The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE PANAMA HAT TRAIL

  “Part reportage, part travelogue, and all pleasure; it is written with enthusiasm and wit. . . . It is filled with lively anecdotes, pungent asides, vivid scenes, and—best of all in a travel book—delightful characters.”

  —Washington Post

  “Absorbing . . . a lively, entertaining exploration. Chock-full of the enthusiasm and energy of the experienced traveler. . . . The Panama Hat Trail is an armchair adventure that shouldn’t be missed.”

  —Boston Herald

  “One of the most thoughtful and engaging travel books in recent memory, a superlative job of reporting. . . . A wonderful book with a rich mixture of native and expatriate eccentrics.”

  —Playboy

  “Fascinating . . . like a detective story in which one clue leads to another until the complex fabric of a society slowly reveals itself.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “One eagerly and joyously turns the pages of this lively and vivid account. Each page is loaded with rich treasures.”

  —Latin America in Books

  “Strange and wonderful characters, rich descriptions, and even richer anecdotes.”

  —San Diego Tribune

  “Miller has a fine, unobtrusive, offhand way of writing. He is a good and conscientious correspondent who has produced a lively, memorable book.”

  —Outside Magazine

  OTHER BOOKS BY TOM MILLER

  Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro’s Cuba

  Cuba, Hot and Cold

  Revenge of the Saguaro: Offbeat Travels Through America’s Southwest

  On the Border: Portraits of America’s Southwestern Frontier

  The Assassination Please Almanac

  EDITOR:

  How I Learned English: 55 Accomplished Latinos Recall Lessons in Language and Life

  Travelers’ Tales Cuba: True Stories

  Writing on the Edge: A Borderlands Reader

  THE PANAMA HAT TRAIL

  TOM MILLER

  TUCSON

  The University of Arizona Press

  www.uapress.arizona.edu

  © 1986 by Tom Miller

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published in hardcover by William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986

  Published in paperback by Vintage Departures, Random House, Inc., 1988

  First University of Arizona Press paperback edition, 2017

  Printed in the United States of America

  22 21 20 19 18 17 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3587-3 (paper)

  Cover design by Leigh McDonald

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following: The Donkey Inside, by Ludwig Bemelmans. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc. Copyright © 1927, 1938, 1940, 1941 by Ludwig Bemelmans. Copyright renewed. “Assembly Line,” by B. Traven. Reprinted with permission of Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc. Copyright © 1966 by B. Traven. “El Sombrero de Montecristi,” by Lupi. Reprinted by permission of Luis Espinosa Martinez. Copyright © 1964 by Luis Espinosa Martinez. “Juan Cuenca—Biografía del Pueblo Sombrero,” by G. H. Mata. Reprinted by permission of Centro Interamericano de Artesanías y Artes Populares (CIDAP). Copyright © 1978 by G. H. Mata. “Folk Arts Thrive in a Quito Shop” and “City at the ‘Middle of the World’” originally appeared in the January 16, 1983, and the January 22, 1984, issues of the New York Times, respectively. Copyright © 1983 and 1984 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Miller, Tom, 1947– author.

  Title: The Panama hat trail / Tom Miller.

  Description: 2017 edition with new preface by author. | Tucson : The University of Arizona Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017007700 | ISBN 9780816535873 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ecuador—Description and travel. | Ecuador—Social life and customs. | Hat trade—Ecuador. | Miller, Tom, 1947– —Travel—Ecuador.

