Latin American Cultural Objects and Episodes. William H. Beezley
Spanish conquerors, called monteras. Here women for weddings and fiestas use a flat hat, with a black cloth brim, two raised points on top, embroidery of green, red, and black threads and an assortment of silver beads and shingles. Various other versions of the montera exist with associated legends that it is a “secret map hat” indicating where Inca treasure had been hidden or that its decoration uses pre‐Spanish amulets to preserve indigenous religion. The sheep wool hat called an ovejón became typical in the rural communities of six Bolivian provinces: La Paz, Oruro, Potosí, Tarija, Chuquisaca, and Cochabamba. In the three lower provinces with tropical climates, women use palm hats. The ovejones were made with molds that enabled the shaping of a variety of hats that were worked until they became rigid. In many communities, men, women, and children wore these. For example, women’s hats of Ursia have a high crown shaped, according to one writer, like a warhead with a black strip around them at the base. In Potolo and Ravelo, they adopted low crowns decorated in many colors.
Some communities, especially remote ones, had hats that are not of the ovejón type. The members of the Yura community adopted woven hats of dark blue with low crowns that during fiestas were festooned with stars and moons in the shape of the owner’s initials. The Tarabuco community in Chuquisaca province had two styles, the shining montera, like the conquistador’s helmet with details representing the community, and the Pasha montera, worn only by women, with an elliptical shape reminiscent of Napoleonic‐era hats. These were decorated with embroidery, beadwork, and glass. As a base, the Pasha has white fabric that in case of mourning is exchanged for black. Unmarried females choose woolen hats. Boys in this community wear black wool caps covered with embroidery called a jokollo, or tadpole, in part because of the tail of the cap and also referring to their adolescence.6
Styles in the provincial capitals varied. Striking women’s black hats in Potosí resembled those of medieval European witches. Those of Tarifa, at a lower altitude with warmer weather, were made of lighter cloth with low crowns and were worn on the back of the head. The resulting halo reflected the style of the Andalusian settlers who had come to the region. In Cochabamba, they wore the tarro cochabambino (the Cochabamba jar), an all‐white hat with a tall crown and wide brim, that featured a black ribbon. According to legend, a Roman Catholic priest ordered an unmarried Quechua woman living with her lover whom she intended to marry (a practice common among community’s engaged couples), as penance for adultery, to wear a black ribbon on her hat. At the next mass, all the Cochabamba women wore black ribbons as a comeuppance to the priest and the style persisted.7 The women also still perform a dance called La Diablada (dance of the devil) wearing these hats. In La Paz, the women adopted this hat shape in black, brown, ivory, or white color without the ribbon.
Cholitas (indigenous females) in La Paz and cholos (both women and men) in the Potosí and Oruro mining districts changed their hat style early in the twentieth century. Italian merchants selling goods in Bolivia received merchandise, including hats, brought from Genoa by a wholesale enterprise based in Tacna, Peru, Laneri, Solari, & Company. Perhaps Tacna’s earliest Italian retail company was Canepa Hmos y Cia, founded in 1862. Several other Italian companies developed after the British, French, and Spanish abandoned the region in 1879 when the outbreak of the War of the Pacific sparked the Chilean invasion of Bolivian and Peruvian coastal towns. Italians, who had been mostly involved in small trades,8 stayed during the Chilean occupation and came to dominate commerce, including merchandise going to La Paz, Potosí, and Oruro. Tacna offered the shortest distance with its well‐established trade route that had existed since the mid‐sixteenth century when silver from the mines arrived there for shipment from the nearby port of Arica to Europe and trade goods imported from Europe passed through on the way to Potosí and other mines. Italians, chiefly from Lombardy, Piedmont, and Liguria (especially the capital Genoa), were the largest number of immigrants in Peru from the 1870s until World War II. Tacna’s Italians soon became an integral part of the community, recognized in the Plaza de Armas with a portly statue of their national hero, Christopher Columbus. Each October 12, the town firemen cleaned it with their hoses as part of the Día de la Raza, the Columbus Day celebration. The Italian government named one of the resident Italians as honorary consul.9 The community had an Italian Club (the Círculo Italiano) led by tycoon Dante Abelli, who had tin mines in Bolivia, and Andrés D. Laneri, who managed the wholesale import business from Genoa.10
From Tacna, Laneri, Solari & Company shipped to Chile, Peru, and Bolivia various items including luxury clothing and other goods such as Ferrarelle, the famous bottled mineral water from near Naples.11 The company provided retailers with a multitude of mining tools, preserved foods, and ready‐made clothing, including the rather expensive Italian Borsalino and Valera & Ricca hats. The merchandise until early in the twentieth century arrived from the coast after several days’ travel by mule when it reached Huanuni near Oruro, and Uncía near Potosí.12 In Oruro, a group of 40 Italians (in 1889) competed for the commercial trade. In nearby Huanuni, Ludovico Antonio Galoppo, who had left his native Piedmont town of Vallemosse for Chile, lived for some years in coastal mining towns, and then moved to the Bolivian mining zone. He soon created a construction partnership with fellow Italian Marcelo Aglietti di Cossato. Aglietti & Galoppo worked for Simon Patiño’s mining company. In 1914, Galoppo turned to retail merchandise with Aldo Ormezzano establishing la Sociedad Galoppo & Ormezzano to import Italian goods to Huanuni. The company successfully sold imported fabrics, draperies, hosiery, hats, stockings, handkerchiefs, shoes, loose wool, and cotton fabrics – all bought from Italy at half price. Galoppo sold his goods in the small general store, where his hats were either tossed in with canned sardines, condensed milk, hard cheeses, other foods, hammers, nails, and dynamite, or they were dangled from the ceiling between slices of smoked lard and Oxford pig feet. Workers selected hats and other items and the mining company deducted the cost from their pay.
Galoppo’s business acumen and market intuition after some years resulted in two decisions on March 17, 1914. His success in developing interest in hats led him to drop the sale of general merchandise and focus only on hats in the hope of obtaining an exclusive contract with the Italian company Borsalino. He wrote to Borsalino’s wholesaler that the obstacle to major hat sales, especially to women, was the cost. Women costumers liked the style but only wanted or could afford to spend about 2 lire, so he proposed that Borsalino produce for them a hat made of less expensive materials than the usual quality felt or wool. He wanted bowler‐style hats described in the 1912 catalog, but made as “qualitá superiore,” with the lowest price materials. He proposed these hats, to appeal to the women, be called the Cappello da Ciola – the Chola hat.13 It became the iconic derby of women in the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes.
Galoppo’s plan worked. The Borsalino Cappello da Ciola had a good reception and other derbies became popular with men in Huanuni in 1915. For the following year, Galoppo ordered 28 dozen cloth hats for men and 18 dozen Cholas for indigenous women and an additional two dozen elegant samples, with brims of at least 5½ or 6 centimeters (about 2 to 2½ inches), stating, “there is nothing worse than a hat without a brim.” He also ordered four dozen tongos (caps). Galoppo did not want Borsalino to supply the women’s hats to other retailers in Bolivia and suggested such business with other companies might prejudice his dealings with Borsalino.14
Galoppo’s comments reflected the local competition for hat sales. The Portillo company of Uyuni had begun selling Borsalinos in Huanuni, and in Oruro, Filippo Nannetti had been selling general goods for years. The Marin company had opened a shop in the same community to sell Borsalinos. The hats represented only part