Mapping Mate from Colonial to Consumer Society

Mate, the beverage made of the infusion of yerba mate’s leaves, was originally drunk by the Guaraní indigenous people in the Parana region. During the conquest of South America, mate consumption quickly spread throughout the whole of colonial society, and doing so by remaining embedded in its traditional collective mode of consumption. While yerba mate, known as the “green gold” became a key pilar of the colonial economy, mate, as a beverage, somehow avoided commercialization and hardly penetrated western markets the way other stimulant drinks did. The practice of drinking mate collectively, passing the gourd around and sipping the beverage from the same straw, established itself in the Middle East thanks to returning migrants from the Syrian and Lebanese communities who had grown accustomed to mate in Argentina. In both South America and the Middle East, mate is synonymous with hospitality and sociability, it is always shared, and does not appear on restaurant menus. More recently, in parallel to the popularity of so called ‘ancient grains’, mate has been re-branded an “indigenous magic potion” to appeal to western consumers seeking a health food ‘salvation’ through the consumption of authenticity. Whilst yerba mate has been studied from economical and historical perspectives, there are no current studies about mate tea drinking habits. My research will fill that gap by tracing the routes that mate followed as a social practice and as a beverage and by exploring the various spaces and meaning of mate’s consumption at a time in which the collective ritual of drinking mate is not only under attack by recent efforts to commodify and market it, but also as a result of Covid 19 and the global injunction for contactless interactions.