First, Failures

I wanted to include an image with this essay that would help me organize my thoughts. But words and images are insufficient. In times of debt and austerity, these are also in crisis. Words, in their fragility, hardly serve to imitate an impossible extension of the cuerpas1 that we manage to constellate in the material world.2 Images only reflect the instances when they tried to make us less, or tried to make us more; they deem themselves to be a sign of the times, or the times themselves. In the end, concepts are perverse monsters with a penchant for inequality and impossible encounters. From indebted Puerto Rico, to articulate one concept over another is also to choose the means of locating colonial power and managing the guilt of indebted women.3 It is thus a feminist political practice to recognize that the words we speak are more or less broken from being molded so much. Among other possible words, I give the following examples: colony, responsibility, law, austerity, debt, women, las propias, struggling.4 To speak the truth in pieces is also a way of expressing it.5

I wanted to write a text in which I only cited women. What I will say next will show that I didn't achieve this. The reason for this, beyond the patriarchy found in the academy, law, and everywhere else, is simple. This text is also about the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA),6 created by federal legislation and passed by the US Congress on June 29, 2016.7 By passing this law, the US government invoked the right—under the doctrine of plenary powers over its territories—to impose a Junta de Control Fiscal (Fiscal Control Board) or “Junta” on Puerto Rico.8 Designed to deal with the public debt crisis on the Caribbean island, PROMESA was written without the participation of those living in Puerto Rico and thus reflects the democratic imbalance that has characterized the relationship between the island and the United States since 1898.9 Through the Junta, a body of seven unelected officials—all of them white men (according to the equation “all are men minus one woman plus the patriarchy”)—established a de facto government over Puerto Rico. From its first meeting, which lasted barely twenty-nine minutes, the Junta assumed control of public policy, the treasury, government agencies, the university, “essential services,” and the possibility of a dignified life in Puerto Rico. This essay offers—possibly without achieving it—a feminist legal, political, and ethnographic reading of this legislative act that came to accentuate a political crisis that has remained hidden from international law, the academy, and the postcolonial margins. PROMESA, as legislation with plenary power, as austerity and colony, is the word of man. The “us” [nosotras]10 in the equation has to do with the supposed passivity of the occupied geographic and genealogical spaces, just as it does the effects administered by the “law and order” state. It also concerns the spaces, agencies, and rage that women themselves adopt in the struggle.

Attempts and Promises

The first time I read Light in the Dark by Gloria Anzaldúa, I did it hurriedly, skipping around the pages and drawings to find quotations that would bridge the gap between the author's academic-ness and my own incipient, wannabe version. I marked very few things, almost all of them in the prologue and the notes. It seemed like a very beautiful book to me, intimate and sad at the same time: like a tiny, ancient animal about to perish. I thought to myself that texts like these—uselessly beautiful, fleeting, ill—ought not to be published. With the purpose of writing this text, and feeling somewhat hopeless, I returned to the book to hunt for citations. This time around, I marked up everything, even the images. I wanted to write a text like that. About resistance. About always being in the middle of things, which is to say split in two, nepantla.11 I wanted to write about exhaustion. About tedium. About rage. About being still. About healing. About the academy and the law, about the nonplaces and the end of promises, about what it's like to live a life in which we owe everything instead of living the lives we want, and how to refuse the so-called “national debt” in order to take up our individual cuerpas, our communities, and the just weight of the heart.

This document is an attempt. It is about us / the others [nos/otras] living in an indebted country, knowing full well we don't owe anyone anything. It's a presentation on the politics of austerity that have constituted the women who came before us, and that threaten to determine the women we will become. It also attempts to reflect on the debt we refuse to pay, and the means by which we will collect everything we are owed.

I want the impossible—to save from expectations this text, whomever reads it, and those for whom it is written. This is to liberate us from other women's requirements, from false promises and from the emergence of new debts, to think of public indebtedness and austerity from a space that is off-limits to us: the space of las propias. Anzaldúa says writing is a gesture of the body.12 She who writes does it the only way she can, from her cuerpa mujer. I write from my body, as a partner, comrade, writer, activist, lawyer, to agitate—if I may be permitted—the space that separates me from the other cuerpas propias—from other women—from you all.

If anything, this document approaches something like a pedagogy of indebted women. I use that which is not achieved as a generative theme. From here on out, the list of the text's internal failures begins, which, although comparatively small in the face of a country on the decline, are failures nonetheless. I will move from concepts to context, attempting to reveal what we have already been announcing in our bodies, in our everyday lives, in our precarity, in our struggles, in our feminisms: that life in debt is undignified and dehumanizing, always undeserved and illegitimate. And further, that to transform any country we should return to our cuerpas, to their diversities of race, gender, and class, to propose new forms of dialogue in order to move from there to action.

