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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Viewpoints / Puntos de Vista
- Sprache: Englisch
Delight in the cultural aspects of Latin America by observing the objects that give life to history
Latin American Cultural Objects and Episodes provides readers with an eclectic and fascinating exploration of Latin American history through the examination of physical objects. Distinguished author and Professor William H. Beezley takes readers on a journey that includes objects used music and visual media, such as movies, documentaries, and television.
Forming an integral part of the history they represent, the objects described in this book tell the tale of the little known or neglected part of Latin American history. While most historical authors and researchers focus on the political and economic life of Latin America, this author uses the objects he highlights to explain and illuminate the daily lives of the Latin American peoples and the legacies that they share.
Forming an essential part of a comprehensive understanding of Latin American history, the book includes discussions and explorations of:
- How objects have transformed and shaped the cultures of Latin America over the years
- Unusual and interesting objects serendipitously discovered by a variety of researchers and historians
- Ten chapters, each beginning with an object acting as a synecdoche or metonym that introduces a discussion of Latin American historical life
- The significance of the objects to particular religious practices, musical traditions, or schools of visual media, such as folk art, film or television
Perfect for anyone interested in Latin American life beyond politics and economics, Latin American Cultural Objects and Episodes belongs on the bookshelves of everyone with a curiosity about culture in Latin America as it's revealed through physical objects.
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Seitenzahl: 367
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Series Editor’s Preface
Call…cry…shout…yell
Introduction
Acknowledgments
1 Bowler Hats
Additional Resources
2 Magic Beans
Additional Resources
3 Red Flags
Additional Resources
4 Roasted Chicken
Additional Resources
5 Eye Patches and Telenovelas
Telenovelas Redux
Additional Resources
6 Ugh! Soup!
Additional Resources
7 Holy Wurlitzer
Additional Resources
8 Mapuche Flag and Rap
Additional Resources
9 Eye Patch Laughs and Bubble Gum Wraps
Additional Resources
10 Ski Masks
Additional Resources
10 Coda: Ski Masks and Soccer
Re‐Call and Conclusion
Conclusions
Bibliography
Archives
Online Sources
Books and Articles
Unpublished Materials
Correspondence and Interviews
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Viewpoints/Puntos de VistaThemes and Interpretations in Latin American History
Series editor: Jürgen Buchenau
The books in this series will introduce students to the most significant themes and topics in Latin American history. They represent a novel approach to designing supplementary texts for this growing market. Intended as supplementary textbooks, the books will also discuss the ways in which historians have interpreted these themes and topics, thus demonstrating to students that our understanding of our past is constantly changing, through the emergence of new sources, methodologies, and historical theories. Unlike monographs, the books in this series will be broad in scope and written in a style accessible to undergraduates.
Published
Beyond Borders: A History of Mexican Migration to the United StatesTimothy J. Henderson
Bartolomé de las Casas and the Conquest of the AmericasLawrence A. Clayton
A Concise History of the Haitian RevolutionJeremy Popkin
The Last Caudillo: Alvaro Obregón and the Mexican RevolutionJürgen Buchenau
Spaniards in the Colonial Empire: Creoles vs. Peninsulars?Mark A. Burkholder
Dictatorship in South AmericaJerry Dávila
Mothers Making Latin AmericaErin E. O’Connor
A History of the Cuban Revolution, Second EditionAviva Chomsky
A Short History of U.S. Interventions in Latin America and the CaribbeanAlan McPherson
Latin American Cultural Objects and EpisodesWilliam H. Beezley
Forthcoming
Emancipations: Latin American IndependenceKaren Racine
Mexico Since 1960Stephen E. Lewis
Latin American Cultural Objects and Episodes
William H. Beezley
This edition first published 2021© 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of William H. Beezley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Beezley, William H., author.Title: Latin American cultural objects and episodes / William H. Beezley.Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2021. | Series: Viewpoints/Puntos de vista : themes and interpretations in Latin American history | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2020030563 (print) | LCCN 2020030564 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119078265 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119078142 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119078074 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Material culture–Latin America. | Popular culture–Latin America. | Mass media–Social aspects–Latin America. | Latin America–Social life and customs. | Latin America–Civilization.Classification: LCC GN562 .B44 2021 (print) | LCC GN562 (ebook) | DDC 306.098–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030563LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030564
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © Gabriel Perez/Getty Images
Series Editor’s Preface
Each book in the “Viewpoints/Puntos de Vista” series introduces students to a significant theme or topic in Latin American history. In an age in which student and faculty interest in the Global South increasingly challenges the old focus on the history of Europe and North America, Latin American history has assumed a prominent position in undergraduate curricula. At a time when immigration restrictions, a growing income gap, and a pandemic have combined to problematize globalization under the aegis of neoliberalism, knowledge of Latin American history is also important for the public at large.
