Heirs to a future yet to come: Thoughts on colonial debts

In the aftermath of Hurricane María, journalistic and scholarly investigations of Puerto Rico increased exponentially. The key question driving the cascade of articles, policy papers, and reports seemed to be: how did things get so bad? Or the slightly more critical version: why were things allowed to get so bad? The answer seemed to be Puerto Rico's out-of-control debt. It was Puerto Rico's debt and the unleashing of austerity in order to service that debt that starved state agencies of necessary funds to make urgently needed upgrades to the archipelago's fragile infrastructure. Although many journalists and scholars viewed the debt as the reason why thousands died as a result of Hurricane María and the government neglect that followed, few went beyond acknowledging the debt and its harmful effects to question the very existence of the debt in the first place. The question was not just how things got so bad, but more precisely what circumstances allowed Puerto Rico to accrue a debt so massive and odious that it cost Puerto Ricans their very lives? In Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico, Rocío Zambrana attempts to answer that question by situating Puerto Rico's debt within a history of colonialism that takes seriously debt's function as a mechanism that ‘actualizes, adapts, reinscribes race/gender/class posited by the history of colonial violence that produced the modern capitalist world’ (Zambrana, 2021: 11). For Zambrana, debt is central to the continued operation of coloniality in one of the world's oldest colonies. She deftly shows through the various chapters of the book that debt is not only an instrument of financial capture but that through that financial capture, it functions to reinstall and reify the hierarchies that abet the precarity, dispossession, and violence that nourish colonial capitalism in Puerto Rico.

Thinking through the temporality of debt is a key intervention that Zambrana makes in the text. She notes that at present it is debt that enables the continuous reproduction of coloniality in the colony. In this way, ‘the present is the past’ (14). That is, debt does not create temporal ruptures so much as it creates réplicas as the past is constantly felt and rehearsed in the present. The temporality of debt that Zambrana traces in the book can make for a dizzying read as she often zig-zags between different historical moments separated by years, decades, and sometimes centuries in the same chapter. This disorientation, however, indexes the temporal loop that debt opens up as coloniality is constantly reproduced by using debt to enliven relations of force and power long thought to be relegated to the dustbin of history in our supposedly postcolonial world. While debt as coloniality reproduces the violent relations of colonial capitalism, debt as reckoning as wielded by the colonialized creates ruptures that upend the temporality of debt by asserting different futurity for Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. Zambrana terms this process ‘interruption’ and notes that it aims to render coloniality inoperative in the present by subverting the strictures of debt and shifting from financial debts to historical (colonial) debts. In this way, Puerto Ricans turn the creditor-debtor relation on its head to struggle to make their world livable. That is, to unmake the world created by coloniality. If coloniality, as it operates through debt, dictates that Puerto Ricans will die ‘yesterday today/ and will die again tomorrow/Always broke/Always owing’ in the words of poet Pedro Pietri (1974), then Puerto Ricans are interrupting the logic of coloniality and asserting that it is they who are owed and showing that they will take back what is owed to them. As Zambrana puts it, ‘They affirm that we, in fact, are all heirs taking back rather than paying back’ (16).

Perhaps the greatest strength of Colonial Debts is the way that it forces us to rethink what constitutes the archive of Puerto Rico's debt crisis. This, in particular, deeply resonated for me due to my work with the Puerto Rico Syllabus. In an effort to decenter overly economistic discussions of Puerto Rico's debt, over five years ago a feminist collective of scholars created the Puerto Rico Syllabus, a collaborative digital resource that curates information about the economic, social, and environmental crises related to Puerto Rico's debt. We felt it was important to create an accessible public resource to historicize the debt crisis, place it in a larger framework of colonial relationships, and emphasize raced and gendered experiences of indebtedness and austerity precisely because a purely financial understanding of the debt fails to account for the devastating effects that the debt has had on Puerto Ricans’ everyday lives. Coloniality is reproduced through a narrowly economistic focus on Puerto Rico's debt – how much money is owed and to whom. When you read about Puerto Rico's debt in the Wall Street Journal, or Bloomberg, or the Washington Post it is almost incomprehensible. Often times when so-called ‘financial experts’ try to explain the mechanisms by which the debt was accrued they obfuscate more than they reveal, contributing to the myth that these financialization schemes are too sophisticated and complicated for the average person to understand. As Colonial Debts demonstrates, the abstraction of debt functions as a way to facilitate ongoing plunder and immiseration. For Puerto Ricans, the debt is not something abstract, instead, it is something that they feel and constantly come up against as they navigate life in an increasingly hostile and deadly social and political-economic context. For this reason, I appreciated Zambrana's attention to literature, theory, and protest as sites where Puerto Ricans are articulating an understanding of debt that upends the deadly calculations of the colonial capitalist state. In the sources that Zambrana brings together, we see how writers, artists, scholars, and activists endeavor to situate Puerto Rico's debt within a larger context of ongoing colonial violence and capitalist exploitation that worsens social hierarchies and precarity.

Through tracing this alternate archive of the debt, Zambrana moves ‘from an account of financial debts to a reckoning with historical debts’ (143). This move shifts culpability for the debt and encourages Puerto Ricans to take back what is owed through rescue and occupation. As she puts it, ‘Debt functions as an apparatus of capture, as a form of coloniality, turning everything and everyone into an heir: something with which to pay back the debt of capital. In the hands of rescuers/occupiers, that is precisely the point. We are the heirs taking back what is owed’ (164). Ultimately then, Colonial Debts is a book that looks to the past not only to understand the present but to make a claim about the future. If what coloniality does is create a temporal loop that seeks to limit the future horizons of the colonized, to rob the colonized of a future on their own terms and animated by their own desires, then we see how a reckoning with the history of colonial capitalism invites an opportunity for interruption through the reversal of culpability. In this respect, Colonial Debts is in conversation with Sandra Ruiz's Ricanness through a concern with how Puerto Ricans struggle to escape the constant loop of slow death and dispossession created by coloniality. As Ruiz puts it:

This ongoing death, coupled with the growing debt crisis of the island now exceeding seventy-four billion dollars, has invigorated colonial practice, unmasking how it is still on active loop. In this case, the language of debt reveals the imperial implications of this silent death. Ultimately, the language of debt is as terrorizing as the end of life – both recycled from colonialism to permeate a non-future for Ricanness under the neoliberal enterprise. (Ruiz, 2019: 171)

Both Ruiz and Zambrana are concerned with how Puerto Ricans interrupt what Ruiz calls ‘the colonial clock’. For Zambrana, an embodiment and subversion of the logic of debt become sand in the gears of the colonial clock. By exploiting the asymmetry of the injunction to pay inherent to debt obligations, Puerto Ricans are taking ownership of the abundant and life-affirming future they are owed.