Leopardo al sol is, on one level, a historical document which charts Colombia's absorption into global drug-trafficking processes in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the consequent cultural changes. During this period, rapid acquisition of wealth made for the accelerated modernization of lifestyle and the rise of new cultural identities and social configurations, which co-existed, sometimes uneasily, with traditional ones. Although it seems that Restrepo wishes to achieve a degree of universalization through a refusal to pinpoint the novel's exact temporal and geographical setting, it seems clear that she is describing the ‘70s and ‘80s when the drug cartels were consolidated from their roots in marijuana-trafficking, mafia-style feuding family clans.

Restrepo's hybrid, postmodern novel re-stages and intertwines televisual and literary forms against a backdrop of problematic modernity and violence in Colombia. The narrative works through cleverly employed mise-en-abyme structures, as well as through the performance of televisual genres – a device which has clear feminist precedents in Colombia – specifically the telenovela. Whilst on a diegetic level, characters attempt to negotiate the identitarian contradictions associated with rapid cultural change, the clash of tradition and modernity, and the confusing new consumer and artistic landscape necessitating the acquisition of ‘good taste’, the novel itself knowingly highlights and plays with the boundaries between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste, and so-called ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, between the serious and the frivolous, through its own form, self-consciously deploying vulgar and camp style in a recognition of the power structures served by these categories.