The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  I was much less enthusiastic about continuing. “Siga no más,” they insisted. Keep going. “Next, put the straw on the left down under while you hold the upper one.” “Good.” “One down, one over. The top left straw goes straight down to the bottom, and the next one on the left goes two under.” “That’s right—one up, one down.” “Ah-ah—keep the cross-strands in place.” Their instructions jumbled in my ears, yet for a few straws’ worth of weaving I could see minuscule progress. “Pull on the edges to tighten it up a little.”

  But with each new cross-strand I added to the outer edge, one closer to the center would weaken. This was much more difficult than I had imagined. It quickly became clear that my effort was for naught. My clumsy fingers maneuvered the straw in no apparent order. The farther I progressed with the hat, the more obvious its failure became. As they looked on, three generations of native Panama-hat weavers began laughing, first with their eyes, then out loud. Finally I gave up and joined in. My Panama hat looked more like the Panama Canal.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ITALIAN SPECIALTY COOKS

  “Where’s the next bus for Déleg?” An elderly Indian nodded toward an old green and white school bus precariously parked on a steep hill. The bus, marked Trans Panamericano, departed Azogues in forty-five minutes, more than enough time to get to Filanbanco, a major bank, and exchange dollars for sucres. Ecuador’s currency continued to lose steam, to the detriment of everyone except foreign travelers. The trip cost less than fifty cents, the driver’s helper told me as he wiped a quarter inch of grime from the side of his bus. Decals of Mickey Mouse covered the driver’s window.

  This was a classic third-class South American bus ride, complete with chickens, goats, buckets of slop, burlap bags full of vegetables, sacks of cornmeal and potatoes, tattered suitcases, crying kids, snoring adults, brash fifteen-year-olds ready to take on the world, and drunken twenty-year-olds who had tried. The bus traveled downhill to the hospital, then began a winding ascent that didn’t end until we reached Déleg more than an hour later. The only town we passed, Cojitambo, showed little life and lots of poverty. The dirt road we climbed, just wide enough for the bus, cut through soft forests with lush valleys on the other side. Riders hopped off at their homes along the way, and by the time the road leveled off at this pastoral village high in the Andes, only four of us remained.

  During the last few miles, the homes, which by all rights should have been miserable see-through hovels, started to show some measure of prosperity. Some were actually made of brick, while wooden homes showed long and skillful labor, ensuring that each board fit snugly against the next. Doors swung on hinges, and opened and shut with the turn of a knob. Real glass filled the window openings. Coats of paint appeared to have been applied within recent memory. Some homes had fences surrounding them, and gates leading to front doors. It wasn’t so much that Déleg displayed wealth, for it didn’t; it was the absence of poverty that stood out. Hidden away miles from the nearest outpost, Déleg countered all cultural and economic patterns. The bus circled the plaza, passing some old but sturdy two-story houses, and squeaked to a stop in front of a general store. At an isolated South American town twenty-three hundred miles from the United States, an overhanging sign from Filanbanco boasted COMPRAMOS DOLARES. We buy dollars.

  A narrower, less traveled dirt road went off the far end of the plaza. Down it, men walked their oxen, women came to market, and children returned from school. Samuel Guzmán stopped to introduce himself.

  “You’re from the United States? Really?” He spoke in wonder, as if the king of Spain had just dropped in for a beer. “We’ve never had anyone from the United States visit here. A lot of our people are there. I have a sister who lives in Brooklyn. The other lives in the Bronx. You’re the first person from the United States ever to visit us!” He kept rotating his head in a manner I took to mean that this fact was almost too much to absorb. He led me on a walking tour of town, pointing me out, despite my halfhearted protests, to everyone we passed. “Look! From the United States!”

  We sat down in the plaza near the waterless fountain. “The first people from this area went to the United States about 1960. We have electricity here because so many of our people went there. Every five years or so they return, sooner if there’s an emergency like a death in the family. Our whole town owes its prosperity to the United States. These cement houses were built with money from your country. We go to Cuenca to cash our checks from the United States. We used to get our water from wells and keep it in barrels. Now, thanks to money sent from the States, we have water in pipes.”

