Reconstructing Notions of Environmental Care Through the Configuration of the Maternal Figure in Fever Dream

Samanta Schweblin’s novella Fever Dream serves as a literary stamp of the ways the Argentine author saw the social, political, and environmental climate at the exact moment of its publication in 2014. Scholars have harped on the novella’s purpose as an artifact of a post-dictatorship and growing agro-business Argentina, but also its ability to capture and release a sensation that erupts in its readers a tangible way of experiencing the urgency of environmental crisis – no matter their physical proximity to the novella’s site of toxic horror. The novella is a speculative fiction piece that is at times difficult to engage with due to its unconventional syntax and absurdist elements, but evokes a reaction from its audience that has the potential to change their ways of viewing the world under environmental destruction and the uncertainty of an infertile future within and beyond the mother’s womb. 

The narrative follows a mother, Amanda, and her child, Nina, on their vacation from Argentina’s capital of Buenos Aires to its rural countryside. Or rather, the maternal protagonist Amanda seems to follow in the lead of the narrative itself, as the novel literally begins from her liminal position between life and death, and backtracks toward the moment she was terminally contaminated by an unnamed substance. Amanda is urgently led by a young boy, David, in an attempt to recount her fleeting memory of her time spent in the toxic landscape, and most importantly, locate her daughter and maintain her safety. Prior to the toxicity, Amanda meets David’s mother, Carla, a bereft woman that was forced to subject her to a “transmigration”, a spiritual process by a community healer that takes souls from unhealthy bodies and transports them into healthy ones. The novella’s maternal figure is faced with the convergence of her pre-existing anxiety around care for her child, and newfound doom rising from the accumulating toxicity in her body and the bodies around her. The novella leaves us with an ambiguous answer to the questions of what the toxic chemicals are, to what extent the work is fictional, and what the “important thing” is that its mother fervently looks for, but in the end, is too late to see. 

In this essay, I examine the literary elements Schweblin uses to achieve her affectual goals. Schweblin employs extended metaphor, unstable placemaking, embedded dialogue, nonlinear temporality, character mirroring, intermeshing of physical bodies, double entendres, and unexpected tonal shifts to achieve the novel’s affectual nature. I argue that these affectual techniques surrounding the maternal figure work to disrupt the reader’s conception of individual impermeability under the environmental crisis and, as a result, offer new ways of distributing care to the living bodies around them. While many scholars within the literary discourse surrounding Fever Dream notice similar affective tools to evoke maternal dread, the conversation lacked an analysis of what Schweblin offers to her audience through the illustration of a toxicity-ridden future – how the unnamed “important thing” that its mother searches for can be of use to us beyond the pages. The frameworks I will be working under to interact with Schweblin’s work and this leading question are affect theory and feminist posthumanism, which allow us to understand the maternal figure’s literary purpose through the novella’s visceral aspects. I aim to explore these literary tools and, humbly, offer my interpretation of what Schweblin’s purpose is in her convergence of maternal and environmental dread, which may, in the end, may not be separate from one another. 

