Mate Culture

Mate-sharing is a communal drinking ritual, distinct from the mate beverage itself, in which a single gourd and metal straw called a bombilla are refilled with hot water by one designated server, the cebador, and passed hand to hand around a circle of participants, each drinking the full gourd before it is refilled and passed on. It is practiced across Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and southern Brazil in homes, workplaces, parks and streets, cutting across class, gender and age lines, and offering mate is treated as an invitation to friendship considered impolite to refuse. Guarani use of yerba mate as both a stimulant and a social drink predates European contact, undated precisely, and Spanish colonists and criollos adopted the practice after sixteenth-century contact with the Guarani, with Jesuit missions cultivating the plant commercially by the seventeenth century. Argentina's Instituto Nacional de la Yerba Mate reports mate present in the great majority of Argentine households, and a 2013 law declared it the country's official Infusion Nacional.