In March 2020, Fernando Iglesias, a conservative congressman from Buenos Aires, took to Twitter suggesting that the pandemic was "a good time to completely eradicate the horrible custom of mate, responsible for the country’s decline." How did this caffeinated ritual inspire so much ire? Yerba mate has traveled a fractured road — sometimes revered, sometimes vilified. Julia J.S. Sarreal, an associate professor at Arizona State University, pores over this iconic beverage in her new book, Yerba Mate: The Drink That Shaped a Nation.
Evan Kleiman: When did you first start drinking yerba mate regularly?
Julia J.S. Sarreal: When I was a Peace Corps volunteer, from 1998 to 2000, in Paraguay, in South America. I had never heard of yerba mate beforehand. I knew nothing about it. Immediately upon arriving in the country, I encountered yerba mate. Everyone in Paraguay drinks yerba mate, either cold as tereré or hot as mate. I found that while I was there, I had to drink it in order to establish relationships and build community. I really got interested intellectually in it when I lived in Buenos Aires, where yerba mate coexists with coffee and both are strongly integrated into the culture. That's when I got interested in it intellectually, seeing how these two caffeinated beverages could coexist.
Let's talk about the earliest evidence of mate-drinking. What role did it play in Indigenous communities?
It's hard to know all of the different ways that it was consumed and the different meanings because the Indigenous peoples of the region didn't have writing and a lot of their records were not preserved, so we have to rely on Spanish and European missionaries and other settlers in the region to comment on it and they have their own prejudices and such. Keeping that in mind, what we know is the Jesuits recorded a lot about shamans using yerba mate and that they used the yerba mate in their religious ceremonies and as oracles to predict the future.
The Jesuits, of course, thought this was the devil and they condemned the use of yerba mate, especially initially. But as time went on, the Guarani convinced them that yerba mate was really important, and in their efforts to convert the native peoples, they had to allow and actually even promote the use of yerba mate in order to convert the Indians. They found that it was also very profitable to sell yerba mate to the settlers and the mixed race population of the region.
Primarily, we know of the religious ceremonies but it was also drunk daily. We know that it was really important to indigenous societies, used in marriage ceremonies and the like. It was among the Guaraní and the Kayangan people in the region.
Let's come to present-day. Who drinks it and how much when we're talking about Argentina?
Today, everyone drinks it, or at least they say that they drink it. It is the national infusion. Argentina also has an official geographic designation for Yerba Mate Argentina, just like champagne is French and tequila is Mexican, which is a bit ironic because yerba mate grows naturally and is still produced in Brazil, southern Brazil, and also in Paraguay. But everybody says that they drink it.
All Argentine households have the accoutrements, the mate gourd and the bombilla, the specialized straw. But like the quote that you began with, there are Argentines who don't drink it. For much of the 20th century, the middle class and the upper class, especially in Buenos Aires and urban areas, had really replaced it with tea and especially coffee. But today, everybody drinks it. It's this symbol of national and especially regional identity.
What exactly is it? And why does it look so different from other beverages that we infuse into hot water, like tea made from Camellia sinensis?
Ilex paraguariensis is its scientific name. Ilex is a holly. In the southern United States, there's another ilex that is drunk and it was specially consumed by indigenous peoples and is now being marketed, I was told, in Austin, Texas and other parts of the US South. It's called Ilex vomitoria. It has a very unfortunate scientific name but it's called yaupon. These are both holly. They are trees. Tea is a plant and you harvest it in a different way or you harvest it in the same way (you use the leaves) but with tea leaves, you harvest the new green shoots, whereas yerba mate you want to harvest the mature leaves.
What makes it very different is the way that it's drunk in South America. It's traditionally put in a gourd, maybe say half a cup to three quarters of a cup of the ground leaves, powder, and twigs. Then, you have a special metal straw that has a sieve at the bottom. You put that in the gourd with the yerba mate and you repeatedly refill the gourd with water — hot water if it's mate or cold water if it's tereré — and you share it. Typically, you have a small group of people and they drink from the same metal straw, so it's a communal beverage, something that we find very strange, anti-hygienic, and sometimes distasteful in the United States but it has deep meaning in South America.
They also drink it as a tea with tea bags, that's called cocido. In the United States, the mate idea really hasn't caught on but yerba mate as a healthy energy drink has become very popular. It's sold as a cold iced tea beverage or a carbonated beverage, often flavored, sweetened, and pre-prepared, so it's a very different beverage in the United States.
In terms of your work as a historian, you were trained as a colonialist. Does yerba mate have a particularly interesting colonial history?
Yes. To me, it's fascinating. Why did chocolate and tobacco travel from the Americas to Europe and become globalized? Why didn't yerba mate? Why did yerba mate spread in South America and become very popular, far beyond where it grows naturally? And why didn't it go to Europe?
What I found is that it was produced in the Spanish Empire, and the Spanish Empire focused on silver and mineral wealth. They controlled and limited trade between Spanish America and Europe, so everything that was produced in the Paraguay/Buenos Aires region had to travel over the Andes, get to Lima, go by boat to Panama, cross the isthmus, then join the fleet in the Caribbean to go to Spain. Yerba mate was just too expensive. It couldn't shoulder those transportation costs, so it did not popularize in Europe. Once Spain started reducing these trade limitations, by that point, tea and coffee had become predominant in Europe and yerba mate couldn't compete.
"Yerba Mate: The Drink That Shaped a Nation" details the historical, political, and social significance of Argentina's national beverage. Photo courtesy of the University of California Press.
Could you talk a little bit more about the cultural shifts and class tensions that historically surround mate in Argentina?
This is why I study Argentina as opposed to Uruguay, Paraguay, southern Brazil, and other places where yerba mate is popular. The trajectory in Argentina is very different. In the colonial era, in the early 19th century, everybody drank yerba mate — rich, poor, male, female, black, white, indigenous — everybody drank yerba mate. But then, in the late 19th century, we find that mate becomes associated with the countryside, with poverty, and the elite aspire to be more European, so they replace it with coffee and tea.
We see throughout much of the 20th century, the middle class in Argentina doesn't drink mate. They reject it. They see it as something associated with poverty, something for people who can't afford to buy tea and coffee. Then, we see in the 1980s and 1990s, in Argentina there's a flip and Argentina goes back to embracing mate as being part of their identity. That really sets it apart from Uruguay, Paraguay, southern Brazil, where people have always drunk yerba mate.
That quote that I read at the beginning of our segment from that conservative congressman from Buenos Aires, was there a lot of pushback to that? How did people react?
He immediately had to backpedal. He immediately had to say, "Oh, yeah, I don't drink mate but I didn't mean that." Whenever anybody these days says anything bad about mate, there's immediately an uproar. It's been cyclical.
Every once in a while, people have said some things about getting rid of mate consumption or that mate is a sign of poverty. Whenever that is said publicly, there's a big uproar and you have to backtrack. So it's really interesting, this tension, I think, in Argentina, where it's the national infusion, it's the national symbol. Everybody says they drink it. Well, in fact, not everybody drinks it and it reveals this undercurrent of classism and division within Argentina.