  Classification: LCC F3716 .M55 2017 | DDC 918.6604—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007700

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3747-1 (electronic)

  To Val

  CONTENTS

  Preface to the 2017 Edition

  Map

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  1. An Opening into Heaven

  2. Cuenca by Night

  3. With the Exporters

  4. The Bus Plunge Highway

  5. The City of Monkeys

  6. Toquilla Sunrise

  7. Revolution and Seafood

  8. Montecristi Fino

  9. The Visiting Judge

  10. Carmita’s Peace Corps Bar and Grill

  11. Red, White, and Blue Yellow Fever

  12. Alfaro Lives

  PART TWO

  13. To Market

  14. Muscling in on the Sombrero Trade

  15. Henry Miller’s Nephew

  16. Biblián Weavers

  17. Incas and Indians

  18. “All We Have Is Ourselves and Our Straw”

  19. Italian Specialty Cooks

  20. Romancing the Hat

  21. Travails

  22. Cuy for Two

  23. The 10,000 Hats of Adriano González

  24. The Last Jews in Cuenca

  25. Assembly Line

  PART THREE

  26. Dead Drunk

  27. Cruising with Olga

  28. Sour Lake Oil

  29. To Colombia

  30. Up the Aguarico

  31. Madeline in Quito

  32. Crossing the Line

  PART FOUR

  33. Production Line

  34. Lasting Friendship

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Index

  PREFACE TO THE 2017 EDITION

  If you’ve peeked at the introduction a page or two from here, you’ll recall a passage quoting a U.S. State Department officer commenting that “Ecuador has a severe inferiority complex.” When this book first came out in 1986, I had quite the opposite sensation. Reviews were wonderful, including one in the Washington Post that appeared just days prior to a book signing at Olsson’s, a since shuttered Georgetown bookstore. Bowls of candy sat by stacks of books. My publisher sent a rep to assure a smooth event. It was a comfortably warm late summer weekday evening, and the casually dressed patrons snaked through the store practically out the door onto Wisconsin Avenue.

  A slight hubbub arose as a determined-looking man in a three-piece suit maneuvered his way to the front of the line.

  “Mr. Miller?” He said this more as a statement than a question.

  I nodded.

  He snapped his card at me. He was Mario Leon-Meneses, counselor from the Embassy of Ecuador.

  “Mr. Miller, we are very concerned at your characterization of Ecuador as having a ‘severe inferiority complex’.”

  Then, having proven the characterization, Mr. Leon-Meneses turned on his heels and walked out.

  The one product Ecuador can feel superior about is the Panama hat, whose name provokes national pride and international confusion. I’m not spoiling your reading adventure by stating that Panamas come from Ecuador, but now, even within Ecuador, there’s controversy about the various styles of Panamas, their weaves, and their towns of origin.

  This is the trail, very roughly, as it has been followed for well over a century: straw cutter → weekly straw market → weaver → middleman → factory finishing → exporting. In recent generations, however, many weavers have found m
ore lucrative work, and fewer weavers means fewer hats. All this makes for a diminishing industry. “In twenty years,” lamented the late Carlos Barberán who promoted and sold high-quality hats, “the weaving of the Montecristi finos will be all over.” That was in the mid-1980s.

  Montecristi Panamas are known internationally for their soft, airtight weave and clean, honey-smooth surface. And they originate in Ecuador’s coastal region of Montecristi. The finest are more art than headwear. Most Panamas, however, come from the Cuenca region high in the Andes 275 kilometers distant, where midrange hats predominate. That is, except for the very best from the Cuenca region, which are marketed as Montecristi hats. As a result, Montecristi becomes both adjective and proper noun. The confusion: a hat named for the Canton of Montecristi comes from a city called Cuenca, branded as a product of Panama. Well, you can see the quandary of names, quality, and marketing all at once.

  Carlos Barberán’s twenty-year prediction might have come dangerously true, but rather than depress one reader, it inspired him. And so Brent Black, an American close to forty when this book was first published, took a flyer on the Panama hat industry. His goal: encourage the weavers of the Montecristi region and restrict the Cuenca exporters from using—actually misusing—the name Montecristi. His motive: preserve the fine art of hat weaving and reward its weavers. It has only taken him more than thirty years, but Black has made a twenty-first century dent in the nineteenth-century hat trade.

