In a woman's life almost every choice involves risk, and in Nothing to Declare Mary Morris gives us a stunning account of those risks in one woman's journeys through Latin America. As Morris travels south to Mexico, she leaves the old measurements behind and confronts the realities of place, of poverty, of machismo, and of her own self. It is a dangerous land, where anything can happen.
From the high desert of northern Mexico to the steaming jungles of Honduras, from the seashore of the Caribbean to the exquisite highlands of Guatemala, she experiences the rawness of life as a woman south of the border. A traveler in her own space and time, Morris befriends a Mexican woman and shares the precariousness of everyday life in a Latin American culture that heightens her own sense of deprivation. Haunted by memories of family and failed love, Morris tries to make sense out of her past as the present boundaries take new form. "I listen to the ghosts and obey the gods. The ghosts whisper, the gods prod." In this beguiling travel book, Mary Morris calls upon us to listen.With Nothing to Declare, Mary Morris joins the company of Beryl Markham, Mary Kingsley, Isabella Bird, and the few women travel writers in a field long the privileged territory of men.