stimulating consumption: yerba mate myths, markets, and meanings from conquest to present

Stimulating Consumption: Yerba Mate

Myths, Markets, and Meanings from

Conquest to Present

CHRISTINE FOLCH

The Graduate Center, CUNY

Before Najla passes me the gourd brimming with yerba mate, she makes sure to

wipe the end of the metal drinking straw with the fragrant leaves of a local

herb—for the flavor and to clean it she explains in her Venezuela-accented

Spanish.1 We sit under the welcome shade of a veranda, each taking our turn

to drain the gourd and then returning it to Najla to fill once more with warm

water from the teakettle. After splashing a pitcher of cold water on the concrete

to cool it, her husband offers us a rare privilege: the liberty to ask any question

we wish about the Druze religion. The Druze, an offshoot from eleventh-

century Shi’a Islam, are endogamous and usually reveal the tenets of their

faith only to those born within their community. Though we are speaking a

mixture of English and Spanish, we are all guests at the Lebanese mountaintop

home of Najla’s deceased grandfather, an important Druze warlord during the

civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. Najla and her husband are vacationing from

their home in the Persian Gulf and staying with her unmarried female cousins,

our hosts.

The Druze acquired the habit of drinking yerba mate, a stimulating infusion

made from steeping the leaves of a holly-like tree indigenous to South America,

as a result of transnational migration to the Southern Cone during the twentieth

century. Though Lebanon and Syria are the largest consumers of yerba outside

South America, within the Levant it is associated primarily with the Druze.

Acknowledgments: I wish to thank Marc Edelman, John Collins, Fernando Coronil, NathanielBarksdale, Jane Rubio, Rola Ayash, Rabih Nassar, the members of the New York consortium work-shop “Works in Progress in Latin American Society and History” (WiPLASH), and four anon-ymous CSSH reviewers for their valuable comments and critical suggestions on previous drafts.Shortcomings that remain are solely my own.

1 For the purpose of this piece, I use both yerba and mate to refer to yerba mate. I also eliminatewriting the accent over the “e,” a convention in English to mark the “e” as non-silent but which, inSpanish, would change the syllabic stress of the word. Note that all translations are my own save forthe Arabic and for those found in English-language texts.

Comparative Studies in Society and History 2010;52(1):6–36.0010-4175/10 $15.00 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History, 2010doi:10.1017/S0010417509990314

6

Justo

Highlight

As the interlude with Najla showed, mate consumption follows a highly ritua-

lized performance that retains many elements from its consumption in South

America. For example, the word for the drinking straw, bombilla, comes

from the Spanish, but instead of the South American term, the Arabic word

for “gourd,” qar‘a, is used for the drinking vessel.2 For the Druze, drinking

mate is at once a leisure and domestic activity. It is taken by women at home

during the day while the men of the family are at work, or, as we see from

Najla, conducted by women when in mixed company. How a beverage indigen-

ous to South America and, indeed, indexical of Southern Cone identity and

largely unknown outside that region, has in the last century come to be

widely consumed in the Middle East (and increasingly in North America and

Europe) is all the more notable given its origins, and earlier, failed attempts

at exporting the leaf.

In 1592, the criollo governor of Paraguay, Hernando Arias de Saavedra,

searched the looted bags of indigenous Guaranı defeated in a military campaign.

The victors came across a powder the Guaranı called ka’a.3 In this manner, Eur-

opeans supposedly first encountered yerba mate.4 Though this apocryphal

account seems to have been invented out of whole cloth by yerba enthusiasts

as nineteenth-century propaganda for European consumers, it is true that soon

after their 1537 entrance into what is now Paraguay the Spaniards quickly

acquired the habit from the natives. In the course of a few decades they expanded

the use of yerba throughout the southern part of their empire, from Potosı to San-

tiago de Chile to Buenos Aires.5 At the turn of the seventeenth century two other

stimulating infusions, tea and coffee, were still unknown in Europe, and so all

three products entered the European world at approximately the same time.

All three delivered a hitherto unknown substance, caffeine, which was to

change the social, physiological, financial, and imperial face of Europe. But

why did yerba not take in the same way as tea, coffee, and cacao?

To the bitter disappointment of South American yerba producers, multiple

efforts to introduce yerba to a broader public generally foundered until the

later twentieth century. This article examines this recent about-face by

linking a diachronic analysis of market to a diachronic analysis of meaning.

To do so, I treat secondary documents as primary documents; look at books,

pamphlets, and other advertising material oriented toward an audience

outside of South America; examine texts meant for a South American audience

that speak about yerba’s relationship with the rest of the world; and set all of

2 This may be because, while the word for “gourd” existed in Arabic prior to the introduction ofyerba, the capped and perforated metal drinking straw, the bombilla, a key yerba implement, onlyaccompanied the South American drinking ceremony.

3 Archivo Nacional, Asuncion, Paraguay 1865. Ka’a is the Guaranı for “plant,” just as yerba isSpanish for “plant” or “herb” (in other contexts, the word may also be written hierba).

4 Le Mate ou The du Paraguay 1914: 4.5 Archivo Nacional, Asuncion, Paraguay 1682.

S T I M U L AT I N G C O N S U M P T I O N 7

this against a botanical and historical description of yerba. Though I focus on

documentary and archival sources, I draw also upon recent ethnographic

research consisting of participant-observation of mate consumption among

South American expatriates in New York, the Druze in Lebanon, and through-

out Paraguay, as well as interviews with yerba vendors in Paraguay and cafe

operators in New York and Lebanon.6 Yerba has been critical to the economic

and political formation of Paraguay, a subject documented and analyzed in

works that uncover its historical significance, most notably by Lopez, Blinn

Reber, and Whigham.7 Nevertheless, there is a curious dearth of scholarship

on the contemporary use of yerba in both South America and the Middle East.

Consumption is the embodied interface of political economy and symbolic

significance and it both reveals and complicates the interplay between econ-

omic forces and the choices of individuals and groups. Following the analytical

model of tracing “commodity chains” beyond national economies suggested in

Topik, Marichal, and Frank,8 I argue that only by looking at both the historical

development of yerba’s market and the way yerba has been used can we under-

stand the positioning of yerba toward a wider audience. As it moved beyond the

indigenous community to European colonizers, encountered effective barriers

in Europe and North America, accidentally adhered to migration between

South America and the Middle East, and finally benefited from intentional ven-

tures in the global north, yerba has been re-signified into new representations.

These reflect changes in its political economy, shifting from a Spanish crown

monopoly product to being a free market competitor with other “drug

foods.”9 By examining quantifiable factors (economic and institutional) along-

side non-quantifiable aspects of cultural contexts10 through which people make

sense of and give meaning to the product, we can begin to explain why yerba

failed for centuries to penetrate the non-Latin American world, and what

changes have engendered new possibilities in the present day, as we trace the

commodity’s path through an alternative consumption/production circuit that

evades the global north.

Put simply, “yerba mate” is a different thing in different places, even if the

imbibing ritual looks the same (although changes in this are often one clear

sign of differences). In this sense yerba is a fetish—not in the sense that it is

false, but rather in that it is a changing meeting of social relations and material

properties. Furthermore, any implication that the former are malleable whereas

the latter are fixed is, as we shall see, erroneous. In considering the way yerba

6 The ethnographic research on which this is based was conducted in Asuncion, Paraguay in Julyand August 2007; Beirut and Aley, Lebanon in July 2005 and September and October 2007; andNew York City from February to June 2007.

