Here and There in Mexico

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.