  We returned to Samuel’s house, where he maintains a bicycle repair shop. “Right now,” he said, motioning to his barren workbench, “there are none to repair.” American Airlines posters promoting San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Disneyland hung on a wall. A calendar seven years out of date was tacked up next to them, and beneath it rested a Chevrolet cap alongside a sombrero de paja toquilla. His wife sat weaving a Panama hat the whole time. Each time I addressed her, Samuel cut her off and responded in her place.

  “To go to the United States we use a system of falsificando,” of forgery. “There’s a travel agency in Cuenca that helps us. It costs three thousand dollars and more. We have to supply photographs and go to Guayaquil. Then we go by plane to Mexico, and cross over from there.” He withdrew from the room to get a flier from the travel agency. “Usually after two or three years there a man will send for his wife and the rest of his family.”

  We began walking again. Another COMPRAMOS DOLARES sign hung above a small store. Everyone seemed to have family in the country one continent away, and rushed to show me the return address on recently received letters. With Samuel heralding my stroll through town, word traveled faster than I did. Soon every mother was waiting in front of her house, ready to stuff an envelope in my hand as if I were collecting entries in the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.

  Samuel took me to the one place in town to eat. I reached for the doorknob, which turned out not to be a doorknob at all but a cluster of flies so thick they appeared a solid mass. Soup and rice were being prepared. “We don’t open for another half hour,” the proprietress said. She turned to light a gas burner beneath a pot of brown sludge on which more flies were resting. “What kind of soup will you be serving?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t know. Whatever is in that pot.”

  “I spent some time in the United States,” Carlos Vélez Flor, the local political chief, told me. “We all did. All five of my children now live there. Our grandchildren are U.S. citizens! I came back a few years ago because I had arthritis.” Samuel interrupted to announce for the tenth time that I was the first norteamericano to visit Déleg. “Well,” Carlos responded, “once we had a Peace Corps volunteer from Azogues come up to help us build our potable water system.”

  Dora Vélez, Carlos’ wife, is the postmistress. Her domain includes about nine thousand people. Wearing dark eye shadow and black clothes, she looked like a blind woman in mourning. Mail arrives twice weekly in Déleg, she explained, at eight Wednesday mornings and at nine on Sundays. “The post office is very crowded when the mail comes in. We get about three hundred letters from the United States every week. They take about half a month to get here. The majority of them are certified, which means they have money inside them. I’ve seen checks arrive here for two thousand dollars.”

  After they get to New York, most of the Déleg men head for an employment agency on West Fourteenth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, where they find work washing dishes or busing tables in Italian restaurants. Weekday mornings, the front room of this agency is filled with Ecuadorans, a handful of whom invariably come from Déleg. Despite their undocumented status, they become certified by the U.S. Department of Labor for jobs that can’t be filled through normal means—in their case, “Italian Specialty Cook.” In New York, Déleg men live under the rubric of Italian Specialty Cook even if they’re only mopping the kitchen floor. Armed with their Labor Departmen
t documents they return to Ecuador, where the U.S. Consulate in Guayaquil is obligated to grant them visas to return to the States—this time, legally. It’s a tradition.

  “We’ve asked them how they prepare Italian foods like spaghetti or ravioli,” a worker in the consulate visa section said, “and they look at us blankly. They have no idea what we’re talking about. The damn thing is that with the Labor certification we have to grant them a visa even if we know the whole thing’s a scam, and then after a while they send for their families. The ones who’ve never been to the United States before are worse. When we ask where they plan to live, they say, ‘Oh, the New York Sheraton.’ They’ve never been outside Déleg in their lives, and all they know is that Sheraton is the name of a hotel. When we ask what they do for a living they say ‘businessman.’ What kind of business? ‘Oh, a merchant.’ What kind of merchandise? It turns out they’re street vendors or they sell potatoes at the market. A lot of them, when we ask why they want to visit the United States, they say ‘Quiero conocer Disney World.’” I want to know Disney World.

