Yerba Mate

Annamaria on Monday

Among the plants the first Europeans found in the New World were many that rather quickly became important parts of the European culture.  Tobacco comes quickly to mind.  There was another, yerba maté that slowly gained huge popularity, but then fell out of favor, and is now - once again - increasingly sought after.

Yerba Mate' is an indigenous tree that grew wild in that heart of South America, in an area occupied by the Guarani' people.  They harvested its leaves and twigs and soaked them water to make a beverage that helped them find the energy to deal with their primitive lives.  Mate'contains more caffeine than coffee or Ceylon tea.

Old myths told of a visit to the heart of South America by the goddess of the Moon, who was delighted with the beauty of the place.  But then she was threatened by a Jaguar that wanted to devour her.  An old man came to her defense and killed the jaguar.  In gratitude the goddess gave him and his people the yerba mate tree. 

With the arrival of Europeans, in the 16th Century, the Spanish settlers also began to enjoy the drink they called Mate (pronounced as two syllables.). When the Jesuits began to defend the Guarani' against the Portuguese and Spanish slave takers, they gathered them into Indian "reductions" - communes, and the priests learned to domesticate the plants and create orchards.  With the increase in suppply, mate' became more and more known and more and more popular.

Eventually, when the Jesuits were expelled in 1776, the plantations were taken over by the crown.  The popularity of the yerba mate continued spreading across South America, and eventually to Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France.  And Paraguay became enormously rich.

So rich that it's dictator, Francisco Solano Lopez thought he was wealthy enough to take on a war with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. That war is the background history to my novel, invisible Country. And in that war Paraguay lost 25% of it land to Brazil and Argentina. The victors, of course of, took the most valuable parts of Paraguay: those where yerba maté grew.

Then and now, mate' is typically drunk from a calabash gourd.  Early on the Europeans' began fashioning special cups decorated with silver that are still popular in Paraguay and Argentina. Here are some close-ups of my mate' cup that is also shown the photo at the top.

 

The straw, called a bombilla, is designed to for allowing a person to drink without imbibing the leaves or the twigs

Customarily, family members, when visited by friends, stand in a circle, and pass the gourd around clockwise. The first person drinks, and then the gourd is refilled for the next person, etc. At the very end, everyone says thank you. It's a social faux-pas to say thank you before everyone has drunk.

Nowadays, in South America, the drink is still very popular. Wherever I went in Paraguay and Argentina, especially outside of Buenos Aires, even in Brazil near Igusu Falls, in the parking lots of places that travelers visit, there were people, mostly men, in or near the cars, drinking mate at all hours of the day.

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Currently, mate' has gained a following in the Middle East, and with the arrival of many South Americans to the US, it is more and more popular here, where it accounts for 5% of the caffein drinks, and growing each year.

What about you?  Have you tried it?  Would you care to? For me, I tried it when I first encountered it Paraguay. I think it must be an acquired taste.  And I think I am too Italian to prefer any source of caffein other than a delicious espresso.

I will leave you with this taste of the brilliant, the gorgeous The Mission, a film about those Jesuit missions in Paraguay.  If you have never seen it, watch it!  Even if you have, I promise you, you will be glad to see it again.

Missiones, Argentina: The Ruins of the Jesuit Missions

Come with me to the northeastern corner of Argentina to the province of Missiones.  In the northern tip of Missiones is the Argentine side of the great Iguazu falls.  If you don’t know about that great wonder of the natural world, you should search this blog for “Iguaçu” and read Leighton Gage’s wonderful post about it. 

Today, I want to take you to the other end of that province to a 1984 entry into UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites, the ruins of the Jesuit Reductions. I visited there in 1990, while driving around Paraguay with David, researching what I thought would be my first novel.  (It turned out to be my second—Invisible Country.)  Missiones was, off and on, a part of Paraguay, but it was finally lost to Argentina in The War of the Triple Alliance, the background setting for my book.

Thanks to a mutual friend, for this leg of our trip, we had the advice and company of a delightful Paraguayan couple—Gladys and Pebe Da Costa.  Without them, we would never have had the know-how and the language skills needed to get our rental car over the newly built bridge of San Roque González de Santa Cruz and into Missiones.  The beautiful span crosses the Parana and connects Encarnacion, Paraguay and Posadas, Argentina.  Contraband issues made it tricky to move a car to Argentina and then take it back to Paraguay.  As it was, we had to exit Argentina by driving onto the bridge, leaving Gladys and Pebe behind.  They secured a certificate saying the car had left Paraguay.  Then they took a bus over the bridge to get Argentine paperwork processed for our return. 

During their absence, David and I sat in the car; he read, and I knitted.  At one point I decided to see what would be playing on the local radio stations, expecting a glimpse into the local musical culture.  As soon as I switched it on, what to my wondering ears did I hear?  Little Richard singing “Good Golly, Miss Molly!”

After about an hour and a half, Gladys and Pebe took the bus back, walked out onto the bridge, and got into the car.  We were off.  Into a land of enchantment.  Where, that day, we were the only tourists.

Magical realism was born in South America.  I understand why.  There are places on that spectacular continent where one feels magic can happen.  Missiones is one of those.

It was there, in the Seventeenth Century, that Jesuit missionaries founded their “reductions.” In a matter of only a few years, they created thirty villages, four of the greatest ones in what is now Missiones.  It was the practice of the Spanish in those days, to gather the indigenous population into towns, to make it easy to Christianize, tax, and govern them.  They Europeanized them into the bargain.  Though the Jesuits converted the Indians under their control, they did not force them to adopt European culture.  Instead, they sought to preserve at least some of their native values and much of their way of life.

In Jesuit mission villages, they protected the Guarani from Portuguese slavers, who had been taking them to staff brutal plantations across the border in Brazil.  Instead, they taught them agriculture and crafts.  The Jesuit missions became financially independent and, to a great extent, autonomous.  It has been said that they became a source of great wealth for the Jesuit order, but recent research show that this was far from the truth—really a part of anti-Jesuit propaganda that had more to do with political and power rivalries in Europe than with on-the-ground realities in South America.

Jesuit missions garnered a great deal of resentment—from those who had profited by stealing the Indians and selling them into slavery and from those who envied the mission villages’ prosperity.  This acrimony certainly contributed to the eventual expulsion of the Jesuits from South America.

In 1759, the anti-Jesuit factions gained ascendency in Europe and all the Jesuit reductions were ordered closed.  In 1767, the priests vacated the continent, leaving behind magnificent structures, so well built that they survived two centuries of neglect and remain as monuments to one of humanity’s stabs at Utopia.

Their buildings were Baroque decorated by indigenous artists.  Today their remains are hauntingly beautiful –towering church walls, free standing in open fields, headless statues carved with draped clothing, their hands holding symbols of apostles and saints.   It is almost twenty-five years since I stood among them, yet I can still smell the spicy vegetation and feel awe for men who came from great European cities and had the skill and the heart to construct such wonders in this remote and wild place.

To complete this picture, I will state that there are those who characterize what the Jesuits did in South America as theocratic terrorism.  But others, including the anti-clerical Rousseau, admired their brief success at creating jungle utopias of plenty, of music, of art and worship.

This history, a bit romanticized, is the tale told in the marvelous 1986 movie, “The Mission.”  Here is a sample of Ennio Morricone’s brilliant film score, performed in Arena di Verona.    Listen and transport yourself.

http://youtu.be/PygPri0-LNA

Annamaria - Monday