ka'a mati

Yerba mate is a compound name from two different indigenous South American languages. Yerba is the Spanish word for herb, itself a translation of Guaraní ka'a, which means both 'plant' and 'herb' in the specific sense of this plant; it is the Guaraní name for Ilex paraguariensis, the holly species whose dried leaves and stems are used to make the infusion. Mate comes from Quechua mati, meaning 'cup,' 'gourd,' or 'vessel for a drink' — specifically the calabash gourd (Lagenaria siceraria) traditionally used to drink the infusion. The full phrase yerba mate means, therefore, 'the herb of the gourd' or 'the herb drunk from a gourd,' naming the beverage simultaneously by its plant ingredient and its traditional vessel. Both indigenous words survived into Spanish and then into English because they named specific objects that had no exact European equivalents.

The Guaraní peoples of Paraguay, southern Brazil, and the northeastern Argentine provinces were the primary cultivators and consumers of mate before European contact. In Guaraní culture, the plant was known as ka'a, 'the plant' — a name as generic as the English 'the herb' but specific in context because everyone knew which plant was meant. Guaraní myth described the plant as a gift of the forest deity Yasí (the moon), who transformed an old woman's hospitality into the mate plant growing near her home. The beverage was prepared by adding dried, ground ka'a leaves to hot (not boiling) water in a gourd, drinking through a metal or reed bombilla (a filtered straw that prevents the leaves from being ingested), and passing the gourd communally. The communal sharing of a single gourd was and remains a social ceremony — refusing to drink the mate passed to you is a social snub.

Spanish Jesuit missionaries who established the reducciones (reduction settlements) of Paraguay in the early seventeenth century had a complex relationship with mate. Initially they tried to suppress it, associating the communal gourd-sharing with indigenous ritual practices they sought to replace. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, the Jesuits had reversed course entirely: they domesticated mate cultivation, established the first large-scale plantations in their missions, developed techniques for seed germination (wild mate seeds are difficult to germinate), and became the primary commercial exporters of dried mate to the wider colonial world. The Jesuits were expelled from South America in 1767, but their plantation system remained and expanded; commercial mate production has been continuous ever since.

Mate's expansion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been driven partly by migration and partly by the global health food market. The large South American immigrant communities in the Middle East — particularly in Syria and Lebanon, where over a million people have South American ancestry through nineteenth and twentieth-century immigration — brought mate with them, making Syria and Lebanon among the largest per-capita consumers of yerba mate in the world. The image of Lebanese families drinking mate from gourds in Beirut is one of the more striking examples of indigenous South American material culture transplanted through diaspora. In Europe and North America, mate's reputation as a caffeinated beverage with high antioxidant content and different stimulant properties from coffee has established it as a specialty health drink sold in cans, teabags, and loose-leaf form.