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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.
Her collected work was still in progress when she died in a train
accident in 1901, and was never published. Renowned Latin
Americanist Ralph Lee Woodward Jr. discovered Townsend's
manuscript, along with many of the author's personal papers, in the
Special Collections division of Tulane University's Howard-Tilton
Library. In addition to annotating the text, he has written a
critical introduction to the work that provides excellent
background information about the author and places the work in its
historical and cultural context. Townsend's writing provides an
unusual feminine perspective on Mexico as she describes the country
during the middle years of the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship, a
pivotal time in Mexican history. Though Townsend does not delve
heavily into politics her observations of people's lives provide a
valuable source for social historians of the period. 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.
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