To begin, the historical shaping of the maternal figure within Argentinian literature is important in understanding what social conditions Fever Dream derived from prior to the novella’s publication. Under the dictatorship of Juán Perón and the following presidency of Raúl Alfonsín was an era of poor economic conditions for the country and a desperate attempt to re-enter a world dominated by overproduction and globalization. From this emerged the neoliberal acceleration of agricultural production in the Argentinian rural landscapes – predominantly soybean cultivation. With this increase in domestic export and overproduction of soy came the federal approval of GMO crops and pesticide use, particularly glyphosate, in order to establish the country as a viable source of agricultural export. The toxins have since permeated every aspect of life for the human bodies, animal bodies, water bodies, and all other earthly bodies subject to any measure of proximity to the capital-driven poison. Argentina’s history of human and nonhuman violence has become an aspect of the country’s placemaking within literature, which is where Schweblin’s work within the ecohorror genre emerges. Inside and outside of the literary form, Argentine mother figures have “occupied a central place within the family structure, have been emissaries of human piety, mediators between the state and the poor, venerated by Catholic and Jewish cultures, and have, among other things, been traditionally responsible for their children’s traumas and fortune, including that of their biological endowment” (Brill 1). With this being said, there it is essential to acknowledge that some bodies are subject to further forms of violence than others within the country. The permeation of the herbicide throughout the country has “highlighted a significant cleavage created by the reorganization of Argentine agriculture, between a corporate-state elite that has benefitted from soy production and those who are, in consequence, worse off, particularly small farmers, rural workers, and indigenous and peasant populations,” (Leguizamón 684).  While this essay generalizes “the maternal figure” as one, collective lens, it goes without saying that the maternal experience is varied, and impossible to encumber under one literary narrative. The perspectives that are most touched by the effects of toxicity and other products of colonial violence are often the least amplified within mainstream media stages. With this being said, Schweblin takes generic forms of maternal anxiety to their utmost extremes in order to reach a primal sense of fear within the reader that can be felt reverberating through their body whether or not they have ever taken on a maternal role. 

The two maternal figures of the novella showcase feelings of existential responsibility for their failures to protect their children from toxicity, feeling personal guilt for their failings or misguidance. The maternal characters in Fever Dream are placed in a world that is not compliant with traditional notions of family, class, or individualism as a way to reshape the character’s, and our own, perceptions of idealized motherhood. In their article on unfamiliar notions of femininity, Ninfa Stella Cárdenas Sánchez and Jorge Iván Parra Londono argue that Schweblin “breaks (the idea of motherhood) with the sweetness and the tenderness of the stereotypes and constructed imaginaries which have fed the ideas of many women – and, of course, many men as well,” (Sánchez & Landono 20). I want to expound on this idea of deconstructing idealized motherhood, which I believe Schweblin achieves, but not necessarily for the purpose of liberating mothers from the constraining responsibilities of care. The maternal protagonist is in many ways holding onto a fixed conception of motherhood via her tunnel vision to protect only her child against all possible threats. It is through the other maternal figure, Carla, through which Amanda is given the opportunity to see a community-based care system where stewardship is extended to all forms of life by Carla in order for it to reach her son. The natural taxonomies, binaries, and boundaries that make Amanda feel safe as a mother, and that make us feel collectively safe as humans, are melted away in Schweblin’s toxicity-ridden hellscape. With these cultural contexts in mind, we can begin our whirlwind into the literary composition of the novella’s maternal figure. 

