The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  Cheers for his speech were suddenly drowned out by the twenty-member municipal marching band, consisting of clarinet, trumpets, cymbals, saxophone, and tuba—playing, what?—the music was indecipherable, but the spirit and volume were high. The grand fiesta honoring St. Peter and St. Paul was underway, a week-long celebration centering in the park. Fifty little girls in pint-sized wedding gowns emerged from the cathedral, their first communion over. Evening came to the plaza as the little girls, nuns, and demonstrators mingled with townspeople who gravitated family by family to the square. The last of the demonstrators bolted from the crowd to set several automobile tires afire, but, except for the odor, their revelry blended in with the festivities.

  Cuenca is among the most Roman Catholic cities in Latin America—conservative, religious, and correct. Even the pope would be considered a backslider here, but he would appreciate Cuenca’s municipal motto: Primero Dios, Después Vos. First God, Then You. I heard about a Cuencano who sent his daughter to college in the United States. A few months later a business associate was to visit the States, and the father asked his friend to check up on his daughter. Upon his return the businessman lunched with the father. “I’ve got terrible news for you,” the businessman said in a somber tone. “Your daughter has become a pro—” The rumble of a passing truck drowned his words.

  “Oh, that’s awful,” said his unhappy companion. “I raised her so properly, took her to Mass every Sunday, sent her to the right schools—why I even had the bishop himself officiate at her communion. Where did I go wrong?”

  “Yes, such a pity,” consoled the businessman. “I was shocked to learn that she had become a prostitute.”

  “Oh!” said the father, much relieved. “I thought you said she’d become a Protestant!”

  Two cathedrals stare into the plaza. To the west is the New Cathedral, built in 1880. Across the plaza the Metropolitan Cathedral, built three centuries earlier, faces it. For the fiesta honoring St. Peter and St. Paul, a thousand people crowded in between the two cathedrals, drinking and gambling, drinking and shooting off fireworks, drinking and eating, drinking and singing.

  Small card tables with Coleman stoves on top were set up throughout the plaza. A pot filled with water and cinnamon bark rested on each stove. Bottles of Cristal—clear sugarcane liquor—were lined up next to the stoves. For ten cents the middle-aged Indian vendor would pour a little Cristal into a shot glass and fill the rest with a ladleful from her simmering caldron. The glass had just come back from the dishwasher—her six-year-old barefoot son, beneath the table, who dipped each glass into a vat of lukewarm water and smeared it dry with a rag. The recipe for canelazo: two parts cinnamon-water to one part Cristal. Add a squeeze of lemon, if you please. A warm glow results.

  Gambling took place at other tables. Roulette and other games using crudely built spinning wheels, craps with hand-carved dice, fast-moving pebbles under thimbles, and still more primitive devices lured petty gamblers who bought into them for two cents each. Fast-talking pitchmen, Indians all, ran most games like barkers on a carnival midway. Their faces were illuminated by the soft glow of the nearby Coleman stoves. Their children slept soundly through the noise on the ground beneath their tables. Fireworks were launched into the sky from bamboo structures thirty feet high, each the project of a neighborhood for this one night’s use. Paper globes rose into the night sky like hot-air balloons. A blind man in sunglasses sat on the ground singing Andean wedding songs into a jerry-built loudspeaker. His wife circled the small crowd that gathered, selling a book of the marriage songs for forty cents a copy. Most people wore Panama hats, the hat for peasants and campesinos, both men and women. Debonair in the Northern Hemisphere, the Panama hat identifies you as one of the lower-class majority in the Southern. No self-respecting member of Cuenca’s aristocracy would ever be seen wearing a locally made hat of native straw.

  Tooth-rotting confections sent a thick aroma through the carnival air. Potatoes and freshly popped corn added to the smell, mixed with meat, candy apples, rice, sugar cane, canelazo, and what still hung in the air from the burning tires. Mestizo and upper-class kids flirted on park benches, posing for photographers whose aging cameras balanced on wooden tripods. Pickup trucks slowly circled the plaza, with children in the back smooching, laughing, yelling, and waving to the happy celebrants.

