This chapter examines journalistic representations of the yerba mate industry created by the Hispano-Paraguayan author Rafael Barrett. It describes the long history of the yerba industry from its origins in the sixteenth century to the current vogue of nutraceutical herbal supplements before focusing on the conditions that led to massive exploitation of agricultural laborers in the debt-peonage system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This establishes the context for a detailed examination of the politics and poetics of Barrett’s chronicles. Barrett, known today as a pioneering anarchist intellectual in the Río de la Plata region of South America, was primarily focused on exposing the human rights and labor abuses of the yerba industry, but his writings also suggest a mode of ethnobotanical inquiry at odds with the Western ontological distinction between nature and culture, a mode in which yerba itself demonstrates a startling and fascinating agency.

The turn of the century saw the emergence of a host of different entertainment media through which visual culture was industrialized, commodified, and otherwise modernized. New visual technologies, from photography, moving panoramas, stereoscopes, and cinema, to new image-delivery systems in advertisement and the illustrated press crystalized new forms of social organization and transformed visual perception. Following the modern crónicas of modernista writer Rubén Darío, the article explores the ways in which literary writing faced the challenge of the new mass culture and developed new languages and forms to reach a growing readership in the Latin American modernizing cities. Bridging both sides of the Atlantic and crossing over from the aesthete poet to the popular chronicler, Darío’s writing registers not just the intertwinement of high and mass culture, but above all the forms of spectatorship that delineated “the era of the mechanical reproducibility.”