Sharing Yerba Mate

Recent years have been a boon for new English-language books about the revered South American stimulant yerba mate. Historians got not only the suggestive monograph reviewed here, but also Julia Sarreal's complementary Yerba Mate: The Drink That Shaped a Nation. As a veteran Latin American commodity historian, I applaud this recognition, since mate has long been a glaring research gap in the field. What explains mate's newfound celebrity? In part, no doubt, the appeal of academic studies of goods, consumption, and national identity across the Americas. I also suspect the effect of mate's recent spread beyond its origins as a Southern Cone tea into global energy drinks and café health teas (apart from mate's fascinating earlier twentieth-century chain of meanings to Druze laborers migrating between Buenos Aires and the Levant).Pite excels in highlighting mate's ever-shifting geographic, class, gender, and cultural usage patterns, from the early colonial era in Paraguay (out of Guaraní use of Indigenous ka'a leaf) up to the present. The introduction lays out the book's foundation in commodity, transnational, and cultural (“imagined community”) perspectives, as well as the book's novel sources. Chapter 1 establishes mate's colonial commodity transformation in Jesuit hands, including surprising Pacific coast consumption networks and ornate use among creole elites across the Viceroyalty of Peru. Chapter 2 follows the formation of national states in the Río de la Plata region, including mate's shifting racial connotations and Argentine elite backlash against its embrace by rustic followers of the caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas. Chapter 3 zeroes in on the hot lands of Paraguay (where mate is often consumed as chilled tereré beverage) as the site of nineteenth-century mate cultivation and collection under highly exploitative labor conditions, where the disruptions of both the War of the Triple Alliance and, later, the Chaco War marked mate supply turning points. Chapter 4 pivots to turn-of-the-twentieth-century Argentina and Uruguay and the shift from mate consumption by urban creoles to its identification with ruralism and adoption by new immigrants, in contrast to the civilizing cachet of coffee and imported tea among elites. Chapter 5 compares Argentine and Brazilian mate markets through the 1960s, as Argentine import substitution shifted its production epicenter to northeast Misiones Province and growing commercialization enveloped mate in modern branding, labor, and trade politics. Chapter 6, in contrast, recounts urban Argentine and Uruguayan mate cultures, where public consumption expanded with adoption of the industrially produced thermos and the decline of the traditional bombilla and its rituals. Beginning in the 1970s, mate took on distinctive political shadings (worker and student resistance to the Uruguayan dictatorship, for example); from the 1990s on in neoliberal Argentina, it has acquired an unintended association with the urban poor and youth. An epilogue traces myriad recent developments in mate consumption, including the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on customarily communal mate.As this summary suggests, Sharing Yerba Mate covers a great deal of ground, through a sinuous yet barely exhaustive series of case comparisons and illustrative periodizations. It sometimes therefore wanders. Its forte is demonstrating, usually through a wide range of visual sources, the malleability of mate's status, meanings, and associations, be they nationalist, regional, gendered, classed, or colored by race (such as it is in the Río de la Plata). Pite's stated intent is to use a transnational lens to dethrone the common notion of mate as a particularly or essentially Argentine national good. However, the book never quite clinches how a transnational mate—“dirty laundry” in the “contact zone,” to use Claudio Lomnitz's phrase—colors the national politics of identity. Shifting moral and sanitary perceptions of the shared bombilla versus individualized, private consumption is another recurring motif. Despite today's attachment to mate in Argentina and Uruguay, its consumption is not an ancient tradition in either country. To my mind, mate's malleability of meanings resembles other long-shifting circuits of colonized Indigenous practices, such the Mexican pulque-mescal-tequila complex, Andean coca leaf, and Brazilian guaraná soft drinks.The book's strength lies in its rich visuals: mate's changing representations in plates and engravings from travelers’ reports, rare lithographs and illustrations, postcards, photographs, posters, modern advertisements, even abstract art. Pite provides ample visual or art history–style analysis in the book, so much so that one wishes she had been explicit about its visual or object-centered methodologies, and their possibilities and limits. For example, is representation always the same as what we deem identity? Accenting the book's visual perspective could have lent it greater cohesion. Conversely, there is a dearth of sustained social history, traditional archival sourcing, or statistical data in the book. Without harder evidence, how are we to gauge certain trends (for example, mate's early embrace by creole elites in colonial Peru, or the impact of modern authoritarian military regimes on working-class users)?Finally, I am a little perplexed by an otherwise sober scholarly book's hyperbolic title. Is yerba mate really “South America's most popular drink”? Did it really “define a region”? Nonetheless, it's wonderful to suddenly enjoy this wealth of published works about yerba mate, an emblematic regional stimulant. And the spotlight on mate may finally compel writers and editors everywhere to stop spelling it wrong (it's mate, not maté!)

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• Interview with Jeffrey Pilcher

  Open Access•Adriana Salay Leme, Rômulo De Paula Andrade•Estudos Históricos (Rio de Janeiro•2024

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