This is the story of a remarkable woman whose artistic mission was to relate Mexican cultural history to English-language readers. A world-renowned playwright in the 1930s and best-selling novelist in the 1940s, Josefina Niggli published at a time when Chicana/o literature was not yet recognized as such. Her works revealed Mexico from an insider's point of view, although she found herself struggling with publishers who wanted an American hero pitted against a Mexican villain.M
Niggli's life experience transpired in Mexico, Texas, the East Coast in the pre-World War II years, and North Carolina, with jaunts to Hollywood and to England, all in an era when few U.S. women writers were able to publish. Only recently has Niggli received critical attention as scholars of Chicana/o literature recognize her as one of the earliest Mexican American writers to focus on life lived between two cultures and nations. This scholarly biography, which includes selections from some of Niggli's unrecognized writings, is designed to solidify her place in the literary canon.
"Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez's exceptional book,
Josefina Niggli, Mexican-American Writer: A Critical Biography
, is a magnificent contribution to the scholarly study of the life and works of the brilliant binational and transnational writer, Josefina Niggli. From poems to short stories and theatrical plays to novels, [Martínez] provides the reader with extensive and detailed biographical data interspersed with key selections of Niggli's lesser known or unpublished writings. Martínez's groundbreaking book will be a fundamental work for any future study undertaken on this Mexican American writer's creative production and on Chicana/o literature in general."—María Herrera Sobek, author of
Chicano Folklore: A Handbook
(2006) and associate vice chancellor at the University of California, Santa Barbara