'Dichos en Nichos' expressively explores love, loss, identity and community

“Dichos en Nichos” is an enticing, enriching addition to New Mexico literature.

The book contains dichos -Spanish for adages, sayings and proverbs — all composed and translated into English by the author, Sage Vogel.

The dichos are embedded in the book’s 10 connected short stories that are set in an unnamed fictional village in Northern New Mexico in the 1950s.

The expressively told stories are about love, loss and identity, each fitting into an overarching theme of community.

The images inside the nichos are oil paintings of characters, human and animal. They’re ensconced in old wooden frames. Vogel’s artist-father Jim Vogel created the paintings and his artist-mother, Christen Vogel, repurposed the frames.

“Most of the wood is from garage sales, antique shops and even thrift stores. I was looking for things that have the right age that could be made into something else,” Christen Vogel said in a phone interview.

Each story has its own nicho. The nicho on the front cover — “The Gift” — is repeated at the end of the story titled “Las frutas y el disfrute/Fruits and Fancies.” The image, which has a three-dimensional quality, is an oil on canvas panel in an antique trunk frame. Above the image is a hand-painted carving of a peach set in the frame.

The character of Esposa is presented in clean work clothes and a hat above a bandanna. She’s carefully holding a peach with her very large hands. Oversized hands seem to be a Jim Vogel special artistic feature.

Esposa offers a ripe, juicy peach, kind of a sacred offering, to each of three suitors — Facundo, Salomón and Celestino — who have come to visit; two of the visits her mother arranged.

Esposa isn’t interested in any of the men as potential mates. Which terribly upsets her mother, who scolds, one day you’ll be so old that no man will want to marry you. Esposa retorts that she doesn’t know why she’d need an esposo — a husband — to begin with.

Read on.

Esposa soon has a moonlit tryst with Rosabel, a neighbor. Esposa offers her a peach as well. Rosabel accepts it, but she splits it exactly in half.

“She handed one half back to Esposa and wasted no time in taking a big bite from the other half,” the narrative goes.

That gesture of sharing pleasantly surprised Esposa as much as the “ambrosial flavor of the peach. She was speechless, and felt herself becoming overwhelmed with passion and desire.”

The story ends satisfyingly for Esposa when Rosabel warmly declares to her in this dicho, “Compartir en amor,/endulza el sabor./A treat shared with your lover/is sweeter than any other.”

Of the stories in the book, one stands out because of its intense drama — “El rito de trampas/The Catch.”

It tells of Rosabel’s father, Cornelio, who heads out to fish at his familiar spot on a remote mountain stream. This time, however, he encounters a powerful, mythical golden fish that challenges Cornelio in a monumental struggle, a struggle between man and nature, amid a worsening rainstorm.

The story may remind some readers of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Does Cornelio survive? The outcome is revealed in the subsequent story.

Sage Vogel’s six-page introduction gives the reader background information about the author, about the cultural context of dichos and nichos, and about the Northern New Mexico community of Embudo where he grew up. He lives in Dixon, a few minutes away from Embudo, where his parents still reside; he’s the librarian at Dixon Elementary.

“Dichos,” Sage Vogel writes, “are passed down from generation to generation and can be centuries old, but there is always room for contemporary, culturally aligned poets and storytellers to craft new ones.”

Dichos, he adds, are in everyday conversations and in traditional stories. Vogel recommends Don Usner’s book “Chasing Dichos Through Chimayó” as a catalog of traditional Northern New Mexican sayings and as a context for their usage.

Vogel writes that nichos are traditionally ornate, decorated recesses “that serve as reverential altars in places of worship and veneration” in New Mexico’s broader Hispanic and Native American communities.

Vogel explained that he purposely did not translate many of the New Mexican Spanish words and phrases — apart from the dichos — in the stories in order to maintain the narrative flow.

A bonus work of art is Jim Vogel’s untitled painting — not a nicho — that is on the book’s dedication page — Para el pueblo/For the village.”

“Dichos en Nichos” is part of the University of New Mexico Press’ Querencia Series.

'Dichos en Nichos' expressively explores love, loss, identity and community