Debt

A debt is an obligation that binds a person, group, or country to do or give that which is owed [lo debido]. A country's debt is known as sovereign debt, although I will omit the adjective in part for economy's sake, and in part to do theatrical (i.e., real) justice to the expression. It's also known as public debt, and as a country's debt, although this is debatable. A debt is sustainable, according to the International Monetary Fund, when a state is in a position to pay it.13 A debt is illegitimate when it becomes apparent that the former definition obscures human rights that are limited or denied when the payment of debt is prioritized over people. As opposed to other obligations, public debt doesn't arise from a contract between A who borrows and B who loans money or purchases the rights to collect it. Instead, it is a relation subordinated to the nontransferable obligation governments have to safeguard the well-being of those living within their territories.14 The debt contract is limited by the need to protect dignified life and majority participation by the people in decision-making about indebtedness. These decisions should occur independently of the fluctuations and exigencies of financial markets, credit rating agencies, speculators, vulture funds, and the rest.

Austerity is the direct consequence of unsustainable indebtedness. Although tied to conditions of dire poverty and inequality, austerity is not their synonym. It is the state's attempt to “adjust,” to cover deficits and fulfill the payment of obligations, practices, and conditions of predatory creditors. Such an adjustment translates, at the same time, into the limitation or elimination of access to, and enjoyment of, fundamental rights like education, health care, employment, housing, access to justice, and security in old age.

According to PROMESA, the Junta's almost unlimited authority to impose budget cuts is based on the law's two principal objectives. First, PROMESA seeks to secure the payment of Puerto Rico's public debt with concrete guarantees for restructuring, moratoria, and auditing. Second, according to legislation, these efforts seek to restore the island's reputation in international financial markets. From a human rights perspective, and particularly for historically marginalized identities, groups, and communities, these objectives are inadequate for addressing the increase in precarity and violence that accompanies austerity.

Although it is possible that, when faced with inadequate resources, the state may consider itself obligated to restrict services, nevertheless budget cuts are not a “purely fiscal” measure. Budget adjustment administration requires the careful prudence that comes with understanding its power to affect the conditions of life for other people. The management of public debt, governmental restructuring, and the analysis that precedes budgetary allocations aren't purely financial or administrative juggling acts. They are measures that directly affect the conditions and prospects of the lives of those who inhabit a territory. For that reason, these actions must respond to criteria based on human rights. 15 This is the grievance that Puerto Rican delegations, like other communities and countries, have taken before various international forums. Among them, I'll mention the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.16

Four different criteria turned out to be indispensable. The first is the principle of nondiscrimination; interventions by the government in terms of public debt andeconomic crisis cannot increase inequality or hurt those who have already been harmed. When this principle is absent, conditions of inequality increase and cause further indebtedness and social violence. The second criterion is transparency: a transversal right not limited to access to information, and which includes the possibility of monitoring the government and third parties and requiring that they be accountable with respect to their actions in the management of public debt. With respect to our debt obligations, transparency demands that financial statements, bondholders' offers, and conditions related to the management and repayment of debt are disclosed, as are the fiscal and social consequences of indebtedness.

Fulfillment of the following criteria for real and effective participation is only possible when the first two criteria are satisfied. Such a relation is evident, for example, in public demands and a citizen audit of debt. The people, and particularly those groups who will be disproportionately impacted by fiscal measures, have the right to directly influence discussion and actions related to the negotiation, management, payment, or non-payment of public debt. The principle of participation is tied to that of agency, which recognizes the individual and collective autonomy of persons as a condition for the enjoyment of human rights. In considering debt in the context of Puerto Rico's colonial condition, we can't lose sight of the fact that respect for real and effective participation is intimately linked to territorial and political sovereignty, which does not exist in Puerto Rico.

The fourth criterion for human rights to which I'll refer is that of shared and differentiated responsibility.17 Although I'll take up “responsibility” again later as a concept that conditions the internal and external relations of indebted existence, it's important to signal here that this principle reveals the differentiated responsibility that multiple actors have when confronting illegitimate indebtedness and austerity. This principle allows for the monitoring of the state's compliance with its inalienable obligation to safeguard the rights of inhabitants from its own actions and those of third parties. Moreover, it signals the responsibility of private actors, such as banks, international financial institutions, credit agencies, so-called vulture funds, and others, and demands they respect fundamental guarantees. The principle of shared and differentiated responsibility is also linked to access to justice and the possibility of demanding remedies and reparations for individual or collective damages which result from illegitimate indebtedness, as well as the predatory practices of unscrupulous debt collectors.

