jenkins posting job xml via requests fails with exception

I have python write the file to disk for trouble shooting

Caused by: com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.StreamException:  : only whitespace content allowed before start tag and not - (position: START_DOCUMENT seen -... @1:1)

Code:

timeout = 3
headers = {'content-type': 'text/xml'}
configFile = {'file': open(os.environ['NEWJOBXML'], 'rb').read()}

newjobxml = requests.post("http://" + os.environ['USER'] + ":" + os.environ['API_TOKEN'] + "@" + os.environ['JR_URL'] + "/createItem?name=" + newjob, files=configFile, headers=headers, timeout=int(timeout))

I get this for the header too:

{'Accept': '*/*',
 'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate',
 'Authorization': 'Basic ********************************************************',
 'Connection': 'keep-alive',
 'Content-Length': '11629',
 'User-Agent': 'python-requests/2.5.1 CPython/2.7.5 Darwin/13.3.0',
 'content-type': 'text/xml'}

When I post the same xml via curl, no errors

curl -H "Content-type: text/xml" -X POST http://USER:API_TOKEN@JR_URL/createItem?name=newjob --data-binary @/tmp/.config.xml

I am trying to migrate my code from bash to python.