Mexican-born Anglo-American playwright and novelist who wrote about Mexican-American issues in the middle years of the century, before the rise of the Chicano movement. She was the first and, for a time, the only Mexican American writing in English on Mexican themes; her egalitarian views of gender, race and ethnicity were progressive for their time and helped lay the groundwork for such later Chicana feminists as Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros.
Niggli is now recognized as “a literary voice from the middle ground between Mexican and Anglo heritage.” One critic has written that Niggli should be considered on a par with such widely praised Spanish-language contemporaries as Mariano Azuela, Martín Luis Guzmán and Nellie Campobello. She is thought to be the only Mexican-American woman to have a theatre named after her.
After her story Mexican Village was picked up by Hollywood to be made into a movie (Sombrero, 1953, starring Ricardo Montalban, Pier Angeli and Cyd Charisse), Niggli moved to Hollywood and became a “stable writer” for Twentieth-Century Fox and MGM studios, working anonymously on such films as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and The Mark of Zorro. The adaptation of Mexican Village involved quite a change in genre, being turned into a musical.
Niggli died on 17 December 1983 at age 73 in Cullowhee, North Carolina. After her death Niggli’s work was for the most part forgotten until the 1990s when literary scholars began to reevaluate her work and Chicana/o writers began to acknowledge her as a trailblazer of the Chicana/o literature movement.
Link to Wikipedia biography