Perhaps the most recognizable and withstanding element of the novella is the extended metaphor of the “rescue distance” that strings itself throughout the novel and functions as a materialization of interconnectedness between mother and child, an icon that ultimately fails to withstand the external features that dematerialize it. “I call it the rescue distance: that’s what I’ve named the variable distance separating me from my daughter, and I spend half the day calculating it, though I always risk more than I should” (Schweblin 18), Amanda says to David, defining the method of care that she believes allows her to protect Nina from external dangers. Schweblin’s creation of a physical means of nurture from the mother to child is reminiscent of an umbilical cord, an extension of the maternal body that serves to fulfill Amanda’s conception of her maternal duty. This cord is tightened, loosened, lost, and broken throughout the narrative timeline, materializing the mother’s slow loss of control over the nourishment of her child. The maternal figure in this novel expresses anxieties that represent a common notion that one is either a “successful mother” or a “failed mother” based on how closely their child falls in relation to the standardized, healthy, and safe child. We can assume that Amanda’s standards for motherhood are based on the societal expectations within the modernized city that she lives in, such as traditional hopes of an adequate education, health care, emotional outlets, and nutritive care for the child and family unit. Even though her daughter seems to possess all of these basic necessities for a child, there exists an existential anxiety from Amanda that is not specific to the novel, and is rooted in the contemporary moment of environmental doom. As noted by Allison Mackey in an essay on motherhood and environmental degradation, “a sense of impending doom around the notion of failed parenting is increasingly linked to humanity’s failed stewardship of the planet” (Mackey 2), such as how Amanda’s anxiety around everything obstructs her sight of the important thing that will result in the death of her child. The novella’s progression depicts this increasing linkage between maternal and environmental stewardship , where Amanda’s maternal worries become less focused on things like providing enough love or affection to her child, and more on getting her child out of immediate physical danger. At the beginning of the novella, the rescue distance is used to measure the danger of realistic threats that occur to most maternal figures: uneven floorboards with ample tripping potentiality for a child, feral dogs that may get into the play space of a child, or having a child out of a prospective line of vision. As the characters sink deeper into the nightmarish nature of the countryside, the rescue distance becomes tested against supernatural elements, and ultimately fails to aid Amanda’s care of Nina. The symbol of this physical tie between mother and child brings the reader into the cosmovision of the maternal figure, where the child is an extension of the body – if the child is in danger, we are too. It is argued by Dóra Bakucz that “if we accept the child as an extension of our own body, the consequences are tragic and we are faced with caring for a bleak future,” (Bakucz 15), but I believe there is something productive to be gained from viewing the child as an extension of ourselves; that by caring for ourselves, our children, and our nonhuman counterparts with an intentional drive to sustain, there arrives a worldview that isn’t bleak, but hopeful. This metaphor is implemented throughout the entirety of the novel and will be examined again later in this discussion for a fuller understanding of its evolution of meaning. 

The embedded dialogue between Amanda and David is what is initially introduced to the audience in the novel, which takes Amanda out of her role as the sole protagonist. Before we are even aware of Amanda as the protagonist, we are inundated with a disorienting dialogue between two unspecified characters speaking to each other, with one line of dialogue italicized and the other contained in formally straight text, which we are slowly able to identify as the conversational format between Amanda and David. 

“They’re like worms. 

What kind of worms? 

It’s the boy who’s talking, murmuring into my ear. 

Worms in the body? Yes, in the body.” 

(Schweblin 1)

This is the initial introduction we have to Amanda’s loss of agency as a protagonist and as a mother, where she is unwillingly herded by another individual, significantly a child,  to locate the dysfunction within her own corporal existence. There are no traditional quotations around the dialogue between the two, instead their words float, perhaps reflecting the flux of Amanda and David’s transmigrational state. The lack of traditional formatting also points to an indistinguishable nature between Amanda and David, which doesn’t necessarily read as a maternal one. David seems to have knowledge beyond Amanda that is the only gateway to locate her own child, ultimately resulting in her unwilling reliance on a child. She attempts to take on a motherly role by condemning his mother for her alienation of him and her labeling of him as a monster. She also states “If it weren’t for the spots on your skin, you’d be a normal, everyday boy” (Schweblin 61), pointing to her value of aesthetically standard and able-bodied children as a mother. There emerges a sense of othering of David that doesn’t feel maternal in nature. It raises the question of the idealization of motherhood that may prevent mothers from carrying out the important things that could protect the children around them. We’re urged to ask, if Nina looked like David, would Amanda still care for her? 

