(c) Hacienda Los Nacimientos, El Salvador, http://www.elsalvadorazul.com/Indigo is possibly the most famous of all dyes, and in a sense also among the most difficult one’s to get right. After all, Indigo isn’t just normal dye stuff put a pigment and ‘a living being’ during its fermentation phase. It is the only dye stuff that doesn’t fade in sunlight but only through wear.
India is possibly the country with the largest production of natural Indigo – the vast majority of Indigo pigment used globally is a chemical replacement – but exports only very little. In contrast, El Salvador has hardly any Indigo production, but what there is is of prime quality and nearly exclusively destined for export. Brands like Diesel, Levi’s and others swear on Salvadorian Indigo for their premium lines.
Hacienda Los Nacimientos is one of only 2 farms world wide that produce certified organic Indigo, and is located in El Salavador. The farm’s story reaches far back, and is marked by the years the country suffered from a violent guerilla civil war:
The farm itself exists already for at least a couple of generation. However until years after the end of civil war it was producing only sugar cane. The owners of the farm had been required to leave the farm behind and not visit for the whole of the civil war. This as a result of a deal with the guerilla forces: in this way the farm workers where allowed by the guerilla to run the operations – just as long as the owners would not show up, but pay the worker’s salaries.
Only when the owner died, his three children, now all in their 50s, came back to the farm. What they found was a soil that had turned to sand, a market for sugar cane that had all but disappeared, and workers living in poverty barely making ends meet. Two thirds of the farm was ultimately sold to an agricultural cooperative – but one the daughers, Rhina Yolanda de Rehmann, decided that she’d farm again just as her father had done before her.
Rhina Yolanda de Rehmann talking about how she started off Indigo farming on the Hacienda Los Naciemientos.
Researching the history of El Salavador’s farming traditions, and looking at the world market and new trends that were coming up at the time, she finally decided to convert the farm slowly both from sugar cane to Indigo (‘añil‘ in Spanish), and from conventional to organic farming. And with this decision a slow process of recovering the soil as well as the skill of farming Indigo started.
The making of organic Indigo in El Salvador.
The farm is certified organic by BIOLATINA since the year 2000, and more recently also through GOTS and other national organic certification bodies. The farm remains small, and there is a lot of manual work and hard graft involved in ‘the making of’ Indigo (see video on the left).
The blue essence of Salvadorian Indigo is extracted from one of two species of ‘Jiquilite’ (Spanish for the Indigo plant): the Guatemalensis and the Indigofera Suffruticosa, both of which grow to a hight of about 1.5 metres.Once the plant has grown to full hight, it is cut, and the seeds collected. It is the seeds that ultimately are the origin for this valid dye stuff.
The Hacienda Los Nacimientos exports around 500 kilos of Indigo every year. The process to extract the dye stuff from the plant is rather laborious and in many ways mirrors the production processes of garments: washing, oxygenation, fermentation, the founding, drying and finally the pulverisation.
The conversion to Indigo cultivation under organic principles has turned the farm also into an attractive tourist destination for travellers. It is a the ideal place to get under the country’s skin: to learn about the political and social links and development, and how a community is trying to rebuild itself from the scars of war profiting to the best they can from the opportunities that globalisation is offering them.
