9 Animal Adventures for Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s China Iron

It is no coincidence that the protagonist of the novel Las aventuras de la China Iron (2017) by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara similarly climbs onto the wagon of the Scottish Elizabeth with “menos modales que una mula” (2020: 14) to begin an individual journey, propelled by and intertwined with the animal imaginary of gaucho literature (Hamed 1996: 14; Ludmer 2002: 131), which ends in an alternative sociopolitical community. In this chapter, I examine how in Las aventuras de la China Iron the category of “animal” operates as a matrix that articulates a counter-hegemonic epic, anchored to a plural experience of bodies and desires, to outline a “Nosotros engordado” that harmoniously brings together humans and non-humans (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 176).

In her latest novel Las niñas del naranjel (2023), Cabezón Cámara focuses on the historical character of Catalina de Erauso, or the Monja Alférez, who in a letter to her aunt reviews all the mishaps she has suffered from the moment she escaped from the convent in Spain up to her new life in the Paraná jungle as Antonio, the protector of two Indigenous girls. In addition to the gendered question and critique of the project of modernity, in this latest novel ‒ just as in Las aventuras de la China Iron ‒ Cabezón Cámara also views nature and the relationship between humans and nonhumans, akin to the “relational approaches” present in many Indigenous communities of the Americas (Svampa and Viale 2020: 200). In this way, the “animal” category becomes once more a key point of reflection for her most recent novel.

In Las aventuras de la China Iron, as soon as Martín Fierro is taken to the border, the protagonist feels liberated, leaves her children behind, and joins Elizabeth/Liz’s wagon with the dog Estreya. As they cross the desert, the gaucho Rosario joins them. China’s ignorance is complete, so Liz takes on the young woman’s education. Over time, the close bond between the two becomes an intimate relationship. Soon after, they arrive at the fort-estancia of Colonel José Hernández, where they are horrified by the severe discipline imposed on gauchos and Hernández’s capitalist ideas for modernizing the Argentine countryside. After deceiving and robbing Hernández, they continue inland until they meet a group of Indigenous people at the Kutral-Có lagoon, among whom is the deserter Martín Fierro, who “más que de fierro parecía hecho de plumas” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 157). Fierro is now a member of Kutral-Có’s community and even presents himself as the everlasting lover of deceased Cruz. The deserter spends his days singing and dreams about designing “vestidos de arcoiris” (166).1 For an analysis of eroticism and homoeroticism in Martín Fierro refer to Gustavo Geirola’s essay as well as Adrián Melo and Marcelo Raffin’s article. The experience with these Indigenous people shapes the future Iñchiñ people because it exposes the traveling group to a community that lives beyond capitalism in a climate of peace and respect in which social and environmental justice go hand in hand. Sometime later, due to the threat from the Argentine army, the Iñchiñes take refuge by the waters of the Paraná River and its tributaries. The end of the novel finds the protagonist turned into a writer with a new name: “Me llamo China, Josephine Star Iron y Tararira ahora” (12).2 For an analysis of the question of names, see Laura Fandiño’s article. In addition to “Josefina” being a tribute to the Argentine critic Josefina Ludmer (Pomeraniec), author of El género gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria, I would point out that this is also the name of the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s story “Josefina the Singer or the People of Mice.”

Like Pablo Katchadjian’s El Martín Fierro ordenado alfabéticamente (2007), Óscar Fariña’s El guacho Martín Fierro (2011), and Pedro Mairal’s El gran surubí (2013), Cabezón Cámara’s novel also revives José Hernández’s Martín Fierro (1872 and 1879), the quintessential work of Argentine gaucho literature, amidst the celebrations surrounding the Bicentennial and casts a critical retrospective eye over the nation’s literary heritage. Cabezón Cámara thus intensifies Ocampo’s provocative gesture by going to the heart of gaucho literature in order to subvert it, giving voice and agency to the hitherto silenced and ignored female partner of the gaucho Fierro. In doing so, Cabezón Cámara, like Fariña and Mairal before her, also turns the category “animal” into a key node of reflection for her work: the insult “siempre has de ser animal” (uttered by the major in response to the demand for wages of the nineteenth-century gaucho Fierro) reappears to pounce on her novel (Hernández 1963: 45). Based on the contribution of animal and gender studies, biopolitics, gaucho literature and Anthropocene studies, I examine the question of the animal in this novel by Cabezón Cámara as a critical rewriting of Martín Fierro and, above all, of the model of the country that this work promotes.

