The five books that inform this essay examine how drinks—coffee, guaraná, and mate—helped to “shape,” “transform,” or “define” national identities even as the plant-derived beverages spilled across geopolitical boundaries. All three are sourced from tropical/subtropical “woody” plants (i.e., bushes or trees) whose biological origins lay in forested ecosystems. Their cultural origins lay in stories involving people, animals, and spirits. In between harvesting and consumption, the seeds of guaraná and coffee, as well as yerba mate leaves, undergo elaborate processing that includes drying and heating. Guaraná and yerba mate are plants first cultivated by Indigenous groups in South America; arabica coffee was first cultivated in the highlands of Ethiopia. Today, guaraná and yerba mate are popular beverages and expressions of national identity in South American nations large (Argentina and Brazil) and small (Uruguay and Paraguay); coffee is widely and frequently consumed outside of Latin America in Europe, North America, and increasingly, East Asia.

These beverages are frequently called “stimulants” or “drug foods” because they contain varying levels of caffeine in addition to psychoactive compounds, a quality that all of the authors acknowledge with varying degrees of emphasis. However, their research serves to challenge biochemical explanations for their popularity, demonstrating that cravings for caffeine cannot account for why, how, when, and with whom people sipped, guzzled, or slurped these drinks. Rebekah Pite’s account of her first experience drinking mate conveys a unifying theme of these books: “I felt warm inside and not just from the hot drink and the buzzy effect of the caffeine. I felt I had been welcomed into a special club” (p. 2). This sense of hospitality or commensality is central to these books, which, in the process of telling histories about three culturally important beverages, also help to historicize hospitality and its limits. In other words, these books address both the substance and the circumstance of drinking coffee, guaraná, and mate, placing emphasis on the shifting meanings of consumption in arguably the most important of modernity’s “social clubs”: nation-states. These beverages were acquired tastes that, not unlike nationalisms, have historically functioned to unite and divide people in the process of becoming commodities of mass consumption.

As readers of this journal know, commodity histories are a pantry staple in the historiography of Latin America. From colonial-era silver, cacao, and cochineal to twenty-first-century lithium, soy beans, and avocados, the production, movement, processing, and consumption of commodities have served as the raw material for both empirical research and theorization. Academic interest in commodities has proven to be remarkably durable, appealing to a wide range of theoretical tastes, including modernization and Marxism, dependency theory and post-modernism, and new materialisms and post-humanisms. Given this, one might reasonably ask: How do these books stand out on shelves chock full of histories of edible and drinkable commodities?

Histories of yerba mate and guaraná are of course far less common than histories of coffee, tea, or Coca-Cola. A focus on yerba mate or guaraná opens a view of goods both produced and consumed primarily within South America. These are commodity histories in which European and US actors lay mostly on the margins. In contrast, Michelle Craig McDonald’s meticulously researched Coffee Nation focuses on explaining how coffee became the national beverage of the United States long before Starbucks and the “latte revolution.” That is, her book stands out for its focus on late colonial- and early national-period coffee consumption, an era largely ignored by commodity histories organized around Latin America’s commodity boom (1870s–1920s).

Another noteworthy quality that these books share is their deep and nuanced contextualization of the political and social worlds in which these substances transformed into not only valuable commodities but also symbols of nationalism and conviviality. The authors are not content to follow these substances along a narrow commodity “chain” but rather examine rituals of consumption, cultural meanings, and political representations (textual and visual) of these beverages.