  A young man sat behind me on the bus from Déleg back to Azogues. His shirt, recently pressed, was neatly tucked into his polyester slacks. His shoes were shined and his combed hair was still damp from a recent washing. A small and ancient suitcase rested on the floor beside him. “I’m going to Guayaquil,” he said, “and then, God willing, to the United States.” He spent the whole trip gazing out the back window.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ROMANCING THE HAT

  Panama hat sales at Resistol Hats in Texas had not kept pace with the company’s growth. With the retirement of Irving Marin, the company’s straw-hat expert, there was no one left who had ever been to Ecuador to meet the exporters face-to-face and see the supply line firsthand. Ever since 1952, when Resistol first sold straw hats, it had prided itself on how well received its product had become. Sales were not improving, however, and problems kept recurring with the hats received from South America. Orders came in the wrong style, size, or grade. Hats arrived too late, too early, too many, or too few. On occasion Resistol received hats it had never ordered. Rarely did the right number of requested hats arrive on schedule. The hats that did arrive fluctuated in quality. Often ten percent of a shipment failed to meet in-house standards. They became “throwouts.” Paperwork between the two countries sometimes went awry. Orders and confirmations in one country weren’t entirely understood in the other. At company headquarters in Garland, Texas, the international letter-of-credit system wasn’t entirely clear; the exporters in Cuenca couldn’t make themselves understood. Resistol took little consolation that its competitors were likewise suffering.

  The entire production system went far smoother with imitation Panamas from the Orient. They looked as good and caused far fewer headaches than the real thing from South America. And they cost substantially less to manufacture—savings that were passed on to customers. Only the discerning shopper could tell the difference between a natural straw Ecuadoran hat and one made from paper product in Taiwan or China. “The paper Panamas have an even weave and a more consistent color,” explained Tommy Massie, a wiry Oklahoman who manages Resistol’s straw plant. “But they don’t breathe, and they wear out after a couple of years.” Ecuadorans prided themselves that Panamas were seen around the world on the heads of officials at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, unaware that the hats were not made of paja toquilla at all but rather were imitations from the Orient. “It’s like polyester versus cotton,” said Massie, who oversaw the Olympic headgear production. “But not as many people are willing to try the cotton.” Impressing the prestige of a genuine Ecuadoran Panama upon the buyers for many retail sales outlets had become more and more difficult for hat companies’ sales representatives.

  “The hat buyer for most department stores is a twenty-four-year-old girl with no experience who’s waiting on a promotion. She thinks she knows hats because her father wore one. But the buyer usually doesn’t know the first thing about hats.” That’s the opinion of Mike Gibbons, Resistol’s president until fall 1985, when Levi Strauss sold the company to a Virginia hat-company owner named Irving Joel. “We want to impress our Montecristis upon them,” Gibbons said. “The problem is that all of our finest are allocated before the straw-hat season even begins. We can only get so many each year, and while the demand increases, the supply doesn’t. There are certain things that will never be assumed by machines. The weaving of a Panama hat is one of them.”

  Gibbons went to a major New York hatter on Madison Avenue and listened while a sales clerk explained a hat to a customer. “She said it was one hundred percent beaver, and that they only use the finest beaver skins from Europe. Then she said you could tell it’s a high-quality beaver hat by the way it snaps back to form if you twist it a little. Finally she told him how good it looked on him.

  “Well, she was a hundred percent wrong. First, it wasn’t a beaver hat at all. Second, beaver skins don’t come from Europe. And third, twisting it a little isn’t going to tell you if it’s beaver or not. Anyway, the fellow believed everything she said and bought the hat for ninety dollars. We want our sales force in the field to be able to explain the story of the Panama hat to the retail buyers. We want to give it a mystique. Intrigue. That’s really what our sales people are doing—romancing the hat.”

  Gibbons sent Massie from the straw plant and Al Luiz, vice-president in charge of manufacturing, to Ecuador to learn more about the hats and look over the supply line to see if they could resolve some of the problems. “Is their system of pricing different from ours?” Gibbons asked before they left. “How do they block their hats? Are we making unreasonable demands on them? We think that they ship bad hats all the time. They think we bitch all the time. As for quality, when we say we want X, does our X mean the same as their X? Do they want their delivery schedule spaced out? Do they want more lead time or less?”

