Sharing Yerba Mate
How South America's Most Popular Drink Defined a Region
- 296 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Drinking yerba mate is a daily, communal ritual that has brought together South Americans for some five centuries. In lively prose and with vivid illustrations, Rebekah E. Pite explores how this Indigenous infusion, made from the naturally caffeinated leaves of a local holly tree, became one of the most distinctive and widely consumed beverages in the region. Latin American food and commodity studies have focused on consumption in the global north, but Pite tells the story of yerba mate in South America, illuminating dynamic and exploitative circuits of production, promotion, and consumption. Ideas about who should harvest and serve yerba mate, along with visions of the archetypical mate drinker, persisted and were transformed alongside the shifting politics of class, race, and gender.
This global history takes us from the colonial Río de la Plata to the top yerba-consuming and producing nations of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with excursions to Chile, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, where yerba mate is now sold as a “superfood.” For readers eager to understand South America and its unique drink, Sharing Yerba Mate is an essential text that delves into an everyday ritual to expose systems of power and the taste of belonging.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction. Sharing the South American Drink
- 1. Making Ka’a South American, 1520s–1810s
- 2. Establishing Mate Hierarchies in Would-Be Nations, 1810s–1860s
- 3. Taking the Herb of Paraguay, 1860s–1910s
- 4. Picturing Mate as Rural in Argentina and Uruguay, 1870s–1920s
- 5. Selling Yerba/Erva Mate as Modern in Argentina and Brazil, 1900s–1960s
- 6. Conspicuously Consuming Mate in Urban Argentina and Uruguay, 1960s–2000s
- Epilogue. A New Age for Yerba Mate?
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index