Drinking yerba mate is a daily, communal ritual that has brought together South Americans for some five centuries. In lively prose and with vivid illustrations, Rebekah E. Pite explores how this Indigenous infusion, made from the naturally caffeinated leaves of a local holly tree, became one of the most distinctive and widely consumed beverages in the region. Ideas about who should harvest and serve yerba mate, along with visions of the archetypical mate drinker, persisted and were transformed alongside the shifting politics of class, race, and gender.
This global history takes us from the colonial Río de la Plata to the top yerba-consuming and producing nations of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with excursions to Chile, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, where yerba mate is now sold as a "superfood."
In celebration of Pite’s new book, Sharing Yerba Mate: How South America's Most Popular Drink Defined a Region, MOFAD is excited to welcome Rebekah E. Pite for a conversation on the importance and impact of yerba mate as well as a yerba mate making demonstration.
Tickets include the option to purchase Sharing Yerba Mate by Rebekah E. Pite from our bookseller partner Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York City.
REBEKAH E. PITE
Rebekah E. Pite is a Professor of History at Lafayette College (USA). She is a social and cultural historian of Latin America, and especially Argentina, with an analytical focus on gender, labor, and food. Her other books include Creating a Common Table in Twentieth-Century Argentina: Doña Petrona, Women, and Food (UNC Press), which won book prizes from Gourmand and the Chile-Río de la Plata subsection of LASA, and La mesa está servida. Doña Petrona C. de Gandulfo y la domesticidad de la Argentina del siglo XX (Edhasa).
KITCHEN ARTS & LETTERS
Kitchen Arts & Letters is a bookstore devoted to food and drink, with titles imported from around the world. They emphasize works on food culture and innovation.