This incessant push by David for Amanda to temporally backtrack through the narrative is another affectual tool that invokes the reader’s contemplation of their own regrets for caring successfully for the things that they love. Amanda, and the reader, are pushed and pulled by David to find the “exact moment that the worms came into being” (Schweblin 2), which forces us to examine her earthly experience in a new way from her position in the liminal space between life and death. As examined from the previous elements of the novella, the maternal figure enters the linear narrative in real time with agency over the safety of her and her daughter’s bodies. The nonlinear narrative moving back and forth between a pre-contaminated and post-contaminated body encapsulates the mental and physical degradation that the toxicity is having on Amanda’s body, as “damage manifests itself physically in maternal protagonists” (Bakucz 5), limiting her ability to remember the exact moment of her contamination. At the same time, the blurring of temporality suggests that even a linear recollection of her contamination would not have saved her from its effects; that “the effects of toxicity transcend the specific temporality that they emerged from” (Stuelke 21). While I agree that the time of the contamination is powerless against the permeability of the toxins, I argue that there is something to be gained from looking through the maternal lens in a backwards manner in order to examine the possibility of realizing the important thing sooner. By looking from death backwards, Amanda has the opportunity to realize that escaping the toxic landscape would not save her from the impermeability of toxicity, that it doesn’t recognize physical or political boundaries. Schweblin envisions a dystopian, yet clearly critically-realistic, world that hyperbolizes very real means of environmental anxiety under neoliberalism which, “reveal(s) the misplaced nature of placing blame for failures of care in the private realm of the family, instead of identifying the very public risks to their well-being,” (Mackey 7). As readers, we are able to see Amanda mislocate blame on different agents for the toxicity, and ultimately fail to carry out her duty of maternal protection because of this distraction. The toxicity in the novella is obviously rooted in larger systemic issues of hyper-capitalist production and unsustainable agriculture, but there are examples of personal ethics of environmental care to be gained from the examination of the novella’s maternal experience. The narrative sets up the hypothetical: what if our current protection systems (medical care, wealth, policing, or maternal vigilance) aren’t powerful enough against the power of toxicity? This worldview has the potential to shift one’s core values from the prioritization of personal wellbeing to collective wellbeing – which may sound idealist, but is the only ethically-sound way to move toward a livable planet. 

I think at this point in the discussion, it is useful to distinguish what maternal protection and care is defined as by the characters in the novel, which Schweblin explores through a mirroring of the novella’s two maternal archetypes – Amanda and Carla. The traits of Carla are only ever relayed through Amanda’s experience of them, which can be assumed to be partially skewed under her fever-induced state of toxicity. By looking at Amanda’s perception of another mother in comparison to her self-perception of her own motherhood, we can gauge Schweblin’s aim in placing these two mothers under the same environmental conditions but at different temporal locations; the doubling structures functioning “as a sounding board that amplifies the affective resonances of the story’s emotional content: the high arousal and negative valence of the fear and dread experienced by the two mothers” (Vásquez-Medina 7). I argue that this mirroring of fear is actually taken out by Schweblin’s maternal protagonist, Amanda, onto the other maternal figure, Carla,  to critique a contemporary notion of motherhood based on hierarchical conditions. By showing the different approaches to care by the two mothers, Schweblin highlights the unproductive nature of only caring for what is genetically or legally ours, while also critiquing the capitalist idea that one being must suffer for the other to thrive. That in order to work toward better stewardship of the planet, our conceptions of ownership must be shifted, which we will see as Amanda is forced to reckon with the non-individuated state of her child. Amanda notably centers much of her recount of Carla on her physical attributes or tendencies: a big bun of hair, gold bracelets jangling, a cigarette between her lips, sporting a gold bikini near the pool. Their initial interaction begins when Carla tells her the story of David’s toxification from the local water stream and the desperate attempt she made to protect what was left of him by allowing the local healer to perform a bodily transmigration. Amanda cannot conceptualize what this surreal process is, much less imagine allowing her own child to undergo it. “It happens Amanda” (Schweblin 94), Carla responds, as if this horrific process was bound to happen eventually due to the omnipresent existence of agrotoxins. Amanda questions Carla’s sanity and ultimately decides that she is somewhat untrustworthy due to her unconventional means of care. 

