Four minutes to read.
My dad loved factory tours. Growing up, we traveled to Detroit to visit an automaker’s assembly line, to Virginia to see how cigarettes are constructed, to the Jelly Belly headquarters to watch jellybeans jell, to the United States Mint to learn how our money is printed.
A factory tour is like reading a history book. A kind of biography about my baggage, the stuff that I accumulate and keep, the machines I use, the food I eat. If objects could read and write, factory tours would be memoirs telling us where they come from, their roots, their life purpose.
My father’s hairline receded in his early thirties. An expanse of baldness polka-dotted with tuffs of black hair looked like wild grasses growing on a barren plain.
One year for his birthday, I bought him a Panama straw hat. On the sunniest of days or in drenching rain, he never wore it. I don’t why. He never said. I never thought to ask. After he died, I found the hat tenderly stored in an attic trunk.
He simply refused to hide himself, to engage in artifice. As if saying to the world this is just how I’m put together, how I’m built. If you want to see me, then see me.
Whether going through a factory, poking into an artisan workshop, visiting a painter’s studio, taking a behind-the-scenes guided tour, I am my father’s son. Like him, I have an unquenchable curiosity for learning about the inventions that make up the magical world around me, for understanding how things are birthed.
Today, I am in Cuenca, Ecuador, visiting Homero Ortega, the world renowned, family-owned Panama hat company. U.S. presidents, celebrities and Nobel prize winners have walked this way, stepping over and around the colorful hats drying on the concrete factory floor. Like me, they’ve watched the workers block and cut the woven straw, stack the hats, sew in the finishing touches.
In the 1940s, Panama hats comprised twenty-three percent of Ecuador’s total exports. At one point, the industry employed a quarter of a million artisans. Today, 10,000 people weave, tighten, shape, dye, mold and press hundreds of thousands of hats per year.
In the history of product branding, the Panama hat stands out. A Panama hat is not Panamanian. Panama hats, every single damn one of them, are handmade in Ecuador.
In the 1990s, entrepreneurial Ecuadorians marketed the lightweight, durable straw hats to fair-skinned workers on the Panama Canal in need of sun protection. By the time the canal was ready for Atlantic shipping bound for San Francisco, the sunhats were forever misbranded.
Whether a thing or a person, my dad didn’t much care for what he called name-calling. His eyes twinkling, he’d tell that a goodly number of ‘gentlemenbugs’ are misnamed ladybugs. He joked that baby oil isn’t made from babies and buffalo wings don’t come from a flying buffalo. The traveler, he’d say, should get behind the façade, question the slick travel brochure, get inside the factory.
The uneven, crooked streets leading from Homero Ortega into the heart of Cuenca are dry, dusty, sundrenched. A Panama hat—my dad’s inheritance—shields the glare.