Scribes Hold the Keys to Hearts, Paperwork

The young man in baggy jeans and a Nike cap hunches over his notebook, trying to decipher emotions laid bare in a tangle of scribbled ink.

“Our relationship isn’t like it was. I feel bad. You’re drifting away from me slowly but surely.... I look forward to your response. I love you,” 28-year-old Jose reads haltingly, then looks up at the man next to him.

“How does that sound?” he asks.

Jesus Tenorio, 33, stops tapping at the keys of his electric typewriter. “It’s good, but I think we should add this,” he says, jotting a thought in the margin that only the two can see.

Jose leans over, looks, nods. “Yeah, I like it.”

The love-struck man could have composed his anguished missive in an e-mail at an Internet cafe or dialed up his estranged girlfriend from the cell phone dangling from his hip.

Instead, he has come to the Plaza Santa Domingo, a square in the heart of Mexico City where for more than 200 years scribes like Tenorio have been drafting legal forms, love letters and the like for all comers.

In an age of Palm Pilots and personal computers, the escribanos represent a colorful vestige of Mexico’s colonial past that is as rooted in the plaza as its two monolithic stone buildings that once housed Mexico’s customs house and Inquisition tribunal.

Historians believe the first quill-wielding scribes went to work sometime in the 18th century, serving custom house clients and Inquisition victims who were illiterate or unfamiliar with government procedures.

Later, the clerks began putting form to feelings, writing original love letters, “Dear John” notes and apology messages for clients.

The quill gave way long ago to pens, then to manual typewriters, and then to the electric typewriters that still sit atop a series of small wooden and metal desks set up under the stone arches of the 17th century building known as the Portal Santo Domingo. Computers have yet to make an appearance.

Talking over the shouts of printers hawking their services and the clank and thunk of antique hand-operated presses, customers dictate facts and feelings to the escribanos or seek advice on completing government forms -- all for 10 to 50 pesos a page, about $1 to $5.

“We serve as guides -- on how to fill out applications, how to write a letter, whom to direct it to,” says Miguel Hernandez Ordonez, 51, who has been a scribe for 29 years. “You can’t get that kind of personalized service at an Internet cafe.”

Hernandez is secretary-general of the union that represents the 40 scribes and more than two dozen old-fashioned print machine operators who work at the plaza.

Being an escribano is “in some ways like being a psychologist,” says 40-year-old Enrique Acevedo Salas, a fixture in the plaza for 18 years. “You have to figure out what each individual needs. They come so that we can advise them.”

Acevedo says he has dealt with “every class of person, from the most humble to doctors and lawyers.”

“Unfaithful wives send anonymous notes to their lovers,” he adds, giggling conspiratorially. “Then there are the timid lovers who need help coming up with just the right words for their letters.”

But even the most nervous customers have faith that the escribanos will guard their secrets.

“Here, you’re dealing with the utmost discretion,” says veteran scribe Jose Edith Gonzalez, 62. “We don’t betray the customers. They deposit their trust in us.”

For 35 years, Gonzalez has held court on a small patch of public concrete at Portal Santo Domingo No. 12. He still uses a clunky, decades-old manual Remington 17 typewriter with the letters worn off the green plastic-covered keys.

Gonzalez obviously is attached to the old relic. “It’s very egotistical. If someone asks to borrow it, it immediately breaks down and refuses to work,” he says.

But when all is said and done, “it doesn’t matter what kind of machine I have,” Gonzalez says. “What matters to the client is that I understand what his needs are.”

“I no longer see him as a typist. I see him as a friend,” says Fausto Diaz Orozco, 72, a journalist who has relied on Gonzalez’s sharp editing eye for 20 years. “Thousands of people have come here to reap the benefit of his knowledge and experience.”

The scribes’ tradition owes its survival in large part to the families who pass it down through the generations like an heirloom.

Enrique Acevedo’s grandfather labored here from 1936 to 1980, when he retired at age 80. His father started 35 years ago and at 75 still puts in several hours a day.

“It’s a lovely thing, to be here helping people,” Acevedo says. “I am very proud of what my grandfather left me, and that I am able to keep this tradition alive.”