The Bitter Leaf of Misiones
A Novel of the Yerba Mate Harvest

About this book:

In the red-dust borderlands of 1923, nineteen-year-old Mateo Ayala crosses the Paraná River into the yerba mate concessions of Misiones, trading six months of his life for thirty pesos and a pair of dead men's boots. What awaits isn't work—it's a meticulously engineered trap: company stores that charge double for salt meat, debts that grow faster than the harvest, and a capataz who treats men like disposable tools. But beneath the canopy of the *yerbal*, where the drying fires burn night and day and the air tastes of iron and woodsmoke, something is stirring among the *tareferos*. Veterans like Chepé have survived fourteen harvests by keeping their heads down. Mateo isn't sure he can.

*The Bitter Leaf of Misiones* plunges you into a world where green gold flows from the jungle to the parlors of Buenos Aires on the broken backs of Paraguayan peasants. With visceral, unflinching prose, this novel illuminates a forgotten chapter of South American history—the debt peonage that built the mate empire—through the eyes of a young man discovering that the only thing more dangerous than the jungle is the system designed to swallow him whole. As the harvest deepens and the strike at dawn approaches, Mateo must decide what he's willing to risk for a freedom that exists only on the other side of the river.