The three books devoted to yerba mate are arguably steeped more in the circumstances of consuming the beverage than in the substance (i.e., the material history of mate). They cover similarly big sweeps of time, from the early colonial period to the twenty-first century, and they consult a similar set of primary sources. Folch, Pite, and Sarreal begin by briefly describing the Indigenous origins of the plant that Spanish-speaking colonists called té de Paraguay. Two indigenous societies are credited with cultivating yerba mate: the Kaingang, who reportedly chewed the leaves of a plant called cogoî; and Guaraní-speakers, who after migrating into the Paraná River Basin, cultivated and cured caá (or ka’a). The origin of the name yerba mate has generated considerable scholarly debate. Folch suggests that the Spanish word yerba (or hierba) typically refers to herbaceous plants and therefore was a misnomer for the plant that was a woody-stemmed shrub or tree. Pite, however, indicates that, for Guaraní speakers, the word “ka’a” could refer generically to a wide range of plants, including herbs. The etymology of mate is also unclear; Spanish sources used the word to refer to the gourd in which cured leaves were combined with water. “Mate” however, most closely resembles words in Quechua or Nahuatl, not Guaraní or Kaingang. One thing that seems clear from the name yerba mate is that the plant and the beverage are conjoined; the manner of drinking the leaves (yerba) packed in a gourd (mate) seems to be essential. In this regard, the emphasis that Folch, Pite, and Sarreal place on practices and meanings of consuming yerba mate is entirely appropriate.

As the subtitle of her book—The Drink That Shaped a Nation—suggests, Julia Sarreal’s study of mate focuses on the beverage’s importance in a single nation: Argentina, the world’s largest producer and consumer of yerba mate. Sarreal uses mate’s history to “understand how and why Argentina became the nation that it is today” (p. 3). In answering this question, Sarreal traces yerba mate from early Spanish encounters with the herb through its consumption in twentieth-century Argentina via chapters organized chronologically according to a periodization informed more by the political history of Argentina than changes in yerba mate production or consumption. Sarreal, along with Folch and Pite, reveal that Jesuit missions and missionaries living among Guaraní speakers figured prominently in both the history and historiography of yerba mate. The missions funded themselves in part via the cultivation of yerba mate; their recorded descriptions of the beverage’s importance among Indigenous societies have served as an important source for historians. From the standpoint of yerba mate cultivation, historians credit Jesuits with overcoming challenges associated with seed germination in order to establish plantations. Jesuits also introduced changes to how cured yerba mate was processed, creating a product called caaminí. To make caaminí, Indigenous workers removed little twigs and other debris, leaving just tender leaves that were subsequently finely ground and packaged. The added labor needed to make caaminí meant that it sold at a higher price than yerba mate (referred to as yerba de Paraguay), reportedly generating handsome profits for Jesuits whose domination of caamini production sparked jealousies from other producers of yerba mate. This colonial-era example of market segmentation resonates with today’s hand-sorted “specialty coffees” marketed to affluent consumers.

Throughout her book, Sarreal pays attention to the influence of class, race, nationalism, and Argentina’s national political project on mate’s shifting meanings. For example, she shows how early-twentieth-century Argentine elites, invoking concerns about hygiene, denounced the ritualized use of a shared bombilla (metal straw) to drink mate, even as they continued to consume mate in the privacy of their homes. Yerba mate also figured prominently in urban elites’ nostalgia for the figure of the gaucho, and rural life more generally, a topic also explored by Folch and Pite. Sarreal also reveals, counterintuitively, that the rise of Peronist populism coincided with a decline in mate consumption due to the drink’s association with working class/rural poverty, not progress. Mate consumption declined until the 1980s, when it rebounded in the context of hyperinflation that drove up prices of imported coffee and tea. In a brief afterword, Sarreal notes that, by the early 2000s, yerba mate was firmly associated with Argentinidad. The government declared mate to be the “official national infusion” in 2013, and three years later it designated “Yerba Mate Argentina” as an official geographic indication, an increasingly common move in a neoliberal era dominated by international trade and concerns about authenticity amid mass consumption. If not always clear just how yerba mate per se shaped Argentina, Sarreal demonstrates the durability of yerba mate consumption even as its meanings and popularity shifted during Argentina’s tumultuous twentieth century.

