Sharing Yerba Mate: a Book Talk with Professor Rebekah E. Pite

Please join us for a "book talk" with Professor Rebekah E. Pite on her most recent monograph, Sharing Yerba Mate: How South America's Most Popular Drink Defined a Region (UNC, 2023) with Engineering Studies Professor Benjamin Cohen as discussant. Refreshments will be served. 

Drinking yerba mate is a daily, communal ritual that has brought together South Americans for some five centuries. 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.

Rebekah E. Pite is Professor of History at Lafayette College and Department Head. A social and cultural historian who researches and writes about food, labor, and everyday life in Argentina and the Río de Plata region, Sharing Yerba Mate is her most recent book.