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Here and There in Mexico: The Travel Writings of Mary Ashley Townsend
Author(s): Mary Ashley Townsend (Author), Ralph Lee Woodward Jr
- Publisher: University of Alabama Press
- Publication Date: 31 Mar. 2001
- Language: English
- Print length: 392 pages
- ISBN-10: 0817310584
- ISBN-13: 9780817310585
Book 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. 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 a 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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Townsend’s descriptions of everyday life in provincial towns and in Mexico City – ranging from pulque production to bull fighting – add discerning insights into the social fabric of the land of Porfirio Diaz. – John A. Britton, author of Revolution and Ideology: Images of the Mexican Revolution in the United States
About the Author
Ralph Lee Woodward Jr. is Neville G. Penrose Professor of Latin American Studies at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and author of Central America: A Nation Divided.
