Man sipping yerba mate in Montevideo, Uruguay. Photo by jorgeloayza via Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED. Everywhere you go in Argentina or Uruguay, you’ll see people engaging in an old and much-loved ritual: sipping a hot, slightly bitter infusion of caffeinated leaves from a dried gourd through a filtered metal straw, before passing the gourd to their friends to share. It’s yerba mate, South America’s Indigenous tea with a long and storied history. “Yerba mate” is the common name for Ilex paraguariensis, a shrub native to South America whose dried and cured leaves are brewed in hot water to produce a popular caffeinated drink called mate. Long consumed by the Indigenous Guaraní and Tupi peoples of what is today Paraguay, mate spread rapidly throughout South America during the Spanish Empire. Today, mate is the favorite drink of Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay, as well as parts of Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, and even the Middle East. But where did this South American infusion originate and how did it captivate so many millions of daily drinkers around the world? The first people known to cultivate and drink mate were the Guaraní peoples of pre-Columbian Paraguay. While its consumption was limited to a few regions of Paraguay, mate was at least familiar to other Indigenous communities in South America. While the term “yerba” comes from Spanish, meaning “herb,” the term “mate” derives from the Quechua word “mati,” referring to the dried calabash gourds in which mate is traditionally served. Traces of yerba mate found in a Quechua tomb near Lima suggest that mate may have been held in prestige far from its Paraguayan heartland, perhaps due to its medicinal connotations and ritual applications. The Quechua etymology also explains why to this day both the drink and the container it is served in are known as “mate.” When Spanish colonizers arrived in the Southern Cone — modern-day Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile — in the mid-sixteenth century, they soon encountered the caffeinated leaves being consumed in large quantities by several Indigenous populations. By the late sixteenth century, mate was already popular among Spaniards in the region of Asunción, the eventual capital of Paraguay. Mate was popular enough by 1596 that one Spanish official in Asunción claimed that Spaniards addicted to mate sold their possessions or went into debt to obtain the precious herb. The colonial government briefly attempted to control the mate trade in the belief that mate drinking was a dangerous habit — a belief tinged by racism based on its Indigenous origins. Even so, by the early seventeenth century its popularity was such that it began to spread to other corners of the Spanish Empire. For a time, yerba mate was an important commodity in colonial cities far from where it is commonly consumed today, such as in Peru and Ecuador. One of the most important chapters in the history of mate came with the arrival of the Jesuit Order in Paraguay in the early seventeenth century. The Jesuits, a Catholic order of priests, acted as a vanguard force of colonialism on the fringes of the Spanish Empire. In Paraguay, they established a series of mission settlements, or “reductions,” characterized by political and economic autonomy from the Spanish crown. Because the Jesuit reductions needed to establish an independent economic base, and yerba mate was the most valuable commodity in Paraguay, many settlements turned to yerba mate cultivation. Initially, they followed the traditional method of dispatching Indigenous harvesters long distances to gather leaves from wild stands. However, this was costly, time-consuming, and dangerous, so the Jesuits found another way, becoming the first to domesticate the plant — a feat not repeated until the nineteenth century, as the Jesuits kept their methods secret. Before long, the Jesuits held a near-monopoly on the colonial mate industry. Jesuit mate was eventually so cheap and abundant that, in the absence of gold coins, it was used as currency in the reductions. In 1767, the Jesuit Order was suppressed in the Spanish Empire and the Paraguayan reductions, together with their mate monopoly, fell into decline. Even so, Paraguay remained the center of the mate industry and consumption of the drink continued to expand throughout colonial South America, even reaching southern Europe by the late eighteenth century — though it never rivaled the popularity of other colonial cash crops like cocoa, tea, and coffee, the three most important caffeinated beverages in early modern Europe. Paraguay only lost its preeminent position as the top mate producer following independence, as Argentina and Brazil began to vie for control over the mate market.