Kali Fajardo-Anstine is one of the New Voices Fellows at the 2022 Sun Valley Writers' Conference.
Her short story collection "Sabrina & Corina" was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award. And her debut novel, "Woman of Light," which came out in June, is a story that chronicles five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family in the West.
Fajardo-Anstine spoke with Boise State Public Radio about her new book.
BSPR: I wanted to start off with the main character in "Woman of Light," Luz Lopez. Luz reads tea leaves, she has visions, and her mother tells her there's one person in each generation, a seer, who keeps the stories. And I was wondering if you could tell us about Luz and what she sees.
KFA: So Luz is a 17 year old laundress in 1933 in Denver, and she lives with her auntie, Maria Josie, and her older brother, Diego, who is a factory worker and a snake charmer. Diego has been run out of town for his involvement with a white woman, and Luz is suddenly left on her own to try to figure out how to make more money. She ends up going to work for a civil rights attorney, a Greek-American attorney, and while she's uncovering all of this sort of violence that's inside Denver and Greater Colorado, she also starts to have visions of her ancestors in the 1890s in southern Colorado.
BSPR: There's a place in the book called the Lost Territory. It's where we go back to, as readers, usually in the late 1800s. What is the role of the Lost Territory in this novel?
KFA: So Woman of Light is a novel that's very much based on my own family history. And my ancestors migrated north from southern Colorado in the 1920s, and they told fabulous stories of this desert region. And I knew when I was working on "Woman of Light" that I also wanted to talk about the Lost Territory, and this is essentially the territory that the U.S. gained from Mexico. And so in this part of the book, things are a little bit more magical. There's Wild West shows, we have a gunslinger, and this part of the novel really does transport readers back in time in a different way than the sections in the 1930s do.
BSPR: You have talked about how this book parallels your own family's story in Colorado. To what extent is that the case and where in the story do the characters become their own?
KFA: Well, the characters really surprised me because they are all based on my ancestors, like Luz is based on my Auntie Lucy, who really did have the sight and she read tea leaves.
But in the process of writing this novel, [the characters] started going rogue. I mean, they're going out on dates with people that I do not recommend. They're getting drunk off lemonade and peppermint schnapps. They're sort of being young and fun American teenagers. And in that way, they're really hard to control. I started noticing probably, I'd say a third of the way through the novel, I could no longer keep them along the straight and narrow path that was my family history, and suddenly the book got much larger than the tales of my family.
BSPR: Your family's own stories provided a lot of the material for the book. But you also took deep dives into archives and old newspapers. When you were doing that, what was on your mind? What do you think you were looking for?
KFA: I was looking for us. You know, I'm always sort of the history nerd that if I see a black and white photo in the lobby of a Wild West ranch or lodge, I look and see where are the women of color, where are the Indigenous people in these black and white photographs? And oftentimes, I'm looking all day because we're not there.
And so when I was doing the deep dives in the archives, I was finding that my ancestors – their stories–were not nearly as collected as the stories of white Americans. But I also was seeing everyday life reflected in a way that was really fascinating. The cost of diamonds really surprised me – they still were really expensive. Fur coats were really popular, and just seeing advertisements and the way people lived and how closely their lives are to our lives today was really surprising.
BSPR: What is it you hope to say about the American West, the Mountain West, in "Woman of Light" and your writing in general?
KFA: I want people to know that the Mountains West is an incredibly multicultural space. So I'm a person who comes from Indigenous, Latino, Filipino, Jewish and white American ancestry. And the only reason a person like me could exist is because of our region and people coming together here. I don't want our stories to be one kind of story, which is the white cowboy narrative. Don't get me wrong, I love Westerns and I love all the new Westerns that are on TV. But we have a lot more stories than just the obvious Western tropes. So I really want to sort of change the perception of what the American West is.
BSPR: I'm wondering if certain members of your family have read the novel and what some of their reactions were?
KFA: I was really sort of nervous because basically this book is about my grandpa's parents. My grandpa, he's in his eighties and he's an avid outdoorsman, and we've connected a lot over the years on the fact that he loves to tell stories. But I'm always sort of curious, what does he think of my books?
And he read "Woman of Light "and he absolutely loved it. He said his favorite character was the sharpshooter Simo Salazar-Smith. And I can see why, as a hunter, he would love this sharpshooting character. Also, my godmother, she's in her eighties, she's my cousin, she read the book. She is a queer woman, and she told me that when she finished, she looked up to heaven and she told the ancestors, ‘We're inside of a book!’ And she was just so proud. I’m just really happy that I got to share this with my elders.