  To achieve his goal, Black established a school for weavers in the town of Pile (PEE-lay) in the Canton of Montecristi, where, historically, the best weavers are said to live. Pile children, at age fifteen, can earn an artisan certificate. After five years of training, they might rise to the level of Master Weaver—someone who can produce some 3,000 weaves per square inch. These are hats which can take up to six months apiece to weave, marketed as finos, or often, superfinos. A rare few weavers can reach the next level of Superior weaver—4,000 weaves per square inch, or forty rows to the inch, and only one weaver has, on commission, woven a silky 5,000 weaves per square inch. Black commissions these hats and, unlike most arrangements, pays weavers in advance, then more when the hat sells. Through this system weavers make considerably more than they would otherwise earn. About sixty students have graduated from this school and are now turning out high-quality hats. It’s a singular approach for an industry that for generations has worked on the hat-by-hat sales method. And it avoids the exploitative excess the Panama hat business has often been accused of. If Ecuador had roadside adopt-a-highway signs, one would surely list Brent Black as the sponsor of the road leading into Pile.

  Hats woven in the Canton of Montecristi using straw from the region have acquired an official Denomination of Origin (D.O.) of “Montecristi Hats” from the Instituto Ecuatoriano de la Propieded Intelectual. This legal status was established to prevent hats from elsewhere using the name of Montecristi to indicate quality and imply origin. “Once you create a mystique of an item’s history, the value of that item increases,” the intellectual property rights lawyer handling the Montecristi D.O. told me. “History and mystique are important to trademark.” The hats are part of Ecuador’s national patrimony. In the year 2000, the hat industry benefited by stabilization when the country converted its currency from the sucre to the dollar.

  Panama hat creation, whether in the Montecristi region or hats woven in the Cuenca area, has one characteristic: the hats are woven by hand and hand only, with no mechanical devices involved. Accept no substitutes.

  —T.M.

  INTRODUCTION

  Where do Panama hats come from? One might sooner ask who was buried in Grant’s tomb, except that the answer is not so obvious. Panama hats are made in Ecuador.

  The major trading post for South American goods in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was at the Isthmus of Panama, the quickest and safest seafaring route to Europe and North America. Sugar, fruit, minerals, cloth, and dozens of other products passed through the isthmus on their way to market, Ecuadoran straw hats included. In the mid-1800s gold seekers from the East Coast rushing to California picked up the straw hats on their way west, and—for those who returned home—on their way back as well. A famous woodcut from 1850 shows seven scraggly gold-rushers just returned to the East from California via Panama sitting outside the Philadelphia Mint. Each is clutching bags bulging with gold dust, and each is wearing a Panama hat. Fifty years later, workers on the Panama Canal found the locally sold hats ideal for laboring in the tropical sun and, like the Forty-Niners, named them for their point of purchase rather than their place of origin. The name stuck.

  To visit Ecuador under the best of conditions seemed unlikely. But to travel throughout the small country with only the vague notion of tracking down the straw-hat trade seemed absurd. The country, a fraction larger than the state of Colorado, is of marginal interest to all but the few Americans who can place it on a map and whose livelihood depends on its well-being. “You’re going to Ecuador?” bewildered friends asked, invariably inquiring about the dangers of traveling in a country undergoing civil war. Like most people, they confused Ecuador with the other Latin country beginning with E and ending with ador.

  In fact, Ecuador is relatively peaceful, lacking the intensity of guerrilla activity to which its better-known neighbors, Peru and Colombia, are prone. Its attitude toward the rest of South America is sufficiently enlightened that it could host a hemisphere-wide conference on human rights and have its participants welcomed by the nation’s vice-president. Ecuadorans are basically squeamish when it comes to changes in government, and prefer their coups bloodless. After the hoopla of a new regime settles down, the only perceptible change to most of the country’s nine million people is new letterhead on government stationery. Panama hat production has outlived theocratic rule, benevolent dictatorships, military juntas, and wobbly democracies. Ecuador’s current experiment in democracy, which began in 1979, depends upon international crude-oil prices for its survival. Petroleum pumped from beneath the Amazon basin and from offshore deposits supports the national economy. In the not-too-distant past the country was a genuine banana republic, dependent upon that fruit and cacao as its major exports.

