We Are Green and Trembling

Deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio de Erauso begins to write a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the Basque convent he escaped as a young girl. Since fleeing a dead-end life as a nun, he’s become Antonio and undertaken monumental adventures: he has been a cabin boy, mule driver, shopkeeper, and conquistador. Now, caring for two Guaraní girls he rescued from enslavement and hounded by the army he deserted, this protean protagonist contemplates one more metamorphosis.

Based on a real figure of the Spanish conquest, We Are Green and Trembling is a queer baroque satire, a surreal picaresque rich with wildly imaginative language and searing criticism of subjugation, colonialism, and tyranny of all kinds. In this masterful subversion of Latin American history, Cabezón Camera finds in the rainforest a magically alive space where transformation is not only possible but necessary. Lyrical and swashbuckling, tender and surreal, Cabezón Camera’s new novel sees glimmers of hope for the future amidst a brutal history of colonization.