“Ours was a kingdom of women, with Mamá at the head, perpetually trying to find a fourth like us, or a fourth like her, a younger version of Mamá, poor and eager to climb out of poverty, on whom Mamá could right the wrongs she herself had endured.” 

Chula’s description early in the novel of the matriarchal structure of her home life provides a concise introduction to Mamá’s forceful character and to the issues of gender and class. The book itself is “a kingdom of women" dominated by numerous complex female characters; male characters are few, marginal, and two-dimensional by comparison. Uncorking the problematic role of class in the Santiago women’s lives, the quotation describes Mamá’s attempt to alleviate the discomfort of her socioeconomic privilege as she tries to justify her own good fortune of leaping strata by hiring a disadvantaged young woman as her maid. 

“It was, after all, the tree whose flowers and fruit were used in burundanga and the date-rape drug. Apparently, the tree had the unique ability of taking people’s free will. […] Many people used it in Bogotá—criminals, prostitutes, rapists. Most victims who reported being drugged with burundanga woke up with no memory of assisting in the looting of their apartments and bank accounts, opening their wallets and handing over everything, but that’s exactly what they’d done.” 

This first description of the novel’s eponymous “Drunken Tree” reveals its complex symbolism. It embodies numerous significant concepts and motifs: superstition, the occult, intoxication, disinhibition, powerlessness, rape, and robbery. That Mamá has planted this mythological, poisonous, criminally exploitable tree in her front yard is evidence of her subversive nature. The fact that Chula and Cassandra live peacefully in such proximity to this dangerous plant and grow up under the shade of the Drunken Tree echoes the stark juxtaposition of their comfortable, privileged lives with the violence and peril that lie just outside their gated community.