Rebekah Pite covers a similar sweep of time as Sarreal, albeit tilted toward the twentieth century. However, as indicated by her book’s subtitle—How South America’s Most Popular Drink Defined a Region—Pite offers a transnational view of mate drinking that includes southern Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay. This approach, in a text that is shorter than Sarreal’s book, sacrifices some detail for an approach that overcomes an unresolved tension in Sarreal’s study by situating yerba mate’s history in a transboundary frame—one that acknowledged the rise to prominence of Argentina without ignoring the importance of consumption in places such as Montevideo or production in Brazil. Pite’s unifying theme and major methodological contribution is a focus on yerba mate in visual culture (including paintings, photographs, and product marketing) across time. She does so not merely to document the ubiquity of yerba mate in South American societies but also to explore histories of sociability and hospitality, demonstrating, among other things, a shift in depictions of women as consumers of the beverage to its primary preparers and servers.

One of the most striking photographic images reproduced in the book depicts a young Paraguayan prisoner of war serving mate to a Brazilian officer during the War of Triple Alliance (p. 78). The war devastated Paraguay’s male population and resulted in the loss of territory that served to strengthen Brazil’s position at the time as the region’s dominate producer and exporter of mate. Paraguayan production did not disappear, however, and yerba mate cultivated in Paraguay continued to be highly regarded for its quality, even as late-nineteenth-century, leftist writers condemned labor conditions in Paraguay’s yerbales (yerba plantations). Concerns over the exploitation of labor also emerged with respect to mate farms in Misiones, production from which would propel Argentina to become South America’s top producer in the mid-twentieth century. Pite documents the persistent criticism of low-wage labor in yerbales in the present century, but her conclusion stresses the “communal ethos” of drinking mate over its “symbolically distant” profit motive seemingly undercutting her attention to how yerba mate could reinforce class and gender distinctions.

Christine Folch’s The Book of Yerba Mate offers a wide-ranging exploration across time and space of the uses and meanings of yerba mate. The historical portions of the book (chapters 3–5) cover much of the same ground and utilize similar textual and visual sources as do Sarreal and Pite. However, Folch bookends the historical narrative of mate’s production and consumption in South America with thought-provoking, if brief, chapters on (1) the consumption of beverages derived from mate’s plant cousins (yaupon and guayusa) and (2) mate consumption in contemporary Syria and Lebanon, a legacy of early-twentieth-century migrations between South America and the Middle East. These chapters do more than expand geographical and cultural contexts for thinking about yerba mate consumption; they also raise important questions about how to account for tastes that paradoxically appear durable and dynamic.

By beginning her book by placing yerba mate (Ilex paraguariensis) in a botanical context, alongside guayusa (I. guayusa) found in the tropical Andes and yaupon (I. vomitoria), distributed widely in North America, Folch reminds us about caffeine-producing plants that have yet to be converted into commodity beverages. Indigenous people used these holly plants widely, drying/roasting the leaves prior to infusing them in water served in gourds. As the European-given name “vomitoria” suggests, Ilex plants were consumed not necessarily to stay alert but as emetics. On the one hand, Folch’s attention to these botanical cousins offers a Michael Pollan-esque “botany of desire” perspective that points to the power of plants to shape human cultures. On the other hand, their divergent post-colonial trajectories remind us that the power of plants is limited—people can get a caffeine “fix” or take a “trip” via many different kinds of plants whose salient properties are sometimes more widely dispersed than most of us realize, in part owing to the marketing fictions that create “just so” stories around prominent commodities such as coffee, tea, or yerba mate.

