The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  My host emerged clean-shaven, wearing a newly pressed white shirt. For cuff links he used buttons from his grandfather’s military uniform. “Follow me. I want to show you something.” We went back into his bedroom, where a hammock extended from wall to wall, and he carefully pulled a plastic bag down from a shelf. “This is my Panama hat. It comes from the same town as my grandfather.” I admired its laced crown and tight weave. “Yes, well, I haven’t worn it in a while.”

  We set back down next to the parlor window. “On October ninth every year I invite some friends over to celebrate Guayaquil’s independence. We dip a cup into the river and drink to the memory of my grandfather.” I recalled what I had read about alligators in the Guayas River from Edward Whymper, famous throughout Ecuador for having scaled its most difficult peaks in the 1890s, and from William E. Curtis, in his turn-of-the-century account, Between the Andes and the Ocean. Of alligators, Whymper wrote, “the natives do not seem troubled by their proximity, though it is admitted they do occasionally chew incautious children.” Curtis had seen Guayaquileños, stark naked except for yard-wide toquilla straw hats on their heads and long knives between their teeth, hunt alligators for their hides in the Guayas. “They swim along among the ’gators, and when one of the reptiles opens his jaws and goes for him the swimmer dives, leaving his hat on the surface for the alligator to chew on, and plunges the knife into the monster’s vitals.” Avilés seemed amused by the descriptions but discounted any current danger, either from alligators or their hunters. “We have a saying here: ‘My hat instead of myself.’”

  Avilés, like the other Guayaquileños I’d met, was annoyed by Quito’s attitude toward his city. “We’ve been abused by national governments. Eighty percent of the country’s money is earned here, and what do we get—maybe five percent of that. We should give the country twenty percent and keep eighty to better our city. People here are disillusioned. No matter how hard we work, almost all of the money goes to Quito. The serranos get mad at us. Well, I’m proud to be a mono. All the oil money that the state petroleum monopoly makes ends up in Swiss bank accounts. This is a marvelous country with a wonderful climate. We have year-round fruit and vegetables. But the people are no good. They want to get as much money out of you as they can.”

  Some forty homes line the one narrow street of Las Peñas. In many ways it resembles the finer sections of Georgetown in Washington, D.C., during quieter days. Plaques honor the four Ecuadoran presidents who have lived there. Hidden away from the noise and traffic that characterize the rest of the city, Las Peñas has retained its architectural integrity and dignity. “Folks here don’t want this to become a vulgarism with all that commercialization. I want some families to live here like we had in the old days. Maybe we could have a couple of small restaurants and art galleries and antique shops, but we don’t want to popularize the neighborhood so that it becomes a tourist place for drinking and scandals.” To this end Avilés heads the Committee for the Preservation and Improvement of Las Peñas and Cerro Santa Ana, the adjoining crowded lower-class neighborhood. “We are fighting to preserve the area. The rich own homes in Las Peñas, but many of them let their houses fall apart so they can turn the land into skyscrapers and make even more money. They should have some civic pride and help preserve it. If a man, rich or poor, smart or not, has no tradition, he has nothing. The only tradition the people here have is ¡chingo!—the sound of money. When they hear that sound everybody looks. That’s what they all want. That is their tradition.”

  The grandson continued. “There is a man down the street who wants to alter the façade of his building and turn an old apartment into a garage. That would mean more cars on the street, and that would be terrible. He said he had a permit from the city, but I checked, and he didn’t. I filed a denuncia against him”—a sort of people’s indictment—“and he got furious. He threatened to wreck my house and cut me up with a knife.”

