Sharing Yerba Mate

How South America's Most Popular Drink Defined a Region

By Rebekah E. Pite

Sharing Yerba Mate

Approx. 312 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 36 halftones, 4 maps, 3 graphs, notes, index

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-7453-7
    Published: September 2023
  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7452-0
    Published: September 2023

Paperback Available September 2023, but pre-order your copy today!

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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.

About the Author

Rebekah E. Pite is professor of history at Lafayette College and author of Creating a Common Table in Twentieth-Century Argentina: Doña Petrona, Women, and Food.
For more information about Rebekah E. Pite, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Beautifully written and solidly grounded in multisite archival research. Pite displays a command of scholarly methodologies of the histories of Latin America, nationalism, and commodities, as well as visual culture and food studies."—Jeffrey M. Pilcher, author of Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food

"Working from the premise that the culture surrounding yerba mate (ka’a) needs to be studied from a broad regional perspective, Pite confidently crosses linguistic and political boundaries to shed light on how the infusion has shaped ideas about class, race, gender, and nation in southern South America."—Bridget Chesterton, author of The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay, 1904–1936