Yerba Mate: A Nativist Beverage and Immigrant Drink

This essay shows how a beverage can draw out the complexities of national identity in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Argentina. For Argentines, maté is much more than a caffeinated beverage; it is a shared cultural practice full of meaning and it is a marker of national identity.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, maté became hotly contested. Unlike the colonial period, maté was no longer a key part of daily life for people of all social and economic throughout the region. Over the course of the nineteenth century, maté became closely associated with the gauchos (cowboys), rural life, and Argentina’s past. The liberal elite of Buenos Aires no longer publicly consumed it, claiming that because maté was unhygienic and a waste of time, there was no longer a place for it in a modern Argentina. Despite such assertions, maté did not disappear. It continued to be an important part of daily life for many Argentines; nativists embraced it as a symbol of Criollo national identity; foreign immigrants became the most fervent maté drinkers as a way to show their integration into Argentina; and even the elite continued to drink maté, albeit in private. The persistence of maté reveals the inability of the liberal elite to reshape national identity and cultural practices; and it shows how immigrants were able to subvert the meaning of maté in order to reshape what it meant to be Argentine.