From Black Drink to “American Made” CPG: The Power of Consumerism in the History of Yaupon Tea

Yaupon, North America's only indigenous caffeinated plant, has slowly been making a comeback. Growing natively across the south and southeast, yaupon has a complicated cultural history impacted by settler colonialism, the agricultural industry, and Indigenous myth-making. For many generations, yaupon was considered a nuisance. Recent tea and coffee tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration place the yaupon industry in a potentially lucrative position to market themselves as the nation’s next Made in America caffeine of choice. At the same time, cuts to federal grant programs and broad measures to defund programs related to issues including DEI, BIPOC, and climate change threaten many, if not all, in the yaupon industry who heavily rely on grants to support agricultural research and farming endeavors. For The Yaupon Brothers, a company that operates out of a 100-year-old organic citrus grove in Florida, the current anti-DEI climate threatens a large part of their production, which relies on the support of BIPOC farming initiative Potlikker Capital. While these efforts to support Black yaupon farmers are recent, they are built on a long, historic precedent of newly emancipated African American farmers who turned to yaupon as a viable trade during the tumultuous 19th century. The Yaupon Brothers are also finding support from yerba mate farmers in South America. Yaupon farmers are in an awkward position. If they take advantage of a current conservative political moment, do they downplay the Indigenous and Black farmer histories of the plant? And will they be able to meet consumer demand if their federal agricultural funding that they qualified for thanks to sustainability and DEI efforts dries up in the meantime? If yaupon continues to grow in popularity, will it ever be able to shrug off the shackles of its Westernized botanical name, a name that many southerners were taught to fear?