“This could be your family...Your brother, your son, your father. This could be your loss. But it's not. It's mine, and you might think you're lucky, but for every lucky person, unluckiness arrives. Our existence shouldn't depend on luck. It should depend on justice, what is good, what is right.”
These words are being spoken into a megaphone toward an assembled crowd, but this character could just as easily be speaking directly to the reader. Woman of Light is a great big expansive novel covering multiple generations. It is not an "everyman" sort of story populated with white Americans. It is very specifically a tale about those for whom unluckiness arrives far too often in the form of white Americans. Indigenous peoples and Mexicans are pitted against everyone from the KKK to employers who were immigrants from "preferable" continents. What Celia is shouting out loud through the amplification of the microphone is essentially a message to all readers that luck and justice are often the same thing for some groups while unluckiness and a lack of justice often interchangeable for other groups. How that calculus works out is entirely dependent on individual circumstances at the time.
"All around them were waiters in tuxedos with long finned tails rushed about carrying silver trays. Luz wondered about the people they served, the rich, the doctors and lawyers, businessmen and silver tycoons. Though they shared the same city street, Luz often felt she and her people were only choking on their leftover air."
The imagery here says it all. Waiters dressed in the formal wear as a job uniform to diners who only wear their tuxedos to occasions declared off-limits to the waiters, it is very difficult to not imagine the waiters showing up to one of those fancy balls that the lawyers and doctors attended while attired in their top hat and tails and wonder those responsible would tell who belonged and who didn't. Of course, in this case, it would be easy: the fellows with the pigmentation and features that were unlike the others would be excluded. Which, of course, brings up the problem: what if one those lawyers or doctors also looked like they didn't belong. This is the problem with racism in America that Lux is getting with observation about sharing the same streets, but the same air. Dark-skinned poor people can wear the exact same "uniform" as the wealthy whites and yet it even then still not be seen as equal.
"Denver's skyline around them, pointed and gray, a city canyon beneath the moon. Rail yards and coal smelters coughed exhaust, their soot raining into the South Platte River. Young people had unlaced their boots and removed their stockings, wading into the moon's reflection. Bats swooped low and quick."
Denver is nicknamed the "Mile High City" but first-timers flying into the city may be quite surprised to see that it actually is like canyon surrounding by mountains rather than an American version of a quaint Swiss village. The growth of this now iconic American metropolis plays a huge role in the story to the extent that the city comes to represent the thematic exploration of division and contrast. The nature of its role in the novel is hinted at in this seemingly simple description. It is a city and a canyon. A place where miners and smelters cohabit with barefooted lovers. A place where dull gray buildings rise high and sleek black bats swoop low. The contrasts of the city become a commentary on the contrast of the characters and the evolution of a changing city become a marker for the slower evolution of changes in society.