The assurance that these and other criteria govern fiscal decisions is indispensable for guaranteeing the primacy of human rights in the face of austerity, whether it be during an economic crisis or not. Nevertheless, references to rights are absent in the discussion. It's unacceptable for austerity to be administered blindly or, worse yet, with one eye covered and the other winking in the direction of privileged groups, who will not only conserve their power but will see it grow as a result of the crisis.18 It is inconsistent to cut retirement pensions, close schools, privatize medical services, and eliminate labor rights while at the same time approving a public policy that rewards the financial speculation of foreign and local investors. It is unacceptable that when privileged sectors are offered exemptions, the political class is enriched by lobbying for greater austerity and measures like PROMESA, and the salaries of those same public servants who are called on to administer budgetary adjustments are raised. To offer an example: while the average annual income of Puerto Rican families is $18,600—far below the poverty line in the United States—the Junta's executive director, Ukrainian Natalie Jaresko, makes $650,000 a year. This figure doesn't include other benefits such as having a driver, paid trips, and other expenses.

The Puerto Rican government's debt—which is not the same as saying Puerto Rico's debt—is close to seventy-three billion dollars. The figure hovers between seventy-one and seventy-five billion dollars, depending on the source or the day when the figure is shared. We don't know much else. The Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (Center for Investigative Journalism), an independent organization in Puerto Rico, reported that between 40 and 50 percent of the debt is in the hands of hedge funds, otherwise known as vulture funds.19 Likewise, a US entity called Hedge Clippers, which investigates the transactions of these funds, has denounced the role of the banking sector—led by Santander Bank and with the direct participation of some members of the Junta—in the progressive indebtedness of the country.20 These findings pass from news stories into indignation, and from there to indifference. The allegation gets watered down in the repetition of an imprecise number given to such a diffuse and tricky concept as a “country's debt.”21 The limit is the reality of not knowing how much, why, to whom, and how it's owed—because they don't tell us, because they don't reveal public data, because they negotiate behind closed doors and under the table, because they set themselves against us, because they control the private interests, rackets, and lies. What we do know is how much, why, and the fact they demand that we [nosotras] pay.

To illustrate this point, I will include a note about what we know for certain. Junta President José Carrión III expressed his belief that the people of Puerto Rico's adjustment capacity stems from their maturity and understanding of the exigencies of these difficult times. In which anyone—including someone like himself—might decide to stay at home instead of attempting to do something for Puerto Rico. When Carrión and other members of the Junta leave their homes—to do “something for the country”—they do it in luxurious places. The Junta meets in the Hamilton Building in New York or in the hotel El Conquistador in Fajardo, Puerto Rico. One of the more recent meetings took place in the “Centro de Convenciones de Pedro Rosselló González” (Pedro Rosselló Convention Center), which is named after the former governor, and father of the current governor, Ricardo Rosselló. The father's administration, during the economic boom of the early 1990s, stood out for its privatization, criminalization of poverty, and repression of protest. His son has followed in his footsteps. This meeting of the Junta coincided with the prelude to student strikes at the University of Puerto Rico, an institution whose budget the Junta had threatened to cut by more than half. For many, and particularly for the students who went to protest at the Convention Center, the Junta's meeting was an homage to an earlier meeting that the previous governor, Luis Fortuño, had held nearby during the student protests of 2010, where they beat students unconscious. There are no metaphors that can withstand the weight of these times. Even so, aren't our cuerpas tasked with carrying the burden?

This brings us back to the question of responsibility as a key element in the discussion of debt as it's handled by the Puerto Rican and US governments, by the vultures within and without, and by those who insist on the mythical yet useful figure of the (female) scapegoat. Conversations about debt are plagued by tropes of responsibility.22 The market and bondholders establish the parameters of fulfillment and satisfaction of obligations. A country gives its word when it enters into a debt agreement. This same country fails in its responsibility—a meta-patriotic/financial/international duty—when it does not pay according to what was agreed in the contract. The people are responsible for adjusting to—or abiding by—the austerity measures that must be fulfilled. If the state responds, we all respond (#TodasRespondemos).23 Although not all of us. Blame, which is the other side of indebtedness, is translated into common discourses and common practices around irresponsibility and the vocation of personal failure. It manifests in local bodies and identities, in the barriada, in the projects. Blame in this country, or in any other, is never an orphan. She is poor, Black, and a woman.

Indebted Women

Despite the fact that discussions of debt are dominated by masculinity, their consequences aren't gender-neutral.24 Budget cuts in education, healthcare, housing, and development impact girls and women, including elderly women, with greater severity. Privatization does this as well, as a key aspect of austerity's architecture, whereby essential services are put into the hands of those who seek to generate profits by raising prices and lowering availability. It is women who assume the role of overcoming the deficiencies created by unsustainable debt, which increases their exclusion and dependence.

