THE WESTERN HISTORY & GENEALOGY DEPARTMENT ON THE FIFTH FLOOR OF THE DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY’S CENTRAL BRANCH IS QUIET, EXCEPT FOR THE SOUND OF KALI FAJARDO-ANSTINE FLIPPING THROUGH MAPS OF THE CITY FROM THE EARLY 1930S. “LET ME SEE IF I CAN FIND WHERE MY PEOPLE WERE,” she says, before landing on a page that charts out an area just west of downtown where each building is marked with a specific color. “You can see,” she says, “my character’s whole neighborhood is red.”
The character Fajardo-Anstine references is Luz, the protagonist of her debut novel, Woman of Light, a multigenerational saga due to be published by One World, an imprint of Random House dedicated to telling underrepresented stories, this month. And red is the color Sanborn Map Company, which created the nearly century-old atlas, used to denote structures that fire insurance companies should’ve viewed as too hazardous to underwrite. The map is a quintessential example of redlining, a discriminatory practice by which resources, such as mortgage loans and insurance, are denied to residents in specific neighborhoods, almost always largely inhabited by people of color.
Fajardo-Anstine, who identifies as a Chicana of mixed heritage, including Indigenous ancestry she can trace back to various Pueblo tribes whose homelands are in what is now northern New Mexico, picks up another redlining map and reads aloud the words that accompany it. “Infiltration of Mexicans. Occupation: laborers, single. Repairs: very poor. This is an area of scattered old shacks and brick houses. Ranking: very rugged and unattractive,” she says, and then looks up. “It’s fascinating to see the way they talked about us.”
To give the heft she desired, Fajardo-Anstine, who is 35, spent countless hours in archives, including this one. Studying the maps allowed her to choose the neighborhoods where each character in the novel lived in a historically accurate way. Looking through microfiche of 1930s newspaper clips helped her decide which Denver radio station people in the book would’ve been listening to (an early version of KOA) as well as what stories listeners would’ve heard about constantly (everyone was talking about Bonnie and Clyde). She also found relics in the archives that make an appearance in the story, such as a Ku Klux Klan robe that was made for a baby,
