We report on a 30ks XMM-Newton observation of the central region of the Cha I star forming cloud. The field includes a substantial fraction of the known pre-main-sequence population of Cha I South, including all thirteen known very-low mass H{alpha} emitters. We detect two bona-fide brown dwarfs (spectral types M 7.5 and M 8) and seven H{alpha} emitting objects near the hydrogen burning mass limit, including six of seven earlier detections by ROSAT.