Lux Magazine, Issue 15. November 2025.
A Spanish conquistador is on the run through a South American rainforest. He flees execution by his compatriots — but really, he flees his entire identity. The man’s name is Antonio, and he is the protagonist of Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s latest novel, We are Green and Trembling, in which we follow Antonio as he sheds his old life. Yesterday a soldier, today he travels with a pack of dependents: two small children, Indigenous Guaraní girls named Michī and Mitãkuña; two monkeys; a mare and her foal; and a dog named Red. He who arrived to this land a violent European supremacist is thrust into the role of caretaker, and he’s also beginning to meld into nature, suddenly finding himself able to interpret messages from the plants around him. In short, he is transitioning. And this is only his most recent transition: Antonio was born female but donned a male identity as a teenager to escape a subservient life in Spain and instead swashbuckle abroad as only a man could. For Antonio, navigating masculinity and coloniality would mean a constant process of transforming both — by following the lead of the Indigenous children and the jungle.
Cabezón Cámara’s novel, published by New Directions and translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, is a joyful, riotous unraveling of imperial narratives. (It first appeared in Spanish in 2023 as Las niñas del naranjel.) It draws from the true-life story of Antonio de Erauso, a Basque nun born in the late sixteenth century who escaped the convent, assumed a male identity, and became a conquistador. Into this history, Cabezón Cámara weaves the Ayvu Rapyta, a text chronicling the cosmovision of the South American Guaraní people, imbuing the novel with a mythic long view and sly decolonial humor. Also responsible for its wit, according to the acknowledgments, were Miguel de Cervantes, Mary Oliver, and Shakira.
In moments of rest between days of flight, Antonio composes a long letter to an aunt in Spain. He explains all that has transpired since leaving home. Upon arrival in the Americas, he survives on odd jobs and crime before joining the occupying Spanish military. Then, he is imprisoned and sentenced to death for his offenses. From the dungeon of his cell, he hears and smells the daily mass executions of other prisoners by noose and pyre; most of them are enslaved Indigenous people. One day, to comfort himself, Antonio sings a lullaby, and his lilting feminine voice pierces the bloodlust that normally drives the military captain stationed there, reminding him of home. The captain decides he’d like that voice available on command, so he frees Antonio and makes him his scribe. Almost immediately, Antonio escapes, taking with him an enslaved Guaraní girl and two monkeys. He snags one of the captain’s horses and her foal for good measure, and then happens upon a second Guaraní girl hiding among reeds with her copper-colored dog. The pack is complete. They slip into the jungle and spend the ensuing days outrunning the Spaniards, who are furious to have been foiled by prisoners and animals.
The book’s central relationship is between Antonio and the Guaraní girls, whose ages are only ever indicated by how many teeth they’ve grown: Michī, the youngest, has “her first milk teeth,” while Mitãkuña “has but a few of the new ones, and gaps in her smile.” These two are childhood embodied. Michī makes a poop joke, and Mitãkuña laughs admiringly. They ask Antonio ceaseless questions: What is a soul? (“It is the spirit of a person.”) Why does the devil trick men into sinning so they go to hell? (“Because he does not like to be alone.”) What is a country? (“Men and women who live in the same place and speak the same language and have a king,” to which Mitãkuña responds defiantly, “The jungle is no country.”) Antonio’s short-sighted European socialization becomes clearer the more the girls ask, and they’re tickled by the many ways they can expose his ignorance. They’re also ever fonder of him. Noticing that Antonio has one breast, they ask whether he is a man or a woman, then settle the matter by deciding that, in fact, he’s an angel — or, they tease, maybe he’s just a “big ugly bird.” He is their Antonio, and no more categorization is needed.
Meanwhile, Antonio is becoming a parent. Writing to his aunt, Antonio marvels that Michī “says no to everything.” Absorbed in his writing one day when the children are off playing, he suddenly clocks a spell of silence and yells nervously, “Girls! I cannot hear you!” Another day, he remembers that his pant pockets used to have a purpose beyond carrying things that children need. He constantly scours the jungle for fruit and water to keep them and the animals alive; at one point, he milks the mare to feed the girls. Every night, he sleeps in a heap, “laced with the tiny arms and legs of the two monkeys and the two girls and Red’s small head.”