Since its beginnings with Bartolomé Hidalgo’s cielitos, the verses of gaucho literature have been traversed by a whirlwind of animals to summon, designate, and characterize both the speaker and his own, that “we,” as well as his rivals. As Josefina Ludmer states, “[t]he history of challenge in the genre, and its relation to animals, constitutes another of the genre’s histories” (2002: 131). Now, in the challenge, what is at stake is “a battle for a logic of identity or being” (112), which in the case of Martín Fierro crystallizes in the question “what does it mean to be a ‘gaucho’?” In rewriting Hernández’s work, this question is raised again, always intertwined with the animal imaginary, to be updated in the figure of Fariña’s delinquent gaucho (Campero 2018: 203) or Mairal’s monstrous poet (Campero 2022: 121). In the case of Cabezón Cámara, discovering who the protagonist is implies exploding the gaucho genre based on the very question of gender. Cabezón Cámara comments: “I read everything I could find about gaucho genre. I realized that there was no woman’s point of view, and I wanted to write about that […] It is such a sad book [Martín Fierro], because of the way it is left, broken, resigned; it made me sad that this was our national hero. I thought about writing another epic, another possibility of Nation, in fiction, in a small way” (Bertolini 2017). In this sense, the publication of this novel coincides, on the one hand, with the recent explosion of the feminist movement in Argentina and the entire continent, driven by the slogan “Ni Una Menos” (June 3, 2015) and, on the other, with the global debate about the recognition of the rights of the LGTBQIA+ community, which in Argentina was reflected in the approval of the Law on Equal Marriage and Gender Identity in 2010.

By launching itself into the heart of Argentine gaucho literature, Cabezón Cámara’s writing recovers the vigorous animal body inherited from that tradition (Ansolabehere 2003: 46; Jitrik 1967: 375) to radically question both its “logic of identity or being” (Ludmer 2002: 112) and that project of a civilized and liberal country embodied in La vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879). To examine this counter-hegemonic epic, which is based on the category of the “animal,” I first study the figure of the dog/bitch and the protagonist’s obstinacy/emperrarse. Second, I analyze what is at stake with the category of “animal” both inside and outside Hernández’s establishment, “Las Hortensias.” Finally, I focus on the configuration of the Iñchiñ people, based on an animal “we” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 180), and how this community is aligned with several Latin American attempts to escape from the socio-ecological and civilizational crisis posed by the Anthropocene (Svampa and Viale 2020: 199).

Precisely in the third part of the novel, Cabezón Cámara incorporates the arguments of the debate around the Anthropocene as it is “a new period, in which the human represents a transformative force with a global and geological reach” (Svampa and Viale 2020: 24). The collapse of human civilization, ecocide, environmental awareness, relational narratives, the ontological turn, and environmental justice are key nodes in the debate around the Anthropocene. The writer explicitly intervened in this discussion in Argentina by participating in the virtual presentation (November 2020) of the theoretical volume on this subject titled El colapso ecológico ya llegó (2020) by Maristella Svampa and Enrique Viale with the manifesto poem, “El colapso ecológico ya llegó,” which is the last entry in the book.3 Cabezón Cámara’s intervention in the virtual presentation of Svampa and Viale’s volume is available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLYeRfUd_lw. Accessed 13 August 2025. In her articles “Desprecios” and “En Argentina, los mapas de la pobreza y la contaminación coinciden” published in El País, Cabezón Cámara once again displays her concerns about the socio-environmental crisis in the region, as she has done in recent interviews. For a study of environmental crisis in Latin America and Argentina refer to Heffes’s work. The poem constitutes a diagnosis-denunciation of this present in ruins and, simultaneously, a programmatic call to resist and fight.