Oh, wow -- it's crazy to see an article on Hacker News about Pile (the village that the weaver in the article is from). I have a house 4 minutes from Pile and h

Oh, wow -- it's crazy to see an article on Hacker News about Pile (the village that the weaver in the article is from). I have a house 4 minutes from Pile and have some good friends from there. I spent the past 7 years in those exact villages on the coast, including Pile: El Aromo, Liguiqui, San Lorenzo, Las Piñas, El Abra, Santa Rosa, San Pedro 6, and finally Pile (in order of their distance from Manta along the highway). The article is correct that the finest Panama hats are not made in Montecristi, but in Pile (although there were a good number of weavers in El Aromo as well, more picked-over by the dealers). One thing the article doesn't mention are the occasional abortive attempts to collectivize, and to wrest some degree of control away from the dealers and towards the hat producers. Pile, for instance, recently built a pretty little hat museum, and tours of mostly European/US tourists are brought through from time to time to take pictures and see where the hats are made. But the gulf between the dealers and the weavers is enormous. Most weavers, when they move upwards ... move out of weaving. For instance, the coastal fishing economy is going through really hard times at the moment, but even so a fisherman can make 2 or 3x what a weaver does. Even someone doing machete work will probably net more per month than a weaver. Which is why most of the weavers in terms of volume are probably women; little old ladies with sunken chests from leaning on the rounded stone that holds the work in place.