Growing a Third Arm: Public Mate Consumption in 20th-Century Argentina and Uruguay

In this talk, I will examine how yerba mate crossed borders and at the same time helped to define them in twentieth-century Argentina and Uruguay.  Argentina established itself as the largest producer of this popular South American infusion in the 1930s.  (First Paraguay and then Brazil had held this honor.)  For its part, Uruguay, proved unable to grow the holly-like tree used to produce yerba mate—like all other nations outside of the semi-tropical river basin linking northeastern Argentina, southern Brazil, and Paraguay.  Nevertheless, Uruguayans became the largest per capita consumers of this infusion during the course of the twentieth century.  Indeed, since at least the late twentieth-century, and despite the fact that Argentines are the largest total consumers of yerba mate, residents of Buenos Aires have identified Uruguayans (and not themselves) by their propensity to drink large amounts of mate in public.  As several porteños explained to me, “ellos tienen un tercer brazo” [they have a third arm], in a sarcastic reference to the thermos many Uruguayans port around with them with the hot water used to cebar, or serve, their mates.  And yet, while this practice has been less common in Buenos Aires than in Montevideo, patterns of public consumption have been much more similar in the northeastern Argentine province of Misiones (where most Argentine yerba mate is produced) to those in Uruguay. Combining qualitative and quantitative sources with ethnographic research, this paper will examine the historical development of region-specific national identities tightly linked with this at once “national” and regional infusion.