He writes fondly to his aunt of having once been a child at her skirts, learning from her his “weapons” of choice, like sewing, with which he makes his male clothes. “To advance, doing all I was instructed not to do in my girlhood years,” Antonio writes, “I made myself a man by obeying you, yet in the opposite direction.” Now, he is finding himself again, he writes, “because gazing upon stars and trees and animals is something I learned a long time later.” For his whole life, Antonio has seen flora and fauna as nothing more than “cargo and shelter, as food or menace.” He is finally able to see, too, that the men he was born among are a racist, extractive, brutish bunch. As those men pursue him through the jungle, Antonio is ever closer to death, yet is being born anew. “Antonio didn’t know that monkeys laughed until the day they pelted him with pacará pods,” Cabezón Cámara writes. “Now he knows almost without noticing, as he understands that the breeze rustling the leaves is faint because the light barely moves.”
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I write this from El Salvador, where we are under the command of a new generation of brutish strongmen. President Nayib Bukele and his accomplices, in concert with the Trump administration, have hijacked democratic institutions and filled Salvadoran prisons with the poor, based on little or no evidence that they have committed any crime. Earlier this year, more than 200 Venezuelans deported from the United States also entered Bukele’s gulag.
Then came the month of May, when Bukele unleashed a new and brazen crackdown on dissent. Within days, four activists who had stood up to Bukele’s abuses — a pastor and three lawyers — were arrested. They remain behind bars with little hope for due process, their examples a warning to anyone else tempted to speak out. Simultaneously, the congress, controlled by Bukele’s party, passed a “foreign agents” law, modeled on similar legislation in Nicaragua, Russia, and Georgia, which threatens to tax and surveil human rights work and journalism out of existence. The mass exodus of civil society began from El Salvador: human rights defenders, journalists, prosecutors, judges, feminists, queer activists, democracy advocates. Among them were colleagues and friends. I found myself in San Salvador, feeding the pets and watering the plants left behind. And I — surely like so many of you, because El Salvador is not an anomaly in our historical moment — was starving for Cabezón Cámara’s type of world-righting.
“The catastrophe is undeniable and still unfolding,” she said last October in Argentina, on a stage at a book fair. “Humanity is depressed, animals headed for extinction.” Cabezón Cámara gazed at her conversation partner, feminist theorist Verónica Gago. “We need to cultivate a joy for living despite it all, almost as if this is a duty to our own selves, who have only one life to live, and to the people to whom we must leave an inhabitable planet,” she said. What’s important, she added, is “to generate the alliances that allow all people to live.”
Cabezón Cámara lives, writes, and organizes in Javier Milei’s Argentina, a place beset by austerity measures, “anti-woke” crusades, and a political culture that is at once inspiration for MAGA philosophy and derived from it. Milei, like his ally Bukele, has attacked civil society, but it has fought back, filling the streets. A remarkable generation of feminist writers, including Cabezón Cámara, has led the charge within Argentine literary circles. As they’ve been censored by Milei’s government for their supposed attacks on family values, they’ve staged public readings of each other’s books.
In fact, the hemispheric feminist movement called Ni Una Menos (“Not One Less”) was incubated in that literary nest. A decade ago, a small group of writers including Cabezón Cámara organized an annual feminist public reading, and in 2015, the theme was misogynist violence. The night of the event, Cabezón Cámara offered uncanny foreshadowing, telling a journalist that she hoped the collectivity of the evening — all these women seeing each other’s faces — would have a multiplier effect. Six weeks later, after yet another feminicide (a 14-year-old girl murdered by her boyfriend), the writers’ group set a date and time for a protest in Buenos Aires and shared the invitation online. Tens of thousands came. Ni Una Menos soon went beyond protests to include lobbying for women’s rights and organizing nationwide women’s strikes. It spread rapidly across Latin America. Cabezón Cámara became increasingly prominent as a writer and activist leader. In her public remarks, she describes her feminism as anti-domination in all forms, advancing explicitly decolonial and environmental aims. She grieves climate change with its tossed-off massacre of the luminous plants and animals that her writing celebrates, and she looks toward the Indigenous, the queer. When she speaks of Ni Una Menos, she speaks of her desires: for justice, for us to find each other, for us to build together.
