Panama Hat Works of Montecristi - The Making of Panama Hats

How Panama Hats are Made

The Panama Hatworks of Montecristi is proud to tell this tale of how Panama hats are made. There isn't a factory with belching smoke stacks and conveyor belts full of paja toquilla pushing out Panama hat clones. No presentations with glitzy models pretending to work while wearing $1000 Italian suits and smiling with flawless horse-toothed grins. There are no flat-screen monitors upon each desktop, nor handhelds, nor 24K gold cufflinks. The only Palm Pilots are occasional tropical birds soloing in and flying among the various palm trees. Yet, in a glitzy office somewhere, is a hat stand with no less than two Fino-Fino Panama hats from Montecristi. For that we are thankful!
The sun has been up almost an hour and a tropical bird calls. The tune echoes softly in the morning mists. Wisps of smoke rise, then break off from each hut, and breakfast smells are in the air in our tropical coastal village. Some gallos crow in competition and a hen squawks. A baby cries in the distance and several dogs across the river bark, welcoming morning.
Your Panama hat started its existence on the Ecuadorian tropical coast as a toquilla plant. Toquilla, a tall, rich green, palm-like plant, is harvested of its leaves, called fronds. These fronds are taken to market and sold. Later, the fronds are deftly split their length along the grain and divided lengthwise repeatedly. Human fingers are the only tools. After splitting the fronds into long flat fibers varying from one to three millimeters in width, the woman, christened 78 years ago in Manta as Machita — the first link in the making of your Panama hat — rises to place them on a pile of separated toquilla fronds harvested with machete from the tropical coast by her nephew Carlos and niece Angelica. Truckloads of toquilla leaves pass on the way to processing groups from a local farm, but Maria del Carmen's family still harvests from the wild toquilla plant that grows in abundance on their property.
The finer the fiber, the finer the woven Panama hat will be. The fibers are actually the long bundled capillaries of the plant (the circulatory system) and are bundles of what botanists call "xylem tubes" which all leaves and stems of all plants have. Wood, for example, is merely empty dry xylem tubes arranged radially by the tree into bundles. These bundles are separated to make common paper. The xylem tubes of the toquilla plant carry nutritious fluids through microscopic capillaries made of cellulose (plant fiber) and are the support of the stems and the leaves of the plant. The toquilla leaves are comprised almost entirely of these long parallel microscopic tubes which extend in one fiber from the root to the last leaf tip. The leaves therefore can actually be divided lengthwise very thinly, again and again, to the point of being hair-like. The ancient indigenous people spun thread and wove linen-like cloth from these nearly microscopic fibers. Linen itself is made similarly from extremely thin fibers taken from the stems of the flax plant, distributed worldwide.
Maria del Carmen lays the fibers on the ground beside her, straight like hair, after her fingernails separated them from the fronds with jeweler’s precision. Then she gingerly stands up, takes a deep breath, arches her back, bends down and gathers them up as a bundle, throws them on her shoulder and walks across her patio, scattering the chickens, and puts the fibers into an organized pile beside the barrels of boiling water.
Since her husband Luis died a year and a half ago, she and her family continue to survive by making paja toquilla fiber. Her nephew Carlos puts the fibers into boiling kettles made of two old discarded fifty-five-gallon oil barrels. The wood fires were lit at four a.m. — two hours before sun came up — to get the water boiling vigorously. After five or more hours in the boiling barrels, the green fiber turns to a limp, gelatinous brown.
Carlos carefully removes the fibers from the barrels using an oar-like wooden paddle and sets them on a plank platform to cool. Carlos and his sister Angelica then carry the fibers to the river's edge where a wooden-plank incline serves as a washboard, and they squeeze and wash out the softer organic material from the fibers. By now it is past lunch time and the aroma of fried plantains and chicken fills the air. The hour of washing leaves yielded almost pure hair-like cellulose fiber. The fiber is now considerably lighter in color. Carlos rinses it a final time and lifts it to drain over an improvised clothesline made of thick blue rope tied to poles driven into the ground. The sun bleaches the fiber somewhat as well. It is now called paja toquilla or literally translated from Spanish, straw toquilla.
The fibers accumulate during the week as they dry and bleach in the sun. Maria del Carmen's nephew Manuel sorts the fibers by fineness and color, bales them by bundles sorted for quality using plastic twine, and waits for the bus to Pile to pass. He loads the fibers on top of the bus. Manuel's bus ride along the bumpy and rutted jungle road terminates an hour later in Pile, home village of the best hat weavers. He pays the bus driver the usual dollar-and-35-cent fare, then unloads the bulky fibers of paja toquilla onto the sidewalk. It is Thursday morning and every Thursday Manuel arrives with a bail of paja toquilla. Juan waits for Manuel in anticipation of the new fiber. Juan’s family weaves hats and Juan himself is a master weaver. Juan carefully inspects the fibers, feels them in his fingers, and arrives at a price with Manuel.
The paja toquilla fiber is sold not only in Pile but to hat weavers all over Ecuador, mostly in the coastal areas and in and around Cuenca. Fine fiber is sold for more than courser fiber due to the greater time it takes to separate it and wash it. The toquilla plant of southern Ecuador, due to the favorable growing conditions involving the latitude, humidity, rainfall, and soil properties, produces the smoothest, longest, and strongest toquilla plant fiber of any locale in Latin America. The toquilla plant, however, is used as an ornamental plant in many Latin American countries and in the Galapagos where the fiber isn't suitable for high-quality Panama hats. This is not to say that inferior fiber is not used. Caveat emptor. Buyer beware, especially in literally all other Latin American countries.