As partners, mothers, professors, activists, caretakers, teachers, workers, or the unemployed, we are the women called on to respond, adapt, serve, and meet the demands on us in times of crisis in order to ensure the well-being of our families, our communities, and the country. This is not accidental. As Athena Athanasiou contends, debt is a key technology of biopolitical governance, a political and moral economy of life itself.25 In this sense, the condition of indebtedness is part of the global feminization of poverty, growing structures of domination, colonialism, and patriarchy. It's a “natural” extension of the cycle of contract-responsibility-blame-burden created in our name as women, but without taking us into account, and sometimes with our approval.

Often when we approach austerity critically, we reproduce the same structure by concentrating on the readings of authorized economists, commenting on the margins of what our male colleagues produce from the left, center, or right. We end up serving as footnotes to “more knowledgeable” lawyers, or we limit the scope of our studies to employment statistics or access to social welfare. These facts have little to do with our true economies and instead describe the functions of the machinery that has historically repressed and rendered us invisible.

It is in the context of this way of situating indebted women that a kind of pornography of austerity is validated, which seeks to use us as an anchor in the face of current exigencies and uncertainty. The pornography of austerity has, at the very least, two elements that get rearticulated according to majoritarian political, state, fiscal, and religious demands. The first component is the colonial condition. The second is the production of footage of poverty. What I argue next doesn't negate the experiences linked to those referents. I believe that when we feel militant and called to action because an occasion approaches when we can come together with other women who feel similarly, for example, in feminist work in activism or the academy, it's because we recognize the opportunity to share with other women the burden, the rage, and the empathy of knowing ourselves traversed by the colony, poverty, and the power of information. What I want to insist on is how these axes—along with others—naturalize the idea of “the debt in us,” as women, and to a certain extent legitimize the notion that we ought to pay back what we don't owe and never did owe in the first place.

I'll begin with colonialism. Debts don't occur in a vacuum. They occupy a place that sometimes coincides with being one of the causes of debt itself. In the case of Puerto Rico, the place and cause are the colony. According to Ann Laura Stoler, “for those women who inhabit it, the colony is a promise and the anticipation of a future. For other women, it is a suspension of time: the ordinary is reordered in a sealed off and delimited space.”26 The colony is that which does not appear anywhere, that which is overcome in discourse and in practice: that which is displaced by the postcolony. The colony is that which is abandoned by everyone, except for those who keep finding ways to exploit it. Such a selective invisibilization is never accidental.

In international discussions that focus on human rights responsibilities in the context of unsustainable debt levels, colonies and their inhabitants are rarely considered.27 Since 1953, Puerto Rico has stopped being included on the United Nations' list of colonies.28 It is because of its colonial condition that the island doesn't have access to external restructuring mechanisms and international forums where it could demand—and obtain—adequate remedies for the violations of human rights caused by debt and austerity. Puerto Rico's colonial status dooms its economy to failure and maintains the country as a captive market and consumer. At the same time, it permits US tribunals to remake criollo mechanisms of restructuring. With the utmost impunity, the federal government thus invokes sociopolitical and juridical doctrines around plenary and territorial powers on the island—doctrines reminiscent of Manifest Destiny—to eradicate any democratic threat, to impose the Junta, and to guarantee the repayment of debt to bondholders.

Recently, I encountered a definition of the colony that seemed correct to me: the colony operates through “repeated acts of capture.”29 It's never a safe space: for women, it's a hostile territory tinged with the rise of gender violence, precarity, the criminalization of protest, impunity for civil servants who rape women, and the church who prays for the rapist and his family.30 The island is a nonhome [no-hogar]. As a woman, one is always waiting anxiously for something else, or for a liberation from that anxiety.31 While the country empties, some women are always looking for an opportunity to leave clandestinity, to leap over to the other side, to arrive at the noncolony here or somewhere else—perhaps.32

Nevertheless, to insist on space is a kind of prison. The politics of the local-colonial shuts us in with the jailer. We swallow the key. We women remain prisoners, permanently indigestible. The colony is a trap of sorts: impossible to confront and, at the same time, easy to see. Even as the colony is invisible, at moments it becomes hypervisible—pornographic in its austerity—which threatens to displace whichever other need is “not related.” By “not related,” I mean, for example, the demands that they don't take our jobs, housing, or healthcare, and that they don't harass, rape, or murder us. Or when they ask us to postpone making “women's complaints” in order to devote ourselves completely to the struggle for the country's liberation. To end the colony is important, but it can't be everything. If the colony's struggle is everything, it ends up being nothing, and it is this nothing that threatens to swallow all our grievances. Indebted life is the continuation of colonial life and denouncing one of the manifestations of the occupation can't require the suppression of another. Furthermore, the cartographies of debt include and affect our individual and collective cuerpas above all, cuerpas that are spaces of conflict, spaces to decolonize. It is to those cuerpas that we are returning.

