The Crown of MONTECRISTI

Natural History, June, 2000 by Tom Miller

Resistol, a well-known Texas hat company, was formerly one of the world's biggest importers of Panamas. "The quality of the Ecuadorean straws we'd see went down, and the prices went up" reports Bob Posey, Resistol's manager for product development. "They'd dry out to a brittle yellow. If you bleached them for uniform color or squeezed them, they sometimes cracked." Once, he tells me, the U.S. Customs Service put a hollow metal rod through a stack of Panamas as if taking the core from a tree. They were looking for cocaine-soaked imports and got a plug of straw instead. "That isn't the sort of treatment that encourages you to continue importing straw hats from South America." Resistol now buys less than 5 percent of its straws from Ecuador.

A proud industry is going through a painful metamorphosis. Between 1997 and 1998 alone, Ecuador's hat exports fell by more than 30 percent overall and by almost 40 percent to the United States. No one has yet figured out how to reverse this trend. Still, a few advocates are trying to preserve this time-honored business. An analysis by the Guayaquil branch office of the Ecuadorean Foundation for Nature Conservation concludes that because the villagers keep going deeper into the deforested countryside to find mature, cuttable wild straw, the plant itself may eventually become endangered. The group hopes to plant new toquilla acreage and bring about a managed straw harvest. Others would like to legally restrict usage of the very name "Panama hat" so that it would apply only to genuine toquilla straw hats woven in Ecuador. This, they hope, would reduce competition from the makers of similar hats, such as the shantung.

Mark Baum and Orlando Palacios, who used to work at a high-end hat shop in New York City, have helped the people of Pile by building a medical clinic to replace one damaged by El Nino. "We thought we really should be giving something back to these people" explains Baum. Inspired by the new clinic in Pile, Brent Black, an importer in Hawaii, has underwritten a study of the town's medical needs, with an eye to providing monthly visits by a health-care team. And he is planning to give weavers new caco wood molds that are sized for the overseas market.

The story of this legendary hat has, I believe, a number of generations to go. Every month, on the waning quarter-moon, I think of the path this product travels from straw to sale, and if I'm wearing my Panama, I tip it toward the equator.

Tom Miller ("The Crown of Montecristi") first encountered the people behind Ecuador's legendary hats more than fifteen years ago, when he researched his book The Panama Hat Trail (William Morrow, 1986). He welcomed the opportunity for a follow-up visit to see how the industry and its workers were faring. A writer and lecturer based in Tucson, Arizona, Miller is the author of Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba (Basic Books, 1996). He has previously contributed two articles about Cuba to Natural History: "The Season of Las Parrandas" (12/97-1/98) and "Cuba's All-Stars" (4/99).