Josefina Niggli, Mexican American Writer: A Critical Biography

Chapter One. Introduction and Early Life 1910–1935

1 C h A P t e r O N e Introduction and Early Life 1910–1935 When I was a young kid, starting out as a writer, I had a shining goal. I was going to present Mexico and the Mexicans as they had never before been presented. Well, I did. I made the big time. I even made M.G.M. and Book of the Month. You see, I reached my goal and passed it. —Josefina Niggli In the early twentieth century, women artists and intellectuals who wished to create and publish had to swim against the stream. Many young women continued traditionally defined roles, while the more daring intrepidly followed their dreams and embarked on careers, carving a new path for women. They attended college and traveled alone, weaving their way between the fine-line distinctions of scandalous and respectable. The risks they took inspired future generations and rendered such notable figures and trailblazers as photographer Margaret Bourke-White, novelist Pearl Buck, and singer Josephine Baker. chapter one 2 Like them, Josefina María Niggli rose to acclaim in an era when women were neither encouraged to pursue careers nor greatly distinguished . But Niggli is an exception; she was saluted as a world-class playwright in the 1930s, and as a best-selling novelist in the 1940s. And yet, by the late twentieth century, she had been mostly forgotten. Like other great women trailblazers, Niggli was an independent woman ahead of her time. Her passion and life’s work was to reveal Mexico, to create understanding of its culture through her stories. Niggli felt that Mexican history and its people were greatly misunderstood and even dismissed by Americans. Therefore, she decided to create her stories and plays in English, to inform and educate the U.S. public. Her primary artistic goal was to create a good story, with interesting and complex characters. But when publishers told her it had to include an American (U.S.) hero, with Mexicans only as villains, Niggli would not relent. “They would say, ‘You don’t really think anyone will read this, do you?’ [she stated in 1980], but I said, if it’s a really good story, I couldn’t see why people wouldn’t read that. I figured that if I sat down and kept writing until people were aware that there was this beautiful world south of the border, people would see there was something in the world besides their own [experience]. And, it happened. I think that it was when I started doing my thing that the door opened for [what is now called] Chicano literature” (Shirley 1980). With the exception of a few short-story writers whose work did not see major release, Niggli is the only writer of the 1930s and 1940s who revealed Mexican life and culture from an insider’s point of view, in English, and of high creative quality. She exposed the roots of Mexican culture, its myths and lore, and the lives of the campesinos or peasants. She also documented, for the first time in creative works in English, the changes brought on by the Mexican Revolution, from feminist ideals to the mestizo’s (person of mixed blood) rise in Mexican society. From the child with a keen eye for observation in her native Monterrey, to the teenager transplanted to San Antonio, Texas, who was asked to write a play for her church theater, to the award-winning playwright and novelist, Hollywood screenwriter, theater director, and professor, Niggli relentlessly pursued her life’s passion. In the process she lived a remarkable life and left behind a literary and cultural treasure, one of few women achieving this during the first half of the twentieth century. introduction and early life, 1910–1935 3 Unlike the aforementioned women artists, Niggli grew up in a country remaking itself following the volatile political struggles of the Mexican Revolution. Her childhood experience was not that of Mexico City, which lured artists and intellectuals by the 1920s, but instead that of the Monterrey valley in northern Mexico, a land of weather extremes and breathtaking natural wonders, a land settled by immigrants whose descendants remain fiercely independent. Even before Texas launched its bid for independence from the relatively new country of Mexico in the early nineteenth century, the region to its south—now the states of Coahuila and Nuevo León—had already made moves in that direction...