The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  “So it’s the United States you’re from?” one of the straw cutters asked as we walked along. “There was a man from this town who went to Holland. Tell me, is that near your country?” They talked of another friend who had just walked upon Mount Chimborazo, the volcano with a perpetual cap of snow. “On days like today we can see it from the path here,” one pajero said, gesturing off in the distance to the right. “It’s pretty, isn’t it?”

  We trudged another hour up and down steeper hills. Rain sprinkled lightly but steadily. Antagonistic mosquitoes joined us. The way grew more sloshy and humid. The muddy path was thick enough to suck the hind hoofs right off a bull. I took off my mud-caked sneakers and carried them over my shoulder. My feet had never looked whiter than they did against the black South American clay. Domingo noted my anxiety. “It’s right over there,” he said pointing his piedra in the distance. “We should be there soon.”

  Soon? What does soon mean to someone who walks barefoot three hours to work in the morning and back again at night? For all I knew he went home for lunch too. Soon? Distance and time are two of life’s limitations that take on surreal qualities in Latin America. Dimensions mean little. Soon? It could mean today, tonight, tomorrow, by next week, or I’m not sure. Soon could be fifteen minutes or fifteen miles. The difference between soon and forever might be negligible. A few minutes later Domingo added: “We’re getting closer.”

  Antonio, Domingo, and the others were not Indians. Neither were they Spanish, nor were they blacks from Esmeraldas, the city on the Pacific. They were montuvios, described by Rolf Blomberg in Ecuador: Andean Mosaic as costeños “in whom are fused the white, Indian and Negro bloods in varying percentages. . . . In a hard and uneven struggle with the jungle, the climate, the wild beasts, the crawling reptiles, the treacherous rivers and his own fellow human beings, the ‘montuvio’ has managed to dominate the wilderness and has created sources of wealth of which he has but a minimum share. The ‘montuvio’ not only grows the cultivated tropical products, but exploits the wild jungle.”

  “There. Up ahead. That’s where we’re going.” Domingo was more specific now. Every family in Febres Cordero is entitled to at least one cuadra, square, from which to harvest toquilla straw; the actual number of cuadras each family gets is determined annually at a community meeting. Domingo had worked his way up to ten cuadras, the maximum allowed. I had difficulty understanding just how big a cuadra is. At first Domingo indicated about ten yards square, then an area far larger. In any event, he seemed satisfied to have ten of them whatever their size.

  We turned left off the wide path and walked into a lush sloping green forest with plants ten or twenty feet high. The mosquitoes from the trail followed us. After twenty yards Domingo stopped. “This is it. This is the toquilla straw.” He clutched a slender green stalk rising ten feet off the ground with thin green leaves fanning out two to three feet from the center at the top. Other shoots had not yet flowered and remained tightly wrapped inside their green leaf casing. Those were the ones we wanted. Domingo took his machete in his right hand, held an unopened shoot in his left, and sliced it off where it connected to the trunk. He did it again with another shoot, and another and another. Antonio and the others took their machetes and did the same. In five minutes we had a pile of some fifty shoots. Here, eight miles down a back road from a village at the end of a dirt road in South America’s tropical northwest, I had found the beginning of a Panama hat. Domingo sensed my pleasure. “Would you like an orange?” he asked. Without waiting for my nod he climbed a nearby tree and started tossing down its fruit.

  Native South Americans had been weaving hats from toquilla straw long before the plant was christened Carludovica palmata by Hipólito Ruiz and José Pavón in the late eighteenth century. The two scientists, botanists at the Royal Garden of Madrid, traveled through Spanish America identifying and recording flora under appointment from King Carlos III of Spain. The name they gave the palm is a bilingual contraction of the Spanish and Latin names for his successor, Carlos IV, and his wife, Luisa. Although Carludovica palmata has been found as far north as Panama and as far south as Bolivia, nowhere are conditions better for its growth and regeneration than in Ecuador’s coastal lowlands, where the fertile ground is moist but not saturated, where the wind carries the cooling air of the Humboldt Current in from the coast, and where taller plants shade it from the sun’s direct rays. Each plant takes close to three years to reach full maturity. Although the plant grows wild for all practical purposes, when all the useful shoots have been cut from the main stalk, the seed, about the size of a baseball, is uprooted and replanted in shallow dirt nearby.