  As the fiesta died down and the firecrackers slowed to one every couple of minutes, two Indians walked over to the Hotel El Dorado, peeked into the bar, and blew their last sucres of the night on the casino’s roulette wheel. They played red five and walked away before the silver ball plunked down in black sixteen. A truncated beggar with gnarled hands leaned against the hotel window. A legless boy rode home on a hand-pedaled bicycle.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WITH THE EXPORTERS

  Cuenca’s Panama hat exporters are the fulcrum on the scale between the weavers and the marketplace. A business directory provided a starting point, and I visited a handful to learn about their trade. Moisés Bernal Bravo met me at his Panama hat factory the morning after the fiesta. Bernal lives and works next to a city park on the east side of town. A hundred of his Panamas were spread out drying in the park. Neighbors walked around them; none were stolen. “Most of the hats are woven in small towns nearby, not in Cuenca itself,” Bernal told me. “They use a straw called toquilla. You know, of course, that ‘Panama hat’ is a misnomer. None are made there.

  “The weavers bring their hats to the special toquilla straw market in Cuenca on Thursday, in Azogues on Saturday, and in Biblián on Sunday. That’s where they sell their woven hats and buy the straw for the next week. There are smaller markets in other towns too. The hats are sold to comisionistas,” to middlemen.

  “Let me show you something.” He took me into his bodega—a storage room—filled with dozens of ceiling-high stacks of Panamas. “You see these?” He tapped a pile of light-brown hats designed with rows of air holes in the crown. “They go to Brazil. These over here”—he motioned toward another stack with wider brims—“they are for Mexico. And those”—smiling, he pointed to piles of hats near the door—“those go to your country.” In an adjoining room two young men inspected hundreds of hats one by one. “They’re looking for imperfections. That’s our quality control department. My children work for me too. The eldest handles the business end of things. His wife speaks some English.”

  Bernal called for coffee from his secretary. I asked if the weavers who make the hats from the toquilla straw had any idea what the hats cost in the States, or even where they go once they’re sold to the middlemen. “Ah, the weavers are ignorant and illiterate. They know they’re exploited, but they’re exploited in everything they do. They sell hats to the comisionistas, but they don’t know or care what happens to the hats next. It doesn’t affect them. They wear the cheapest straw hats themselves.

  “In Biblián, the best weavers weave by the light of the moon. In general, the finest hats are woven when it’s cloudy and slightly overcast. Here, have some coffee.” His secretary spooned some instant coffee into a cup and added hot water. I pretended to like it and Bernal continued. “Although I’ve been in this business for many years, I still don’t understand your country. The U.S. is spoiled. They want the absolute best hats. They are obsessed! If there’s the slightest imperfection in the color, then they won’t take the hat, even if the weave is the most intricate and the style the most fashionable.

  “We sold ten thousand hats a week to the States during World War Two. It’s still a tremendous market, even though sales to North America have shrunk recently.” He sipped his coffee and handed me a nicely styled Panama, Mexican brown. “Here, won’t you accept this as a gift from Ecuador?”

  I thanked him and asked, “What do you do with the imperfect hats the U.S. won’t take?”

  “That’s easy. I ship them to Brazil.”

  Across town, Homero Ortega was equally eager to show me his export operation. He had just returned from the weekly straw fair a few block
s from his business, and middlemen were drifting in and out with piles of hats they’d bought at the market. Stacks of Panamas were everywhere. You couldn’t walk a straight line for more than ten feet without bumping into one. Iron hat presses from the United States, most at least fifty years old, stood off to the side, ready to give shape to the soft hat bodies.

  “This company is a hundred years old,” the patriarch of the Ortega hat company said. “My father Aurelio started it. I joined him when I was sixteen. That was fifty years ago. My children will take it over from me. As recently as the late seventies we sold sixty thousand hats a month to Brazil alone. Now, with their economic problems, they buy only a hundred thousand a year. I think we export more hats than anyone else in town.” And again: “You know, by the way, that we don’t call them ‘Panama hats.’ That’s a mistaken name we have to live with.”