Juan and his family moisten the fiber slightly to make it more pliable. They (mostly women in this case) sit in chairs in a circle, occasionally talking and joking, but the work is serious and intensely precise. They sit — without a table or work bench — in a generic wooden chair or on the floor and begin weaving hats by hand, beginning with the rosetta in the center crown.

It is said the master weavers only use non-glaring light and weave only on cloudy days and/or in moonlight so as to see the fibers better, as this prevents errors. Shade trees provide this light also. Juan weaves most of the time when he's not buying fiber or selling hat bodies and prefers to sit under his woven reed canopy in back of the house. Weavers can be seen sitting inside their doorways well into the front room away from glare. Remember, they are working with fibers of less than one or two millimeters thick. There is no loom. There is not a machine. There isn’t any aid in the weaving. It is done with fingers and fingernails. Starting from the center of the crown, radiating out in a spiral, the weavers incorporate more and more strands into the project, producing the famed concentric circles, vueltas, in the crown. If you hold the hat up to the light and look at the crown of the hat, you can count these circles. The lowest-dollar hats have four to six vueltas. The super-fino hats have upwards of 18 vueltas.

Taking this further, weaving good Panama hats, as with any skill, depends on several variables.
The quality of the fiber must be excellent to produce an excellent Panama hat. Coarser fiber of high quality can be woven tightly and densely, producing an inexpensive everyday hat and sold on the local market or to tourists who aren't particularly familiar with fineness factors. Fineness of fiber alone doesn’t indicate a quality hat. Super-fine fiber can be woven loosely as well, taking less time, producing a less dense hat. The most fino of finos are woven of high-quality fine fiber, and are woven tightly and regularly over a period of months with an minimum of irregularities, unequal fibers, twists, knots, and other errors. Sorry, folks! There aren’t any flawless hats out there!
Juan the weaver's family co-op is a group of family women who have been weaving hats since childhood. Their ancient ancestors were the original tribal weavers on the southern or south-central coast of Ecuador. The best paja toquilla fiber comes from families like that of Maria del Carmen and many other large and small producers. The village of Montecristi is most noted for Panama hats because it is the central marketplace where the weavers from Pile and other villages and hamlets close by to come and sell their hat bodies. It also houses the Central Artisan House and Museum.

Many Hats Drying
Juan takes a few hat bodies to the Montecristi streets each week as they are finished. These are good "finos" and "fino finos". Like Juan's cooperative, most of the master weavers' huts are in nearby Pile or Pampas. Juan sells his hat bodies to the highest bidder, returning 75 percent of the money to the weavers and returning five percent to his metal box from which he buys more fiber. His commission of 20 percent is well earned as he knows the market and sells only for the prices he wants.
The hat bodies — straight from Juan — are then purchased by Modesto, who has a nice hat-finishing business. The hat bodies which Modesto purchased from Juan are actually not pretty at all. They are a very rough bucket-like outline of a hat. The fibers from which it was woven stick out of the raw brim like a beard. Each fiber is a half-meter in length, sticking out loosely from the brim. The hat body is covered with many fibers protruding at all angles, inside and out, which must be meticulously and individually trimmed off by hand — carefully — with a razor blade. You would never realize that in a week that this would be a Panama hat selling for $1,000 or more.

The brim of each raw hat body must be trimmed of loose fibers and each individual fiber must be segregated and woven backwards over itself and its neighbors to prevent the weaves from fraying. This is called "back weaving” and one person does all of the back weaving in Montecristi. This is an art and takes a fair amount of time to do.