Folch’s foray into yerba mate consumption in Syria and Lebanon confirms the contingent character of acquired tastes. Syria, Lebanon, and their neighbors had long histories of tasting coffee and tea prior to the arrival of yerba mate. Yerba mate, therefore, was not “filling a void” for a caffeinated beverage associated with sociability. In the case of Syria and Lebanon, yerba mate consumption seems to have developed alongside, not instead of, coffee or tea. Folch concludes her book by suggesting that yerba mate is going “global” based on largely anecdotal and US-centric examples where yerba mate, minus the gourd and shared metal straw, is appearing in ready-to-drink products. This form of consuming yerba mate seems more aligned with trends toward “energy drinks” than with specialty coffee or teas. However, given global climate change and shifting politics in the United States, who can deny with certainty that yerba mate—or yaupon—might become more widely consumed in future generations if the ability of consumers to access coffee or tea diminishes? In sum, Folch’s book serves to demonstrate the importance of telling histories of yerba mate that are both comparative and connected.

Michelle Craig McDonald’s Coffee Nation reminds readers of a past time when coffee was neither readily available nor widely consumed in the United States. Set in the late colonial and early national United States, Coffee Nation shares many themes, including the cultural, economic, and political dimensions of consumption, with the books on mate and guaraná. McDonald’s book stands out for the wealth of primary sources consulted including the correspondence and diaries of mostly prominent colonial figures, in addition to advertising, cookbooks, government statistics, and federal legislation. She also draws on material artifacts, specifically coffee pots and services, to trace the making of a material “coffee culture.” Along the way, McDonald deflates the myth that the Boston Tea Party triggered the definitive shift to coffee by showing that coffee became popular prior to the protests and that coffee itself was targeted for taxation under the Sugar Act (1764).

McDonald argues that coffee houses became important centers of political conversation and organizing, similar to historians’ interpretation of coffee houses in England and elsewhere in Europe. By 1780, calls for opening ports to trade became a reality as the British forces withdrew from major ports, opening opportunities for coffee to come from French (San Domingue) and Spanish (Cuba) colonies.

McDonald’s book includes a fascinating chapter on what she calls a “creole economy” that, following the Revolution, led to increased trade that blurred the lines between legal and illicit. She also calls attention to how tariff policy and foreign relations, more generally, shaped the early coffee trade. For example, in 1832, the US Congress abolished tariffs on coffee (the only nation at the time not to tax coffee imports). This move coincided with a sharp rise in imports, particularly from Brazil, which was rapidly emerging as a challenger to Haitian and Cuban coffee. McDonald notes that major US coffee traders sold or leased ships to slave traders, even after the British attempt to make the transatlantic trade illegal. Although her focus is on the US side of the coffee story, McDonald acknowledges that business ventures in coffee following the Revolution were a result of the “collective efforts” of participants from “many countries and colonies” (p. 168). Coffee Nation may not explain how coffee literally changed the United States, but it tells a fascinating history of how people in the United States acquired a taste for an imported good that would become central to foodways and hospitality in the United States.

Finally, Seth Garfield’s book spans the colonial and national eras of Brazil while tracing the movement of guaraná from the agroforested landscapes of Amazonia to the cities of southeastern Brazil. The subtitle of his book notwithstanding, Garfield does not focus so much on guaraná’s caffeine content as he does the shifting meanings and material forms that guaraná acquired in Brazil. He begins by introducing readers to the Sateré-Mawé, inhabitants of the Lower Amazon and survivors of colonial violence, who call themselves “the children of guaraná.” Sateré-Mawé have cultivated and harvested the plant for purposes of extracting its large seed whose resemblance to a human eye figures prominently in Indigenous stories. Garfield draws on historical, ethnographic, and genetic evidence to show the role of Sateré-Mawés in selecting guaraná plants over time. After a four- to six-year period, guaraná shrubs bore fruit that was harvested by hand and washed. The seeds were roasted and then pounded into a paste that was molded into sticks and smoked. This process imparted distinct flavors and permitted storage, a technique that enabled guaraná to circulate outside of Sateré-Mawé territory. Ethnographic evidence indicates that women have been central to preparing the beverage, known as capó. The process involves grating the cured guaraná, combining it with cool water, and serving in a gourd. Serving and drinking capó remains central to Sateré-Mawé forms of hospitality and group identity.