7 Lopez 1974; Blinn Reber 1985; and Whigham 1991.8 Topik, Marichal, and Frank 2006.9 Mintz 1985: 180.10 Bauer 2001; Smith 1992.

8 C H R I S T I N E F O L C H

is fetishized differently in its circulation(s), and thus exploring the mystical

qualities with which it is imbued as a result of the combination of its chemical

composition and its social use, we treat seriously the somatic substance of

yerba as we meaningfully connect seemingly disparate social processes across

space and time.

A P O L I T I C A L - E C O N OM I C H I S T O RY O F E U R O P E ’ S E N C O U N T E R

W I T H Y E R B A

The Colonial Encounter

Yerba mate (Ilex paraguariensis) is a small tree native to the humid woodland

drained by the Parana River in eastern Paraguay. Like coffee and tea, yerba

contains caffeine as well as other psychoactive alkaloids: theophylline (primar-

ily found in tea, to a much lesser extent in coffee) and theobromine (a non-

addictive stimulant which, like chocolate, it contains in greater quantities

than either coffee or tea). When raised from seed, whether in its original

forest habitat or in today’s highly organized plantations, Ilex paraguariensis

requires at least four years of growth from the initial planting before the first

harvest of leaves and tender branches; after that it may be trimmed every

two to four years. At first it yields one or two kilograms of yerba, but after

several decades a plant may produce up to one hundred kilograms per

harvest.11 Harvesters clip, by hand, only the leaves and softer branches, and

gather the yerba into a pile that will be dried and processed in the immediate

vicinity of the trees. Within twenty-four hours of reaping, the newly cut

yerba is flash dried through direct heat (the step called sapecado) and then

toasted through indirect heat (the step called secado, traditionally in a special-

ized oven called the barbacua), and finally coarsely ground (canchada or

mborobire). Yerba canchada may be consumed as is, but frequently it is

aged for at least six months before being more finely ground (molida). At

this point the formal processing of the yerba is complete; the remaining steps

in Ilex paraguariensis’ journey from plant to drink are taken by the consumer

as part of the consumption ritual.

To prepare (cebar) the beverage, the loose powder is typically steeped in hot

water in a drinking vessel, often made from a gourd but also from bamboo or

the horns or hooves of cattle, called a mate12 or a guampa, and strained through

a bombilla, the drinking straw. In Argentina, Uruguay, and the Brazilian state of

Rio Grande do Sul, yerba is almost exclusively drunk warm, but in Paraguay’s

sweltering summer months Paraguayans drink terere,13 yerba mate made with

11 Ferreira 1902; Roger 1906.12 The terms matero and yerbatero are also used. Mate comes from the Quechua word mati,

which means “cup.”13 Onomatopoetic in Guaranı for the sound made by drawing the liquid through the bombilla

(J. A. Caceres, personal communication, July 2007). Note the persistence of indigenous terms.


cold water and often mixed with yuyos, herbs and roots used in traditional

remedies. Though there is disagreement about this in some of the sources,

most historians and archival sources assert that indigenous groups had discov-

ered the plant’s uses as a stimulant years before the Conquest. Like users of the

more controversial coca to the northwest, they chewed the leaves and also

FIGURE 1 Early-nineteenth-century lithograph of Jose Gaspar Francia, ruler of Paraguay (1814–1840), mate in hand. Artist unknown. With kind permission from CAV/Museo del Barro, Asuncion,Paraguay. Author’s photograph.


drank it as a liquid brewed from the leaves and stems.14 If some Paraguayan

accounts are correct, it seems that a pre-colonial trade in yerba existed. Rem-

nants of yerba powder found in Incan tombs suggest the plant was linked to

prestige.15

At the time of European contact, the indigenous people of inland South

America already had extensive knowledge about how to locate and harvest

the best trees. The many different varietals of yerba were found in the wild

in such abundance that the precolonial population did not have to turn to agri-

culture to supply their needs.16 Unlike tea, coffee, and to a lesser degree cho-

colate, yerba proved much more difficult to cultivate and therefore harder to

transplant to other regions more accessible to European and North American

markets. According to common colonial wisdom, seeds are encased in a

shell so hard that germination is impossible unless the seeds have passed

through the intestines of birds, where the acidity wears down the lining to

allow the seedling to burst through the case.17 Because of Paraguay’s soil

conditions, tree types, climate, and even processing techniques, its yerba

long enjoyed the reputation as the best in the world, to the consternation of

the country’s neighbors.18

Though the Spanish government first encountered the plant, European fam-

iliarity with yerba came via the Jesuits, notably through the eighteenth-century

accounts of Fathers Jose Sanchez Labrador and Martin Dobrizhoffer’s experi-

ences in Paraguay, as well as through the order’s commercial networks.

Because Paraguay lacked the mineral wealth, population density, and organized

state societies of Peru and Mexico, the Spanish crown was more willing to cede

(at least at the beginning) responsibility and authority to various church orders,

chiefly the Jesuits.19 Shortly after founding Asuncion in 1537, the Spanish rea-

lized that yerba trade could provide revenue for the crown. Yerba production

took the place of gold and silver mining in meeting Spanish tribute require-

ments (the mita), and yerba even took the place of money in exchange.20

This was not merely a convenient substitution—according to Whigham,

because yerba sprang from the earth without human intervention, Spanish

law treated it as a mineral.21 Just as mine labor decimated the Indian popu-

lation, yerba harvesting disrupted the indigenous social system as workers

were forced to leave their communities and relocate into the hinterland to

14 Girola 1915: 3.15 Archivo Nacional, Asuncion, Paraguay 1682.16 Levy 1890: 184.17 Dobrizhoffer 1822: 107. This likely points to the key roles played by birds in the mythic

imaginary of Paraguay’s indigenous community. See Escobar 2007.18 Blay Pigrau 1918: 4; Levy 1890: 184; Daumas 1930: 17.19 Dobrizhoffer 1822: 2.20 Archivo Nacional, Asuncion, Paraguay 1659.21 Whigham 1991: 14.


collect it. They were even called mineros (mine workers). Into this stepped the

Jesuits. The crown had issued new directives to stave off the population

destruction wrought by conquistadores intent upon extracting as much

surplus as they could in as little time as possible. (Since wealth acquired in

the Spanish New World generally was not inheritable, enjoying the benefits

of the conquest frequently involved working the Indians to death.) With this,

and with a call to fulfill the moral mandate to instruct the natives in the teach-

ings of the church, the Jesuits set about correcting what they saw as the

excesses of a worldly enterprise.