  Avilés brought out a fancy glass jar half-filled with Eau de Cologne Jean Marie Farina, bottled by Rogers and Gallet. “My grandparents used this, and so did my parents. It smells clean and fresh at the same time.” He pulled out a neatly folded handkerchief from the top drawer of a dark wooden dresser and dampened it with some of revolutionary General Eloy Alfaro’s personal French cologne. With a regal flourish he presented it to me: “There. Now you are part of the Alfaro clan.” As we walked out the door, he slipped a derringer into his pocket. “You can’t tell anymore. This fellow did threaten me, and Cerro Santa Ana is a rough neighborhood.” He tapped his pocket. “I carry it everywhere these days.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  TO MARKET

  The overstuffed sack holding Domingo’s toquilla straw had arrived in Guayaquil before I did. A truck picked it up along with a dozen more from Febres Cordero and other small towns nearby, and carried it to Victor González’s bodega near the corner of Colón and Pedro Moncayo. The storefront warehouse, which González shared with a middleman in the grain trade, was in the thick of a noisy neighborhood full of brawny men pushing heavy carts, noxious fumes, sweating laborers, barefoot Indians, busloads of new arrivals from the countryside, vendors hawking newspapers, rawboned women balancing platters of fruit on their heads, and the street-smart cries of abandoned children. Most intersections lacked sufficient traffic lights or stop signs; drivers played “chicken” every time one cleared. Pedestrians maneuvered among moving cars, outflanking a taxi here, a truck there. The few working lights gave rise to the definition of an Ecuadoran nanosecond: the length of time between the instant a light turns green and the first honk of a horn. González pointed to the straw from Febres Cordero. “That will go on a bus for Cuenca tomorrow,” he yelled over the din. “I’ll ride on the same bus if I can.”

  A couple of days later Victor González brought his bundles of toquilla straw into the ground floor of his house in Cuenca and stored them in a front room. Along with a handful of other intermediaries, González supplied the tens of thousands of weavers in Cuenca and the surrounding countryside with the raw material for their income. Distribution of straw from the coast depends upon availability, which in turn is determined by transportation, climate, work force, and price. Victor and the others had worked out a system, at once elaborate and simple, to get the paja toquilla to the weavers.

  The main funnel, regardless of destination, is the weekly market, which virtually every weaver attends, selling hats woven the previous week and buying raw straw for the following week. The feria de paja, almost always held in conjunction with a larger market, is like an informal convention at which Indians, campesinos, cholos (non-Indian peasants), and others buy and sell food and supplies for the coming week. More important, the feria brings together for one crowded day every week small merchants, weavers, and farmers who raise livestock and grow crops on the arable part of their rocky land. News and rumors circulate from seller to buyer, merchant to consumer. An increasing number of women wear slacks, but most still cling to the traditional calf-length full skirt hemmed with colored embroidery. The skirts and the women who wear them are called cholas. Gangs of pickpockets are not uncommon at the main Cuenca market; usually one of three cholas working together will slit open the purse of a shopper and reach inside for money while the other two jostle and distract the unsuspecting victim.

  Straw brought in from the coast gets trucked from Cuenca to Azogues, Sígsig, Biblián, and smaller towns. By the time it reaches the weekly market, the toquilla straw bundled in Febres Cordero and other villages on the coast has been graded in three basic quality levels and broken down into smaller quantities. Slightly fewer than three thousand tallos—shriveled-up palm fronds, each with a dozen or so strands attached to a common stem—make up one bulto. Victor González has paid a bit more than a penny and a half for each tallo, and sells them at close to two cents a tallo. His profit before expenses—a warehouse in Guayaquil, transportation for himself and his straw to Cuenca—comes to about thirteen dollars a bulto.

  Fro
m the campo they come every Thursday morning with produce, children, and sometimes even livestock on their backs—Indians and cholos, trudging toward Cuenca. Out of the hills and valleys, emerging from folds in the Andean fields, they flag down buses and trucks headed for town. Most of them, even children, wear well-lacquered Panama hats.

  The straw market in Cuenca can be deceptive at first. No more than seventy-five people appear at any one time, but the turnover is gradual and fluid, as women sitting on the ground behind small piles of straw bargain with weavers who come for their weekly supply. With the discriminating eye of a jeweler, each weaver peruses the straw in every saleswoman’s pile, looking for coarseness, size, length, coloration, and blemishes. They gently tug at the ends testing for strength and suppleness, then arc a few strands to gauge their pliability. Knowing that from this purchase their income for the next few days will be determined, they fondle the paja with expertise, almost stroking it. (In fact, the phrase hacerse la paja, literally “to do the straw to one’s self,” means, in slang, to masturbate.)

