Conclusion

Old ideas die hard. Look no further than this 1980s mate commercial for the Aguila brand as evidence. Aguila, supposedly, has a “legend” as a backstory - a love story between a settler and an indigenous woman. While the settler plants a tree, he notices a nude indigenous woman washing a loincloth in a river at the base of a majestic waterfall. He “fell in love with her, of that sweet and tasty kiss which he stole from her,” and starts to chase her until she finally submits. At the end of the ad, they literally transform into Aguila’s products - the man becomes a mate and bombilla, while the woman is the embodiment of the boxed yerba itself. There is a clear equation between the desire for an indigenous woman and the purity of the mate, as “Aguila is pure yerba, with your tenderness I will brew.”

Clearly, some Argentines maintained the association between yerba mate and its rural origins, between indigeneity and purity, and between modernity and civilization. The ideas that early twentieth century producers used to make their highly commercialized mate intelligible to a bourgeois consumer market, which were relatively stable across brands, permeated the minds of Argentine advertisers even after Argentina’s complex and contested twentieth century. 

While this project has centered around mate and the people that advertise it, it is really about ideas about mate and how they intersect with ideas about race and modernity, and how rural areas were not just a physical space where laborers cultivated yerba but an imagined space where advertisers laid out and negotiated the relationship between their products and those who would consume it. Rural areas provided the backdrop for marketers to participate in larger national debates over what it meant to be part of a modern, civilized nation, and they used those ideas to sell yerba. 

To deconstruct those ideas, to place them into historical context, is the task of the historian. But it is the task of you, dear reader, to consider how this methodology might inform how you interact with the ideas around you. For example, environmental protection in the United States began with indigenous dispossession and settler conquest, and representations of African-Americans in the environment and in environmental movements stagnate despite many Black communities’ positions on the front lines of environmental justice fights (Finney, 27-29).  The images and interpretation in this project might face the constraints of the bits and bytes and binaries of a pixelated screen, but I hope that this inspires you to reimagine the world around you and to take action to make the world you envision a reality.