The habit of drinking mate, which can be traced back to the culture of the Guarani people—one of the main hypotheses of this work—long before the arrival of Europeans to America, survived centuries of political oppression and cultural exchange. Yerbear is a practice that has accompanied the Spanish colonization, the struggles for independence, anarchy, civil wars and successive social processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The art of brewing “mate” and The language of “mate”, two key books in Amaro Villanueva’s work, propose—as Sergio Delgado, responsible for this edition, points out—"a combined and complementary study of objects and their language".