  A four-foot-tall chola with a plastic sack of eggs in her left hand and a basket of fruit on her back knelt barefoot in front of a pile of paja as if before an altar. At seven a.m. she was still early enough to select from the widest assortment of straw. After running her dirty hands along half the straw for sale, she bargained with one saleswoman for five tallos—enough straw to weave one coarse Panama hat. Unable to talk the lady down from two and a half cents a tallo, she reached in her purse for change. Her face remained expressionless throughout the transaction. A boy of six with the face of a grandfather had accompanied her, carrying her eggs for her as she departed.

  Azogues, the capital of the Province of Cañar, lies a good forty-five minutes northeast of Cuenca. It is Ecuador’s Podunk, the stereotypic town filled with dull-witted rubes. In this province, it is said, more alcohol is consumed than milk. On Saturday, people fill every street corner and crowd the municipal market. Trucks from the countryside continually load and unload their human cargo. An obscenely drunken cholo in a dark suit and felt hat staggered down the main street at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground, his right arm draped around his wife’s neck as she lugged him forward one step at a time. His marinated eye glazed at the sky; the other eye socket was empty. Every ten feet he bounced off some storefront wall, giving new life to his lopsided gait. Passersby ignored the couple until the man collapsed completely. Then they helped his wife drag him away from the gutter and out of the flow of traffic. A few feet away a crowd gathered around a woman selling little sucre-sized tins of lip balm; she hawked it through a portable speaker as if it were the greatest salve since Simón Bolívar. Three men walked by hoisting a wooden Jesus on their shoulders. One held out a tin can to collect money from the faithful who approached to touch the crown of thorns, kiss the robe, and genuflect. Tacked to Jesus’ robe was a police permit allowing the trio to solicit.

  Dozens of barefoot women sat behind piles of straw, laughing at jokes told in a raspy, high-pitched Quichua cackle. The straw in Azogues cost between two and three and a half cents a tallo, the thinner and more uniform paja at the upper end of the scale. The women who sell straw to weavers, usually weavers themselves, earn about half a penny above cost for each tallo. On a good market day they might make a dollar or more. During the rest of the week they often sit in their doorways at home, weaving hats while waiting for others to come and buy straw they’ve laid out on the sidewalk before them. Weavers who get just five tallos for coarse hats often buy enough for three or more hats at a time. Ten and sometimes more tallos are needed for a more delicate weave. The finos from Montecristi require still more straw, and of a far superior quality.

  The market at Biblián, another twenty minutes north, was much the same as that at Azogues, except on a smaller scale. The hat weaving here is of a generally better quality, and the straw, delivered by Victor González, is of a correspondingly better grade. Aside from straw, Biblianeros could buy the following at their weekly market: bananas, potatoes, plantains, beans, fruit, tomatoes, bread, corn, avocados, onions, garlic, carrots, sauces, baskets, pepper, lettuce, choclos, meat, flowers, cheese, rope, bandages, Alka-Seltzer, thread, knives, sunglasses, scissors, toothpaste, and Quaker Oats. At eight o’clock one Sunday morning traders at the local market were entertained by the Municipal Band: three clarinets, two trumpets, and three drums. The woodwind, brass, and percussion sections were each playing different tunes. A man wearing boots, his bottle of aguardiente falling from a pocket, delighted onlookers by dancing alongside the marching band. After a couple of minutes he found the beat, then he found a friend, and the two men danced off behind the musicians as they wandered down the dirt streets of Biblián.

  Back at the marketplace, a six-man volleyball game paused between serves to let a chola, oblivious to the game, walk through center court with her emaciated dog. Less hurried than the crowds at Cuenca or Azogues, Biblianeros meandered through their primitive shopping center greeting friends from the smaller towns far from the main highway. From the eastern hillside the white Shrine of Our Lady of Rocío looks down into Biblián, a perpetual reminder to the townspeople of a drought in the late 1800s that ended the same day they all prayed extra hard to the Virgin Mary for rain. A visit to the shrine is worth “a hundred days indulgence to whomsoever visits the sanctuary,” according to Victor von Hagen, “said indulgence to be applied to souls in Purgatory.”