  Ortega’s export operation is run out of an old colonial building. Like so many homes in Cuenca, from the outside all you can see is a drab wall and a wooden door promising little behind it. Inside, however, is a sizable two-story house with a large courtyard in the middle, illuminated by a skylight. Hats dried in its middle. Floors of tile, marble, and cement had loose strands of toquilla straw all over in a sort of orderly mess. A showroom greeted customers, displaying a wide selection of Panamas. The few organized tours that pass through town often stop at Ortega’s place to buy hats direct from the factory.

  “My son Bosco here spent fifteen years in the United States,” said Ortega, introducing us. “He’s the subgerente here,” the assistant manager. Bosco had lived in Connecticut working at a number of restaurants, the names of which he reeled off with minimal prompting. “Once Paul Newman came in to one of them!”

  Bosco took me to his house for lunch. While I sipped a drink with him and his wife in their living room, the cook finished preparing our meal. “Sometimes we get hats that can’t be used by themselves,” Señora Ortega said. “With those, we simply weld two imperfect hats together as one. You can’t tell the difference. Bosco’s father was the innovator of that process.”

  Back at the factory Homero Ortega elaborated on the rest of the process. “When the hats come in from the weavers, the outer brim is incomplete, so each hat has hundreds of loose strands of paja toquilla hanging from the edge. We buy them this way. We employ our own hat finishers to complete the outermost part, tie the loose ends together, and snip off the excess. Look.” He handed me a hat bought just an hour earlier at the market. A thick fringe of loose straw, each strand at least six inches long, hung from the brim. “Our finishers complete the hats at their homes. We paid sixty cents for this hat here at the market. The finisher makes another few cents for each hat he works on. We don’t exploit the workers. We pay vacation time and give them all the benefits.”

  Bosco motioned me out into the hall and offered me some coffee. I took a sip and feigned pleasure. “My father and I would like you to have this hat, special from the Ortega family.” He handed me a Panama from a pile destined for Brazil, then started placing stickers inside some hats going to Mexico. The stickers said HECHO EN MEXICO—Made in Mexico. He noticed I was watching. “They want it this way. It’s better for their business.”

  Señora Paredes greeted me at her husband’s exporting company. The Paredes family lived above their hat plant, although with all the piles of hats on the carpeting, on furniture, and on the television, it was hard to tell where the shop ended and the home began. I declined a cup of coffee. “Here is where we clean and bleach the hats,” her son Jorge said, leading me into a smaller room. “We use sodium sulfite and also peroxide. After that the hats go into the presses, and then we soften them again.” A worker was pounding the hat brims with a mallet, a softening process every hat undergoes. “You can’t hit them too hard or the straw will break,” the pounder said. “But if you tap too lightly it has no effect at all.”

  He continued pounding while Jorge sat me down in his office. He pulled a sheet of onionskin stationery out of a drawer and put it in his typewriter:

  Information about possible trade in sombreros de paja toquilla. Standard price for finished hats: U.S. $46 a dozen. Standard price for hat bodies: U.S. $42 a dozen. FOB Cuenca, Ecuador. Conditions of payment: An open letter of credit from a U.S. bank. Quantities: Whatever quantity you want can be shipped within ninety days. In stock: At the moment we have 2,400 hat bodies ready for shipping. Sincerely, ___________

  He signed it with a signature resembling that of every Latin American businessman: a series of neatly scripted compressed parallel curved lines, carried out with a flourish and utterly illegible. “I’d like to start selling hats to the United States,” he said. “Right now ninety-five percent of my business is with Brazil. You know, they really shouldn’t be called Panamas at all.” He put his sales letter inside an envelope and the envelope inside a straw cowboy hat. “Here”—he patted the brim—“take this as a gift so you’ll remember us.”

