The Crown of MONTECRISTI

Natural History, June, 2000 by Tom Miller

Genuine Panama hats are crafted--as they always have been--in Ecuador.

When I was growing up in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, my dad wore a Panama hat--but just between Memorial Day and Labor Day and, even then, only with a seersucker suit. I always assumed the hat came from Panama and the suit from Sears. I was wrong on both counts. A store downtown supplied the suit. And the stylish straw hat? It was from Ecuador, a South American country that once shipped its exportable wares to the Isthmus of Panama. In the mid-1800s, the hats were picked up by gold seekers crossing the isthmus overland as they rushed to and from California. During the Spanish-American War, in 1898, the U.S. government bought some 50,000 of these hats for the troops from merchants in Panama. Add to that the hat's popularity with the crews that constructed the Panama Canal in the early twentieth century--well, it's a wonder that anyone at all knows them as Ecuador hats.

To understand how a Panama hat zigzags from an outpost just south of the equator to the gleaming window of a New York haberdashery is to understand how the world works. The trail begins in Cadeate, a coastal village in Ecuador's Guayas province. Two enterprises sustain the 1,500 local residents. Most of the time the men wade into the water to collect shrimp larvae, which they sell to shrimp farms. But for five days in every lunar cycle, they harvest toquilla (Carludovica palmata), the ten-foot-tall, palmlike wild plant from which the Panama hat is woven.

Arriving in Cadeate, I ask people at random if they know any of the straw cutters whose names I have been given. One of the men I ask, Jorge Vicuna, is on my list; he acts nonchalant, almost as if he's been expecting me. He has been harvesting toquilla straw for most of his fifty years, traveling ten miles inland with other straw cutters to areas where the plant grows, including hillsides where each family has been assigned a lot.

The straw cutters schedule their monthly harvest for the five days after the moon reaches its waning quarter, when, Vicuna explains, the straw holds less moisture and thus is lighter, easier to cut, and more pliable to weave. Wielding machetes, they harvest the slender new four-foot-high stalks, each containing the tightly wrapped fingers of one growing frond. The village council imposes a daily quota of 1,200 stalks per family; the harvest is brought back by mule and truck. Vicuna shows me how he strips away the worthless outer sheath of each stalk and then splits and separates the inner fingers, leaving dozens of yard-long, ribbonlike strands attached to the leaf stem. He tosses the prepared stalk into a vat of boiling water for about an hour and hangs it on a clothesline to dry.

After expenses, each family nets the equivalent of about $13 for the six huge sacks of stalks it fills monthly. In the 1940s the women of Cadeate wove hats from the harvested straw, but not any more. Instead the straw gets trucked east to Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest and most industrialized city, and then to Cuenca, a town in the Andes that is at the center of hat production. Trucking the sacks this distance (some 230 miles by road) is no minor matter, especially now. Pounded by El Nino's torrential rains for weeks at a time, the region has recently suffered wasted highways, homes, and crops.

In Cuenca I meet Victoria Moreno, a no-nonsense businesswoman whose father and grandfather were both in the Panama hat industry. Every few weeks, a truck delivers sacks of straw to the courtyard of her home. She sells them to women from the town and from the surrounding countryside; they in turn sell to straw weavers or, more commonly, to straw vendors. It costs Moreno about $150 for a sack, and she sells it for $170. "The straw is expensive, mainly because of the transportation," she says. "I extend credit to the reliable straw sellers. Everything here is by credit. They buy one sack every two weeks. The debt, it never ends."

Sunday is market day for the straw sellers, weavers, and hat buyers in Biblian, a small town about thirty miles from Cuenca. One of the straw sellers, Victoria Gutierrez, stands beneath a makeshift plastic cover that protects her from the persistent drizzle. She sells straw for about 8 [cts.] a stalk, realizing a profit of 1 [cts.] for each one. Weavers stop to buy enough for one or several hats, each of which requires about six stalks.

On another morning I locate the home of Isaura Calderon, a hat weaver who makes four small hats a week, along with baskets, place mats, caps, and other items that take less time to weave and that bring in a few additional pennies. Each hat requires roughly 40 [cts.] worth of straw and is sold to a middleman for about 90 [cts.]. Like other weavers, Calderon uses a wooden mold shaped like the crown of a Panama to get the basic size and shape, but she leaves the product unfinished, with a somewhat unshaped body and with the straw ends protruding around the brim. The task of edging the hat by working the ends back into the woven brim is usually farmed out to specialists at a hat factory.