Damn, They do Leathaa!
by Thaddeus Tripp Ressler
In recent years I’ve had the joy of joining the ranks of people that walk into a room and forget entirely why they went in there in the first place. I don’t want to brag, but I’ve even forgotten what I was thinking about, while deeply in thought, simply because a noise distracted me for a split second. There is no greater betrayal than your own mind giving you a truly insightful and illuminating thought to mull over and then yanking it away because you heard a weird sound in the next room. There are of course events, phrases, and moments that will stick forever in my mind.
In the fall of 2000 I was but a young pup, and had only been in Chicago for a year. My friend Claudia, in need of a fresh start, came out from New Jersey. We shared an apartment with my older brother and the greatest dog of all time, Puck.
Being from Jersey, Claudia did not have a lot of Chicago winter appropriate clothing. Her only coat was a cream colored suede lined with fur. It was a cute punk rock coat, but it certainly wasn’t going to be enough come January and February. It was only October and she was having to pull the coat tight around her to keep the cold wind out.
Well, the three of us took the dog for a walk one day. As we passed the dry cleaner, Claudia stopped dead in her tracks and faced it. I can still picture her nineteen year old self, Huge black sunglasses taking up half her face, pixie haircut, left hand holding her coat tight over her chest and neck, right hand lolling off to the side with a cigarette dangling from her fingertips, a genuine look of shock on her face. Then in the most New Jersey accent I’ve ever heard from her, “Daaamn, they do leathaa.”
And there it was born. It took me and Jason a solid minute to stop laughing. Puck didn’t understand what was going on, but was sure he was being left out of a game that he wanted to play. Claudia stood there, embarrassed but unwilling to let her pride to be toppled by two idiot men that thought her occasional accent faux pas were the funniest thing in the world. From then on out, at random times throughout my life, the word leather would trigger that voice and phrase in my head. Sometimes out loud too. Try it, it’s fun.
One of the benefits of age though, at least mine, is the appreciation of craft and craftsmanship of all kinds. Let’s take leather crafting for instance, it’s an under appreciated art form. The idea that we can take the hide of an animal and turn it into beautiful and utilitarian forms to me is really incredible. With the advent of plastics and other synthetic materials, leather has taken a back seat in a lot of areas where it used to be king. Then again there are places where it will never go away.
My lumberjack friends in Colorado will never switch to boots or gloves made of synthetic materials. Leather is durable and protective and those are qualities that are appreciated in places that don’t have cellphone signal. In fact many of the people that I know in the Trades would never give up their leather goods, whether it be tough gloves, or an apron that can take sparks, boots that don’t melt or absorb, or a bag that won’t fall apart just because it’s been repeatedly poked with sharp objects.
Leather isn’t all utility either, there’s an aesthetic side to it too. I’ve always been partial to leather goods, but finding things I’m willing to pay up for is tough. Would I like a pair of square toed cowboy boots? Of course! Am I realistically ever going to need cowboy boots for any reason? Need, is a strong word. No, I don’t need cowboy boots. I have, on the other hand, needed a new belt for years. And I figured now that my nephew was starting to wear more than just sweatpants, he might need a real belt too.
I was coming back from a quick side quest in the Dominican Republic and really didn’t want to take the seven hour bus ride back to San Luis Potosí. I knew that I was going to San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato soon, but wasn’t quite ready yet. I looked on the map and saw this largish city to the west of them. Google proclaimed “Leon is a city in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. It’s known for it’s leather goods, sold in the Zona Piel district.” It went on, but that was enough to pique my curiosity. Leon, Mexico, leather capital, who knew?
Leather is more complicated than simply taking the skin off an animal. The difference between the hide and the finished leather product is the the tanning process which makes the rawhide a stable product that won’t rot or putrefy. And it is a process, to be sure. There are various soakings in alkali baths and acid baths, there’s degreasing, where the oils and fats are removed. After several days of this process you finally come out with a soft piece of material that you can then color, mold, cut, and form into nearly any shape you desire.