The hat body, as it is now called, is ready for "pummeling." One of the locals — a man in his mid 40s named Marcelo (man with the mace!) — gently manipulates the weave dispersion by precisely impacting it on a padded surface using a rounded wooden instrument as an impact tool. This is called pummeling and is done by artisans specifically skilled in this craft, to make the weaves settle in more regularly; and the hat body therefore straightens and becomes more symmetrical in appearance. The word pummel in English refers to severe beating but this is hardly beating in the usual sense. It is merely getting the weaves to sort of nestle in together and become more equal. Skill details this process of precision insofar as no fibers are even close to being stressed or broken.
Next the hat body is bleached using burning sulfur to give the hat a uniform ivory color. The hat body is hung and rotated in the burning sulfur fumes and this bleaches the fiber without hurting it. This also preserves an ivory color and rids the hat of any irregular color areas. This is the main difference between a Cuenca hat and a Montecristi hat. Cuenca hats are bleached in a liquid oxygenation process that give them the crisp white color.
Customers who really know their Panamas prefer little bleaching of any kind and prefer to see slightly different colors in the woven strands, giving the completed Panama hat in their view much more authenticity, character, and personality. The more a person appreciates a good Panama, the less artificial process is desired.
After the bleaching process, Modesto's shop washes the hat body in water and detergent. Soap and collected rainwater (no scum forms) works too. The hat body is rinsed with rainwater and dried in the shady alleyway of Modesto's blocking shop.

Ironing

Ironing comes next in Modesto's shop. Maury is the top hat ironer. The brim is moistened just a bit and Maury irons it using a rather small old-fashioned cast-iron iron that is initially heated on a stove. Some hat blockers use electric irons but the majority such as Maury use old fashioned cast-iron ones. A piece of moist cloth is placed over the hat body and the resulting steam and pressure from the iron straightens the brim and crown, using — among other things — hand carved wooden forms as an ironing surface. Each form is for a different hat size and block style making for a LOT of forms!

Next, the hat is brushed to remove any dust and to align the fibers a bit and the block itself is installed in the crown by placing the hat body on a block form and ironing it using a cloth between the iron and the hat body in the same way the brim and crown were ironed. The fingers of a skilled blocker form the details as well and Modesto oversees literally all of the work, working himself on the hat block bench.

Finally, the inner sweat band is trimmed to size by Modesto's sister Ana and hand sewn in place with a needle and thread that matches the hat color, so as to make the stitches invisible from the outside of the hat. A decorative black outer band is cut from a ribbon of material by Monica, Modesto's niece, and is tied to form the bow. Monica sews the band into a continuous loop and slips it over the crown, its own slight tension holds it in place.
Modesto completely inspects each hat carefully, holding it up to the light and going over it carefully, held eight inches from his eyes, in filtered light. It will be sold with four others in Montecristi. We get a call from Modesto that he has another few hats and we bus over to Montecristi to take a look. Sure enough, in Modesto's tradition, we are impressed all the way around with three of his four hats and we settle on a price for the three. The fourth is just too high-priced for the quality, so we leave that one for someone else. From there we offer the hats directly to our customers, no middle man. But often Modesto's hats and other blockers' hats are exported to a far away land by whatever buyer he sells to in Montecristi, either to be sold to you (as if you had purchased the hat from us) or to a wholesaler who would sell it to a dealer who would then sell it to you at one of two higher prices. Think about it: Obviously, it is best to purchase from whom?
For thousands of years these patient Native Ecuadorians produced fiber such as was produced by the family of Maria del Carmen and have woven hats and articles of clothing from the long smooth paja toquilla fiber. What sets these people off from the rest is the incredible patience they have to produce one fino fino Panama hat every four or even five months for their entire lives until literally they can't move or see. It takes years to develop the skills necessary — hat after hat after hat — and it requires a very special culture and mindset to do it. A single hat at times represents nearly the total income of a family of six for three months. If this culture is ever lost, it will never return, ever: It's a one-way street. Consequently, it is important to preserve it as our own American heritage, far beyond buying and selling Panama hats, although the Panama hat business itself provides the vehicle of preservation of these ancient skills. We do this by purchasing their one product: Panama hat bodies. Slowly but surely the younger generations are losing interest in hat weaving, going to computer and other technologies and venturing to other lands for more lucrative futures, rather than continue to struggle here in a land of inflation and uncertainty. We are not trying to create hype but this may very well be the close of the era of the fino fino Panama hat. Most of the master weavers — who are almost the only producers of fino finos — are elderly or near elderly.