Gamaliel Gómez is a perpetual mover and shaker. Besides being a skilled craftsman, he is proficient in cabinetmaking, tailoring, photography, and music. When he’s not engrossed in one pursuit, he’s energetically engaged in another, aiding family and friends with his diverse skill set. Throughout his life, he has hosted woodworking workshops, managed internet lounges, worked in systems engineering and as a music teacher.

This restless trait in Gamaliel is why his straw hats hold immense significance: they emerged during a time when he was compelled to halt, an entirely unfamiliar state for him. Amid the pandemic, after losing his job as a music teacher, he ventured into the wild to procure straw. It was then that memories of his father’s teachings resurfaced. His father, a field laborer and basket weaver, instilled the craft in him merely through observation. He weaved his first basket at the tender age of nine. Though imperfect, it was crafted during a time when rice was harvested manually using knives and stored in straw baskets. Encouraged by his father’s delight in his learning, Gamaliel continued absorbing everything about woodworking, the rhythms and melodies his father sang, and his guitar playing. Undoubtedly, his father’s multidisciplinary and empirical spirit was inherited. At twelve, when he first picked up a guitar, he realized his innate talent for playing it. This connection with music and art had been deeply ingrained in him since childhood.

During his venture into the woods amidst the pandemic, Gamaliel returned home with matapalo straw, a parasitic plant that chokes and kills the trees it latches onto. Easily propagated by birds, wherever there’s straw, numerous fallen trees are found. Gamaliel experimented with crafting hats from this fiber, noticing that the weaving technique for the crown mirrored starting a basket. Like his initial basket, the first hat was rough; the second, however, was more refined, and so on. Engrossed in his work within the confines of his home, he unexpectedly amassed two dozen hats for sale. Fortunately, they were a hit. With time, he refined his methods, replacing risky tree-climbing with the use of an eight-meter retractable pole to safely cut the straw from the ground. According to him, the most laborious part is preparing the straw with a knife—stripping it of all bark before weaving, softening it with water to twist and shape the crown and brim. This innovative technique demands thin straws and encompasses 300 to 400 turns. With thicker straws, he’s devised crafting rocking chairs, weaving the fiber around a metal frame of his own design.

Today, Gamaliel aspires to establish his hats as the quintessential Caquetá hat, seeking to inaugurate a tradition honoring the land he cherishes for providing him a prosperous life through labor. He grew up in the countryside of Belén de los Andaquíes, where the nearest town was a three-hour horse ride away. There, he cultivated bananas, yucca, and corn, working the fertile Caquetá land. His experiences traversing the woods and sourcing materials—wood initially, and now straw—have profoundly shaped his craftsmanship. Thus, he endeavors to reciprocate the countryside’s generosity through a craft born from his profound love for the land.