Need a thin long piece to help you keep your pants up, easy enough. Need a place to carry important document on your way to business meetings or to court, no problem. Several pieces of leather can be stitched together to form a beautiful briefcase that will get you compliments. In the olden days there were processes that hardened leather to make it more suitable for armor. They would boil and then form it over a mold, as it dried it would hold it’s shape and become hard. Would it stop a direct blow from a sharp sword, no, but it could definitely help with a less than 
sharp sword in the melee of battle when blows tended to be less accurate. I’d certainly take it over a wool sweater in that scenario.
In the Zona Piel there are multiple markets that sell the normal assortment of leather goods. Some shops dedicate themselves to a singular style like ladies handbags, or motorcycle jackets. There were whole stores dedicated solely to belts. I’ve always been partial to a good leather belt, but it never occurred to me that there would be so many belts that you could fill a store with the different styles.
I will say though one of my favorite discoveries was La Luz, a leather market dedicated to the manufacturers of leather goods. I walked by it and stopped short. The sign said Bienvenido, but the entrance said otherwise. The thing that kept me from just moving on, was a guy walking out with a small bundle of leather sheets rolled up and tucked under his arm.
Ironically for a place called La Luz, the light, it was the most dimly lit market I’ve been to in Mexico. You would 
think this place was going out of business, but you’d be wrong. Each stall was packed high with folded and rolled leathers in a variety of browns, reds, and blacks. Some had full fur-on-pelts, there was one that specialized in crocodilian leathers. There were tool shops with knives, razors, chisels, stamps, punches, edgers, and bevelers. Other shops carried shoe and boot treads, heavy duty thread, paints, stains, and and a huge assortment of buffing wheels hanging overhead.
Arranged on a grid, these shops maximize what space they have, no matter how small or large the shop. Some of the stalls are just storage for the stall next door. All the different lengths, colors, textures, and finishes rolled and folded into columns and rows ten feet high and sometimes twenty feet wide. Some of the corridors were choked with scraps and tubs and bins overflowing from the smaller stalls that weren’t quite making enough money to make the investment in a larger stall yet.
The streets surrounding La Luz have the sole vision of giving the leather industry what it needs to make their wares. It’s more like an open air mall with heavily trafficked streets running through it. Storefront after storefront of buckles, zippers, and clasps for backpacks; highly detailed cowboy belt buckles; accessories and adornments for belts, purses, wallets, jackets, briefcases, or cowboy boots, or work boots for that matter, maybe some sandals. Hell, I lost count of how many shops, I walked past, that had shoe, sneaker, and boot tread sitting in big bins out front.
Then there’s the finished product. There is an actual mall, it happens to be located right next to the bus station which is also surrounded. The five or six blocks that radiate out from it are simply covered in every manner of leather good you can think of including fully leather baseball hats. The streets are lined with slick talking men and beautiful women in their tightest outfits touting how good their products are compared to the next guy, who says exactly the same thing, sometimes using the exact same verbiage.
I promised my buddy Matt that I would pick him up a leather apron. He didn’t really give me any instructions, just make sure it’s big enough. Simple enough. Oddly aprons seemed to be one of the few items that didn’t have its own specialty stores. So, I 
stopped in one of the hundreds of stores that offered aprons along with a thousand other things. The place that had what seemed the best selection of aprons also carried designer looking wallets, clutches, handbags, briefcases, backpacks, knapsacks, suitcases, duffels, hats, caps, jackets, boots, shoes, sandals, and keychains.
I sifted through three stacks, two feet deep, of nothing but leather aprons in every imaginable combination of colors. The designs changed little, mostly whether or not it had the beer pocket up near the chest. There were color combinations that would’ve made a 
clown blush. I went more conservative for Matt, I just couldn’t see him in a purple leather apron with red pockets and trim.
I also decided to buy my fifteen year old nephew a simple but nice looking brown belt made from a single piece of thick leather. Just a bit of oil every once in a while and that belt, even with daily use, could be good for decades. Not too many things nowadays are being made to last that long. I know that sounds curmudgeonly, but I don’t care. In a world focused on replacing rather than repairing, it’s nice to have something that can provide long term continuity.
I left Leon, on mission to meet a contact in San Miguel de Allende. I would like to have stayed longer and explored more. For a population of 1.7 million people it did not feel very crowded. While no lifelong catchphrases were spoken in the week that I spent in Leon, I’d go back in a heartbeat if for no other reason than the fact that they do in fact do leathaa. And they do it well