I noticed in last week's edition of The Economist that an ancient profession is dying in Mexico -- or, at least, Mexico City. Not lawyers. Not prostitutes. Not drug lords.
If you walk a few blocks north of the Zócalo, you will find the small plaza of Santo Domingo. The district is the home to stationery stores and printing shops. But the progenitor of those businesses will be found in the stalls of the plaza: professional scribes.
They carry on a profession that seems to be from another century. Need a business letter written? Need a love letter? Want a duplicate of your deed? Receipts produced? A section of a text book copied?
These are the living descendants of cowled monks dutifully copying scripture. But like most copies, they have started to lose the allure of the original.
Technology is one reason. Why pay someone to copy pages when you can get an exact photocopy?
Why buy a love letter when you can twitter your sweetheart directly?
Why have a stranger draft a letter of complaint when it can be ignored just as quickly with an email to the government agency?
I have never seen the plaza. But I would like to. It is another example of an area ebbing away -- what some sentimental gringos call "authentic."
But the mobile telephone, the copier, and the internet that have displaced the scribblers are every bit as authentically Mexican. And, they too will be replaced by some other cousin of the scribes.
If you walk a few blocks north of the Zócalo, you will find the small plaza of Santo Domingo. The district is the home to stationery stores and printing shops. But the progenitor of those businesses will be found in the stalls of the plaza: professional scribes.
They carry on a profession that seems to be from another century. Need a business letter written? Need a love letter? Want a duplicate of your deed? Receipts produced? A section of a text book copied?
These are the living descendants of cowled monks dutifully copying scripture. But like most copies, they have started to lose the allure of the original.
Technology is one reason. Why pay someone to copy pages when you can get an exact photocopy?
Why buy a love letter when you can twitter your sweetheart directly?
Why have a stranger draft a letter of complaint when it can be ignored just as quickly with an email to the government agency?
I have never seen the plaza. But I would like to. It is another example of an area ebbing away -- what some sentimental gringos call "authentic."
But the mobile telephone, the copier, and the internet that have displaced the scribblers are every bit as authentically Mexican. And, they too will be replaced by some other cousin of the scribes.
