Currently, Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the United States, has 74 billion dollars of bond debt and 49 billion dollars in unfunded pension obligations. Debt functions as an apparatus of capture, Maurizio Lazzarato argues. Neoliberalism, a set of economic policies, seeks to shift the cost of social (re)production to populations, deploying a version of the liberal ideology of personal responsibility. Debt crises intensify the neoliberal project on two counts. While neoliberalism turns the state into an apparatus of capture that serves the rich, corporations, and creditors, debt expands this shift by externalizing the debt of banks, firms, states. It intensifies the shift by burdening individuals who must take on debt to meet basic needs such as housing, healthcare, and education, and who must bear the burden of public debt through taxation and austerity.

Subjectivation within debt economies draws from the value of personal responsibility central to neoliberal ideology. A new form of subjectivity, the “indebted man,” appears, according to Lazzarato. Neoliberal subjectivity is no longer a matter of homo economicus as entrepreneur. It is a matter of assuming and repaying debt accrued in consumption and shifted onto populations through taxation and austerity. The entrepreneurial subject is necessarily an indebted subject. It can only function as “human capital” by taking on debt. Indebtedness, however, is a form of abject subjectivity. The “indebted man” is a failed neoliberal subject, a failed enterprise. Indebtedness is tantamount to culpability. The indebted man is guilty, bound to the fate of capital by its failures.

In Puerto Rico, the debt crisis binds subjects and populations by establishing that they are failed economic agents parasitic on federal ‘handouts’. Yet, in Puerto Rico, indebtedness is not only the fate of failed neoliberal subjects. It is the fate of failed colonial subjects, who affirmed cultural autonomy while reaping the benefits of US economic prosperity with the creation of the Estado Libre Asociado in 1952. As a mechanism of capture, debt is a form of coloniality, to speak with Aníbal Quijano. Minimally, colonialism refers to a form of politico-juridical subordination. Coloniality, refers to the race/gender/class hierarchies produced by a colonial history but that exceed colonialism as a politico-juridical project. That debt is a form of coloniality that feeds on Puerto Rico’s colonial status becomes clear when we consider austerity measures implemented in response to the debt crisis.

PROMESA is a United States federal law passed in 2016. The institution of a Fiscal Control Board intensifies colonial exceptionality. José Atiles Osoria explores the logic of exceptionality as well suited for assessing Puerto Rico’s status as an unincorporated territory that belongs to but is not a part of the United States. Colonial exceptionality is intensified in the political/economic administration of the territory through declarations of states of emergency. The 2006 declaration of fiscal emergency initiated the use of this measure for government administration. Colonial exceptionality deepens the work of debt as a form of coloniality. The institution of a Fiscal Control Board and its austerity plan intensifies it. The Board is tasked with achieving “fiscal responsibility” and “access to capital markets” irrespective of social costs.

Ariadna Godreau tracks the relation between debt, austerity, and coloniality in what she calls a “pedagogy of the indebted woman” (pedagogía de las endeudadas). “The colony,” she says, “is what happens in repeated acts of capture.” “Indebted life,” she adds, “is the continuation of the colonial condition.” Austerity disproportionately impacts cis and trans women, especially women of color, who comprise the majority of the population living in poverty. A pedagogy of the indebted woman centers women’s racialized body (cuerpa) as the site for understanding the work of austerity. Women are at the same time “not counted on” in terms of the decisions regarding budget cuts that impact every aspect of her life and “counted on” to assume the gaps in care, labor (physical, emotional), time, resources (her body, material needs). A pedagogy of the indebted woman, then, tracks the distribution of precarity by colonial exceptionality. It thereby tracks the deepening of race/gender/class hierarchies that comprise coloniality.

Godreau pursues an account of the “pornography of austerity.” The colonial condition makes invisible debt as a mode of capture. In austerity measures, however, such invisibility gains “pornographic” visibility. Godreau focuses on the double invisibility that results from a political-juridical lack of sovereignty. Such invisibility is expressed in the institution of a Fiscal Control Board. It is also expressed in Puerto Rico’s removal from the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories in 1953. International humanitarian standards and debates concerning debt restructuring are hence out of reach. This double invisibility gains pornographic visibility in austerity. It is exposed in the reduction of the lived experience of the indebted woman to “photos and numbers,” to the journalistic picture and the statistic. The reduction at hand is a covering over that exposes “induced poverty,” a poverty that must be understood as “vulgar” precisely because it is “induced.”

I argue that the economic, political, social, and environmental catastrophes that Puerto Rico is currently facing presses us to move from an economic to a historical understanding of debt. A “cartography of debt,” to quote Godreau-Aubert once more, entails mapping the gendered/racialized individual and collective body deemed as dispensable within the logic of austerity. Debt repayment is a return to the body. This is not an abstract claim, however. Such is a return to “spaces of conflict to be decolonized.” A return to the body is a return to a history of capture to thematize, assume, and dismantle the hierarchies reconfigured not within but by a debt economy. The hypervisibility of historical debts gained in austerity illuminates which communities are marked as dispensable within neoliberal coloniality. This hypervisibility illuminates historical debts to be “settled.”

(Presentación sería en español)