On the contrary, Amanda bases much of her own maternal value on the things that separate her from Carla: constantly calculating the rescue distance, serving clean foods to her family, having an organized and stylish living space, and readily being able to extract her daughter from harm’s way. As much as she tries to brush off Carla’s story about the toxicity of the land and the possibility of transmigrated children as a fault of Carla’s own maternal failures, the paranoia of danger hosts itself in Amanda’s body almost as seamlessly as the toxins do. Schweblin’s attention to Amanda’s maternal judgment and othering of Carla allows the audience to question their own notions of “safety” and “care” in a world where external factors may dictate them. At this point in the novel, Amanda still recounts that Carla did something wrong to allow the alienation of her son, and wants to separate herself and her child from the lack of care that Carla seems to have for the loss of her son. The story that Carla tells doesn’t register as reality to Amanda, and even if it was, Amanda seems to  believe her access to proper medical care, structural protection, and overbearing surveillance would never allow her to be in the other mother’s position. She exemplifies a figure of “western humanist individualism, who imagines himself as transcendent, disembodied and removed from the world he surveys” (Mackey 8). 

The intermeshing of children's bodies through the transmigration allows the audience to look through the mother’s lens to see what it would be like if you didn’t know what child was yours. The first time that Schweblin introduces the intermeshing of children is through the form of a nightmare Amanda has where, even in the “safety” of her vacation house, she is faced with a body that appears to be Nina, but claims to be the soul of David. 

“I’m David,” says Nina, and she smiles at me.” 

(Schweblin 74). 

This eerie, clairvoyant experience alone is enough to cement Amanda’s decision to escape the absurdity of the countryside back to the standardized structure of the city, deciding that the omnipresence of the toxic mother and son she’s met are a danger to her own family. For the first time, Amanda is able to view her own child as something alien, something monstrous. The dream Amanda undergoes not only foreshadows Nina’s future toxification and inevitable transmigration, but offers Amanda the opportunity to rectify her judgment toward Carla, to realize that her own livelihood may also be at stake under the abnormal conditions around them. She judges Carla for calling her son a monster, but is scared when she experiences her daughter in an altered form. The dream begged her to see that the toxicity was already enveloping her child who was soon to become another spotty, red-eyed body just the same as all the others in the community. Instead of taking this omen-like dream as an urgent indicator of toxicity as the most prominent threat to her child and all other life around her, she decides that fleeing it to return to her everyday life is the only option; that she had the agency to outrun the toxic runoff. Imagining one’s child as non-individuated from other living beings allows a re-imagination of an ethics of care beyond personal ownership and legacy. “In the transmigration of their souls both children are no longer the individual offspring of Amanda and Carla, but have transformed into something else, something plural, hybrid, something more than human,” (Mackey 8).

But, instead of leaving as planned, the tone of judgment switches, and Amanda has a sudden, intuitive need to make amends with Carla for her prior aggression. I argue that the foreshadowing through the form of a nightmare, or fever dream, allowed Amanda to experience, even unknowingly, the maternal fear of being alienated from a child. The nightmarish convergence of the children allows her to sympathize with Carla in a new way, exemplified in Amanda stating, “I want to convince her that everything is okay, and that she has to calm down…If I don’t do it, I can’t leave in good conscious,” (Schweblin 76). At the same time that she wants to console Carla she also wants to console herself and convince herself that the bizarre experiences of the countryside do not exist as long as she doesn’t allow them to. It is argued that Amanda and Carla represent the mother’s “anti-normative” relationship (Francia 131) where they are not just caring from what is there by genetic linkage or property endowment, but caring for one another because it is the only way to sustain a future. Later on when Amanda visits Carla at her place of employment near the soy fields, where they watch men unload mysterious barrels, walk around, and end up sitting in the grass while Nina plays in the dirt. Amanda, and us at the audience, learn of the process of caring for David following the transmigration, where he doesn’t refer to Carla as his mother, lacks all of his pre-existent personality traits, and most importantly, begins to bury the bodies of dead animals that he finds. At first, Carla believes that David must have been the culprit for their deaths, but soon finds that he is just the one to place them beneath the earth – as inserted by David, “burying isn’t the same as killing” (Schweblin 102). There is an uncanny togetherness that David develops toward the animals, as if he is laying them to rest because he understands that the toxicity has affected them and himself in the same way. In reaction to David’s gentleness toward the nonhuman, Carla begins to develop an understanding of her child’s offputting behaviors, paying attention and care not to step on the sites of burial. Although not expressly stated, Schweblin hints that Carla has developed a care for all living bodies after David’s transmigration, because she doesn’t know what body his soul has taken on; whether her precious son is possibly in the body of one of the ducks or dogs that the “monstrous” David has laid to rest. This intermeshing of human and nonhuman bodies through Schweblin’s bodily imagery subtly breaks through the nature-culture divide, allowing us too to imagine a world where our care must be placed in all things in order for it to reach the person we most care about (in this case, the mother’s child).

