social classes equal because it belongs to everyone” (Vidart 1953).Mate has long crossed socioeconomic and ethnic categories (along with gender ones). Early figures, however, expose the ritual’s less egalitarian side. Here, we will consider four visual representations that reveal the increased visibility of historical hierarchies of mate service. The first two emerge from colonial Lima, the capital city of the Viceroyalty of Peru, and the second pair from early nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, the former capital of the Viceroyalty of La Plata and future capital of the republic of Argentina. Due to their wealth and political power, these cities generated the most mate-related imagery, according to my database of some 1,500 visual depictions of yerba mate, which I gathered over the past decade from South American libraries, archives, markets, media outlets, art, and mate books, as well as digitized collections.In 1717, Frenchman Amédée François Frézier released the first known figure of the mate ritual in a book detailing his three-year-stay in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Frézier depicted an egalitarian mate-drinking scene [Figure 1]. In Lima, three women of Spanish descent in elegant robes gather together in an elaborate parlor around a large gleaming mate likely sweetened with sugar and perfumed with citrus. Just like a scientific drawing, Frézier included a key to his copper engraving for readers back in Europe unfamiliar with South America. Here, the seated woman (item C) purses her lips to “suck through” a long “silver pipe” the “tincture or decoction” made with the “herb of Paraguay,” he explained. The bowl from which she drinks (item D), Frézier continued, is “a gourd adorned with silver,” locally referred to as a “mate” (the Quechua word for cup). The steaming pot in the foreground is the only hint that the three women pictured here did not prepare this mate service themselves.Unlike future artists in the post-independence era, colonial painters did not include a mate server in the scene. And yet servants—likely of African and/or Indigenous descent—surely cleaned the room, brought the mate service out, filled the mate with yerba, and heated the water to infuse it. While their patrons and guests socialized over long rounds of mate, the mate server’s job was to test the first mate to make sure the bombilla was unclogged, replace the yerba when it had lost its flavor, and hustle back and forth to the kitchen to fetch the hot water.Like Frézier, future colonial artists of the mate ritual tended to depict the ritual as a leisurely, feminine pursuit. While men and women across the social strata avidly drank mate, the decision to feature elite women of Spanish descent highlighted the success of the colonial project in affording them the time to socialize in comfortable surroundings. For instance, in the 1770s three artists painted criollas (women of Spanish descent born in the New World), directly linking their identity with their mate drinking. These paintings belonged to the contemporary genre of types, made most recognizable in contemporary Casta (or caste) paintings that engaged in the quixotic mission of representing supposedly discrete ethnic and racial identities born in the New World. Couples and their offspring predominated in Casta paintings, but women stood on their own with a mate and not a man in these paintings. In 1774, for instance, artist Pedro M. (of unknown origins) composed a portrait of an ornately dressed married woman, generically described as “Sra. Criolla de Lima” (Mrs. Criolla of Lima) for a Chilean viceregal official [Figure 2]. The subject, a fair woman in an elaborate dress, stood next to a table with a claw-footed silver mate and bombilla, with a steaming kettle at her feet and the servant who prepared it omitted from the scene.After declaring independence from Spain, artists made a different choice by bringing the mate server into the composition. Most replaced the steaming pot with a person of color. In this way, artists and the elite families who commissioned their artwork visibly signaled the right for white people to dominate and be served by their supposed racial inferiors in new, purportedly race-blind republics. As the wars of independence in the Andean region cut off Peru’s access to yerba, most artists depicting mate drinking now focused on the increasingly powerful city of Buenos Aires.Charles Henri Pellegrini, who was born in Italy, raised in France, and moved to Buenos Aires, pioneered this trend by including a mate server of African descent in his depictions of elite tertulias (or social gatherings) in the early 1830s. Disseminated via the new technology of the lithograph, his depictions of Buenos Aires high society could now circulate beyond this group to members of the upwardly striving middle sectors. By focusing on one of Pellegrini’s paintings, we can see how his depiction of the mate ceremony allowed for a visible racial choreography of mate service. In his painting, “Bailando el minuet en casa de Escalada” (Dancing the minuet in the Escalada’s house), Pellegrini placed the servant in an interior doorway just outside the room [Figure 3]. This servant peeks her head out onto the party scene while holding a silver mate to her lips. As the mate server for the party, she might be taking the first sip out of a newly prepared mate to make sure the temperature of the water was hot and the straw unclogged and that the yerba tasted fresh before handing it to a guest. The servant’s positioning in the doorway also allowed for the possibility that she was taking a moment to herself to enjoy the mate. Or perhaps, she was observing the partygoers, several of whom (including the artist and two female guests) drain a mate as well. Given the size of the gathering, the guests needed more than one mate to share.Pellegrini’s colleague, César Hipólito Bacle, a Swiss immigrant, artist, and lithographer, also released a pair of lithographs in Argentina that featured two pale young ladies in a Buenos Aires parlor drinking mate together attended by a young, Black mate server in the early 1830s [Figure 4]. The two sisters tower above the boy, whose marginal position in the composition suggests his servile role is more important than his identity or appearance. Slavery dragged on for nearly a half century after independence in Argentina, and this young boy was likely a liberto, a young person legally obligated to serve their master until reaching adulthood. In homes like this one, Black and Brown servants made it possible for the families they worked for to mark their high status, entertain other elites, and enjoy being served mate (and other food and drink) rather than having to do it themselves.The visual history of the yerba mate ritual shows us how the work of the mate server became more visible in the transition from the colonial to the national era, which might seem surprising at first. Yet, while colonial elites’ experience and enjoyment of the mate ritual was likewise facilitated by the labor of servants of Indigenous and African descent, it became important to highlight their labor only during a period in which members of these demographics gained the possibility of greater rights in would-be nations. That artists and the elites who commissioned their paintings did so through their depictions of the mate ritual is even more telling. During this period, they pictured even one of the most communal and egalitarian of rituals as clearly hierarchal

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