The Crown of MONTECRISTI

Natural History, June, 2000 by Tom Miller

A couple of the men walk me a few minutes uphill and around a bend so that I can meet Arquimedes Delgado (no relation to Rosendo), who lives in a sturdy wood house with a cement floor. "Here we plant corn, yuca, and bananas and tend cattle" Arquimedes tells me. "And weave hats. Always we weave hats. It takes three to four months to weave a fino. Rosendo will pay up to $80 for each one. He does this in stages, so we always make sure to have two hats going at once."

Arquimedes holds out one stalk of toquilla. "It takes forty of these to make one fino," he says, "Each stalk has about 200 strands after we split them." He stops to make sure I understand. "Look." Using his fingernail, he splits one ribbon of straw into five separate yard-long strands. Only selected strands are used for the finos.

As we talk, Arquimedes's wife, Marl Lopez, enters and quietly resumes her work on a partially completed hat that is sandwiched near the top of a waist-high stack of wooden hat molds. She bends over the stack to keep the hat in place. Monica, the couple's energetic teenager, follows her in and steps up to her own tower of blocks and hat-in-progress. Monica began weaving when she was eight, boasts her father. "It takes the young ones fifteen years to learn how to weave a real fino," he declares. "Our twelve-year-old son, Gabriel, also weaves. He can already turn out a respectable hat."

I also visit sixty-four-year-old Jose Raul Alarcon, a weaver recommended to me before I left the United States. "If you see Alarcon, look deep into his eyes," advised Milton Johnson, owner of the Montecristi Custom Hat Works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. "He's just about the last of his generation of master weavers." I ask the humble, clear-eyed man if he is aware of his international reputation. He nods, then shyly names the countries to which his hats have traveled and from which his determined fans have come to visit him. "I weave between seven in the morning and noon," he tells me. "The sweat builds up on the fingertips too much in the afternoon to weave. Sometimes I go out to the banana and coffee fields then."

Periodically one of the men in Pile takes a bus to Montecristi to deliver hats from the local weavers to Rosendo Delgado. In his hands, their finos and those from other Andean communities have their long hair clipped between rounds of soaking, washing, bleaching, pounding, and ironing. When they are ready for sale, Delgado's luxury Panamas are often bought directly by exclusive retailers abroad.

A number of importers furnish Panamas to stores in the United States and elsewhere. One U.S. importer is the World Hat Company, a Florida firm run by Roberto Dorfzaun, son of Cuenca exporter Kurt Dorfzaun. "Hat sales don't go by fashion as much as by what the public sees on television or films" the younger Dorfzaun says one morning in his showroom. "When people see Tiger Woods and almost everyone else wearing visors and caps at the U.S. Open, that affects the business" he observes. "We'll see a jump in orders when a sports or entertainment personality wears a Panama in public or in the movies."