As was discussed in greater detail in the first two chapters of this study, the trilogy formed by La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits), Hija de la fortuna (Daughter of Fortune), and Retrato en sepia (Portrait in Sepia) presents a unified saga of six families, three continents, and 130 years of political and cultural history. The novels’ progressive Weltanschauung addresses such politically-charged topics as immigration, exile, war, colonization, independence, Marxist revolution, and military dictatorship within the geographic and cultural frameworks of the Southern Cone and the California borderlands of the nineteenth-century Gold Rush. Throughout the texts, Isabel Allende’s carefully constructed narrative framework systematically rejects the borders that have traditionally delimited class, race, and ethnicity; instead, she consistently deterritorializes the ostensibly white dominant social class by shifting its sphere of action to peripheral textual spaces in order to create a narrative whose energy is derived from the agency and mobility of women, ethnic minorities, and the working class. As María Claudia André notes,

Linda Gould Levine also supports this interpretation of Allende’s texts as a coherent, purposeful contestation of the “colonialismo ideológico” (“ideological colonialism”) implicit in traditional constructs of gender and ethnicity, and by extension, in male-authored historiography, which she describes as committing “memoricidio” (“memoricide”) through its intentional forgetting of non-privileged populations (“Fronteras” 170). In other words, Allende’s matrilineal history re-centers Latin American society, displacing traditional power structures while privileging those who have traditionally been written out of history – homosexuals, indigenous populations, lower socio-economic classes, women, and racial or ethnic minorities.

A geo-reading of Allende demonstrates that her plots are sustained, indeed driven, by the contestation of socio-ethnic, socio-political, and socio-sexual boundaries. Within this destabilized universe, her female protagonists’ identities are positionally constructed. Race, gender and sexuality are axes around which identity is constructed, and the foregrounding or minimizing of these traits is spatially anchored.