Debt imperialism and paper towels, or, how to blame Puerto Ricans for the debt

• In Event: Puerto Rican Lives in Debt and Disaster

Abstract

This current crisis in Puerto Rico, the problem of debt, natural disaster, and politicians, is also extensively about discourses of reproduction that is providing a cover story for new forms of imperialism. The approach of PROMESA to the debt and Trump to hurricane relief rely on a conservative story in which the island’s finances are being destroyed by improper family structures and reproductive habits. After years of insisting that the island’s high unemployment was related to “overpopulation,” now, after wave after wave of out-migration, rising unemployment is increasingly attributed to “underpopulation.” Or, in contrast, the American Heritage Foundation claims that men in Puerto Rico do not like to work, and disability payments are to blame; women don’t marry, children receive welfare, and minimum wage is too high. Neoliberalism yoked to a neoconservative narrative about family, with colonial relations, vulture capitalists, and New York’s financialization of debt nowhere in evidence.
In this paper, I argue that we should see Puerto Rico not just as a particular, local tragedy, but rather an important new form of settler/colonialism, specifically debt imperialism--something we should all pay attention to. Debt is a straightforward way of taking people’s stuff, including their sovereignty, while claiming that it’s for their own good and casting aspersions on their morality. Puerto Rico’s success or failure as a laboratory for imperial theft will have significant consequences for the future, as the experiments in expropriation are reproduced.

Author

• Laura J Briggs, University of Massachusetts