MARINA AROSEMENA/THE POLLERA OF PANAMA
Marina Arosemena is an expert seamstress, and award winning designer of the pollera, a traditional costume of Panama. Mrs. Arosemena was born in Panama in 1922, and first began taking needle and thread, as she says, when she was four years old. Her first teacher was her mother, Julia Endara de Arosemena. Marina Arosemena, who has since won national prizes and widespread recognition for her sewing skills and designs, is an expert pollera maker who has devoted her life to her craft. Born under the sign of Leo, she is a fighter, a lion who has struggled against the vicissitudes of life, not only to survive, but also to make art of great and lasting beauty. She and her work form the backbone of “Grufolpawa”, a group who perform the traditional dances of Panama.
Panama is a sliver of land inhabited by people from all over the world, who have settled there and made the country their home. The resulting mixture of cultures – Native, Spanish, French, Chinese, North American, and West Indian among others – have interacted to form a teeming fabric of human energy and diversity. The pollera, and Mrs. Arosemena herself, are embodiments of these extraordinary forces.
The process of making the complex and colorful pollera begins with a piece of pure white linen, imported, as was the pollera itself, from Spain. Mrs. Arosemena first draws the plan of the dress on paper, then uses carbon paper to transfer the design onto fabric. Next, she begins the laborious and time-consuming process of stitching and appliqué. Most polleras take up to two years to complete. Mrs. Arosemena finds it amusing that celebrities pay ten or twenty thousand dollars for fashionable dresses with virtually no fancy stitching, while her polleras cost only two or three thousand dollars but feature intricate designs rendered with masterful technique.
There are four basic categories of polleras – white-on-white, embroidered, appliquéd, and cross-stitched. Areas of color often display a painterly effect, which Mrs. Arosemena achieves by combining threads of closely varying shades and twisting them together. While the pollera may vary from region to region and from dressmaker to dressmaker, each one is a bursting array of colors and patterns. The basic design is repeated twice on the pollera within panels on the top and bottom of the dress. The bottom panel is wider, and the design correspondingly larger; a smaller though identical design is sewn onto the upper part. The pollera is worn with a petticoat, skirt, ruffled blouse, and shoes, along with a variety of specially made ornaments. Contest judges scrutinize each pollera for uniformity of stitching, and for variety of stitched designs. To achieve just one of these, the pollera maker pulls stitches inside floral patterns, employing between 200 and 250 different stitch-and-pull combinations to create designs called calados.
Mrs. Arosemena cares for her polleras by washing them in cold, salty water, which helps retain the color; she washes her dresses by hand on fair days, so they can dry naturally, in the sun.
-Tom Carroll, PhD
Folklorist, Arlington County, Virginia
March 2001
Marina Arosemena at the Embassy of Panama
in Washington, D.C.
PANAMA POLLERAS
Tel. (011.507) 278.0345
Fax: (011.507) 229.3523
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