The second part of the pornography of austerity is the exploitative media representation of poverty and data. Although these fragments never manage to explain, express, or denounce us [nosotras] women-in-debt, there is an insistence on reducing us to these small shards of images and numbers. This practice almost always occurs in order to reduce, project, domesticate, make us responsible for, or repress the complex precarity of women in the economic crisis.

Let me share an anecdote. A few months after the approval of PROMESA, a well-known New York Times reporter visited Puerto Rico to write one of those ethnographic-safariesque articles about the crisis. In one of the interview roundtables, the reporter and the photographer interrupted us again and again to ask where they could find and take photos of the poor. The article, published with the title “A Surreal Life on the Precipice in Puerto Rico,” angered many women because of the way the reporter's scorn for class, race, and gender, as well as her sense of imperial supremacy, had guided her reading of the crisis: “There are fully stocked supermarkets and vacant houses. Gleaming commuter trains rolling past boarded-up storefronts. Patriots who denounce Yankee imperialism and shop at Walmart. Twelve percent unemployment and no one to pick the coffee crop. Teenagers dance in sequined prom dresses while the homeless sleep outside on the sidewalk. It is America, beneath a surreal veneer.”33 Mostly women are shown in the photos: resting, sitting, hungry, unemployed, and never working. It's an imaginary of debt that insists on its legitimacy as it feminizes the face of the “happy,” guilty, rowdy, lazy person [bullanguero]. According to a study done a few years ago, Puerto Rico is the fifteenth-happiest country in the world.34 Sarah Ahmed affirms that happiness is a duty and that every duty is a debt.35 Those who don't suffer as they should, or according to one's idea of suffering, show us just how—and how much—is owed. An image suffices.

This exploitative imagery is dressed up with numbers that attempt to portray the state of women in the country and austerity in a bad light. They are the same myopic and dubious figures as always. They state, for example, that 46.2 percent of the population is below the poverty line, that 58 percent of those same poor households have a single mother at the head of the family, and that 70 percent of them are unemployed.36 Other common figures include the number of women who receive public assistance to obtain food for their households, and those who receive child support. Some days, when the newspapers disseminate statistics about abused women, women killed by their partners, or those who have gone missing, I can't understand if they are raising awareness or propagating victimization.

In spite of so many facts and figures, there are some that never, or only very rarely, get mentioned. Like, for example, that a box of eighteen tampons costs, on average, $7.00 before tax, while the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour before subtracting taxes. They also fail to point out that under PROMESA the minimum wage can be lowered to $4.25 an hour, before taxes, for women twenty-five years old or younger, at the governor's discretion.37 Or that the average menstrual cycle lasts five days; and in order to avoid infections or life-threatening complications, a woman should change her tampon every six to eight hours at most; and that the flow of blood obligates us to change them much more frequently. Or that eight tampons may be needed every day, and that two boxes are needed every month, twelve months of the year, which adds up to about $168 annually, or twenty-four hours of a woman's work time. Or that thanks to the federal government's budget cuts, which eliminate the cash a family with public assistance benefits can withdraw—which was $60 a year ago—today, they can only withdraw $36. Or that from that sum, an impoverished woman is responsible for paying for sanitary pads, tampons, cleaning products, deodorant, toilet paper, adult diapers, children's school materials—because if it wasn't for the teacher there wouldn't even be chalk—but also gas, water, and electricity, because if you don't pay they'll take the roof from over your head. And with that, they'll snatch away our children, our peace and dignity, our bodies, our stink, and all the fucking rest of it. This is what the statistics don't show. This is the truth that fleshes out the beautiful facts and clean numbers of poverty. But it's never spoken about because it isn't proper, because it stinks. In one of the newspaper columns I've collected in this book, I wrote the following:

I speak of blood, of that time of the month, and of how poor women's bodies, imagined as a point of reference for the lessons of austerity, are used to punish impoverished femininity. I speak of the fact that we resist with our blood if necessary, but we pay with our blood as well. Humanity seems no better than a swarm of insects to me when I consider the traffic in napkins in fast food restaurants. I see them stacked on the toilet tanks, cut in half to economize, and so they don't clog the pipes. I think about those women who have to ration tampons and change them only when it's urgent. That is to say: after the stain, the burning, the itch, the smell, the overflow, the exposure. I speak of the expropriated body, of the forced odors, of the shared blows. And from there the vulgarity. Not in terms of the people or the body, but rather the filth and disgust. I want it to be understood in this way: poverty is vulgar, it is also filth and disgust.38