At this point, David has lost hope that our mother protagonist will understand the important thing because of her inability to see the intricate but pertinent threats around her, and Amanda reclaims her last bout of agency over her narrative – “I’m the one who decides what to focus on now, David” (Schweblin 98). This reclamation of the narrative is of interest because “the discourse of mothers is a discourse dominated and displayed by the voice of their sons… Mothers in this literary system do not constitute a privileged object of representation, but arise within an intermittent record that places them in constant tension between presence and absence, centrality and exclusion,” (Domínguez 3). While the two mothers talk, the farm workers around them pour the mysterious barrels around the fields as Nina plays in the soil. David tries in hindsight to tell Amanda of the importance of this exact moment in the narrative timeline, but Amanda is too enthralled in Carla’s tragic recounting of her life with David after contamination. There also emerges a convergence between mother and child with Nina and Amanda’s mirroring of each other's symptoms: both gaining red rashes on their skin and itchy eyes. Suddenly Amanda becomes rapidly more ill, and falls unconscious, leaving Carla to care for both her and her daughter. This transfer of care for Nina from Amanda to Carla seems to make Amanda uncomfortable, feeling as though she is failing to care for her an extension of self – even though her body is physically failing her. She tells David, “I feel the rescue distance shorten, and it's because Nina doesn’t trust Carla,” (Schweblin 120), when in reality, she doesn’t trust Carla, and is assuming her daughter to be an extension of her own anxieties. Even though her instinct tells her to protect her own child and leave the countryside, she stays and develops a short-lived moment of kinship with Carla. When Amanda becomes so ill that she cannot hold her body up in the field, Carla makes the joke that this will finally be the excuse to get Amanda to come to her house for a cup of iced tea, making light of the situation and placating her in this moment of extreme horror. This illustrates the often “idealized, unrealistic demands on women to consistently be emotionally dependable, nurturing, and supportive to their partner and their children, without this support necessarily being returned,” (Francica 131), that definitely shines through in the lack of paternal support shown to Carla by her husband, even in the aftermath of losing a child, as well as the general absence of Amanda’s husband. In this scene of mother-to-mother care, Schweblin offers a vision of care that is maternal in nature (loving, unyielding, present no matter the circumstances), but defies the traditional notion that the mother is the primary caregiver to the family unit. In this moment, Carla assumes care over both another mother and a child that isn’t hers, not because she has to, but because it is the same care that she wishes she could have extended to her own child before he left the physical realm where they both existed. 

When she is finally able to muster enough energy to get into the car to leave, her vision becomes physically distorted, not allowing her to leave the town behind. An invisible cord is keeping her there at the site that would become her death. One scene where she is forced to confront her daughter’s imminent death is when she sees a group of children walking the crosswalk with some caretakers that don’t appear to be their own parents.

“They are strange children. They're, I don't know my eyes are burning. Deformed children. They don’t have eyelashes, or eyebrows. They’re skin is pink, very pink, and scaly too. Only a few are like you.

How am I Amanda?