As part of their work in the indigenous communities in that region, in the

1580s the Jesuits endeavored to create an institution tailored to local

FIGURE 2 Nineteenth-century cattle-horn guampas with cavalry themed embossing, for use whileriding. With permission from Centro Cultural Citibank/Museo del Barro, Asuncion, Paraguay.Author’s photo.


specificities, both linguistic (e.g., using Guaranı as the official language of their

outreach) and geographic. They organized (into reducciones) Guaranı missions

under their tutelage and jurisdiction, and thereby exercised control over their

labor. Many of these missions turned to yerba production, and later cultivation,

in yerbales (yerba orchards) as a source of livelihood. To underscore the advan-

tages they saw in this arrangement, in 1774 Jesuit priest and Spanish naturalist

Jose Sanchez Labrador explained in his memoirs that in the labor system gov-

erned by the colonial authorities the Indians found themselves pledged again,

“and all the more because the masters make them pay for the knife they lend

them to cut the yerba, for the use of the pot in which they cook their food,

and so on, such that the miserable workers return to their homes naked and

in debt. . .. With these setbacks, their destitute wives and families live almost

entirely without protection.”22

It was in the reducciones that yerba was first cultivated, in a process that was

at times shrouded in a sort of mystery that speaks to both the worldview of

those writing about yerba and to the process and limitations of written knowl-

edge itself. Because yerba grew wild, under the colonial labor system workers

left their homesteads and communities and plunged deep into the forests to find

new trees that were untouched, a pattern of expedition that separated families

and frequently cost the overworked laborers their lives.23 In order to prevent

this, the Jesuits attempted to create yerba plantations in the reducciones them-

selves. The general consensus of later writers is that the Jesuits discovered a

way to cultivate the plant but that, in keeping with a common secular

Spanish suspicion about the order, they guarded the secret closely, and with

their expulsion in 1767 their knowledge vanished with them.24

Relations between the Jesuits and other colonials in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries were tense, to say the least. Even as the Jesuits accused

encomenderos (the colonials entrusted with administering plots of land and

the natives that lived on them) of great neglect and cruelty, they were them-

selves accused of greedily withholding important secrets. In the past century

there has been a general rehabilitation of their reputation, a move that serves

to exculpate European intervention in South America while relegating the

Jesuits to a distant past. A pamphlet written by the Pan American Union extol-

ling the virtues of the beverage (to an American readership) two decades after

yerba was once more successfully grown in plantations explained that the

Jesuits, “a very observant and thoughtful class of men,” must have observed

the natural germination process and found some way to mimic the softening

action of passing through the digestive tracts of birds.25 Leon Roger even

22 Quoted in Furlong 1991: 114.23 Lopez 1974: 500.24 Muello 1946: 47; Le Mate ou The du Paraguay 1914: 4.25 Albes 1916: 4.


claims that the Jesuits fed seeds to barnyard birds to wear down the hard

casing.26 But because they did not divulge this technique, the industry of culti-

vation was lost when they were expelled “from Brazil.” The story is much the

same in Argentina. When economist Ernesto Daumas analyzed the situation of

national yerba production, he too asserted that only faint traces remained of the

Jesuit yerbales, the tradition of cultivation having been lost in Argentina until

1903.27 Brazil had succeeded earlier, in the 1890s, in developing yerba planta-

tions in southern Mato Grosso.28

The Business of Yerba

After the Jesuits developed their method of successfully planting yerba orch-

ards, production increased dramatically, as did income from yerba sales.

Although Jesuits were accused of protecting their monopoly by selling yerba

ground so finely that consumers throughout the Spanish empire would not

know what tree the leaves came from, Father Sanchez Labrador’s straightfor-

ward and botanically detailed memoirs give a different story.29 Following a

precise description of the yerba tree, in 1774 he gave the same account of

FIGURE 3 Nineteenth-century mates (made of wood and gourds) capped with embossed metal.With permission from Centro Cultural Citibank/Museo del Barro, Asuncion, Paraguay. Author’sphoto.

26 Roger 1906: 11.27 Daumas 1930: 7.28 Jamieson 2001: 279.29 Quoted in Furlong 1991: 117.


yerba harvesting as his fellow Jesuit Dobrizhoffer30 described a few years later:

in order to grow yerba from the seed it was necessary to first wash freshly

plucked berries in several baths of clean water. This process released a

viscous lather that Sanchez Labrador compared to soap. After this, the seeds

could be dried and later planted. Without the washings, he explained, the

humidity could not penetrate the hard resinous shell and the seeds merely

rotted in the soil. To the charge of trade secrecy, he retorted that since all the

residents of Paraguay were familiar with yerba trees, used their leaves, and

ground them into coarse powder that they later sold, and since the Jesuits

had learned about yerba from the Spanish themselves, “It’s a good secret,

surely—something known in a whole province.”31

A more accurate accusation of unfair business practices targeted the Jesuit

violation of production limits.32 In order to maintain a privileged status that

allowed them to avoid most crown tax requirements, the Jesuits had agreed

in 1664 to cap their yerba exports at 12,000 arrobas annually (one arroba

equaled about 25 pounds, so 12,000 arrobas was about 150 toneladas, or

138 long tons). Colonists, who had to pay many more taxes on yerba, argued

that the Jesuits exceeded their limit and gained an unfair competitive advan-

tage. To exculpate themselves, the order had all their records examined in

Asuncion, proving definitively that at no time from 1664 to 1678 did they

exceed the 12,000-arroba ceiling.33 The inquiry, however, did not address

any trade the Jesuit missions had directly with Buenos Aires since they were

located closer to that yerba consuming center, unmonitored by Asuncion.

Though yerba was initially raised to meet crown tributary requirements, with

the colonial harvesting and the Jesuit yerbal system production increased such

that a trade in yerba spread throughout the Spanish New World. Tensions

between Jesuits and other colonists came to a head and led to the expulsion

of 1767, partly motivated by a desire to get hold of the lucrative yerbales in

the Parana region and seize control of Indian labor.34 But because mismanage-

ment and harsher treatment followed, yerba production began to decline in the

late eighteenth century as Indians fled reducciones, leaving a population that

was only a fraction of that of earlier times. After Paraguayan independence

in the early nineteenth century, the new government sought to fill its coffers

by taking control of the yerba industry. It did so by “liberating” the indigenous

groups from colonial land structures and appropriating the land so that, by

1850, the state of Paraguay owned more than 95 percent of all the national

territory.35 Here Lopez-Alvez argues, in a Charles Tilly-esque manner, that

30 Dobrizhoffer 1822: 106.31 Quoted in Furlong 1991: 118.32 Lopez 1974: 499–508.33 Lopez 1976: 56.34 Lopez 1976: 162–63.35 Carron et al. 2005: 24.


Paraguayan state formation, alone in Latin America, followed a coercion-

intensive model where the lack of a port for revenues meant that the state

turned to a kind of state-controlled slavery for income: the indigenous popu-

lation working in yerbales.36 Despite efforts to export to European markets,

marked by an 1853 trip to the continent by future president Francisco Solano

Lopez, further government mismanagement coupled with the devastation of

the War of the Triple Alliance (1865–1870), and the ensuing loss of yerba-

producing territory, resulted in a shift in production such that by the end of

the nineteenth century Brazil had become the major producer of yerba.37 But

Brazil turned to coffee production in the early twentieth century and yerba pro-

duction declined drastically in the 1930s, allowing Argentina to overtake it as

the world’s top producer and consumer.