  The two company representatives had their own private thoughts about how Resistol was meeting the Panama hat market. Luiz wore a spiffy Ecuadoran straw hat, shaped safari style. Stetson had beaten them badly with the same style by arranging to call theirs the Indiana Jones model, named after the movie character whose manic devotion to hats became a Hollywood trademark. “When we introduced this style a while back, Mike said the only way this hat is going to die is if we kill it. Well that’s exactly what our sales force did, but it was the most popular hat on the market with the competition. It looks good on either sex, at any age, and with any complexion.”

  “We’re killing ourselves by not adapting,” Massie added. “Dress and fashion hats are coming back faster than the western ones, and we’re turning out the same design year after year. We’re not changing a thing. We should.”

  The two flew to Quito, then on to Cuenca, and sat down with their major supplier, Gerardo Serrano. “We consider you the best company,” Serrano said. “When we get hats that we know you want, we hold on to them for you. We don’t send them to Stetson or Miller Brothers or any of our other accounts. We save them for you.” Silent pride settled over the room before Serrano delivered the punch line: “We only ask that this attitude be reciprocated.”

  Luiz and Massie shifted in their seats. “Of course,” the exporter continued, “you must consider some tolerance in the quantity and quality. We’d prefer it if you didn’t order in too large a quantity, and that you require just two grades at a time. The risk you are taking in buying high-quality hats must be taken into consideration. Remember, these are handwoven. For our highest quality hats we have a selected group of weavers to whom we give toquilla straw and a block to shape the hat on. To these weavers we advance money for the hats.”

  The two spent time with their second biggest supplier, Kurt Dorfzaun, a German-born businessman who has spent most of his life in Ecuador. “Now tell me,” Dorfzaun said after the three had talked hats, “what is it with my uncle? Is there a problem?” Karl Dorfzaun, Kurt’s elderly uncle, represents his nephew in the United States from his
midtown Manhattan office on Broadway. Importers who buy from Kurt in Ecuador must go through Uncle Karl, who relays purchase orders to South America and receives Kurt’s shipments from Ecuador to pass on to the buyers. Customers find him a constant source of frustration, a fact Kurt had been only dimly aware of. “Well, yes,” Luiz answered diplomatically. “We don’t seem to be able to get our orders adequately filled.”

  One morning they met with Moisés Bernal Bravo, another of the exporters who earlier had explained his operation to me. Next the Resistol representatives went to his archrival and brother Eloy, the patrón and major employer in Recaurte. Virtually the entire town turned out to greet the visiting dignitaries from gringolandia.

  “It means so much for them to see you,” the heavyset Eloy told his guests as the welcoming party noisily crowded around to shake hands. “To know someone is there to receive the hats at the other end will help morale tremendously.”

  “It’s quite an education for us to see them all,” replied Luiz, startled by the crowd. “We’re honored to be here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  TRAVAILS

  The weavers whose hats end up with Serrano, Dorfzaun, or the other exporters are not paid a whole lot more for their work today than they were ten, fifteen, or twenty-five years ago. Despite tentative attempts to form a syndicate of weavers, none has proven successful in the face of the perros, comisionistas, and export factories. Government agencies, both provincial and central, have made occasional efforts to help, but like the weavers’ stabs at unionizing, little has materially improved their lot. In a cottage industry such as the weaving of Panama hats, the industry regulates the cottage.

  Dr. Luis Monsalve Pozo, 1944: “Thousands of hands, white, smooth, fine hands of women, girls’ hands weaving toquilla fiber, weave the illusion of obtaining their bread and water, when in reality the illusion is converted to mere centavos for them, but for others the conversion is to palaces, Cadillacs, villas, tourism, and other things. . . .” The weavers, Monsalve’s essay continued, “are scattered in the cities and in the country. They do not have a spirit of a unified class. They do not recognize their problem; they feel it, they live it, but not even from afar do they presume to resolve it. This lack of a bond among the workers, this lack of a class unity, and this original scattering of themselves, lost in the Andean brambles . . . have contributed to the workers not speaking a word, however angry or admonishing.”