Some of the books in this series discuss the ways in which historians have interpreted these themes and topics, thus demonstrating that our understanding of our past is constantly changing, through the emergence of new sources, methodologies, and historical theories. Others offer an introduction to a particular theme by means of a case study or biography in a manner easily understood by the contemporary, non‐specialist reader. Yet others give an overview of a major theme that might serve as the foundation of an upper‐level course.
What is common to all of these books is their goal of historical synthesis. They draw on the insights of generations of scholarship on the most enduring and fascinating issues in Latin American history, while also making use of primary sources as appropriate. Each book is written by a first‐rate scholar and specialist in Latin American history committed to bringing their expertise into the undergraduate classroom and to a public audience.
The books in this series can be used in a variety of ways, recognizing the differences in teaching conditions at small liberal arts colleges, large public universities, and research‐oriented institutions with doctoral programs. Faculty have particular needs depending on whether they teach large lectures with discussion sections, small lecture or discussion‐oriented classes, or large lectures with no discussion sections, and whether they teach on a semester or trimester system. The format adopted for this series fits all of these different parameters, as well as the needs of a general public interested in learning more about Latin American history without prior academic preparation.
This volume celebrates a milestone as the tenth book in the “Viewpoints/Puntos de Vista” series, and the first edited and published with the assistance of Jennifer Manias, Wiley’s Acquisitions Editor in History. In Latin American Cultural Objects and Episodes, William H. Beezley provides a compelling and fascinating analysis of Latin America’s rich cultural history, using as its point of departure the history of objects. Drawing on historical literature and primary sources from Latin America, Europe, and the United States, the author takes the reader on a historical tour de force that uses a vast array of objects, from coffee beans to bowler hats, cartoons, and roasted chicken, as gateways to understanding major themes in cultural history, and most importantly, the complex art of survival and resistance in a world region buffeted by conquest, colonialism, exploitation, imperialism, and social inequality. Written by one of the pioneers in Latin American cultural history whose 1987 book, Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico, helped spark intense interest in this field, the book also brings objects to life as mementos to everyday life and material culture – aspects of history that a more traditional or textual analysis illuminates only with great difficulty. I am most pleased to present this important work to what I hope will be a wide readership.
Jürgen Buchenau
University of North Carolina
Charlotte, USA
Call…cry…shout…yell“Ooo‐wa‐ooo‐aaooaaooaa‐ooo!” or “Taaar‐maan‐ganiii”
The call to action, the cry for attention, the shout for followers, or the yell for adventure – the expression of much of Latin America’s history comes through these declarations of political battles, alerts to domestic or foreign dangers, rallies of like‐minded individuals, and introductions of the first step to challenges. These outcries also signal identification of real and imagined communities, built through the appropriation of cultural items in Latin America and the mass media creation of cosmopolitan popular culture. Calls, or gritos, serve a major role in Latin American, for example Mexican, politics and culture. The best known surely is Padre Miguel Hidalgo’s “Grito de Dolores” that in 1810 launched the struggle for Mexican independence. The Catholic rebellion beginning in 1927 against the Mexican revolution leaders featured the iconic cry, “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” Moreover, groups and institutions adopt yells that identify those who shout, such as the National Autonomous University of Mexico students who chant approval, “¡Goya!, ¡Goya!” Searching out these cries for different organizations and different Latin American countries provides an intriguing scavenger hunt that reveals a different dimension of both global and national cultures.
No shout, sounding across Latin America and most of the rest of the globe’s comic strip pages, radio airwaves, and movie soundtracks, has ever equaled Tarzan’s signature roar. When Edgar Rice Burroughs created his fictional hero slightly over a century ago, he described the shout as “the victory cry of the bull ape.” Whatever it sounded like, it called together a global following for the syndicated comic strip that by 1935 appeared in 278 newspapers worldwide. When Tarzan appeared in movies and on radio, fans heard it for the first time. The initial version premiered in the partial sound movie serial Tarzan the Tiger (1929) as a “Nee‐Yah!” noise and then on the first radio serial in 1932 James Pierce as Tarzan yelled something like “Taaar‐maan‐ganiii” (still common in Cuba and other parts of Latin America) that, according to the novels, meant in simian language “White Ape.” For the first full sound movie, the producer wanted a distinctive cry that fans across the Americas and the world could recognize. The movie shout succeeded so well it was adopted and used by young Tarzan fans, called Tarzanistas throughout Latin America.
