"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. Townsend 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."--BOOK JACKET.