One of my favorite parts of The Fortunes of Feminism by Nancy Fraser alludes to the variable, but never arbitrary, signifiers of poor women, welfare, and necessity.39 The author moves from Mikhail Bakhtin and Pierre Bourdieu to Michel Foucault, passing through other male writers, to reveal how necessity is meticulously produced, calculated, and utilized as a political instrument. It's also about a failed exchange, and impossible empathies. As austerity pornographically exposes us, it sets us apart, it breaks us, it renders us invisible. A woman in ruins in a country in ruins is a convenient sociological explanation for disaster, a buttress for the economists of the crisis, a respite for those who caused it.

Las propias

While I write this I feel the moments of rage, of thirst, of exhaustion, of the simultaneous desire to begin and end something, to go out onto the streets. For some time now, reality has been sinking in—here and there: the reality of what this all adds up to, of the (h)isla, of the world in shards, of politics, executive orders, laws, and budget cuts. All of this happens so fast that we can hardly come up for air before another wave hits us again: the crisis of temporality is another aspect of it. At the current crossroads, the possibilities are either that we are constituted by debt or that debt becomes our own affair: that we, as women, refashion and redefine the matter of debt, the fight against austerity, what makes a dignified life, and the future. How will our bodies be described after this? What strategy should we place our bets on? I propose that it be on the consciousness of those who resist in order to insist on us, as women, that we don't owe anyone. And to insist on las propias with, without, and in spite of these times of austerity.

Anzaldúa writes “nosotras” (us, or us women) with a slash between “nos” and “otras.” This rupture can mean many things. Among them, that we are at odds with one another, that we injure the “other” because of her identity, race, gender, sexual orientation. And that because we ourselves are injured, we let our rage trample others.40 Traversed by debt, las propias can also be a rupture. When they want to collect a payment, or take everything from us, we identify ourselves, we put ourselves back in touch with cuerpas: with those who stop traffic, those they rape or kill and throw in a ditch, those whom the state assassinates, and those who disappear. Our bodies, us, “our bodies, ourselves.” Such a return is necessary in times when they deny us access to medical care, regulate us, and attack us for being immigrants, Black, indigenous, lesbian, trans, old, women, other. This encounter with the cuerpa is necessary and urgent.

This is distinct from identity politics, or the critiques of identity politics that we exercise only to obtain pyrrhic victories, self-designate as arbiters, and administer exclusion within the feminist collective. A body can also be a wall. The supremacy of some feminisms can be borders too. And how difficult it is to foresee the ruptures we create when we use our cuerpas, identities, and experiences to exclude other women—instead of calling out the patriarchy—when we aim to prove the supposed superiority of our having been a feminist for more years, having read more books, taken more courses, developed or critiqued more public policies, gone to more conferences, and militated in more public forums and therefore proven ourselves to be more radical, more committed, more precarious, more feminist in the struggle. Within the allegory of debt, a feminism whose principal function is to outdo other women, to alert them that they are very privileged, very white, very passive, very patriarchal, is vulture feminism. Las propias must work against this.

I don't call this out in order to ignore oppression with the aim of creating impossible coalitions. It is urgent to denounce provisional whiteness, class hatred, and the patriarchy. What I call for is for us to be to alert to the reproduction of structures of extraction: that we don't obligate others to be a certain way and then “charge” them [nos/otras] when they don't fulfill the “pact.” Anzaldúa writes: “may the ‘nosotras’ without the rupture be the new name for the women who escape the cages, who fight with and for differences, and who hold those differences without succumbing to binaries.”41 The pedagogy of indebted women is not a call into the void. It calls to us against the vultures both inside and out.

On International Women's Day, March 8, 2017, a group of women blocked one of the major highways of Puerto Rico's metropolitan area. They protested against austerity, the Junta, violence, comrades who undermine us when they say, “the people before the debt,” and the colony. With its slogan “If we strike the country shuts down” [Si nosotras paramos el país se detiene], the activity was the beginning of a day of resistance and encounter—of diverse and militant cuerpas, of women indebted to themselves, to the struggle, to las propias. Amid all the organizing work done by others, I took on the task of arranging legal support. I didn't do this because I thought there would be a need to represent anyone, but rather because we—present and future lawyers—also resist with our bodies. Engaging in the struggle from one's own position, while looking to connect with or be there for another—that is conscious solidarity. In the feminist struggle against austerity and violence, those of us who militate feel certain about our fundamental principle and duty: “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

Nosotras

The day after the strike, I wrote to the coordinators of the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción—the organization that convened the early-morning activities gathering friends—a message that went something like this:

Yesterday at 4:30 a.m. I left my mother at the Sagrado Corazón train station so she could gather with the other rebellious women. There was an enormous group of women already up, laughing, combative, ready to tackle the problem, present. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. A half hour later, we arrived at the Plaza de las Américas parking lot to meet with the lawyers and students who had come in solidarity from the Comité de Acción Legal (Legal Action Committee). Women arrived alone, in pairs. They put on red lipstick and tied the small green bandanas that identify us as legal support around their necks, we organized ourselves and marched to the highway to meet with the others. Once there, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Later, on the highway, I saw my friends, colleagues, women I didn't know, women I've fought with, my mother, stopping traffic, singing, fearless, confronting police and the press. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Just like that, the whole day was a succession of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen, until later on, in the middle of the picket of five thousand women who'd stopped traffic on La Milla de Oro,42 I realized that I was no longer afraid of running into my attackers, who had come one night eleven years ago, and since then had returned to me in my nightmares. It was moving through the streets, with the feeling of being safe—to yell slogans, to cry, to hug, to be accompanied by so much rage, tenderness, solidarity—that was the most beautiful thing in the world, a liberation, a debt settled by you, companions and comrades, who owed me nothing at all.

I wanted to write about this, thinking that from now on, I can join others to begin to delineate a kind of pedagogy of indebted women and our role in the political future of debt and austerity. I wanted to write statements that leave no doubt that activism involves the labor of healing.43 To be an activist against austerity is to announce the time to pay ourselves what is owed even without our owing it, to charge those responsible, to recognize and honor the pending debts in our favor, in, from, and for us women. We are las propias, the ones who don't owe anyone. For that conviction, that payment, that liberty, thank you.

Acknowledgments

Originally published in Spanish in Ariadna M. Godreau-Aubert, Las propias: Apuntes para una pedagogía de las endeudadas (Cabo Rojo, PR: Editora Educación Emergente, 2018), 54–76. An earlier version of this text was presented as the keynote address at the Coloquio Nacional sobre las Mujeres (National Colloquium on Women) at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, April 3–5, 2017.

Notes

1.

Translator's note: The Spanish word for body (el cuerpo) is masculine, while the word la cuerpa in this text is a neologism that has been gaining circulation in feminist circles as it attempts to account for the gendered difference of embodied experience for women. This and other words are often given feminine endings in order to counteract the usage of masculine nouns or pronouns in general or to designate objects or groups of mixed gender. In order to capture this usage and the material particularities it registers, I leave it mostly untranslated in the rest of the text.

2.

Cuerpa refers to the nominal, material, spiritual, and political entity from which we situate ourselves when we identify as women or at the margins of the coordinates traditionally demarcated by male bodies [los cuerpos], the genders, and the sexes. A cuerpa is also a degendered or degraded woman who occupies or is occupied.

4.

Translator's note: Las propias is a concept coined by the author to designate feminist self-possession, as it plays on the word propiedad (property). It's related to the adjective propio/a, which means one's own, or belonging to the self.

5.

With respect to the truth, Puerto Rican poet José María Lima wrote that to tell the truth in fragments is also a way of telling it. Some decades later, another Puerto Rican writer, Guillermo Rebollo-Gil, wrote, “the worst thing about a cadaver is finding it. It's perhaps the only occasion when a discovery is a supreme and total loss. That, and when it's discovered that one of your own is guilty of the crime” (Decirla en pedacitos, 61). To allude to the broken time [el tiempo roto] in which we're living, to those who are born and die during the crisis, is not to make a marginal note about social fragmentation. In the same way, to affirm that to write from Puerto Rico today is to write from the scene of the crime isn't a commentary about street violence. To attend to our reality as indebted colonial women from a decolonizing and feminist perspective is to break with the discourses that reject imperialism while reinforcing the murderous patriarchal colonial power of the banking system. It is to accept that for a while now everything has been a cadaver: what is mine and yours, what is in our hands and the hands of others. To live under austerity is also to subsist on fragments and haphazardly, with stolen words that never say exactly what they should. Still, we can't abandon discovery, movement, voice.

6.

Translator's note: The Spanish word promesa is a cognate for the English word for “promise.”

7.

Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), Pub. L. No. 114-187, 130 Stat. 549 (2016).

8.

Despite the fact that the PROMESA law calls the body the “Junta de Supervisión Fiscal” (“Financial Oversight and Management Board”), its immediate and subsequent acts after its establishment leave no doubt as to the privileges and powers of this unelected body. Beyond overseeing the management of the budget on behalf of the government, the Junta has the ability to implement public policy with respect to austerity, thus directly impacting fundamental rights like housing, dignified work, environmental rights, healthcare, and education. To call it a Junta, moreover, alludes to the long history of dictatorship that we share with countries from the so-called Global South. The Junta was constituted and operates indifferently to the desire of those who live in Puerto Rico. The distance between supervision and control is proportionate to that which exists between democracy and colonialism.

