Description:
Mary Ashley Townsend was a novelist, newspaper columnist, and poet laureate of New Orleans who made several trips to Mexico with her daughter Cora during the last two decades of the 19th century. She collected her impressions of many aspects of life in that country--flora, fauna, architecture, people at work and play, fashion, society, food--and wrote about them during a time when few women engaged in solo travel, much less the pursuit of travel writing. Here and There in Mexico will make new contribution to the field of Latin American studies and to the travel literature genre, both as a primary source for historians and as a well-written account of a southern woman's impressions of Mexico during a crucial period in that country's development.
Review Quotes: "Readers interested in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Mexico will ?nd this book provides a breadth of insight into the life and customs of the times that few other travel diaries present. Townsend's many trips and variety of encounters gives her observations a depth missing in many similar manuscripts. In addition, her writing is certainly superior to the average traveler. This is a pro?table read."
--The Hispanic American Historical Review