  Among the hundreds of shoppers at Biblián’s Sunday market, Isaura Calderón Encalada de Ojeda, fifty-one years old, bought food to feed herself and her family—seven in all, including her ninety-year-old mother and her four-year-old grandson. And she paid about twenty cents for enough straw to make a sombrero de paja toquilla woven brisa style, the most popular weave exported to the United States. That same month, a hat shop in San Diego, California, placed its order with Resistol and a few other companies for spring and summer hats, to be delivered half a year later. Among the selections were a few dozen genuine Ecuadoran-straw Panama hats, woven brisa style.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MUSCLING IN ON THE SOMBRERO TRADE

  Neither Isaura Calderón de Ojeda nor Victor González nor any of the tens of thousands of others in the Cuenca area whose income at least partially derives from Panama hats would be in the business at all were it not for B. Ugalde and Bartolomé Serrano. Toquilla straw first appeared in Cuenca in 1835, but the art of hat weaving did not initially catch on. Few people there knew the craft, straw delivery from the coast was painfully slow and hopelessly erratic, and once the hats were completed, middlemen who took them by mule train to the coast for export were unreliable. Religion was the only thriving business in Cuenca and the surrounding towns, and the Roman Catholic hierarchy was very selective about whom it admitted into its fold. Most Indians and mestizos were tethered to the land and its owners. Indentured and miserably treated, they had little hope of escaping and less chance of an independent income.

  Casting about for an industry to bring a trickle of cash flowing through the region, the Municipal Council of Cuenca unanimously passed an ordinance in 1844 establishing a school to teach toquilla-straw-hat weaving, which included a factory to process the woven hat bodies. The area lent itself to straw weaving: The air was drier than on the coast, where high humidity caused brittle straw; the temperature was cooler, which allowed more hours for weaving each day; and, most important, people willingly accepted lower wages. The city of Cuenca supplied the building, bought the straw, and hired the school’s first director, B. Ugalde. He was paid a commission for every ten apprentices he enrolled plus half the profits from their hats. The students received the other half.

  The next year Bartolomé Serrano brought in teachers from Jipijapa to teach hat weaving to the people of Azogues, where he was magistrate. In addition to offering classes in his domain, Serrano was authorized to “pursue and punish the vagabonds who did not want to look for work or learn to weave.” As a result, twenty “important men” of Azogues wer
e jailed and forced to learn hat weaving. Serrano gave the first crop of hats to the police, and the next to peasants—provided they agreed to learn hat weaving. “The finest hats,” read one history, “were woven in Biblián and were very much liked in Cuenca and Guayaquil.”

  Serrano’s efforts were rewarded with an assassination attempt. One day a stranger, Ponciano García, approached Serrano on the pretext of arresting him, then lunged at him with a knife. Serrano’s bodyguard, the story goes, grabbed García’s knife, whereupon the would-be assassin admitted that he had been sent from the coast with orders to murder Serrano for muscling in on the sombrero trade.

  The demand for fine toquilla straw hats skyrocketed as the Isthmus of Panama became the distribution center into Central and North America. By 1850 weavers in the province of Azuay produced more than two thousand hats a year, a growing supply to meet a seemingly limitless demand. Already popular in the United States, the hats were taken to Paris for the 1855 World Exposition by a Frenchman living in Panama. The finest one was given to Napoleon III, who showed off his hat from Panama everywhere. The year that Ecuadoran revolutionary and hat exporter Eloy Alfaro turned twenty-one, half a million sombreros de paja toquilla were shipped from the Port of Guayaquil. In both North America and Europe they were universally known as Panama hats.

  I came by much of this information from Dr. Ernesto Domínguez, a native of Azogues who works for the Cuenca Chamber of Commerce. A solemn man, his eyes lit up when he learned of my interest. “Wait here,” he instructed, putting pressing business aside. “I found it,” he said when he returned a few minutes later. He waved about a neatly handwritten sheet of paper on which he kept statistics going back year by year into the nineteenth century detailing how many hats had been exported and to which countries. More than five million straw hats were exported from Cuenca in 1977, the peak year since records were first kept. “We measure everything in dollars because that’s how the export houses are paid regardless of country. That’s the main reason business has slipped in recent years—the currencies in Brazil and Mexico have devalued so much that dollars are much harder to come by in both countries. Together, they accounted for a big part of our business.”