  Every exporter I went to had the same sort of operation. He’d buy untrimmed hats from middlemen who bought them from the weavers; then his workers would finish the trim and wash, bleach, clean, treat, shape, and soften the hats and prepare them for shipping. Technically, what they export are unblocked hat bodies, not completed hats. Everyone in the trade lamented the hat’s international name. Ecuadoran consuls abroad were once instructed to attach stickers reading PANAMA HATS ARE MADE IN ECUADOR to all their correspondence. The gambit failed, reported Victor von Hagen in Ecuador the Unknown. The consul to San Francisco complained that people remarked: “I see they are now making Panama hats in Ecuador.”

  When each exporter presented me with a hat and a cup of coffee, I accepted the former and came to decline the latter. The few exceptions I invariable regretted. Is the coffee there measured by the cupful or by its viscosity? For a coffee-producing country, Ecuador offers surprisingly distasteful coffee—bitter and lacking richness. Most restaurants serve either instant coffee or esencia—coffee boiled down to its thickest form and placed on the table in a small bottle. Pour a little in your cup and fill the rest with boiling water. In Ecuador, Ludwig Bemelmans wrote, “If you love coffee, you must bring your own. They cook the coffee long enough in advance, brewing a foul ink of it which is kept in a bottle. Half a cupful of this dye is poured out, the sugar bowl emptied into it, and a little milk added on.” I checked back through the travel literature to see if this were simply a modern prejudice. It isn’t; virtually every written account of travel through South America over the past century notes displeasure with coffee in Ecuador. I was heartened to find that some homes and restaurants have taken to serving better coffee smuggled in from neighboring Colombia.

  The next day I saw five more exporters. Enrique Malo was the oldest hat dealer in town. Eighty-four years old, he sat with his brother in an ascetic office on the second floor of their factory. They wore high starched collars and looked like characters in a Dickens story. In slow but flawless English learned during his years at Oxford, Enrique told me he had once served as governor of the province of Azuay, of which Cuenca was the capital.

  The manager of Ernest J. French & Co. narrated a year-by-year history of the firm, founded by the secretary of the British Embassy in 1933. Next I saw Nicolás Jara, who told me that in 1914 his father used to pack hats on mules for the four-day trek to the port at Guayaquil. Finally I visited Mauro Santana, who announced that he had been to the United States twice. “I wear a Panama when I go to New York.” He gave his impression of a New Yorker by glancing nervously back and forth between his watch and the top of some imagined skyscraper. “I love to listen to the British speak English. But the Americans?” He made a face. “They corrupt the language. They are los monos de inglés,” the monkeys of English. He showed me a superfino—a hat woven tightly and finely with the thinnest and lightest of straw. “The only person who can wear this one,” he proclaimed triumphantly, “is Queen Elizabeth.”

  Before visiting one last factory I stopped at Rancho Chileno for lunc
h. Ecuador has a history of welcoming, or at least tolerating, refugees from other countries. This includes refugees from Chile, some of whom arrived during Salvador Allende’s socialist coalition government. Most have come since then to escape the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Whenever they came, one result is that Ecuador boasts a fair number of good Chilean restaurants. Rancho Chileno, next to the airport, served terrific empanadas, a fried doughy outside sealed around flavorful steamy meat. Tropical drinks made from fruits unknown complement the food.

  I ate my empanadas on the patio, where I bought a copy of Vistazo—a sort of Ecuadoran People—from an eight-year-old vendor named Hernando. When he wasn’t kicking a soccer ball around with his brother in the adjoining lot, he hovered near the tables hawking magazines and keeping an eye out for departing diners. One tableful got up to pay and Hernando lunged upon their unfinished desserts, inhaling the gooey remains of a banana split into his near-toothless mouth. A man of twenty or so sat nearby watching. When the boy got near him, the man reached out, grabbed him, and cuffed him about the ears as he took the money the boy had made selling magazines. Hernando fought back his tears and returned to kicking the soccer ball with his brother.