Since the “rediscovery” of yerba plantations, Argentina, Brazil, and Para-

guay have attempted to expand their markets with renewed vigor. In keeping

with Brazil’s mid-twentieth-century push to industrialize, Brazilian scientists

even sought to promote chemical and industrial uses for the plant beyond its

stimulant effect.38 Argentina has taken a mildly effective protectionist stance

to guard the livelihood of its yerba farmers, who have to compete with

cheaper, higher-quality Paraguayan yerba smuggled across the border. With a

saturated market in the Southern Cone and with the enticing examples of

other “drug foods” such as coffee and tea, the next logical step was to introduce

yerba to new markets, namely Europe and the United States. There were mul-

tiple attempts to awaken northern interest, culminating in a turn-of-the-century

flurry of pamphlets written in French and English, exhibits at conferences, and

advertisements and articles in important trade magazines accompanied by sup-

portive letters from consular and medical authorities. But despite these efforts,

by the 1930s frustrated marketers were perplexed: “When can we expect an

increase in consumption? The United States and France have proven them-

selves impervious to all temptation.”39 Archeologist Ross W. Jamieson can

claim, “Yerba mate was never introduced to the European market—perhaps

because it only gained commercial prominence in Spanish America after

1700, long after tea, coffee and cacao had become available in Europe.”40

But yerba consumption was not wholly unknown or unattractive to

Europeans and North Americans; rather it would be better to say that yerba

failed to take hold in Europe and North America. For purposes of comparison,

36 Lopez-Alvez 2000: 158.37 Blinn Reber 1985: 50–51; Whigham 1991: 55. The war, which saw the death of 90 percent of

Paraguay’s male population, effectively put an end to Paraguay’s attempt at an independent andautonomous capitalist development by forcing economic dependence on its neighbors. SeeWhite 1978.

38 Raoul 1946.39 Daumas 1930: 31.40 Jamieson 2001: 277.


chocolate was introduced to Europe in 1544 by Spain, though only in 1634 was

the Spanish monopoly broken, resulting in increased production and consump-

tion. Coffee came to Venice in the 1640s, and more than a century earlier in

Constantinople. And tea arrived in Amsterdam in 1610, though as late as

1658 it was still widely unknown, since a London coffeehouse could still adver-

tise it as a novel and unheard-of product.41 Though both owed their origins and

exoticness to “the Orient,” tea was spread primarily through a ritual, whereas

coffee was spread through an institution, the coffeehouse, underscoring how

commodities may insert themselves into new audiences through a variety of

vectors. Coffeehouses, where men gathered to socialize, read, and share

news, moved westward from Turkey through Europe, carrying with them a

series of products and practices, of which coffee drinking was only one.

Yerba production and export, in fact, coincided neatly with these other stimu-

lant beverages. From both material artifacts and written documents we know

that Europe had contact with yerba. Paraguay’s Casa de la Independencia,

an Asuncion museum celebrating independence from Spain, showcases a

finely worked silver mate cup and a gold and silver bombilla, both made in

Europe in the eighteenth century. Father Sanchez Labrador writes in 1774,

“In Spain and in Portugal, many drink yerba . . . in Italy, with the arrival of

the Jesuits, many persons of distinction have [also] drunk it.”42 Thomas

Ewbank in 1856, writing a mix of travel literature and early ethnography,

went so far as to claim that in Europe the knowledge of “tea”-drinking came

from South America fully half a century before the “Chinese infusion”

appeared.43 And even much later, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in

Chicago featured an exhibit called “Man and His Occupation,” which displayed

“methods of collecting and preparing yerba mate [sic] or Paraguayan tea,”

including “the different kinds of yerba cups, gourds, calabashes, and bombillas

used for drinking the tea,” as well as “methods of preparing guarana, agua-

diente [sic], chichi, and other beverages.”44

Yerba and other “Drug” Beverages

It was neither for want of promoters nor merely for unfortunate timing that

yerba’s story differs from those of coffee, tea, and chocolate. Tea and coffee

drinking were not cemented as common European practices until the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries.45 Both beverages first entered Europe as elite luxury

41 Tea and Coffee Trade Journal 1905: 14, 15. There are multiple dates given for the introduc-tion of coffee to Europe (Constantinople): 1454 by Ottoman Turks or 1511 by Sultan Selim I, orperhaps in the 1550s with the establishment of the first European coffee house. See Kipple2007; Weinberg and Bealer 2002.

42 Furlong 1991: 118.43 Ewbank 1856: 199.44 International Bureau of the American Republics 1891: 328.45 Schivelbusch 1992.


goods rather than as the working class staples they became by the end of the

nineteenth century. But other factors help explain why yerba did not catch

on in Europe (and subsequently North America) in the way that tea and

coffee did. While yerba cannot be understood outside of the context of the

other caffeine drinks being introduced to Europe at that time, neither can it

be understood outside of the context of empire.

Jankowiak and Bradburd attempt to connect the development of the global

capitalist market to the spread of “drugs” that occurred concomitantly with Euro-

pean colonial expansion, and demonstrate that the pairing was more than

casual.46 They argue that there was a progression as the instrumentality of

those drugs changed with different configurations between their physical proper-

ties and the labor environment. Whereas in early stages of contact drugs were

used to force people into relations of dependency with European trading “part-

ners,” once the ability to control labor could be otherwise secured, the utility

of drugs shifted to intensifying the amount of labor extracted from workers.

Moreover, as the kind of labor changed from agriculture and mining to industry,

there was a shift from numbing drugs (alcohol, marijuana, opium) used to deaden

the boredom and physical discomfort associated with hard labor to stimulants

(coffee and tea) with the opposite effect of heightening alertness and sobriety.

While this is a useful framework, yerba offers a different perspective. It is not

introduced to the population of Paraguay, nor is it replaced by a quicker-

growing stimulant—the population does not undergo factory-based industrial-

ization and still suffers under hard physical labor. This raises questions about

when it is possible to replace an indigenous stimulant. Here the example of

coca may also be instructive since both were stimulants used in Potosı to inten-

sify mine labor after the Spanish Conquest. Though indigenous to the region

near Potosı, under the Spanish coca production was increased specifically to

meet the needs of exacting mine labor. Yerba use was also introduced, presum-

ably with similar intent, but after time it faded into a memory held only on

archival sales receipts, suggesting that a local (and, in this case, faster-growing)

stimulant is not easily substitutable by another.

Tea came under the control of monopolistic companies such as the British

East India Company, whose internal structures and external orientation were

constructed according to a profit-maximizing capitalist logic—hence the

move of production from China to India, and the infamous opium trade.

Coffee, though it entered Europe through the structure of the coffeehouse,

also restructured coffee-producing regions according to a similar logic, as

they were incorporated into the world market, this time under a free trade ideol-

ogy. According to Hobsbawm, coffee was the first of the caffeinated beverages

not controlled by a unified colonial or imperial trading bloc.47

46 Jankowiak and Bradburd 2003.47 Roseberry 1995: 10.


Within the Spanish empire, yerba was developed first for royal tribute and

secondly for local trade, rather than according to the economic directives

of investors and shareholders.48 Like chocolate, another crown monopoly

whose export was severely curtailed by royal decree, prior to independence

there would have been strict limitations on the amount it was legal to trade

outside the empire. This left smuggling as the only option, one that would

have raised the price of a mildly addictive stimulant uncomfortably high.