I don’t know, David, more normal?” (Schweblin 157)

Amanda is forced to see this group of deteriorating children at the worst extreme of toxic illness. From this quote, we are able to see that from her time with him, Amanda has come to realize that David is not as sick as some of the other children in the toxic landscape, but fails to place together that her own child is en route to some degree of this very same toxicity. There emerges a double meaning for Amanda’s inability “to see”, in one way she is losing her literal eyesight, in another way, she has lacked a version of sight all along, one that allows her to identify the danger most threatening to her child – the toxicity. This moment in the car is the last time Amanda will see her child in the body she was born into. 

The inability for the mother to “not see the important thing” is what ultimately causes her to lose control over the care of her daughter. In the end, Carla must assume care over a child other than her own, and Amanda must accept that the toxicity was larger than her concept of protection within her life. “The underlying goal of posthumanist thinking is to shift the epistemological plane from an anthropocentric position that presumes the hegemony of the ‘human’ to a much more fluid, immanent plane of relationality, where the human is merely one relatum among many” (Mackey 3), which is affectually achieved in the novel through its intermeshing of maternal figures of care, non-individuated children, and the lack of taxonomies between human and nonhuman life. Schweblin offers an illustration of a future where care must extend beyond our conceptions of ownership. Schweblin seems to ask us what “care” would look like if we extended it like a mother extends care to their child. Furthermore, would our care persist to be offered if we didn’t know which body it inhabited? What if Nina’s soul were in the dogs surrounding the vacation house, the stream embedded in the landscape, or the soil that underlies her feet? If Amanda knew that the stakes were equally urgent for all of these bodies, would her care extend beyond her own child? The important thing is that toxicity permeates all living bodies, not just ours or extensions of ourselves (in this case, the child). Schweblin offers for the reader to take on the “important thing” that Amanda is too late to realize as a mother to reconstruct our perception of the environmental crisis; to see that the actions we make may have invisible effects in our eyes, but are accumulating as visible forms of violence against others.

I’d like to revisit the notion that the products of agro-toxicity affect some groups more than others, an issue of environmental ethics which is not merely discussed within academic discourses on ecocriticism, but actually acted on by maternal figures at the forefront of ecological devastation. The toxic landscapes that materialize themselves in surreal manners throughout Fever Dream are actively being fought for by collaborators and protesters, most notably The Mothers of Ituzaingó Anexo – an organization originating in 2002 by mothers that noticed the toxic effects on the bodies of their children and grandchildren. In an article published in the “Journal of Agrarian Change” concerning environmental injustice in Argentina, a quote by a mother from Barrio Ituzaingó is presented, stating,

 “In our case, human rights have been violated so what we are demanding is for our right to health, to life, and to a healthy environment, which is, if you think about it, a right everyone should have, but we don't have it right now. The right to life is non-transferable; thus, violating this right, which is a human right, harms us all. They have trampled on what's most sacred to people. They've sprayed us from airplanes; they didn't care about people. No one cared to say, ‘Don't [spray there], there's a neighbourhood nearby’ … No, if people didn't come out, if we didn't come out to fight, they would be still doing the same thing. They stopped because we fought. We organised first because we had to defend ourselves from something that was harming us,” (Leguizamón 1).

The group was formed in a working-class neighborhood embedded by soy farms. Their effort to grasp the attention of political and corporate institutions perpetrating glyphosate use include protests at the provincial courthouse surrounded by sick children and family members that symbolically march with their faces guarded by surgical masks. They work to claim property rights based on their native status to the land and change the model of neo-extractivism, which “involves the use of agro-ecological methods and the creation of a fair trade network for peasant production. These projects are important alternatives that reshape society–ecosystem dynamics beyond the logic of extractivism,” (Leguizamón 1). The Mothers of Ituzaingó Anexo are an example of an ethic of care that extends beyond conventional notions of motherhood. The group has faced the tangible effects of toxicity in their land and bodies, and offers a form of care that extends beyond their own children. Schweblin’s maternal figures similarly bring to the fore the unsustainable mindset of only protecting one’s own semblance of the family unit because, in the end, toxicity permeates the boundaries of family, wealth, space, and time.

(Footnotes provided upon request)