  Domingo and the others stripped to the waist and used their shirts as sacks to carry the straw and fruit over their shoulders. They tied the bundles together at the top with strong narrow leaves found inside the greet shoots. Each sack weighed about fifty pounds.

  We walked back through the hill country toward town in the afternoon heat. Along the way we passed a small one-room house on stilts, desolate in the countryside with a commanding view of the jungle. On the stairs leading up to the room sat a woman who smiled and waved as we walked by. In front lay a pile of toquilla straw, on top of which sat a large turkey. “Why do you find that so funny?” she asked when I laughed and pointed. “Well, we have a folk song in the United States about this very scene,” I told her. “It’s called ‘El Pavo en La Paja.’” “Turkey in the Straw.” I began to sing it, by which she was more startled than amused.

  Each of the four men I walked with had completed primary school. “Most people here just go to the local school,” Antonio said. “If you want to go beyond that,” Antonio advised, “there is a school in Santa Elena,” near La Libertad. “But it costs too much for most of us. Of those who go, some go back and forth every day. Others stay with relatives there during the week.” The elementary school was in lower Febres Cordero. It had a corrugated tin roof and ancient wooden desks. The front of each desk supported a short bench providing a seat for the student in front. In all, twenty chairs were available for forty-five students. A nationalistic poem about Indians dominated the front wall. The final line read “I am Indian . . . I am American . . . and I speak Spanish!”

  “I come out to the toquillales,” the straw fields, “whenever I need money to feed my family,” Domingo said. As a result, he comes three or four days a week, week after week, month after month, year after year.

  In the nineteenth century, toquilla straw was exported from the Provinces of Guayas and Manabí. While this boosted the economy of the growers, it cut into the number of Ecuadoran hats sold abroad. Certainly if the raw straw were available in Venezuela, for example, the demand for finished hats from Ecuador would plummet; Venezuelans could weave their own. Ecuadoran weavers lobbied the national government, and in 1835, only a few years after Ecuador had broken away from Gran Colombia, the exporting of raw toquilla straw was outlawed. Demand for Ecuadoran hats increased and everyone was satisfied except the straw brokers, who managed to smuggle toquilla straw out of the country from secondary ports anyway. The ban on straw export was lifted in 1843 by President Juan José Flores, and paja toquilla went back on the international market. “Once someone brought some toquilla plants over to the Orient to see if they would grow in Japan or Formosa,” an exporter told me. “It failed because of the climate. If it had worked over there, we’d all be in the gutter here.”

  We made it back to town while the sun still shone, and Domingo introduced me to his friend Demetrio. “When the straw comes in from the toquillales,” Demetrio said, “The first thing we do is take the outer leaf off and shake it, like this.” He picked up a shoot, peeled away the green leaf casing, and snapped it like a whip. What had been a straight stalk suddenly became like a light-colored horse’s tail, with dozens of yard-long paper-thin sheaths hanging from a common stem. “Then we strip away the vein, the spine, and the coarse edge.” With his fingernail Demetrio sliced into the plant, removing the unneeded parts. “After
that, it goes in here.” Demetrio led me (and my coterie of thirty kids) over to an oil drum filled with simmering water. A fire dug into the ground beneath the drum provided the heat. He tossed the opened palm fronds into the drum and let it boil for an hour or so. Every few minutes he stirred the straw soup with a long two-pronged pole. When the straw was completely boiled, he lifted it out with the pole and hung it on a clothesline to dry. Others dried the straw under their houses. The long strands shrivel up while they dry, each one forming a closed cylindrical fiber one yard long. Each individual fiber is then shredded into still narrower strands. The straw is boiled and dried again.

