‘I’m Always Writing Against This Idea That Denver’s a White Space.’
Adam Morgan 
Adam Morgan | Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2,462 words)
There’s a section in Robert Bolaño’s 2666 — “The Part About the Crimes” — where women are raped and murdered for nearly 300 pages, their mutilated bodies abandoned in the deserts of northern Mexico. The violence is brutal enough to seem gratuitous, even sadistic, but Bolaño was merely fictionalizing the real-life female homicides of Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. And while 2666 circles these murders like a vulture, the women themselves barely get a chance to speak.
The women in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s debut collection of short stories, Sabrina & Corina — Chicana and Indigenous women living in Denver and southern Colorado — suffer similar fates. But we meet their sisters, mothers, and daughters. We meet the men who abuse them. And finally, we hear their voices.
In the title story, a teenaged cosmetology student is tasked with applying her murdered cousin’s funeral makeup. In “Sisters”, a double date leaves one sibling blind. In “Cheesman Park”, a bank teller flees Los Angeles for Denver after she and her mother are attacked, separately, by the men who claim to love them. And in “Any Further West,” a sex worker and her daughter travel in the opposite direction in search of a better life.
Sabrina & Corina is a moving, textured, masterful collection, saturated with a strong sense of place. I spoke with Kali Fajardo-Anstine about her book, the cycles of violence, and the gentrification of her hometown’s Chicano and Indigenous communities. Read more…
