Recent years have been a boon for new English-language books about the revered South American stimulant yerba mate. Historians got not only the suggestive monograph reviewed here, but also Julia Sarreal's complementary Yerba Mate: The Drink That Shaped a Nation. As a veteran Latin American commodity historian, I applaud this recognition, since mate has long been a glaring research gap in the field. What explains mate's newfound celebrity? In part, no doubt, the appeal of academic studies of goods, consumption, and national identity across the Americas. I also suspect the effect of mate's recent spread beyond its origins as a Southern Cone tea into global energy drinks and café health teas (apart from mate's fascinating earlier twentieth-century chain of meanings to Druze laborers migrating between Buenos Aires and the Levant).
Pite excels in highlighting mate's ever-shifting geographic, class, gender, and cultural usage patterns, from the early colonial era in...
