Race and community
Mistral's writing was important to this biographer because of Mistral's constant and deliberate awareness of the ways race shaped her experience of community. She understands that Latin America has its own cultural heritage that is often at odds with Western capitalism. For instance, she finds financial success to be secondary to community, which American life usually celebrates the other way around.
Money and law
The shape of life for Mistral is economic in nature. She sees the flow of money, and she sees the frustrating limitations of law. However, she does not arrive at cynical opinions with these concerns. Rather, she feels that by continuing to behave in a way that engenders love and optimism, perhaps real progress could be attained for those who are less enfranchised (or completely disenfranchised) from economy and legal representation.
Gender identity
Mistral's private writings reveal a knowledge about her unique experience of gender. She feels that she is essentially masculine, and the biographer notices that Mistral never had children of her own. Her motherhood is not rooted in femininity, but in love. She often discusses the changes that might make her experience of life and community more easy, but that's what makes Mistral so poignant—her life was not easy, but she still managed to keep an optimism in her work and in her writing. Her experience of gender allows her to experience the truth about people and their capricious nature, but she loves them anyway.