Garfield then examines how outsiders—missionaries, European botanists and chemists, beverage companies, government agronomists, anthropologists—took an interest in guaraná and began to change its uses and meanings outside of Amazonia. Similar to coca, outsiders—Jesuits again figure prominently—initially imagined guaraná as an apothecary item whose value lay in promoting good health. Garfield documents the persistence of interest in guaraná’s medicinal properties among Brazilian and non-Brazilian researchers throughout the nineteenth century.

The second half of Garfield’s book shifts to explaining how and why guaraná became the signature ingredient in popular soft drinks during the twentieth century. Carbonated sodas, containing trace amounts of guaraná extract, became an example of the symbolic “consumption” of the Amazon by Brazilian businesses and consumer classes. In comparison with mate or coffee, the amount of guaraná consumed by Brazilians outside of Amazonia was very small but the symbolic importance was large: guaraná soft drinks provided opportunities for socializing while reinforcing Brazilian national identity against both the hegemony of Coca-Cola and the “primitivity” of Amazonian native people. Guaraná, however, has never abandoned the Amazon or the Sateré-Mawé, and neither does Garfield’s history. The final chapter returns to Sateré-Mawés, who continue to cultivate, process, consume, and sell guaraná, even as state-sponsored agronomists labor to breed “improved” varieties. Garfield argues that contemporary Sateré-Mawés are less concerned about cultural appropriation than with the unequal distribution of benefits generated by the mass consumption of guaraná. Guaraná and the Sateré-Mawé, Garfield suggests, are entangled with, but not strangled by, a world of capitalist consumption.

Taken together, what do these books suggest about food commodity studies in Latin American contexts?

Each of these works reveal how beverages—and the rituals surrounding their preparation and consumption—can play important roles in social life and politics; imagining national communities or other forms of social solidarity was often done over a shared drink. Paradoxically, the substance of these drinks required crossing geopolitical boundaries (e.g., coffee), cultural boundaries (e.g., guaraná), or both (e.g., yerba mate). Ensuring sufficient quantity and quality of these beverages sometimes required state interventions in the form of trade policies, regulations, agronomic research, or subsidies. Although none of these authors claim that caffeinated drinks brought down governments, their social significance periodically demanded politicians’ attention. Perhaps more importantly, these books point to the dynamic persistence of quotidian practices of consumption across radical political and/or economic shifts. This is particularly true with the examples of mate and guaraná, beverages rooted in Indigenous cultures that have withstood waves of colonization and economic “globalization.” If not quite “resistance,” their persistence points to the limited power that racists and/or corporations (e.g., Nestle or Coca-Cola) have in imposing their will over diverse populations.

These books also demonstrate the challenges of narrating and explaining the interplay of production and consumption over time. As an ensemble, this set of books draws on Sidney Mintz’s influential Sweetness and Power (cited by four of the five authors), which integrated production and consumption in considering the historical importance of cane sugar in the Atlantic world. Garfield’s book most effectively balances attention to places of production and sites of consumption, describing shifts in the methods and organization of production techniques during the second half of the twentieth century similar to other commodity crops (e.g., plant breeding, monocultures, and increased yields).

The three books on mate and McDonald’s history of coffee tend to privilege places of consumption. The authors by no means ignore places of production, but their stories tend to begin and end with consumption. Production is a means to the consumptive practices that lay at the center of these books. This leaves some important questions unexplored. For example, the histories of yerba mate describe a shift from “wild yerbales” (mostly in Paraguay) to plantations (mostly in Brazil and Argentina). The authors, with the partial exception of Sarreal, seem to accept the colonial perception of yerbales as “wild” resources akin to mineral mines. We learn little about the yerbales themselves beyond the role of birds in germination, a fact that does not in and of itself preclude Indigenous care. The potential erasure of Indigenous nurturing and control over yerbales is important not only for the history of yerba mate’s role in nation-building but also for the decline in Indigenous communities. That is, in contrast to Garfield’s history of guaraná, Indigenous groups appear to have entirely lost control over yerba mate production, yet just how and why this happened is unclear. One also wonders whether the makers of images and/or policies in places such as Buenos Aires and Montevideo worked to erase the persistence of Indigenous knowledge, even as they appropriated an Indigenous beverage as a national symbol.

