Can ‘Woman of Light’ rewrite the Western mythology
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Kali Fajardo-Anstine introduces readers to a Denver they’ve never before seen.
by Emma Athena
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uz Lopez gazes into the tea cup, studying the leaves and “their soaking shapes.” The Platte River rushes at her back and all around, Denver’s chile harvest pulses, crowds moving through “the city’s liquid center illuminated in green and blue lights.” It’s 1933 and the 17-year-old sees three foreshadowing images inside the cup: a clam, an owl, a brick. She glances up at her client, a white woman tightly bundled, then peers back down to witness “something strange, off-putting, the tea leaves seeming to drift like a blizzard over golden plains until Luz saw a place she hadn’t before,” and her vision snaps to something so startling she suddenly lies, gives her client vague answers about what she sees, what it means. Luz, protagonist of Woman of Light, Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s debut novel, dips in and out of that which lies beyond the edges, sees scenes as they might have or could have happened at various points within the arc of five generations in Colorado—not unlike like the author herself oscillates through time in the storytelling of Luz becoming a woman, losing her brother and navigating 1930s Denver as a laundress-turned-law-office-secretary with her complex family histories in tow. The story’s root curls around the last generation before contact is made with Anglo peoples in southwest Colorado. The vines of the family’s DNA then reach toward Denver, slowly unfurling one generation at a time like flowers toward the sun. Luz arrives in the Mile High City at age 11 from Huerfano, the town where her mother landed after leaving the Lost Territory, the region where their indigenous ancestors tried mixing with Anglos but were cheated and brutalized. (“Again and again her husband explained … no human being can possess land. Again and again Simodecea watched as new tents went up throughout the property, the canvas shacks fluttering her eyesight like the blurred edges of reality just before a person faints.”)
see OF LIGHT Page 16 BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
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JUNE 2, 2022
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