  We leave the straw out to dry for the better part of a day,” Demetrio said. “Sometimes longer. Then we bundle it all up into bultos”—the large sacks that make their way to the straw markets in Cuenca. “Every Monday we ship them by truck to Señor González, who has a warehouse in Guayaquil.” According to González’s note, he was paying about fifty dollars for each bulto that week. Sometimes he paid when he visited the straw harvesters, other times at his Guayaquil warehouse. Either way, his payment to the pajeros of Febres Cordero became the very first exchange of money on the long road to a Panama hat’s final retail sale. Domingo had a bulto ready to ship to Señor González the following Monday.

  La Libertad had the nearest public lodging, and the last truck for the day had left an hour earlier. The next one departed Febres Cordero at four-thirty in the morning, nine hours away. Juan invited me to have dinner and sleep at his house, which, from the outside, looked to be the fanciest place in town. Unlike most houses in Febres Cordero, cement had been used in its construction. Full steps with a railing, not just a ladder or a dugout plank, let to the second floor. He had electricity, lights, a refrigerator, and at least two rooms with a separate cooking area.

  Antonio asked if I’d like to bathe before eating. At nightfall we hopped back into his truck and drove east a short distance until we reached a river. Antonio took off his clothes and waded into the thigh-deep water. I timidly followed. The water, cold and refreshing, flowed steadily but not fast. After a few minutes we heard a thunderous splash upriver. I froze and Antonio laughed. “Are you scared?” he asked. “Oh, a little,” I admitted. “That was no animal, if that’s what you think,” he assured. “That was simply a big rock that fell into the river. We use the river for bathing and, farther down, for washing clothes. Most people come here when it’s daylight out. Here’s the soap. I’ll leave the towel next to the river when I’m done.”

  Refreshed, I climbed the stairs to Juan’s house. “Electricity has improved things here,” he said when I asked about its recent arrival. “With electricity came hot plates, television, radio, and lights. Many of the women now use electric irons. Our health has improved because with refrigeration food can be preserved, and so can medicine. Before, we used wood stoves for all our cooking, charcoal irons, battery-operated radios, and candles. Have a seat. I think my señora has your dinner ready.”

  I sat at a wooden table that creaked when you breathed near it. The dining area looked out upon the plaza through an open-air window. (Except in a few cities, there is no other kind of window on the coast.) Juan’s wife brought in a large tray, set it on the table, and hurriedly left. Although I dined alone, four sets of eyes kept sneaking glances at me from the adjoining rooms. Dinner consisted of a fried egg, rice, and a hard-boiled egg. I washed it down with an Inca Cola.

  A half-hour later Juan and a relative walked in. “Well,” he said, “perhaps you want to go to sleep. When the truck arrives at four-thirty, it will drive around the plaza a couple of times, honking. You’ll hear it. I’ll wake you then to make sure.” I thanked him and looked around for a place to lie down. “Oh, we’ll make your bed. Wait a minute.”

  They did make my bed. Literally. First they brought four boards out from the other room, followed by a couple of crossbeams. Then Juan got out a hammer and proceeded to nail the four boards to the crossbeams. A mattress no thicker than a heavy quilt was placed over the beams and a cloth was put on top of that. “Good night, señor,” Juan said as he and the other man backed out of the newly christened guest room. “It is a pleasure to have you here.” I turned off the light and looked out on the plaza. A few other lights in town were on, but they soon went off one by one. All was still. Even the piglets had gone to sleep.

  I awoke on my own at four o’clock and packed my bag. I wasn’t sure if leaving a token sum of money would be proper. Certainly Juan’s family could use every sucre they could get even if they were, as they appeared, the richest in town. Would they consider a small gift from the foreigner insulting? I had no Miss Manners to consult on etiquette at the bottom of the Third World. Juan emerged from the adjoining room. We whispered our good-byes and I left some sucres under the empty bottle on the dinner table.

