Yerba Mate: The Drink That Shaped a Nation

Abstract

Commodity histories have witnessed a boom in recent decades due to their subjects' analytical malleability and crossover popular appeal. The “social life” of a thing encompasses production, exchange, and consumption, use and meaning, value and hierarchy, opening up vast possibilities for historians investigating human behavior over time. Yet the monographs themselves are also commodities, reflecting shifting historiographical trends in scholarly production and consumption and their authors' multidisciplinary influences. Julia J. S. Sarreal's far-ranging account of Argentines' popular caffeinated beverage and marker of national identity spotlights yerba mate's fascinating trajectory from forest to farm and table, and from the nation's frontier (and neighboring Paraguay and Brazil) to its metropoles. Stretching from pre-Columbian to contemporary times, drawing on archives in Argentina, Paraguay, and Spain, and ranging over vast stretches of geographic, historical, and thematic terrain, this impressive study, like many valued commodities, is the product of painstaking labor.Although now the world's largest producer, consumer, and exporter of yerba mate, Argentina's path to preeminence has been as circuitous and conflicted as its process of nation-state formation. Many key themes in Argentine history, arrayed by Sarreal as the varied backdrops of yerba's meanderings, serve as explanation or context. The all-inclusive tour begins with an examination of the plant's Indigenous origins in the forests of South America, followed by analysis of the Jesuits' initial begrudging acceptance and subsequent commercialization of yerba through plantations, its use as a form of currency in the Río de la Plata and advantageousness to the Spanish crown as a source of colonial revenue and interregional integration, and the beverage's widespread cross-class appeal throughout the southern regions of South America and the Andes. For the nineteenth century, Sarreal tracks tensions between centralization and federalism, whereby domestic Argentine yerba production, hailing from the remote northeastern frontier, remained consigned to extraction in the wild. With the acceleration of immigration and agricultural development, local yerba production expanded through cultivation by a debt-ridden labor force, while the social anxieties begot by the massive influx of Europeans lent yerba—now glossed as criollo rather than Indigenous—a newfound valence of argentinidad (and for this reason, the beverage was heartily embraced by immigrant communities). Import substitution, commodity price controls, state regulatory boards, and consolidation of industrial processing further strengthened domestic yerba production and consumption.As Argentines increasingly reckoned with the marketers and specialists defining the “modern” standards of mid-twentieth-century daily life, yerba's credentials suffered. The beverage's Indigenous origins, leisurely method of communal consumption (steeping the leaves in hot water and imbibing the liquid by sharing a common vessel and straw, an activity worthy of its own verb: matear), and indispensability to rural and urban working-class diets (as both an analeptic and an instrument of sociability) transformed the colonial and nineteenth-century mainstay into a cultural lightning rod. Concerns with social status, public health, modernity, and cultural authenticity shadowed the drink (or, more accurately, the drinkers) in a nation forged through Indigenous genocide, riven by regional and class disparities, roiled by economic and political instability, and juggling competing narratives of purification and belonging. Wealthier urbanites came to disavow the beverage (at least publicly) due to its cultural associations and purportedly unsanitary mode of consumption. The postdictatorship lurch toward neoliberalism that buffeted the middle class, however, rekindled broader demand for yerba. Moreover, as an antioxidant and agent of commensality, yerba evoked a countercultural, homegrown authenticity that defied the homogenization of globalized capitalism and its industrial food systems.Methodologically, the book's focus oscillates over the course of nine chapters between production and consumption, as Sarreal ambidextrously draws on economic and cultural history in engaging a disparate primary source base that includes colonial and Jesuit chronicles, fiscal records, congressional debates, agricultural reports, traveler and immigrant accounts, Argentine and foreign advertisements, comic strips, novels, newspaper articles, photographs, and tango lyrics. In identifying a suggestive historical shift—namely, the drop in per capita yerba consumption in Argentina from roughly 8 kilos per person per year in 1948 to approximately 5 kilos in 1984—Sarreal underscores the stigmas of rusticity and working-class diet alongside the greater cultural cachet and affordability of coffee and tea. This reduced consumption level—which still ranks rather high, and not too far below the reported rebound of 6.4 kilos in 1994—may not have had a principally or consciously associational cause. As beverages serve to quench thirst, a more extensive discussion of the development of alternative drink cultures linked to industrialization and consumer capitalism (aside from coffee or tea), including the greater availability of beer, soft drinks, pasteurized milk and juices, and soda waters accommodating shifting, grab-and-go urban lifestyles and milieus, might have balanced the heavily semiotic analysis.In documenting as well the fitful efforts to commercialize yerba mate outside South America, Sarreal reveals the structural and attitudinal hindrances that militated against the greater globalization of the stimulant. Relatedly, yerba mate long remained in the shadows in the English-language scholarship on the history of soft drugs and stimulants. But things are changing. As Sarreal notes, yerba mate is now increasingly consumed as a cold beverage in Europe and the United States, marketed as a pick-me-up superfood with all the false trappings of Indigenous exoticization. And thanks to Sarreal's sweeping book, scholars of Latin America and of food and drugs now have a definitive study of yerba mate in Argentina, and a picture window on the nation's historical longue durée.

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