  “Ecuador has a severe inferiority complex,” a State Department officer told me before I left for South America. It was a comment easily dismissed as Foggy Bottom chauvinism, yet in meeting the people and traveling their land I found, surprisingly, many Ecuadorans echoing that sentiment. Ecuador is the butt of nationalistic jokes by Colombians to the north. It has been emasculated along its southeastern frontier by Peru. During World Cup soccer matches Ecuadorans are glued to their radios and cheer every goal, yet their own team invariably fails to qualify for international competition. Torrential rains cause utter crop failure and flood entire villages, devastating an already stagnant economy, yet the problem is solved not by bank loans or farm credits but by an international telethon with viewers in Ecuador and the United States donating money to save the country from destitution. And although huasipungaje, indentured servitude, officially ended in 1964, social progress in Ecuador seems to move only slightly faster than the giant tortoises on its famed Galápagos Islands. It is a low-profile country whose international obscurity is interrupted only for plane crashes, earthquakes, when its border war with Peru flares, or when one of its magnificent volcanoes erupts.

  When a United States observer reported his impressions of Ecuador back to the president, he regretted that his “analysis is not entirely favorable . . . but the generous and friendly thing is to frankly depict the faults as well as the virtues of the country.” The president in this case was not Donald J. Trump but Chester A. Arthur, during whose administration the United States began to flex its hemispheric muscle. “At present,” the 1883 report concluded, “the elements on which to build a thriving nation are so buried in discord that they are difficult to discover.”

  Now, more than a century later, the discord is so buried that it seldom surfaces in a s
ubstantive way. Through this country, then, I traveled, initially for a few months, and then off and on over a period of three years. I went by foot, canoe, burro, and bus, taxi, train, plane, and steamship. Along the way I encountered evidence of the Inca Empire and United States foreign policy. My goal was to trace the origins of the Panama hat and follow its route from the basement of the Third World to the penthouse of the First. Yet the Panama hat trail, as I hoped it might, occasioned unanticipated twists and turns and afforded unexpected pleasures. The journey, then, became the search for the hat, and the hat the pretext for my journey.

  A word about money: Repeat visits to South America allowed me to retrace my original journey several times. When I first arrived in Ecuador, its currency, the sucre, was 30 to the dollar, or 3.3 cents each. By the week I last departed, more than three years later, it had plummeted to 120 to the dollar, or just over .8 of a penny each. For the dollar-based traveler, Ecuador seemed to be having a half-price sale. Because the value of the sucre never held from one month to the next, attaching a sucre cost each time a price is mentioned in the book would create confusion and distort its relative worth. For consistency, I have given a dollar value to most prices, using the sucre when it is more illustrative. To best appreciate the fragility of the country’s economy, understand that the largest denomination in Ecuador’s currency is the 1,000-sucre note, today worth less than ten dollars. In 2000, Ecuador adopted the U.S. dollar as its domestic currency.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  AN OPENING INTO HEAVEN

  One night during my first week in South America some new friends took me to a rocky crest high up on the east side of Quito, the capital of Ecuador. To our east rose the fullest of moons, so frighteningly near and brilliant that we could almost have reached it with a stepladder. Below us glittered the city of 900,000 stretched out over the base of Pichincha, the 15,400-foot mountain that dominates the city from the west. Many miles away the snow-covered peaks along the “Avenue of Volcanoes,” as the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt called it, appeared gin clear. My friends swept their hands along an east-west arc to the north, indicating the approximate path of 0 degrees latitude, the Equator. At a slight angle to the Equator they pointed out the eastward route followed by sixteenth-century conquistador Francisco de Orellana, who led the first recorded expedition from the Andes down into the Amazon jungle and out to the Atlantic Ocean.