A geographically-rooted reading of the novelistic 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) reveals that Isabel Allende’s fiction subverts masculinist and authoritarian domination of political, ethnic, sexual, and even textual spaces, as it converts these sites into contact zones to be contested, renegotiated, usurped, or appropriated by marginalized groups. Read from a spatial perspective, Allende’s re-writing of the center implies a revolutionary process, since, as Michel Foucault has noted, “the history of space [is] … the history of power” (“Eye” 149). Noted geographer and critic Edward Soja similarly affirms the value of textual readings anchored in cultural geographies, as he claims that “[A]ll social relations become real and concrete … only when they are spatially ‘inscribed’ – that is, concretely represented – in the social production of social space… . There is no unspatialized social reality” (Thirdspace 46).

Yi-Fu Tuan and other contemporary critics have persuasively confirmed “the prestige of the center” (“Space and Place” 38). Through her writings, Allende frequently repositions populations that have traditionally been marginalized, or simply rendered invisible, to the center of her plots and narrative flows, thereby imbuing them with prestige while displacing whites, males, and oligarchs to peripheral roles. The trilogy’s construction of textual spaces insists upon the heterogeneity of both public and private sites as a systematic rejection of what Linda Gould Levine describes as the “colonialismo ideológico” – “ideological colonialism” – of the traditional borders governing gender and ethnicity (“Fronteras” 170). While Allende’s works, particularly La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits), have inspired significant research and analysis, very little critical attention has been paid to the coherence of the three novels in question as a trilogy, and to date no monographic studies have concentrated on the trilogy from a strictly geographic perspective. The study attempts to address this void through an analysis of the sophisticated means by which Allende anchors her works in the construction of physical contact zones among the various sectors of the center and the periphery through their political maneuverings, racial and ethnic hybridizations, regulation (or lack thereof) of access to corporeal space, and both written and photographed texts as a means of acquiring mobility and transcendence.