Heart and sole: the Salvadorian shoemaker catering to Melbourne's well-heeled

The Guardian

28-02-2025

In the basement of Melbourne's historic Trades Hall, the home of Australia's organised worker movement, a 66-year-old Salvadorian is keeping a different kind of labour tradition alive. For the past decade, José Rodríguez has been down here, surrounded by old masonry, industrial sewing machines and multicoloured rolls of leather, hand-making bespoke shoes.
It's a slow craft, and in an age of mass-production, a highly specialised trade.
'Your shoes are not just any type of shoe,' Rodríguez says. 'My thing is to make something unique. I don't want to be pretentious, but it's like a work of art, you know? If you commission someone to paint a portrait, you're not going to make the same one twice.'
We meet in a bright Turkish cafe just down the road in bustling Lygon Street. Thoughtful and gregarious with a wide, welcoming smile, Rodríguez gives the impression of having worked a lifetime at his craft, but he was in fifties before he made a single shoe.
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Born in El Salvador in 1958, Rodríguez was the middle child of 11 to artistic and industrious parents: his father was a woodworker, fashioning children's toys, cigarette cases, ornaments and other handicrafts in their home workshop, and selling them to craft markets and small businesses around San Salvador. His mother was a landscape painter, who also turned her talents to decorating the items her husband made. Rodríguez's earliest memories are of helping his father in the workshop. On weekends, he would sneak in there and make toys for his own amusement.
Despite his evident love of crafting and a fervent imagination, Rodríguez did not follow his father into handicrafts. As a young man, he found work in ground operations at the national airline instead. In his descriptions of his early adult life in El Salvador, the road from the city to the then-new international airport – a 40-minute drive through the countryside from central San Salvador – emerges as something of a motif, representing both routine and huge upheaval.
Much of this was shaped by the civil war, a 12-year-long conflict between the US-backed Salvadoran military and a coalition of left-wing revolutionary guerrilla groups, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. More than 75,000 people were killed in the war between 1979 and 1992, the vast majority by the military and its death squads. Eight thousand were 'desaparecidos', or disappeared.
Many Salvadorans couldn't afford a car, so the airline provided a shuttle bus from the city for its workers. As guerrilla activity and military repression became more intense, the consequences of that violence became increasingly visible, especially on that shared commute.
Sometimes, Rodríguez says, they would drive past bodies discarded on the side of the highway. One crisp, clear morning, they heard gunshots, and the minibus driver slammed on the brakes. 'I think there were three guerrillas. They were running for their lives, with M16s in hand. And we just froze,' says Rodríguez. Another time, the bus stopped to find out why a crowd of people had gathered near a beachside cliff. Four people were dead on the rocks below.
'Why did we have to go and see? It was horrible,' says Rodríguez. 'But the interesting thing is that we got used to it. Desensitised. Because you have to live there, you adapt.'
One by one his siblings and his friends fled the violence, seeking asylum in other countries, but Rodríguez put off leaving.
'I liked the job that I was doing. I liked the position. I was earning good money for a country like El Salvador,' he says.
'Now, when I'm talking to you, I say, how did I survive? How did I last? Why didn't I leave earlier, you know? But back in the day, when you're in the situation, you get used to it – you just move on, and you move on, and then all of a sudden, you just don't care. And there's bombs in the middle of the night and there's machine gun fire …' He trails off.
He remembers vividly the incident that changed everything.
The media were under tight government control, but information about flare-ups of fighting was transmitted in code over the radio that let people know to avoid particular areas. Rodríguez remembers hearing one of these alerts on the commute home. When he arrived, his then-wife was distraught: their seven-year-old son's school bus had been caught at the fire-fight. Their son hadn't been physically harmed, but Rodríguez said the incident made him suddenly see their situation anew.
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'I remember clearly, my wife said, in these words: 'What are you waiting for? For one of our kids to be killed?'' Rodríguez says. 'The next day, I went and filled in the application.' They left El Salvador and arrived in Melbourne on Christmas Eve, 1988.
The route from refugee to bespoke shoemaker would take nearly three more decades. Rodríguez found work quickly, as a phone sales representative at a wholesale travel company. He spent nine years there, followed by a long stint in customer service at Optus and finally Qantas.
Then in 2014, he signed up to a 13-week night course in shoemaking. 'It was only one day, one day a week, three hours, and it was just to make one pair of shoes for fun. But I loved it so much,' he says. From his teacher, Jess Wootten, he learned that there was a full-time, year-long certificate IV course in custom shoemaking at RMIT. It was auspicious timing: just months later, he and thousands of other Qantas workers were made redundant. So Rodríguez decided to devote himself to this new craft.
It took a few years to build business momentum once he'd finished the course, but the waitlist at Rodríguez and Rose is now eight months' long. His prices are high – a pair of boots can cost between $1,200 and $1,500 – but he says people who seek out bespoke footwear understand that what they are paying for is something made uniquely to their aesthetic and their feet.
Often his clients have a particular purpose in mind: a gift for someone close to them, or to wear to a special occasion, such as a wedding. Others come to him because they have trouble buying shoes that properly fit.
Rodríguez remembers a young man who had to wear Blundstone boots many sizes too big to accommodate the significant width of his feet. So his mother paid for Rodríguez to make him a pair of boots, saying that since she had blessed her son with those genetics, she should help him pay for comfortable shoes.
The young man's face when he tried on the finished boots nearly made Rodríguez cry. 'He said that those were the first shoes that actually fit him, because the length was ideal,' he says. 'So I do take a lot of pride and joy when I see that.'
His clients' initial ideas are often very conventional – he suspects our sense of what we like or don't like often develops passively, in response to the market – so he spends time trying to encourage the expansion of their creative horizons, teasing out their interests and passions so the shoes become a true collaboration, a reflection of his clients' individual personalities as well as his own craft.
It would be easy just to make facsimiles of mass-market shoes, Rodríguez says. 'But I would die of boredom. That's not my thing.'
While he wishes he had come to shoemaking earlier in his life, there are some advantages to having had other careers; he's now able to prioritise his work for the love of it, and doesn't need it to bring in the equivalent of a full-time job.
'I'm not driven by money. I'm driven by the satisfaction that I still get making shoes, making people smile,' he says.
'That is a sense of achievement that is very rare,' Rodríguez says. 'It's a special kind of feeling. When you do it for the first time, it's even greater … That, coupled with what you're doing for someone else – and that someone else is happy.'