Visualizing Race and Yerba Mate Hierarchies in Would-be Nations of the Río de la Plata, 1810–61

South America’s wars of independence against Spain ushered in a new political and economic era, as well as a new artistic one. Concurrently, the native ritualized infusion called yerba mate became an increasingly politicized symbol of Río Platenses’ resistance to and cultural differentiation from the Spanish. In mulato poet Bartolomé Hidalgo’s words, “Here we are pure Indians/and we only drink mate.” And yet, even as the favored colonial stimulant became a symbol of local, indigenous-inflected “independence,” the post-colonial artwork surrounding this communal drink emphasized enduring racial inequalities. Colonial artwork had featured elite white men, and especially women, drinking mate, often on their own in domestic settings with the servants who attended them absent from the frame. In the post-independence era, a new generation of immigrant artists inserted the figure of the black and brown cebador or cebadora (mate server) as central to this ritual, especially in their depictions of elite, white families in their ornate parlors and grand ballrooms in Buenos Aires. This paper will analyze the relative place of the “server and the served” in visual and textual depictions of the quotidian mate ceremony in the post-colonial era. It will demonstrate the way in which racialized hierarchies—alongside overlapping hierarchies of gender and class—not only survived the separation from Spain but assumed greater visibility and symbolic power in daily life, and representations of local, domestic culture.