To read Cabezón Cámara is to be overtaken by the tenderness and the ferocity of the femmes. Beginning with 2009’s La Virgen Cabeza — about a trans woman sex worker-turned-living religious icon who unites her neighborhood against corruption and then has a passionate lesbian affair — Cabezón Cámara has published a series of novels, of which only two, Slum Virgin and The Adventures of China Iron, had previously been translated into English (by Charco Press, which has brought multiple other Argentine feminists to Anglophone spheres). Layer by layer, these works build a utopia of which the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz would be proud: utopia not as a destination but as a mode of being, in which we all unlearn, reject what is, insist on what we imagine.
Specifically, in her novels, Cabezón Cámara often rejects the mandate that plot must be moved by conflict, an old rule that implies that if there is no loser, the story is boring. As another queer storyteller, Céline Sciamma, has remarked, bucking the conflict rule allows for new power dynamics and new narrative motors; for instance, instead of domination, how about desire? In Cabezón Cámara’s hands, nothing is irredeemable, and everything is raw material: Her novels see it all, negating none of society’s cruel underpinnings, yet they are riven with exuberance, humor, a horizon. This is meaningful stylistically, for feminist literature’s sake. But it is also meaningful for the soul.
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One of the themes of Green and Trembling is how it might look for a man accustomed to power to renegotiate his relationship to fear and security. As Antonio transitions in the wilderness, he recognizes that he’s been reading the world all wrong, and he strives to learn to read it differently. But he no longer knows how to recognize a threat. In the unfamiliar jungle, is nothing a threat, or is everything a threat? The giggling girls beside him, by contrast, have birthright knowledge of this place, but to his eyes, they are children, unaware of all that could harm them and in need of his protection. As the Spaniards draw nearer, Antonio becomes haunted by the specter of a female jaguar, perched near the girls as they sleep, glowering, muscled, menacing. She is nature’s “means of giving death,” Antonio thinks. Is the jaguar real? If this is a vision, what does it mean? Are his girls in danger? Antonio fears that he is running out of time to understand the jungle’s message.
Antonio knows the men who hunt them all too well. They’re convinced of their greatness, yet they’re bumbling and beastly. At one point, when Antonio is working for the captain, he has the misfortune of being the man’s chosen interlocutor as he eats a multi-course feast. He is pulled close to his acidic breath and “full mouth. The meat more pulverized with every word. A fine mist of pork and wine bespraying him.” Minutes later, an Indigenous servant angers the captain by looking at him too directly, and the captain twists the man’s arm so hard he dislocates his shoulder. A harpist who has been strumming beside the table carries on, and the captain sits down with a serene smile as the servant writhes on the ground in pain.
The conquistadors are driven mad by their lust for riches. By the novel’s end, they’re uprooting every last tree because of a rumor that there was gold beneath the soil. They light everything on fire, leaving nothing but ash behind. What they don’t stop to consider and will later regret is that no one, not even the white man, can live on ash alone. The occupiers, again and again, miss the fundamental truth that domination is not victory.
Meanwhile, Antonio’s transition is reintroducing him to desire. When a tiger-ant bites him, he realizes that he must “surrender small parts of his body” to the jungle, but nature also gives in return: fruit, water, behemoth trees and soft leaves, and above all, endless sun-speckled beauty. “My body, a tender animal that wishes to embrace what it loves,” he writes to his aunt. “This I have learned, this may be the only thing I have ever learned in all my years of living.”
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P.S. Earlier this week, “We are Green and Trembling” won the 2025 National Book Award for translated literature. See Cabezón Cámara and Myers’ pure joy here:
Danielle Mackey 
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