October 14
This trip to other countries has got me thinking about my own. I have heard it said that you can tell quite a lot about a people by the words they use. For example, we call Los Angeles, Las Angellas, forgetting that Spain, then Mexico ruled California before our cavalry wrested it from them. One of our quintessential sports heroes, once the invincible quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, calls himself Brent Farve, when the letters on his uniform clearly spell out Favre, a French name by way of Mississippi and his Cajun background. We call the game he played football, overlooking the fact that football is a global game played with the foot, not the hands. Every fall we host the World Series, but never think to invite teams from other parts of the world, such as Japan, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, South Korea and Mexico, all of whom play baseball at a high standard. We call the Western Hemisphere the New World, even though people have been living here for at least 11,000 years, perhaps much more. Because Columbus had a longitude problem, we call indigenous people Indians, when of course they are Sioux, Santee, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Wintu, Yahi, Chumash, Aztec, Maya, and Inca. It is our habit to call our country America, ignoring the fact that it is only one of the Americas. Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Argentines, and the other inhabitants of Central and South America are all Americans too.
So, where does all this “America bashing” leave us? As most of you have probably guessed, it leads us directly to the Panama Hat! In a sense, Panama Hats are from Panama because they have traditionally been shipped to other parts of the world from there, but they actually are made in Ecuador, in the high Andes, near the lovely city of Cuenca. Only a few hundred indigenous women have the skill and temperament to make these hats. Each one is made of finely split palm leaves from the coast, meticulously knotted and woven into the distinctive shape of a “Panama Hat.” The tighter the weave, the more expensive the hat. A low end hat can be knotted in a day, but it takes up to six months to make a high end model.
When we were in Cuenca, we visited one of the four finishing factories there. The hats are woven in traditional native villages outside the city, in the homes of the weavers. Every week, or so, the ladies place the hats they have knotted in a bag, one atop the other, and bring them to the factory, where they are paid based on the quality of their work. We were lucky enough to be there when these colorfully dressed women were lined up , waiting for their sacks of hats to be evaluated by a kindly looking woman sitting in a chair. She turned out to be the great granddaughter of a Senior Ortega, who founded the company. She looked at each hat, adding it to the nested stacks on the floor. The weavers filled out the door, to return to their homes where they would make more hats. We then visited various parts of the company, where the hats were carefully bleached, pressed, shaped, and trimmed into the finished product. As skilled at selling these hats to tourists as they are at making them, our guide and her assistant had little trouble convincing Jeri and I that our lives would be much better if we each bought one of their creations. Who could blame us? The walls of the sales room were decorated with photographs of famous people -Lady Di, Frank Sinatra, Anthony Hopkins, Jackie Onasis, Brad Pitt, even Winston Churchhill- all wearing “Cuenca Hats.”
To wrap up this little diatribe, I could go on about why French Fries and French Kisses are not French, why Canadian Bacon isn’t Canadian, or why we shouldn’t refer to the Amish of Lancaster County, as “Pennsylvania Dutch.” But why ruin a perfectly good story about a hat?
 |
| Granddaughter of the Ortega founder still operating business |
 |
| Hats are woven by villages and then processed at factory then back out to villagers for shaping |
 |
| Jeri and I will be the next frames on the wall!! |
No comments:
Post a Comment