Spanish colonial rule was encumbered differently than that of the British and

the French because of its ideological dependence on the church as a justification

for rule. Though church and crown were often allied, their sources of legitima-

tion were in practice quite different, and they frequently clashed in ways that

had economic effects, for example, over the different taxation structures for

Jesuit versus secular yerba exports. Though the colonial government limited

the exportation of Jesuit yerba to 12,000 arrobas (150 toneladas) per annum,

during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries production increased steadily

until exports evened off at about 600 tons per annum at the time of the Jesuit

expulsion.49

Economic structures within the Spanish empire combined with features of

the European market to stall the market success of yerba. Coffee and tea inter-

ests worked to create expanding niches for their products and presumably acted

against nascent competition from yerba. Father Sanchez Labrador’s apologetic

writings on yerba address not only its botanical and the agronomic aspects, but

also tackle the competitive discourse about yerba. “They have said in Europe,”

he wrote,

that the use of yerba causes a loss of color in the face and tinges them with pallor. Thosewho hoped to establish the use of Oriental Tea have invented this so that the use of yerbamight fall, as it had begun to take flight. And so, the majority of Peru, Chile, Tucuman,all these provinces, as well as many people from Spain and Portugal are accustomed tothis drink [i.e., yerba] and they all retain rosy faces and such beauty that the defect ofwhich yerba is accused is purely false. Oriental Tea, Coffee from Turkey, and AmericanChocolate also have defects. Nevertheless these beverages triumphed over their critics,their praise resting on the continued experience of their good qualities.50

Yerba’s early market was constrained by a number of factors. Unlike tea,

coffee, and chocolate, it did not transplant easily, thus making it harder to

grow in territories more accessible to naval transportation. The Spanish

empire’s economic and political organization differed significantly from

that of the British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese empires. As mentioned

above, yerba production was primarily oriented toward royal tribute rather

than to the streamlining goals of a market economy. And once participating

48 Whigham 1991: 16.49 Jamieson 2001: n. 24.50 Quoted in Furlong 1991: 119–20.


in a market filled with competitors, yerba faced another series of challenges

from other rivals, namely that its marketers did not sufficiently distinguish it

from coffee or tea but instead positioned it as a mere substitute. By the end of

the nineteenth century, coffee and tea had become so fixed in the European

and North American diets and the protectorate of entrenched business inter-

ests that all efforts to shoehorn yerba into the market failed. Not until the

twentieth century did a new market reality arise that created a space for

yerba mate.

I N P R A I S E O F T H E P L A N T

Cielito, cielo que sı

guardense su chocolate,

aquı somos puros indios

y solo tomamos mate.

——Bartolome Hidalgo, ca. 181051

Yerba’s market cannot be separated from the symbolic significance and moral

economy in which it has operated—what I refer to with the shorthand

“meaning.” This meaning is by no means homogenous or static. Fernando

Coronil, reflecting on Ortiz’s masterwork Cuban Counterpoint, complicates

the notion of reification.52 In treating sugar and tobacco as historical actors,

Coronil argues, Ortiz demonstrates that commodities are not merely the

results of human productivity but that they are actually forces that bend back

upon history, shaping and constraining it. This “counterfetishism” reveals the

interwoven nature of commodities as their material qualities (in the case of

yerba, its chemical composition) are inextricably linked to economic structures

and symbolic interpretations. Mate consumption has been explained and

described by its users and producers differently over time, and this is as

much due to the changing identities of its users and shifts in its economic

context as it is to the changing discourse of yerba’s critics. Indigenous subal-

terns, post-independence merchants, and North Atlantic tourists have had to

respond to different value systems and concerns when they speak of yerba

and, in so doing, have altered those systems.

When Europeans first encountered yerba, the frame of reference they had for

popularly consumed brewed beverages was alcohol, primarily in the form of

beer and wine. And so, when they saw that local Indians used yerba habitually

(since it contains caffeine, it is chemically addictive in addition to being

51 “Little darling, you keep your chocolate, here we’re all Indians and only drink mate.” FromUruguayan poet Bartolome Hidalgo’s “Dialogos satıricos,” where Hidalgo, a gaucho and memberof the armed guard, greets the Conde de Casa-Flores, who is on a mission on behalf of FerdinandVII in the Americas. Recorded in Peralto 1950. The “cielito” is a pre-Independence folkloricmusical style (both song and dance) from the Southern Cone region.

52 Coronil 1995: xxx.


psychologically habit-forming), they labeled it a vice.53 The Indians retaliated

by invoking a moral system the Europeans, particularly the Iberian colonizers,

could not refuse. They claimed that the apostle Thomas, arrived to the Amer-

icas on his evangelistic mission, had discovered yerba and shown the

Guaranı how to toast the leaves in order to make them palatable by removing

their “noxious” qualities.54

Empowered by both the economic potential and this origin myth, natives and

European colonizers developed yerba. Much of the southern part of Spain’s

empire at some point used yerba, and in those places which had no already

established widespread stimulant use (like coca in Potosı), it has remained in

use to some degree. In Chile, unlike the River Plate region, mate saw its popu-

larity decrease in the century after independence with the expansion of what

were by that point “Europeanized” beverages: coffee and tea. To help think

through why things changed for yerba in Chile, Orlove and Bauer find it

useful to differentiate “the allure of the foreign” from “the allure of the

exotic.”55 Whereas the latter is part of the acquisitive impulse in Europe

behind the use of goods from the Orient and the tropics—the possession and

domination of the Other—Latin America’s esteemed imported goods were

from Europe and were used to signal identification with the metropolis—dis-

tancing from the Other. Thus, the rise of coffee and tea and the decline of

mate connote an attempt to conduct a European way of and approach to life,

as opposed to an indigenized or colonial one. Still, that this is not the case

for a place like Argentina, as discussed below, does not negate the power of

the allure of the foreign, but rather indicates the complex and variable relation-

ship between taste, aspiration, and self-fashioning.

When advocating for yerba to a public outside of South America, however,

early mate apologists did not rely on an apocryphal religious tale. Instead, they

extolled yerba’s physical properties: namely, the effects of caffeine (even

before it was identified and isolated chemically) and other alkaloids. Governor

Hernando Arias de Saavedra in the sixteenth century noted that Indians used it

to increase their energy and resistance to fatigue when on the move.56 From that

moment, yerba has been associated with productive labor and, specifically, with

the military. Yerba enthusiasts pointed out that troops on all sides of the War of

the Triple Alliance depended on the drink to suppress hunger and to combat

weariness.57 Of his experience during that war, Brazilian general Francisco

de Rocha Callado wrote, “I was witness during a period of twenty-two days

to the fact that our army was almost exclusively nourished by the mate

53 Dobrizhoffer 1822: 104.54 Le Mate ou The du Paraguay 1914: 4; Muello 1946: 45.55 Orlove and Bauer 1997.56 Muello 1946: 45.57 Martins and de Abreu Filho 1916: 60.


which we collected in the hervaes [yerbales], the lack of provisions on that

occasion not permitting long halts.”58

To entice Europeans to adopt mate, its turn-of-the-twentieth-century advo-

cates suggested it as a low-cost replacement for coffee and tea among

troops.59 For example, commercial literature and advertisements were aimed

at convincing military authorities in Great Britain to introduce the use of

yerba.60 Eben M. Flagg, the U.S. vice-consul in Argentina wrote in 1905: “I

have often thought it would be of inestimable value to our army and navy,

for the entire outfit of a soldier or sailor would not take up so much room as

a cup and spoon, and the beverage could be prepared at any moment of the

day or night without a cook. It would cost about one-fifth the price of tea,

and would not make the consumer bilious, as coffee is inclined to do.”61

Moreover, yerba has been crafted as a morality enhancer for morally question-

able populations—the rural and the impoverished.62 Frequently it was contrasted

with alcohol, with its stimulating and energizing effects opposed to the latter’s

slowing and enervating ones. One Brazilian writer claimed that yerba “has even

been shown to be beneficial to the rural South American communities that use

it habitually and on a daily basis, saving themselves from the influence of

alcohol, that physical and moral solvent that devastates irresponsible individuals

who degrade themselves by its use.”63 Even the act of harvesting yerba was seen

to have redemptive effects. Writing in 1893 of the laborers in Paraguayan yer-

bales, Argentine Juan B. Ambrosetti said, “These men, the majority of whom

are not of the highest moral standing, are transformed in the yerbales. There

they become entirely docile. The troublemaker, characteristic of the northerners,

the injured, even the murderer himself, live there working beneath a burning

sun, among plaguing clouds of insects, poorly fed, without offering a complaint

and without a single thought of rebellion, robbery, etc. crossing their minds.”64

