Why Manuel Matters In Nashville (And Other Immigrants, Too)

NASHVILLE, TN -- One of the highest honors Nashville can give actually requires taking something away; specifically, a surname. Getting the first-name-only treatment is reserved for a precious few who've become so beloved, a last name is unnecessary: Garth, Dolly, Reba, Waylon, Willy, Pekka.

And so it is for Manuel, the Music City's Bedazzler Laureate, the man who first called Johnny Cash "The Man In Black" (and in doing so, designed the all-black duster pictured above). First an employee of, then a partner to and eventually the rightful heir to the legacy of Nudie Cohn, designing, sewing and painstakingly applying the intricate embroidery and zillions of rhinestones to shirts and jackets and pants and boots and hats worn, yes, mostly by country music stars, but by celebrities (and well-heeled wannabes) in general.

But before he was just Manuel, he was Manuel Cuevas, born in 1933 in Mexico's Sierra Madre del Sur. After impressing the local girls with his dresses, he, like so many others before and since, immigrated to the United States, specifically Los Angeles, and working for Sy Devore, the Rat Pack's tailor, before moving on to work for Cohn, a fellow immigrant (Nudie was born Nuta Kotlyarenko in Kiev), and then opening his own shop in L.A. and eventually Nashville.

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"I love the fact we are given opportunities and that you can be successful," Manuel said at his shop at Eighth and Broadway Wednesday. "I try to do my best as a human being, as a citizen and by just being me."

Manuel's designs are certainly iconic and symbolic - him "just being me" resulted in clothes and boots embroidered with western scenes and bucolic iconography that might as well be shorthand for country music. Manuel himself is a symbol as well: of a city with a rising fashion industry that is utterly dependent on workers who were born outside of the United States.

Wednesday's event at Manuel's atelier - lined with photos of stars of all kinds decked out in his duds and shelves and racks full to overflowing with his one-of-a-kind designs - was part of the city's celebration of Immigrant Heritage Month, particularly emphasizing just how much Nashville fashion needs immigrants. In 2015, the last year for which data is available, the Nashville fashion industry generated more than $5.9 billion and employed more than 16,500 people. Nashville has the third-largest per capita concentration of independent fashion companies in the U.S., behind only New York and Los Angeles. By 2025, fashion in Nashville is projected to have an economic impact of $9.5 billion and create 25,000 jobs.

Van Tucker, CEO of the Nashville Fashion Alliance, said tapping into and developing a work force is the only way the city will hit those gaudy numbers.

"One of the obstacles is ... access to skill and talent," she said.

One way that's being addressed is through the sewing training academy at Catholic Charties. Trishawna Quincy, who runs the academy, noted her last class featured students who are Mexican, Kurdish, Burundian, Somali and Burmese, plus a second-generation Greek-American and an English woman whose parents had fled Poland and Germany during the Second World War.

"In my classroom, they share one goal: to better themselves and their families through sewing," she said.

The classes prepare people, invariably already adept at sewing, to do work on commercial equipment. By way of example, Quincy told the story of a refugee from Nepal who had been a tailor in his native country and even run a tailoring service in a refugee camp, but who'd never had access to more modern equipment.

But Wednesday's event wasn't just about the benefits immigration provides to industry or the economy. With scenes of separated families and the Supreme Court's decision upholding President Donald Trump's ban on immigrants from certain Muslim-majority countries, it couldn't be.

"While other places and other institutions chastise and harass and denigrate immigrants ... we in Nashville let our immigrant friends know we are with them," Mayor David Briley said. "It's time for us to recognize the important work immigrants do everyday in Nashville."

Nashville has one of the country's fastest growing immigrant populations; currently, 12 percent of people in Nashville were born somewhere other than the United States.

And, as Briley notes, it's been that way for centuries. James Robertson and John Donelson's hardy Corps of Adventure was full of English and Scots-Irish immigrants and they themselves followed in the footsteps of French traders, who left as a legacy, among other things, the city's most vexing street name.

Africans brought against their wills shaped the city, too, and their descendants gave rise to the civil rights movement.

In the 19th century, Irish immigrants helped build the Capitol, Germans left their names on a North Nashville neighborhood (and gave us beer and a unique Christmas meat to boot) and Italians in Joelton put their homeland's patron saint on the name of their parish church.

In the latter half of the 20th century and into the new millennium, more and more came, from different shores, in part because of the refugee work by Catholic Charities. They came from throughout Latin America, Asia and Africa. Multiple waves of immigrants from Vietnam settled here, largely in West Nashville. A Nepalese shop stands aside a Honduran restaurant on Nolensville Road. An Ethopian restaurant shares a block with a Mexican bakery that offers its menu in English, Spanish and Kurdish, a nod to Nashville having the world's largest population of Kurds outside of Kurdistan itself.

"All of us have an immigrant story to tell," Briley said.

Renata Soto, executive director of Connexion Americas and past president of UnidosUS, the U.S.'s largest Latino advocacy organization, gestured around Manuel's shop and said Manuel's instantly recognizable designs - he was just awarded a National Endowment for the Arts folk art grant - show that Nashville is a place where new Americans can "unleash their creativity" as Manuel has.

"You're sewing more than beautiful clothes," she said. "You're sewing the threads of a strong democracy."

All photos by J.R. Lind, Patch staff