Yerba Mate: The Drink that Shaped a Nation. By Julia J.S. Sarreal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023. 394 pp. $85.00). Guarana: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant. By Seth Garfield (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. 336 pp. $99.00). What can the social life of yerba mate or guarana tell us about the history of capitalism in the global periphery and the processes of colonialism, national formation, urbanization, and modernization in South America? How did everyday practices of consumption and production of once solely Indigenous staples shape processes of class formation, and state expansionism, in the region? And even more interesting, how did these two caffeinated commodities that, unlike coffee or tea, failed to become global commodities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, become the “national beverages” they are today? In these two captivating books, Julia J.S. Sarreal and Seth Garfield intelligently delve into these questions and offer us two studies on commodities that were in need of a comprehensive historical examination. Both Sarreal and Garfield set up to tell a commodity history or, as other scholars have referred to it, a social and cultural biography of a good. To do so, the authors opt for a longue duree approach, examining the evolution, transformation, and adaptation of yerba mate and guarana, respectively, from preColumbian times to the turn of the twenty-first century. In Guarana: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant, Seth Garfield explores how a plant that has nurtured the Satere-Mawe people came to be a namesake ingredient of a multibillion-dollar soft drink industry of Brazil. As a result, Garfield offers us a story of the production and circulation of guarana “from Indigenous cultivar to a colonial-era missionizing concern and regional trade commodity; from an object of Western scientific study and classification to an AngloAmerican pharmaceutical novelty to a mass-consumed soft drink: from a moral crusade and geopolitical agenda to an emblem of Brazilian national development and identity” (7). In Yerba Mate the Drink That Shaped a Nation, Julia J.S. Sarreal studies how yerba mate evolved from an Indigenous consumable initially seen by Europeans as an abhorrent and degenerate activity into a colonial beverage. Yerba mate consumption, Sarreal argues, became a shared practice and a maker of Creole Journal of Social History https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad048 © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jsh/shad048/7231717 by Ohio Northern University user on 01 August 2023 BOOK REVIEW Journal of Social History Spring 2024 identity in the eighteen century in Paraguay and Argentina. In the nineteenth century, it became the drink of the gauchos and lower classes, as well as the clandestine beverage of the Buenos Aires elite. Mate did not fit with modernity and urban life by the turn of the century. Such concerns lead several Argentines to call for an end to mate consumption—much in the line of other Latin American elites, who called for the eradication of chicha, pulque, and cachaça consumption. The association of yerba mate with the poor and lower classes during the Peronist era turned the local commodity into an antiquated symbol of Argentine identity. Yerba mate’s decline only ended in the 1990s in the middle of the country’s economic crisis. Under the impact of neoliberal reforms and globalization, mate once again moved out of the home and into the public. Hence, by following the social life of yerba mate, Sarreal shows how this commodity played a key role in shaping Argentina’s contested process of national identity formation. The methodological contributions of both works are noteworthy. Sarreal and Garfield deftly study complex processes of symbolic and rhetorical appropriation of yerba mate in Argentina and guarana in Brazil, merging a wide variety of scholarly approaches to the study of commodities. By exploring both the consumption and production of yerba mate, Sarreal engages two methodologies rarely combined by historians: cultural history and political economy. Garfield employs a mixed and multi-site approach that draws on contributions from cultural anthropology, political economy, environmental history, and social history of knowledge. The authors’ commitments to understanding the changing and contentious social and cultural meanings of two key commodities in the history of Argentina and Brazil is one of the major contributions of their works. Both studies show how the everyday actions of common people—not just state policies and elite interests—shaped large-scale social, political, and economic processes in South America. With good reason, power struggles and politics end up being at the core of these object-oriented histories. Furthermore, Sarreal and Garfield recognize the many mediators that re-assigned yerba mate and guarana’s meanings to satisfy new political and cultural realities. How scientists, engineers, botanists, physicians, geologists, colonial officials, missionaries, state politicians, and advertising companies intervened in the creation of new codes and rituals to encourage the consumption of yerba mate and guarana is explored in great detail by both authors. Sarreal and Garfield are mindful of the varied historical mediators whose practices and preferences change knowledge and the meaning of commodities through space and time. Among the many strengths of Yerba Mate and Guarana is their study of production processes alongside changes in consumption practices. If told through the viewpoint of “commodity lotteries”—which have traditionally shaped economic history approach to studying Latin American