Compare Constellations

Writer and educator Jim Sagel was born in 1947 in Fort Morgan, Colorado, to parents Edward and Betty Sagel. The eldest of three brothers in the farming family, Jim graduated from Fort Morgan High School in 1965, and published his earliest piece in the school’s literary newspaper “Prufrock” that same year. He continued his education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1969. Later that year, Sagel moved to Española, New Mexico, and began substitute teaching at Española Valley High School, where he met Teresa Archuleta, a native of the Española Valley. They married in 1970. Sagel continued to teach high school in northern New Mexico until 1976, when he received a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico for his thesis “Rebuilt,” a poetry collection.

Sagel’s tenure at Northern New Mexico Community College started in 1976, and during his 22-year career as a university instructor, he taught at the Institute of American Indian Art (Santa Fe), at University of New Mexico campuses in Los Alamos, Española, Santa Fe and Taos, and at campuses in Peñaso, Gallina, and Mesa Vista. He was appointed director of the Division of Humanities at the University of New Mexico in Los Alamos, a position he held until his death in 1998. He was awarded the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1993 and appointed the Carruthers Chair in Honors in the UNM General Honors program.

Of Prussian descent, Sagel arrived in New Mexico neither speaking nor writing Spanish. He quickly determined, however, that mastery of the language was a necessary skill. With the help of his wife’s family, particularly his father- and mother-in-law, Jacobo and Matilde Archuleta, Sagel learned Spanish solely through contact with native speakers, and began to write in both English and Spanish. Three collections of his bilingual poetry, Hablando de brujas y la gente de antes, Foreplay and French Fries, and Small Bones, Little Eyes, were published in 1981. In the same year, Sagel won Cuba’s Premio Casa de las Américas for his Spanish-language collection of short stories Tunomás Honey . Sagel was the second United States citizen in the prize’s history to win the prestigious award, and Tunomás Honey remains Sagel’s most-recognized work.

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 pieces. Coined by Chicano literary critics Donaldo Urioste and Franciso Lomelí, chicanesque works sympathetically treat subjects relevant to the Chicano community, but are written by are written by non-Chicano authors.

Sagel continued to pen English-language and bilingual essays, short stories, poetry and children’s literature throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He was also a regular contributor of local-interest feature articles to the Albuquerque Journal from 1981 to 1996, researching and writing over 150 pieces for that newspaper. His 1992 collection Dancing to Pay the Light Bill drew from these articles and others Sagel published in New Mexico Magazine . A 1990 collaboration with photographer Jack Parsons, Straight from the Heart: Portraits of Traditional Hispanic Musicians, featured an essay by Sagel that accompanied Parson’s photos of traditional New Mexican singers.

Two more bilingual poetry collections followed Sagel’s early efforts: Los cumpleaños de Doña Águeda (1984) and On the Make Again/Otra vez en la movida (1990), and in 1994 the Venezuelan press Espada Rota published Remedios: Una colección de poemas curativos . In keeping with the bilingual publication of Tunomás Honey in 1983, Sagel wrote three more short story collections, producing Sábelotodo Entiéndelonada (1988), El Santo Queso/The Holy Cheese (1990) and Más que no love it (1991), collections for which he wrote complete Spanish and English versions of each story.

Sagel’s series of bilingual children’s books, Where the Cinnamon Winds Blow/Donde soplan los vientos de canela (1993), Garden of Stories/Jardín de cuentos (1996), and Always the Heart/Siempre el corazón (1998), were met with much popular interest, as was his final collection of poetry, Unexpected Turn (1997). In 1997, he won the Premio San Sebastián for his Spanish-language play Doña Refugio y su comadre (Kuxta, 1997), a work that was performed bilingually in Española in 1998.

As an editor, Sagel prepared special editions of the literary journals Suntracks and Puerto del sol, and compiled the Resiembra (1982) literary anthology, efforts which placed him in contact with regional authors, and led to relationships that he continued to cultivate throughout his professional career. He also acted as a consultant on the local Spanish dialect used in the Spanish-language editions of the Pleasant Company’s American Girls: Josefina series. Sagel’s professional association with the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities and various education-related state agencies resulted in numerous speaking and workshop engagements throughout the state.

After suffering from bouts of depression throughout his adult life, Sagel committed suicide at the Sevilleta Wildlife Refuge in Socorro, New Mexico on April 6, 1998.