Incidentally, the “plaguing clouds of insects” that crowd the morally-sanitizing

space of the yerbal carried malaria, among other illnesses, and thus yerba-

producing terrain was deemed unsanitary for more educated North American visi-

tors, especially after 1898 when the mosquito’s role in malaria transmission was

finally proven.65Vice-Consul Flagg opined, “It is fearful to contemplate what the

crime and violence would be in a country like Paraguay, where strong rum can be

bought for six cents a quart, if the people were deprived of this valuable plant.”66

58 Quoted in Albes 1916: 14, original italics.59 Blay Pigrau 1918: 22.60 Romero 1915: 13.61 Geare 1905: 188.62 Albes 1916: 2.63 Martins 1916: 16.64 Quoted in Muello 1946: 43.65 International Bureau of the American Republics, Pan American Union 1911: 120.66 Quoted in Geare 1905: 188.


In general, psychoactive substances first entered European consumption in

the form of medicine,67 part of a larger trend in which the search for local

knowledge about plant remedies and botanical technology formed a key com-

ponent of colonial expansion.68 Traditional understandings of health and the

body can be seen in how coffee, tea, and tobacco were initially praised (or

excoriated) through their effects on the body’s humors. Reflecting the increas-

ing importance of laboratory science in the nineteenth century, medical and

scientific authorities were invoked to sanction yerba after pharmacological

experiments to isolate its chemical compounds. Its early, prescribed medicinal

uses included intravenous injection for heart and urine problems,69 as a hunger

suppressant and to counter malnutrition,70 as an antifebric,71 as a sedative and a

stimulant,72 and to regulate the cardiac, nervous, and muscular systems.73 This

turned out to be a mixed blessing, however, since stubbornly intransigent north-

ern markets and consumers relegated yerba to a mere curative.74

Caffeine was identified and isolated in yerba in the nineteenth century,

though to this day a myth persists that yerba is caffeine-free and instead con-

tains a similar chemical that is a stimulant but not addictive. In fact, a short-term

stopgap for Argentine yerba producers during a mid-twentieth-century under-

consumption crisis was to export five thousand toneladas of yerba to a firm

in the United States solely for the purpose of caffeine extraction.75 This atten-

tion to pharmaceutical and pharmacological issues must also be seen in relation

to questions of hygiene and yerba. The ceremonial ritual of yerba drinking

clashed with European notions of hygiene in ways that neither the coffeehouse

nor the eastern tea drinking ceremony did. The perceived violations of cleanli-

ness and the body hindered the expansion of yerba mate practice.

Yerba mate is not merely a beverage made of infused leaves. It is as much the

highly stylized ritual of taking the beverage. Returning to the example of coca,

Catherine Allen claims that in present-day Peru people communicate cultural

loyalties via coca chewing, and that by using correct etiquette while doing so

they communicate more deeply what those loyalties are and mean. She

argues that chewing creates, maintains, and transmits “a structuring framework

for the experience” of being Quechua.76 Mate recipes also index wealth, social

status, and community identity. Because yerba is placed un-bagged into the

drinking vessel—usually the gourd, but sometimes one of wood or animal

67 Courtwright 2001; Goodman 1993; Jankowiak and Bradburd 2003.68 Osseo-Asare 2008.69 Le Mate ou The du Paraguay 1914: 14.70 Blay Pigrau 1918: 18.71 Girola 1915: 4.72 Levy 1890: 184.73 Muello 1946: 41.74 Daumas 1930: 31.75 Comision Reguladora 1942: 14.76 Allen 1981: 158.


products—it must be strained. This is done through the bombilla, the straw

whose submerged end is capped and perforated. The bombillas used by indigen-

ous groups, the most destitute of the poor in the Southern Cone, are made of

bamboo and used with larger wooden guampas that are etched with burned

grooves. Filigreed silver bombillas, with intricately worked gourds or metal-

plated guampas, are more than merely luxurious showpieces—their use demon-

strates wealth and generous hospitality. Scotsman William Parish Robertson,

when permanently banished from Paraguay by a furious Doctor Gaspar Rodrı-

guez de Francia in the winter of 1815, was allowed to leave the country with

a silver bombilla as an “especial favor” from the dictator.77 Even the ingredients

added to the yerba belong to an elaborate code, the subject of much poetry, and

directly indicate material condition. Mate cocido (boiled), prepared today in

urban Paraguay in much the same way it was in nineteenth-century rural

Chile,78 involves placing hot coals atop a pile of yerba and sprinkling sugar

over the flames that erupt when the embers touch the dry leaves, thus carameliz-

ing the sugar, before the whole mixture is poured into boiling water. Today this is

extravagant, not only because of the time required in preparation but also because

of the additional cost of sugar and coal, which is sometimes prohibitive (fig. 4).

While all this may seem foreign to northern neophytes and while some of

the works reviewed for this article address the deleterious health effects of

FIGURE 4 Yerba, mixed with sugar, ignites when burning coals are placed on top, to make matecocido. Asuncion, Paraguay, 2007. Author’s photo.

77 Robertson and Parish 1839: 193.78 Smith 1855.


imbibing hot beverages, the salient material barrier was how yerba was drunk.

After one drains the steeped liquid from the mate, it is refilled with hot water

and passed to the next person. In this way, a whole circle of people will

share one bombilla passed from mouth to mouth until the yerba leaf is

exhausted and discarded, and the mate refilled. As Enrique Rodrıguez-Alegrıa

has shown, food and the utensils to serve it—and in Latin America those par-

ticularly marked as indigenous—are both subject to judgments of taste and

used in ways that form and transform social relationships.79 Use of a shared

bombilla is at once a hallmark of authenticity, and particularly Southern

Cone identity among yerba drinkers, and yet it reads as traditional, crude, unhy-

gienic, and even barbaric. One tourist to the region in the early twentieth

century wrote: “I must confess that it was unpleasant to put into my mouth

the unclean tip of the pipe-like stem through which the mate drink was

sucked. Except in these circumstances I grew to like mate, and even use it

now, long after my return from South America.”80 The author of the Pan Amer-

ican Union pamphlet where this quotation is found quickly goes on to assert,

“Incidentally, it may be well to mention the fact that yerba mate may be pre-

pared and consumed in a much more genteel fashion. The gourd is not at all

a necessary adjunct, nor is the bombilla. It can be made in any teapot, and

will taste just as good, if not better, when consumed like any other tea.”

Because the bombilla has proven a barrier, attempts were made in the early

part of the century to suppress its use and encourage a more respectable tea-like

consumption.81 But even today the entrenched use of the bombilla has not

given way. Whereas a culture of respectability82 was built around tea as part

of its adoption in Europe, in the Southern Cone, broader gaucho culture has

become respectable post mortem. The resilience of yerba use, particularly

with the bombilla, presents a curious case of the persistence of an Indian prac-

tice in a region that undertook a somewhat successful Europeanizing project.