products—the histories of both yerba mate and guarana would be limited to a story of their short-lived booms. The “green gold” boom from the 1870 s to 1914 in the case of yerba mate in Argentina (Chapter 5), or the Anglo-American boom and subsequent decline of guarana in the nineteenth century (Chapter 4). Furthermore, since both products contain caffeine, they are extremely relevant for scholars interested in other well-known global commodities, such as coffee and tea, and for exploring why some commodities become “global” and others do not. In the nineteenth century, for instance, guarana was confined to the pharmaceutical Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jsh/shad048/7231717 by Ohio Northern University user on 01 August 2023 2 3 sector at a moment when patent medicines’ efficiency as medicine began to be questioned by the scientific community, while yerba mate was surpassed in the global market by tea consumption in Europe, particularly because of British interests in the tea trade which sought to boost sugar sales (72). As a drink, guarana was also bypassed in the European and North American market because of its flavoring. Argentina and Brazil’s prioritization of certain agricultural developments—wheat and livestock in Argentina, and coffee production in Brazil— over others, also explain yerba mate’s and guarana’s particular trajectories from the nineteenth century onwards. As both works show, the “bad luck” of these two commodities in the global market can only be understood alongside the emergence of similar products in other geographies, but also taking into account each country’s geopolitical agendas, the places of production and the available workforce, and local consumers’ preferences and their cultural and political needs. By embracing changes in consumption practices, these studies significantly contribute to the studies of consumption and material culture beyond Latin America. As Garfield rightly states, “consumption can entail both coercion and emancipation, subjugation and power.” (136). Both studies develop their arguments by acknowledging this premise and recognizing consumers’ agency with social structures. Sarreal’s work demonstrates, for instance, that despite the great efforts of advertising companies in the first half of the twentieth century to transform consumption patterns of yerba mate, these changes were not accepted by the majority of the population, including the middle classes. She thus reminds us that we should not assume that the reception of a commodity can be imposed “from above;” consumers can give their material world its own meaning. These findings become interesting when compared to the acceptance of guarana in Brazil in the twentieth century. As Garfield demonstrates, middleclass consumption and mass media gave rise to “modern” Brazil. “Guarana soft drinks bobbed as symbols of self-fulfillment and social progress” (101). Soda companies reinvented the sensory experience of guarana, and consumers embraced it. While yerba mate in Argentina became associated with the poor and thus appeared the antithesis of progress, guarana became a symbol of selffulfillment and social progress in Brazil. Both studies also constitute great contributions to the history of capitalism from the global periphery. As Sarreal notes, Argentina is the world’s larger producer, consumer, and exporter of yerba mate. In 2013, the Argentine government declared Mate the official national infusion. Grown commercially in Brazil, guarana has had a major impact on Amazonian ecosystems and is cultivated today by Indigenous and non-Indigenous small farmers as well as on large farms. As Garfield notes, guarana is today the key ingredient of a multibilliondollar soda drink industry. The position these commodities occupy in the twentieth-first century is the result of the constant exploitation of workers, the inequalities produced by its systems of production and commercialization, and the struggles over land distribution. Not to mention the many tensions that the commercialization natural resources create and the silencing of Indigenous knowledge. All these processes were marked by class, gender, and racial differences, both of which are central in both Garfield’s and Sarreal’s works. Finally, due to the scope of their works and their determination to follow the cultural life of a specific commodity, both studies stand out for their Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jsh/shad048/7231717 by Ohio Northern University user on 01 August 2023 Book Review Journal of Social History Spring 2024 innovative combination of diverse sources, which include Jesuit missionaries’ accounts, ethnographic descriptions, official reports, political discourses, literature and poetry, comic strips and advertisements. The use of visual sources in both cases is particularly commendable. Thanks to this breadth of sources and their deep and careful analysis of their subject of study, Sarreal and Garfield convincingly demonstrate how the commodities they study are crucial to understanding the history of Argentina and Brazil. In the words of Sarreal, “it is not unreasonable to understand that the history of yerba mate in Argentina is to understand how and why Argentina became the nation it is today” (3). The same can be said for Garfield’s study of guarana in the case of Brazil. Readers will find both works exciting read and excellent examples of how the circulation of goods is always—as Sidney Mintz reminded us—a tale of power. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad048 Ana Marıa Otero-Cleves University of York, UK [email protected] Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jsh/shad048/7231717 by Ohio Northern University user on 01 August 2023 4