stimulating consumption: yerba mate myths, markets, and meanings from conquest to present
TRANSCRIPT
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
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.
S T I M U L AT I N G C O N S U M P T I O N 9
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.
10 C H R I S T I N E F O L C H
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.
S T I M U L AT I N G C O N S U M P T I O N 11
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.
12 C H R I S T I N E F O L C H
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.
S T I M U L AT I N G C O N S U M P T I O N 13
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.
14 C H R I S T I N E F O L C H
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.
S T I M U L AT I N G C O N S U M P T I O N 15
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.
16 C H R I S T I N E F O L C H
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.
S T I M U L AT I N G C O N S U M P T I O N 17
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.
18 C H R I S T I N E F O L C H
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.
S T I M U L AT I N G C O N S U M P T I O N 19
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.
20 C H R I S T I N E F O L C H
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.
S T I M U L AT I N G C O N S U M P T I O N 21
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.
22 C H R I S T I N E F O L C H
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.
S T I M U L AT I N G C O N S U M P T I O N 23
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.
24 C H R I S T I N E F O L C H
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.
S T I M U L AT I N G C O N S U M P T I O N 25
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.
26 C H R I S T I N E F O L C H
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.
S T I M U L AT I N G C O N S U M P T I O N 27
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.
28 C H R I S T I N E F O L C H
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/.
S T I M U L AT I N G C O N S U M P T I O N 29
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/.
30 C H R I S T I N E F O L C H
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.
S T I M U L AT I N G C O N S U M P T I O N 31
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.
32 C H R I S T I N E F O L C H
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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