Perhaps the successful ethnic cleansing of the nineteenth century (the “Con-

quest of the Desert” added to European immigration) sanitized the earlier

gaucho pampas culture83—a conquest model distinct from Mexico’s or

Peru’s, which resulted in a different relationship to indigenous practices (poly-

gynous inter-marriage and, in Paraguay, the widespread use of Guaranı). While

consumption may be an act of resistance against an imperial elite,84 yerba also

suggests that different colonial power structures and patterns result in differing

cultural habit effects. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, one Argentine agro-

nomist explored the tension there between national identity and modernity: “On

79 Rodrıguez-Alegrıa 2005: 551.80 Quoted in Albes 1916: 11.81 Walsh 1907: 747.82 Smith 1992: 277.83 Shumway 1991.84 Hearn and Roseneil 1999.


the farm and in the house, mate passes from mouth to mouth . . . there is no one

who will replace this beverage. . .. The system of mate is neither distinguished

nor elegant, and this primitive form of drinking is unhygienic and rejected by

those unfamiliar with it, but this bad habit from our semi-barbaric customs of

the past continues unnoticed in country ranches.”85

N EW A F F E C T S , N EW MARK E T S

Yerba use has spread along the paths of transnational migration to and from the

Southern Cone. Its use continues in Argentine country ranches, in the cosmopo-

litan New York offices of international companies, and in Lebanese mountaintop

summer getaways for Persian Gulf elites. Indeed, outside South America, Syria

and Lebanon rank as the greatest importers and consumers of yerba, where the

use of the shared bombilla has not proven a problem. Perhaps this stems from

different notions of the body, of hygiene, and of the social acceptability of

passing instruments from mouth to mouth—the broad social acceptance of

sharing the arghileh, the hookah, is probably related to this.

The 1935 creation of the Comision Reguladora de Produccion y Comercio de

la Yerba Mate (Regulatory Commission for the Production and Trade of Yerba

Mate) in Argentina marked a critical moment in mate as a commodity through

the founding of a para-state institution to govern the entire process of mate pro-

duction and sale. Figure 5 shows export data from the Commission’s first six

years of record keeping: even at this early date, Syria was at the top of

FIGURE 5 Argentina Yerba Mate Exports, in kilograms. Source: Comision Reguladora deProduccion y Comercio de la Yerba Mate.

85 Muello 1946: 38–39.


Argentina’s yerba destinations.86 Though clearly the Middle East is an important

market for mate, none of the texts examined for this article ever suggested

attempting to expand its presence there. Moreover, the data suggest that

exports began significantly earlier than the mid-1930s. Argentina is currently

the world’s greatest producer, consumer, and exporter of yerba mate (see fig.

6). Though it sells some of its product to other countries in Latin America,

especially Chile and Uruguay, Syria alone receives 40 percent of its yerba

exports, making the Middle East its chief market. Brazil, on the other hand,

has minimal trade with the Middle East, but supplies most of the yerba consumed

in Uruguay (fig. 7), the only Southern Cone country that does not contain yer-

bales and yet which consumes the most mate per capita in the world (about 7

kilograms per person). Paraguay (fig. 8) has struggled to find an external

market for its yerba, though a significant amount of it slips into Argentina, off

the books. This has begun to change, however, and today most of the mate

being imported into the United States is of Paraguayan origin.

In the Middle East, yerba use is particularly associated with the Druze

community in southern Lebanon, and in Syria and Palestine. The practice had

begun there by the early twentieth century. But yerba use has not displaced

coffee or tea as a stimulant in the region—the earlier example of coca and

Potosı speaks to the later difficulty yerba merchants had once the caffeine

FIGURE 6 Distribution of Argentina’s average yerba production (2001–2008) and consumption, inthousands of toneladas. Total annual production: 280,000 toneladas. All values are approxi-mations. Sources: http://www.misiones.gov.ar, Senasa.

86 Note that this is prior to Lebanese independence. In this case, “Syria” encompassed bothpresent-day Lebanon and Syria.


market had been established—and instead it has carved out a particular social

niche. Neither is yerba the only stimulant to have been introduced to the

Middle East after an initial push by tea and coffee—qat offers an interesting

FIGURE 8 Distribution of Paraguay’s average yerba production and consumption (1997–2002), inthousands of toneladas. Total annual production: 25,000 toneladas. All values are approximations.Note these numbers are from the late 1990s/early 2000s and do not reflect the growing trend toexport Paraguayan yerba to the United States. Source: www.bcp.gov.py.

FIGURE 7 Distribution of Brazil’s average yerba production and consumption (1996–2006), inthousands of toneladas. Total annual production: 187,000 toneladas. All values are approxi-mations. Source: Informacoes Economicas, SP.


parallel in Yemen. Qat, too, is a stimulant often taken in gender-segregated

groups, and it indexes a distinctive Yemeni identity within the Middle East,

used alongside coffee.87

Yerba mate functions to distinguish88 Druze identity within Lebanon in

ways similar to its signaling of Argentine, Paraguayan, and Uruguayan identities

within Spanish America, and gaucho identity in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

As a sign of intimacy and diversion among the Druze, it points to community

identity and wealth. By passing the gourd around as a moment of leisure (as

opposed to laziness), the Druze reference their business acumen, financial

success, and cosmopolitan background through a habit acquired during a transna-

tional experience connected to successful wealth acquisition. Their ability to

travel internationally to build family wealth, and to return to Lebanon, stands

in opposition to the Shi’a, many of who are poor and confined to Lebanon,

and who are often spoken of as the greatest threat Lebanese Druze face as

both groups uneasily share the southern part of the country. Even Druze

female identity is differentiated from an imagined Shi’a female identity, with

women empowered in conducting the yerba mate ritual as the feminized counter-

part to the masculine, public-sphere consumption of the arghileh (although

men and women participate in both). By consuming something that is

self-consciously international, with both the leaf and the practice “imported,”

the Druze are able to exhibit and re-inscribe their distinct identity in a country

divided along sectarian lines.

Yerba’s strongly gendered and recreational signification is markedly differ-

ent from that which it has within the Southern Cone, and this was particularly

so in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, its distinctiveness may once again

shift as consumption is commercialized in a new way in Lebanon. In Aley, a

mountain vacation destination in Lebanon for summering tourists from the

Persian Gulf, “The Mate Factory Cafe” opened in 2005, offering rental

mates (with keep-your-own bombillas) stored next to a wall of arghilehs also

for hire. To illustrate how unusual this is, it is important to keep in mind that

this does not happen in Southern Cone restaurants or in Argentine steak

houses in the United States—though yerba permeates typical cuisine there,

restaurants rarely serve it.89 Though business slowed during the 2006 Israel-

Lebanon war, the Cafe’s owners plan to open more branches in the next two

years to take advantage of growing demand. While Aley is a predominantly

Druze town, each summer Sunni visitors from the Gulf eager to display their

87 Varisco 1986; Wagner 2005. For a symbolic analysis of coffee’s entrance to the Middle East,see Matthee 1994.

88 Bourdieu 1984.89 For example, the website of La Portena Restaurant in New York prominently displays a

mate with bombilla along with a looping musical track of tango to indicate the restaurant’sauthenticity. It does not serve yerba mate among its beverages. See http://laportena-restaurant.com/.


wealth through conspicuous consumption descend on The Mate Factory Cafe

in Aley’s restaurant-lined souk (fig. 9).

