Hands on the Green Leaf Labor, Resistance, and Bittersweet Dwelling in Argentina's Yerba Mate Country.

Abstract

Hands on the Green Leaf is an ethnographic homage to the men, women, and children called tareferos (tarefer@s) who labor to produce yerba mate, the naturally bitter, green tea that is both symbolic drink and staple food in Argentina. No ethnographic account exists of everyday life in yerba mate country while the vast majority of written work on the tea has focused on consumption. Focusing on tarefer@ personhood at the production site in Argentina’s poor Northeastern province of Misiones, this dissertation captures views of the first temporal, material, corporal, and affective spaces of the commodity chain from which 21st century agrarian alienation springs. I construct a “feminist ethnography of connectedness” which both links the lives of producers and consumers in order to ‘defetishize’ commodities and builds bridges between the disciplines of anthropology, agrarian studies, social work and psychology, as well as studies on labor, law, gender, and environment. I practice ethnographic “appearing” by tracing the history of los mensú, the workers who harvested yerba in the Paraná Forest up through the first part of the 20th century, bringing to light the role of women and children. I write on contemporary subjectivity in the yerbales unveiling a “bittersweet dwelling” in which tarefer@s fight weed cover and unfair labor practices to get to the green gold even as they experience the joys of camaraderie and the natural world in the yerbal. The second half of this dissertation contains accounts of tarefer@ resistance including historical highway blockades waged to improve the price of green leaf. I argue that tarefer@s forge temporary spaces of power and democracy on the asphalt. Contributing to legal anthropology and labor and agrarian studies, I analyze too the “culture of work” at play in the everyday labor conflict that jeopardizes food sovereignty. I argue that gender violence undergirds the yerba mate economy by writing the life of Presencia in which I demonstrate the critical value of women’s everyday practices of sustaining life. This dissertation closes with an account of my collaborative work with tarefer@s in Misiones, drawing on theories of empowerment from social work, community psychology, and collaborative anthropology.