The newspaper comic strip, radio programs, and subtitled movies attracted great popularity. In Argentina, it resulted in the writing and publication of el nieto de TARZAN (the grandson of Tarzan), by an apocryphal author in 1932 and in 1950 the filming of the unauthorized el Hijo de Tarzan (the son of Tarzan) with Eugene Burns, Johny Colloug, and Mae Comont. Argentina’s first International Comics Convention held in 1968 at the Torcuarto Di Tella Institute featured as its International Guest of Honor Burne Hogarth, the illustrator of the comic strip “Tarzan.” A later parody was done in one of Latin America’s most famous comic strips, Chile’s “El Condorito,” using a Tarzan character called “Condorzán.
”The prominence of the yell suggested using a button like a musical Hallmark greeting card in this prologue. Such a button proved to be prohibitively expensive for the book, but anyone can go to this link: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/12328/disputed‐history‐tarzan‐yell to hear it1 or search videos of Tarzan’s yell in any search engine. Moreover, the objects in this book serve as yells, calling for action, celebration, or adventure expressed in episodes that are linked, however thinly, to the things in each chapter title.
Note
1
Bill Demain, “The Disputed History of the Tarzan Yell” (August 22, 2012).
Acknowledgments
This book has taken a long time but has been a pleasure to complete. It owes its existence, in the first instance, to several persons who have given assistance or made suggestions at critical times. Series editor Jürgen Buchenau patiently allowed me to tinker with the project until it reached this form. Editor Peter Coveney suggested ways to make a half‐baked idea a full‐blown proposal and then insisted on a narrative that matched the subject; he did, surprisingly, have an absolute aversion to titles using Latin phrases. Since Peter’s retirement, Jennifer Manias has continued his careful and professional guidance to authors. Carmen Nava, the unofficial cronista of Mexico, the city she loves, answered obscure questions, made smart suggestions, and laughed at foolish mistakes. William E. French, a fellow traveler throughout Mexico to puppet museums, impromptu accordion concerts, and regular mezcal tastings, converses with the past and always reconceptualizes the context of individuals and events. Our discussions always prompt me to rethink the narrative. There are no better friends.
Two other people serve as accessories to this project as they have for others. David Yetman and Dan Duncan make Emmy‐winning programs for television, especially PBS’s “The Desert Speaks,” and now “In the Americas with David Yetman.” The opportunity to travel with them as a guest for some episodes resulted in the discovery of some of the objects included in this book. Dave and Dan always provided challenging and amusing conversations over dinner and drinks, wherever we were in a half dozen Latin American locations.
Finally, this book is dedicated to Nic Beezley and his brother Matt and cousins Virginia and William, to Rosy, with whom I walk each morning around 4 a.m. While she sniffs the trails of rabbits or squirrels, I ponder the morning’s writing project. Of course, it is also dedicated to Blue.
1Bowler Hats
Hugh Threlfall/Alamy Stock Photo.
Bowlers, often called derbies, for the women of La Paz, Bolivia have become the expression of their identity, community, and locality. Not surprisingly, a recent television program of professional wrestling featured La Paz women, reputedly housewives, wearing their iconic derby. The origin of these hats has been tangled up in a thicket of Aymara romance, town memory, and urban folklore. Largely ignored has been the essential role of merchants from the Italian Piedmont.
Other hats beside bowlers top off the typical clothing of indigenous women in the Andes. Hats appear in Peru, Ecuador, northwestern Argentina, northeastern Chile, and, especially, Bolivia, where they make a statement as an emblem of identity. Especially for women from La Paz, consumption of derbies also allows urban Aymara ladies the conspicuous display of their social status. In one of South America’s poorest nations, the derby predominates in some communities but there exists a wealth of more than 100 hat styles for both women and men in a population of 6.4 million. Some women, preferring another style, have adopted a Stetson known locally as a “J. R. Dallas,” because it resembles what J. R. Ewing wore on the once popular television series (1978–1991). Gunnar Mendoza, director of Bolivia’s National Archives in Sucre, once declared, “I don’t know of another region in the world that has such a variety of hats.” Nevertheless, the derby, called in Spanish a bombín or sombrero hongo (a mushroom hat), predominates as the stereotypical female headgear especially in La Paz. Aymara women, who have dominated market trade, wear black, brown or gray bombines while selling fruits, vegetables, and today, home computers and compact discs. With their hats, they have become a picturesque part of the Bolivian city best known to visitors. Other women wear them throughout the Andes. As a result, hat‐making thrives as a business, from home shops and, until recently, the industry‐leading but now closed Charcas Glorieta factory in Sucre. Although typical today, the bowlers and similar hats preserve neither preconquest vestige headgear nor uniquely Aymara objects.