In McDonald’s Coffee Nation, places of production are acknowledged insofar as the author repeatedly notes that coffee could not be grown in what was then the United States. She acknowledges the use of enslaved workers in San Domingue/Haiti and Brazil, but does not discuss the ecologies and climates that enabled coffee to happen or the role that coffee played in empowering people of color in San Domingue to challenge the power of sugar planters. This is a missed opportunity to illustrate what McDonald calls the “international networks” necessary to transform the United States into a “coffee nation.” Also, McDonald does not mention the cultivation of native plants as unrealized alternatives to both coffee and tea—a possibility provocatively raised by Folch’s attention to yaupon. The intent here is not to criticize omissions in otherwise rich narratives but simply to call attention to the challenges facing researchers trying to trace the interplay of production and consumption dynamics over time.

Finally, these books reveal the importance of historicizing consumption and the formation of mass consumer markets. Although Folch invokes Mintz by referencing the “biohacking” abilities of substances such as coca and mate to enable a “proletariat” (e.g., silver miners) to endure long, harsh work, the authors of these works seek to explain the popularity of drinks without resorting to biological or cultural functionalisms.Footnote ¹ Garfield and Pite place considerable emphasis on the importance of women as both servers and consumers of guaraná and mate. Sarreal calls attention to the affordability of mate relative to coffee or tea. McDonald stresses the importance of duty-free coffee imports in stimulating increased consumption. Taken together, these authors point to a mix of forces shaping consumption that include the material and the symbolic. However, even this is a simplification, since these studies also point to the need to situate any single commodity in an expanding world of commodities and mass consumer cultures. Understanding consumption patterns of mate or coffee or guaraná requires going beyond marketing slogans and images to consider other forms of social pressure/influence. For example, the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages, particularly beer, hovers around these histories suggesting that the social lives of things depends on their relationship to other things as well as their ability to shape relationships among people.

Ultimately, accounting for taste remains a complex, curious thing that defies universal explanations, be they rooted in biology or mass marketing. As powerful as Brazil’s coffee growers have been in the past, they apparently were unable to compel their Uruguayan neighbors to drink coffee over mate, while many Syrians prefer mate over coffee, in contrast to Italians, whose Argentine relatives apparently failed to convince them to abandon espressos for yerba mates.

A final observation that emerges from these studies is the need for scholars (and book publishers!)—who often double as consumers of such delightful beverages as coffee, mate, or guaraná—to take care to avoid being “captured” by their oh-so-seductive subjects. History is not all about conflict. Students and other readers need stories about people’s ability to create, share, and build communities via material cultures. The many hands and minds needed to make mate, guaraná, or coffee are awe-inspiring. But creating, sharing, and community-building do not require mass consumption of material goods whose ubiquity often relies on the exploitation of racialized and gendered labor and/or carries long-term ecological costs that impact some people more than others. As I have learned over the years from teaching students in courses on food history, eating and drinking can be fraught activities for some, associated with isolation and anxiety as well as joy and companionship. In short, everyday practices of consuming food or drink may create new, perhaps unintended, forms of power and exclusion, particularly in contemporary worlds of capitalism where cultural forms and knowledges are rapidly commodified. Acknowledging and understanding these kinds of social and material dynamics are not as easy or fun as savoring a cortado with a friend, yet they are important to keep in mind precisely because they offer explanations for conflict rooted in history and not a pessimistic “human condition.” Fortunately, as these books suggest, enjoying a drink and engaging in politics need not be mutually exclusive. The conversations may prove more stimulating than the caffeine.