  The truck arrived exactly on time, honked its way around the plaza, and picked me up. A couple more men hopped in at lower Febres Cordero, and we took off. The bench in back was as narrow and uneven as before. Whenever we hit a pothole or a bump, the top of my head scraped the roof of the metal shell; I adapted by sitting with my shoulders hunched together and my head bowed slightly. The predawn air was deceptively chilly, and I felt a cold threaten. Dozing became impossible. There was a time when I fancied travel like this incredibly romantic. Now I just considered it uncomfortable. We arrived just as La Libertad’s marketplace opened its eyes for the day. I took the next bus back to Guayaquil.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  REVOLUTION AND SEAFOOD

  The hats to be made from Domingo’s harvest, not yet even woven, had already been ordered by a company in the United States. Unknown to the pajeros in Febres Cordero, six months earlier, while the straw was in its final months of growth, a hat manufacturer in Texas had placed its annual purchase orders with several New York–based representatives of Cuenca exporters. The orders called for a variety of sizes and quality grades to meet the United States demand for dress, casual, and western hats made of straw. That year the Resistol Hat Company needed sixty thousand straw hat bodies. The company based its requisitions on projections in United States fashions, sales during recent years, availability from Ecuador, and its own capacity to prepare the hats for shipment to stores around the country.

  Resistol started supplying haberdashers with hats in 1927, when it was known as Byer-Rolnick after its two founders: E. R. Byer, a Michigan jeweler who bankrolled Harry Rolnick, a hat maker. One of the company’s brand names was Resistol. In the early 1960s Byer-Rolnick bought the Ecuadoran Panama Hat Company in New York, finishers of straw-hat bodies from Ecuador. With it came its supervisor, Irving Marin, the premier Panama hat craftsman in the United States. “He had such a keen eye for straw hats and how to treat them in the plant,” a co-worker said of him. “We’d had seventy-two thousand straw-hat bodies in the warehouse for years. Everyone wanted to throw them out, but Irving turned them from junk into dollars. He could make chicken soup out of garbage.”

  Byer-Rolnick was eventually swallowed by Koret, a California clothing manufacturer, but retained its own identity and headquarters in Garland, a suburb of Dallas. In 1979 it assumed the name of its best-known brand, Resistol.

  Among the California forty-niners, the dreamers who first popularized Ecuadoran straw hats in the United States, was a young immigrant from Bavaria named Levi Strauss. In 1980, the San Francisco–based jeanswear company bearing his name took over Koracorp Industries, the new name for Resistol’s owners. The straw that Domingo cut near Febres Cordero and shipped to Victor González’s warehouse in Guayaquil was now entering the pipeline to be handled by the largest apparel manufacturing firm in the world.

  No one knows who first developed the idea of processing shoots from the toquilla plant to weave into natural fiber hats, or in which century this triumphant marriage of form and function took place. A primitive but inexorable process simply occurred, much as in evolution: there was a need for lightweight protection from the sun, and toquilla was a handy p
lant to use. Where did they learn to open up the toquilla shoot, to boil it, to strip it into thin strands, and to style the weave so that the hat would fit the head? Trial and error. Natural selection. Other plants, no doubt, were used and rejected until the right fiber and the right process went hand in hand.

  From Straw Hats—Their History and Manufacture, by Harry Inwards, London, 1922: “Claims are made that in the Province of Manabi, a native named Francisco Delgado first made a Panama hat about 300 years ago. The very Spanish name for a native evokes a suspicion that the date given was the first Spanish record . . . for it is most probably that the making of grass fibre hats in the Western Hemisphere was . . . of the most remote antiquity.

  Inwards was probably right. When the conquistadors first wandered through Manabí, they saw people wearing a strange headdress shaped like vampire wings. Perhaps to test the Spaniard’s gullibility, the natives said that the hats were woven from actual vampire skin. With these hats the Spaniards protected themselves from the sun, and because the hats were woven so tightly, they would carry water in them as well. Later the Spanish learned they had been fooled. The headdress was made from a locally grown light fiber.

  The most delicate of the woven headdresses were worn by women like a linen handkerchief on their heads or around their necks. Men wore them with feathers sticking out or with bands around them. They were called toquillas, from the Spanish toca, or headdress. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the hats made in Manabí gained wider distribution. Craftsmen were sent south from Manabí to Guayaquil and Peru to teach hat making. The hats and toquilla straw were sold as far inland as Cuenca. A small number were shipped to the United States, where, according to one account, “it was believed that they were fruit from the paja toquilla tree, and that these hats hung from its branches. One had only to pick them when they had turned white in color, a sign that they were ripe.”