Shortly after arriving in the Andes, the Spanish brought guild workers who produced felt to make hats.1 The fabrication involved the use of arsenic, and ingesting the chemical resulted in madness among the workers. In a strange episode, an entire guild of hat makers went crazy at the same time in Potosí, Bolivia – the richest and largest city in the Americas at the time – and they rioted through the streets. Despite the spectacle of mad hatters, production continued for Spaniards; for the indigenous new felt hat styles came only later.
Indigenous peoples did not immediately adopt Spanish hats because they had long used traditional head coverings, as demonstrated today by archaeological evidence. The monoliths and ceramics of the ancient Tiahuanaco culture centered near Lake Titicaca feature headgear of a flat, rectangular style. Later the ancient Aymara, confirmed in burial remains, adopted a conical hat without a brim. The Inca ruler did not use a hat at all, rather a head band that signaled his authority, although the men and women of this empire wore various caps.
The derbies, now traditional women’s wear especially in La Paz, had been typical for barely a century and a half when their adoption completed the evolving women’s clothing adaptations in the Andes. Following the Túpac Amaru Rebellion that racked the region from 1780 to 1782, the Spanish crown sent a Royal Inspector with extraordinary authority to evaluate its causes and make proscriptive changes. Inspector José Arreche concluded the rebellion, as a kind of cargo cult, had resulted from identification with traditional Inca society, so in order to destroy the collective memory of the indigenous greatness of the pre‐Spanish empire, he ordered prohibitions against speaking Quechua, celebrating Inca holidays, practicing cultural mores, and wearing of ethnic clothing.2 One royal decree directed Spanish colonial landowners to require that indigenous peoples on their properties adopt the clothing typical of the Spanish provinces of the owner.3 Villagers were forced to wear Spanish garments that already had become the clothing of Andean mestizos especially in Peru in an adaptation of the clothing worn by Spanish commoners (in Madrid called the Maja). For women it included a skirt with several petticoats, embroidered wrap,4 a jacket‐like blouse, and often a large hat. Andean peoples resented being forced to wear Spanish clothes, and they tended to make changes, creating community distinctions in color, embroidery, and hat styles.
Villagers covered their heads with hats made of feathers, alpaca, tin, plaster, felt, straw, and tortora reeds, a type of bulrush that grows from Lake Titicaca, across Peru, to Easter Island. Perhaps the typical lluchu, a woven cap with ear flaps, comes from this era and was modeled loosely on the Catalan beret with flaps from Madrid. An alternative explanation posits that the cap, also called the Ch’ullus in much of highland Peru, dates about 600 CE from the pre‐Inca Mocha culture. Female residents of Tarija, near the Argentine border, adopted hats patterned after eighteenth‐century women from Andalusia.5 Men and women from Jatamayu, in the highlands near Sucre, preferred helmet‐like headgear, roughly patterned on the helmets worn by sixteenth‐century 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 of the Italian goods sold by both companies. The Laneri wholesale company did not want to jeopardize successful general sales to these companies in Huanuni, Uncia, and other nearby places. The company opposed the idea of the Borsalino company giving Galoppo exclusive rights and noted that Portillo and Marin were two of its best customers with business valued at thousands of pounds sterling each year. Marin & Co. of Oruro, for example, had developed a strong relationship with Laneri, who provided an endless variety of assorted merchandise, and the company’s warehouses stored products, it was said, “from all climates” with an assortment as complete as the trade fairs of Leipzig and Nizhny Novgorod. Galoppo soon opened Sombrerería Nacional, which eventually earned a reputation for its hats throughout Bolivia.
Even more intense competition existed in La Paz. As early as 1884, the Italian consul in La Paz, Roberto Magliano, reported 300 Italians in the country, with the majority in the capital. They included merchants and pharmacy, clothing, and general store owners, along with 150 Franciscan brothers and 36 Santa Clara nuns.15 The capital Italians felt numerous and successful enough in 1910 to found the “Sociedad Italiana de Beneficencia Roma.” By 1919, G. De Nota was selling Borsalinos in La Paz. His offerings for men included the old style with loose, silk lining. He bought a minimum of 100 dozen per year. The male consumers here, according to reports, wanted a hat that featured both aesthetics and durability. Beyond Laneri’s retail clients in the city, another source of hats resulted from his sales to a dealer in the Peruvian town of Yunguyo on Lake Titicaca bordering Copacabana, Bolivia, a short distance from La Paz. The Yunguyo retailer, beyond limited local sales, filled resale orders from nearby La Paz, apparently largely delivered by smugglers. The contrabandistas, who were perhaps women,16
