Sagel, Jim

Chicanesque author and educator Jim Sagel was born in 1947 in Fort Morgan, Colorado. In 1969 Sagel moved to Española, New Mexico, where he began his teaching career and married weaver Teresa Archuleta. Sagel learned Spanish with the help of the Archuleta family and his New Mexican community, and began to write in both English and Spanish. In 1981 Sagel published three collections of bilingual poetry, Hablando de brujas y la gente de antes, Foreplay and french fries, and Small bones, little eyes. That same year he became only the second United States citizen to win Cuba's Premio Casa de las Américas for his Spanish-language collection of short stories Tunomás honey. As a result of the recognition accompanying this achievement, Sagel became a controversial figure within the Chicano literary community. Though Sagel was widely praised for the quality of his work and for the precision of the vernacular New Mexican Spanish in which it was written, his ethnicity made him difficult to categorize. Given that the subjects and themes of his works pertained to the Hispanic communities of New Mexico, the descriptive term "Chicanesque" was applied to Sagel's work. Jim Sagel died in New Mexico on April 6, 1998.