Hemispheric whiteness: repackaging yerba mate across the Americas

By following yerba mate across the Americas, from Argentina to the United States, this article traces how colonial racial projects continue to shape the cultural politics of consumption. In Argentina, yerba mate functions as a national unifier that erases Indigenous presence through blanqueamiento and constructs ideals of gendered domesticity and middle-class respectability. In the United States, it becomes an ethical commodity that repackages yerba mate as a superfood and a source of spiritual and ecological renewal, reaffirming the logics of whiteness that structure ethical consumption. Drawing from a follow-the-thing approach and a semiotic analysis of newspapers, government campaigns, packaging, and advertising, this article reveals how racialized meanings of purity, vitality, and care travel across contexts. Examining these cases together, I argue that hemispheric whiteness endures as a racial formation that travels with the commodity itself, taking shape through the reworkings of yerba mate.