In the global North, yerba has also undergone a metamorphosis. From its

earlier failed life as a cheaper substitute for tea and coffee oriented toward

working classes, it has emerged as a beneficiary of the health food, environ-

mentalist, and new age movements targeted at a global cosmopolitan class con-

cerned with quality and authenticity. “Organic” food consumption reflects not

only a concern for health, but also acquiescence to a discourse about the

environment and about people and their food.90 It serves as a new source of

class distinction that lauds knowledge about cuisine and celebrates the virtue

of its practitioners as they exercise (hygienic?) discipline regarding what

they put into their bodies. Marketing has refurbished yerba’s image, but also

cultivates clear links to the past. Instead of a mythic origin in itinerant apostles,

now it is positioned as the privileged knowledge of indigenous peoples with a

special relationship to the earth. Guayaki, a Paraguayan yerba brand aimed at

a North American audience, invites worldly and alienated Westerners to

partake of the beverage “to feel the good energy.”91 In so doing, they learn

from and attach themselves to the spiritual connection that the Indians of

South America have to “nature.” This present-day instance of “salvation

through consuming the primitive” is predicated on a homogenizing and

FIGURE 9 The Mate Factory Cafe in Aley, Lebanon. 2007. Author’s photo.

90 Durrschmidt 1999.91 See http://www.guayaki.com/.


othering discourse that reaffirms the superiority of Western modernity.92 Not-

withstanding the mystical language, the connections between new accumu-

lation strategies and “nature” are clear in Guayaki’s invitation to participate

in “market-driven restoration,” a business model combining capitalist econ-

omics and sustainable agriculture.93

Roseberry linked new class identities in the United States, expressed through

the consumption of specialty and gourmet coffees, to a new economic strategy

of “flexible accumulation” following the economic crises of the 1970s.94

Coffee, which like tea and sugar began as a luxury item, and then became

widely consumed and homogenized as a proletarian hunger-killer, has been

re-distinguished by looking beyond Fordist forms of mass production and

taking advantage of more flexible opportunities fostered by artisanal craftsman-

ship. Yerba has benefited from this larger trend too; in North America it can

now be found both in marginal (Spanish-language) grocery stores catering to

immigrants from Latin America, and in high-end (English-language) stores

that boast an array of boutique teas and coffees. To make it more accessible

to a North American audience, yerba is often treated like tea—now con-

veniently packaged in individual serving bags or pre-prepared in bottles,

with helpful instructions and illustrations in English (and not in Spanish). An

acute accent is added over the “e” in mate (which is incorrect in Spanish), ren-

dering the name of the product both more exotic and more pronounceable for its

consumers.95

And as for its invigorating qualities, though it has been known for more than a

century that the crucial ingredient in yerba is caffeine, marketers, teashops, and

Buddhist meditation centers continue to position yerba as unique in containing

mateine, an exotic and harmless (non-addictive) stimulant.96 Even yerba’s med-

icinal properties have undergone a new incarnation: Kiehl’s launched a success-

ful “Yerba Mate Tea” skincare product line in the spring of 2007. But concerns

about yerba’s healthfulness have also been raised anew, this time in studies that

claim mate is carcinogenic.97 The scare, published in the English-language press,

has had enough traction that the newly formed Yerba Mate Association of the

Americas (YMAA) has thought it necessary to link (via its English-only

website)98 to dozens of counter-studies that evaluate the positive medical and

92 Di Leonardo 1998: 34.93 Katz 1998: 49.94 Roseberry 2005: 137; Harvey 1990.95 The practice of adding the accent over the “e” dates at least to the early nineteenth century; the

Letters on Paraguay by the Robertson brothers employs its use. Earlier Jesuit writers used “yerba”or the Guaranı “caa,” even when translated into English (see Dobrizhoffer 1822).

96 Casablanca Restaurant in SOHO, New York City, advertises a pot of “Matechino—roastedArgentinean Mate with cocoa, almond bits, sunflower and blue cornflower. A caffeine-free teathat has a stimulant that provides energy. (Mate tea).” Mar. 2007.

97 Goldenberg, Golz, and Joachims 2003. Kamangar et al. 2008.98 See http://www.yerbamateassociation.org/index.php?p=studies.


health benefits of the plant. Beyond answering yerba’s new detractors, many of

these counter-claims place yerba in a discourse that has an even greater health

resonance today than the organic movement: the promotion of yerba as a

hunger suppressant and effective weight-loss aid.99Here, Goodman’s connection

between drug use and vanity is provocative—if, as he says, European disgust at

the distended and stained face resulting from betel nut chewing in South Asia,

and at coca chewing, had something to do with the fact that Europeans did not

take up these habits,100 we are left to consider how the obverse may function,

to what extent vanity and concern for personal appearance affect the adoption

of once unpopular or unknown substances.

As a commodity that has chiefly circulated outside North America and

Europe, a product such as yerba allows us to observe modern financial circuits

that have little to do with the global North. Setting aside questions of pro-

duction, which I have addressed chiefly for the colonial period, yerba illustrates

the flexibility and complexity of the capitalist market as it operates within

different socio-cultural contexts. What remains to be seen is how resilient

these significations and meanings are in light of new market opportunities.

We have seen that yerba embeds itself differently as it is fetishized as represent-

ing the mystical and empowering in St. Thomas, or the ability to work almost

magically without rest or food, or an “organic” connection to nature and the

spirit, or national and ethnic identities.

A product such as yerba demonstrates the usefulness of a “commodity chain”

approach that allows us to transcend the scale and geographical boundedness of

the national economy and the nation-state. Though it challenges the here/there

divide, and disrupts discussions that pit “internal” forces against “external”

ones, it reaffirms the salience of the local, particularly amidst descriptions of

globalization as an indomitable homogenizing force. Since yerba’s position

outside the Southern Cone has changed only recently, it functions as an excel-

lent lens through which to see the tensions within consumption—between

market imperatives, the resilience of taste, government intervention, ideologi-

cal and moral notions of the good, and biological constraints. While yerba had

little success in breaking into the market dominated by coffee and tea, its new

entry into the global North and the Middle East points to the powerful effects of

new affects—new ways of conceiving and feeling about the body. The possi-

bilities of marketing yerba as an industrial productivity booster, or as a civiliz-

ing and domesticating product, were not realized for reasons ranging from

personal views of the body to economic structures. Yet as an exoticizing, spiri-

tually recharging substance, or an emblem of community identity, yerba has

found access. This illustrates the dialectical link between impersonal economic

99 Dickel, Rates, and Ritter 2007; Pittler, Schmidt, and Ernst 2005.100 Goodman 1993: 54–55. Goodman here asserts that coca chewing was first described by

Amerigo Vespucci in 1499.


forces and enactments of the self. In so doing, yerba as a complex cultural con-

struct pluralizes analytical categories by raising questions about modernities,

peripheries, capitalisms, and empires.

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stimulating consumption: yerba mate myths, markets, and meanings from conquest to present

Documents

habit of drinking yerba

mate consumption

yerba matemyths

druze religion

important druze warlord

drinking vessel

cunybefore najla

latin american society