At lunchtime on Friday, Oct. 17, students and faculty gathered at the Africana, Latin, Asian and Native American (ALANA) Cultural Center for a lecture that promised to link rainforest mythology to the rise of modern consumer culture. Historian Seth Garfield of the University of Texas at Austin delivered “Picturing the Amazon: Selling Guaraná Soda in Twentieth-Century Brazilian Advertising,” a talk that traced how a caffeine-rich plant from the Amazon basin became a potent symbol of Brazil’s industrial aspirations and national identity.
Sponsored by the history department, the event drew students and faculty interested in Latin American studies, visual culture and environmental history. Garfield, an award-winning scholar whose books include “In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region,” “A World of Sorrow: The Great War’s Impact on Brazil” and “Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeinated Plant,” based the lecture on his latest publication, which won two awards and two honorable mentions at the 2023 Conference on Latin American History (CLAH).
In her introductory comments, Professor of History Heather Roller, a fellow 2023 CLAH honoree, reflected on Garfield’s influence as a researcher and historian.
“There are vines reaching into all these very interesting areas of history that you wouldn’t think it is connected to,” Roller said. “The story reaches the indigenous people of the Amazon, Brazilian people and the history of the nation.”
Roller emphasized the difficulty of researching his topic, given the scarcity of documentation compared to other commodities like cocaine or coffee. She praised Garfield’s intense sleuthing in building a personal archive of rare sources related to guaraná.
“I have really enjoyed hearing stories about this archival practice,” Roller said.
Garfield opened his lecture by describing the guaraná plant itself — the world’s most caffeine-rich species, native to the Brazilian Amazon. In its natural state, the vine requires painstaking labor to process: The seeds are pounded, formed into lobes and conserved for transport. Once cultivated exclusively in the Sateré-Mawé region, the plant’s consumption remained largely local until Brazil’s postwar industrial expansion in the mid-20th century. Referencing a creation myth that says the guaraná grew from the planted eyeball of the original Sateré-Mawé ancestor, Garfield underscored the cultural weight of the plant for this community.
“They call themselves the children of the guaraná. There is a cosmological, ontological, cultural and political importance,” Garfield said. “The plant is central to their self-view.”
He elaborated on the symbolic role of the guaraná plant in Indigenous political and religious activity.
“The communal gourd of guaraná would provide knowledge, reconcile disputes between factions and [was] a ritualistic way of consuming the beverage,” Garfield said.
The first part of Garfield’s lecture turned to the early advertising of guaraná soda during Brazil’s early 1900s industrial boom and its role in shaping popular conceptions of the Amazon. Although it is indigenous to and cultivated in the northwestern Amazon region of Brazil, the drink was popularized by southern manufacturers like Antarctica Soda, which began in the wealthier metropolis of São Paulo. According to Garfield, this geographical and socioeconomic divide created crucial misunderstandings between producers, manufacturers and consumers.
As Brazilian soda companies sought to appeal to middle-class, urban consumers, their marketing leaned on exoticized portrayals of Indigenous peoples and tropical landscapes. Garfield explained how these depictions both reflected and reinforced metropolitan misconceptions about the Amazon region.
Early advertisements often invoked myths of rejuvenation and magic. One 1944 campaign for Guaraná Champagne Antarctica advertised that the root of indigenous resistance was an energy drawn from consumption of the guaraná. Garfield said that such messaging cast the soda as a fountain of youth and vitality, drawing on colonial-era notions that Indigenous peoples were naturally attuned to the healing power of nature.
In print images, Indigenous men appeared as generalized caricatures in feathered headdresses, while women were rendered as sexually alluring figures with Europeanized features.
These advertisements, Garfield noted, offered urban Brazilians a vision of escapism and purity at a time when rapid urbanization was fueling anxieties about health and modernity.
“They compounded into this fantasy of natural vigor,” he said. “Amidst these shifting and accelerating tempos of urban life, guaraná — a soda rooted in Brazilian tradition — offered a boost of health, libido and patriotism. In a time nostalgic for old magic, here was one re-worked, re-enchanted for urban consumers. It offers a fascinating reflection on how different people view nature.”
The soda’s sleek bottles and industrial packaging contrasted with the raw, natural imagery of guaraná vines dripping into the drink.
“It played on everyone’s fantasies about flora and the secrets of the Amazon,” Garfield said, noting that advertisements even urged mothers to give the beverage to their children as a “healthier” choice.
In the second half of the lecture, Garfield shifted from representation to industrial conflict. He outlined how guaraná soda manufacturers faced significant challenges: limited supply, high production costs and extraction competition with other Amazonian commodities like rubber. By the 1920s, Brazilian beverage companies — including Antarctica, which launched its soda in 1921 — promoted guaraná using nationalistic rhetoric that tied consumption to patriotic pride.
As production expanded in the 1930s, however, tensions erupted between northern producers and southern manufacturers. A main point of contention was that some southern Brazilian soda companies adulterated their sodas, advertising recipes as guaraná beverages that had just small traces of the plant.
Amazonian merchants denounced these practices as fraud, seeing them as part of a broader pattern of outsiders exploiting the region’s resources and image.
“This was not only a conflict over product branding and consumer protection, but a battle between insiders and outsiders over who has the authority to profit over the Amazon region,” Garfield said.
Tests conducted in the 1930s revealed that hundreds of “guaraná” sodas sold nationwide contained no guaraná at all, prompting public health concerns.
Manufacturers blamed supply shortages on Amazonian growers, while producers accused industrialists of deceit. The controversy underscored what Garfield described as a deeper struggle, identifying the question at the heart of the dispute: What constituted a genuine national symbol — a jungle plant or an industrial product?
Throughout decades of cultural clashes and legal battles, Garfield credited Amazonian producers’ dogged efforts for ensuring that even today, all beverages marketed as guaraná contain trace elements of the original plant.
In his concluding remarks, Garfield reflected on guaraná’s enduring dual identity as both sacred and commercial.
“Environmental history [is] not only concerned with the history of humans and non-humans,” he said. “There are myriad ways in which our knowledge of outside places is instilled.”
Assistant Professor of Art Rachel Boate, who concentrates on Latin American art and visual culture in the first half of the 20th century, reflected on the broader implications of Garfield’s analysis.
“I was really struck by the iconography used in advertisements for Antarctica’s Guaraná, particularly the ways in which images of the Amazon were depicted through a colonial and Eurocentric lens,” she said. “Professor Garfield’s talk also made me question my own consumption of guayusa tea — another caffeine-rich product sourced from the Amazon and marketed as a ‘healthy’ alternative to coffee throughout the world.”
Today, guaraná remains a multibillion-dollar industry and a cultural touchstone in Brazil.
“Whether in search of pleasure, profits, professional distinction or patriotic markers, promoters imparted new meanings to guaraná and found new uses for it,” Garfield said.
The vines of guaraná, as Roller remarked, continue to reach into unexpected corners of Brazilian history.