9.

Puerto Rico has been under colonial regimes since 1492. In 1898, the island was ceded by Spain to the United States pursuant to agreements under the Treaty of Paris, which marked the end of the Spanish-American War. Until 1907, Puerto Rico was under a military regime. In 1917, US citizenship was extended to those who were born in Puerto Rico. It was a second-class citizenship that permitted the recruitment of Puerto Ricans for obligatory military service, but did not extend the right to vote in the presidential election. Not until 1948 were the first elections held on the Island, resulting in the victory of Luis Muñoz Marín. Under his government, in 1952, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico was established, a unique juridical and political condition that attempted to “regularize” the colonial relation between Puerto Rico and the United States. In 1953, and thanks to the complicity of the Puerto Rican and US governments, the United States succeeded in removing Puerto Rico from the list of territories that had not reached self-determination, under the eyes of the United Nations. Thus, the United States freed itself from the obligation to report to the international community on Puerto Rico. This invisibilized the persecution, incarceration, and murder of believers in independence, the degree of US control over the economy and politics of the country, and now, the close relation between colonialism and the current crisis of public debt. To date, the Puerto Rican people don't participate in US presidential elections. Moreover, they have one representative without voting rights in the US Congress. This same model is replicated in PROMESA. The Junta officials are chosen by the president and Congress. The governor of Puerto Rico is an ex-officio, non-voting member of the body.

10.

Translator's note: The text uses the feminine “we” or “us” (nosotras) throughout, which I distinguish from the masculine and generic nosotros by adding the qualifier “female,” or “women” depending on the context.

11.

Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 2. Translator's note: the key term nepantla, a Nahuatl word from Anzaldúa's work, registers in-betweenness and liminality, among other things.

13.

International Monetary Fund, “Factsheet.” This approach has been thoroughly criticized by defenders of human rights, including the United Nations Independent Expert on the Effects of Foreign Debt and Other Related International Financial Obligations of States on the Full Enjoyment of All Human Rights, Particularly Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Juan Pablo Boholavsky. See also UN General Assembly, “Effects of Foreign Debt and Other Related International Financial Obligations of States on the Full Enjoyment of All Human Rights, Particularly Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,” A/71/305 (August 5, 2016), www.undocs.org/A/71/305.

14.

One of the guiding criteria of international law is the recognition that the state has a primary responsibility to protect the human rights of those who live in its territory. This includes a duty of care and safety under the protection of which states should ensure that third parties don't affect these fundamental guarantees. When I say the state of Puerto Rico, I mean the local government, but I also mean the United States. In the colony, responsibilities dissolve so impunity prevails. Women are fed up with the fact that responsibility is shared between so many that it belongs to no one. When I say third parties, I include creditors and vulture funds, those inside the country and those outside it.

15.

Although the study of the relation between human rights and public debt is a developing field, there exist various documents and instruments that establish minimum criteria to deal with the management of debt from a human rights perspective. All the sources agree that the guiding criterion should be the primacy of human rights. See the following reports, among others: UN Economic and Social Council, “Public Debt, Austerity Measures, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights,” E/C.12/2016/1 (July 22, 2016), www.undocs.org/E/C.12/2016/1; UN General Assembly, “Guiding Principles on Foreign Debt and Human Rights,” A/HR/20/23 (April 10, 2011), www.undocs.org/A/HRC/20/23.

16.

Since 1972, Puerto Rican delegations from different sectors have participated in the hearings of the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization to demand Puerto Rico again be included on the list of territories that have not reached self-determination. In the last few years, the delegations have denounced the impact of Puerto Rico's colonial condition on the deepening of the economic crisis. There are thirty-six resolutions by the Special Committee recommending Puerto Rico's case be discussed in the General Assembly. United States opposition has impeded such discussion. Furthermore, in April 2016, a group of activists and defenders of human rights participated in a hearing before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights to denounce the impact of public debt and austerity on the human rights of those who live in Puerto Rico. In the hearing, both the Puerto Rican and United States governments were held responsible for the violations committed. See Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, Report from the 157th session, section “Public Debt, Fiscal Politics, and Poverty in Puerto Rico, United States.”

17.

The concept of shared but differentiated responsibility has been developed in international environmental law. For example, it is one of the guiding principles of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. See UN General Assembly, “Rio Declaration on Environment and Development,” A/CONF.151/26 (June 14, 1992), www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcompact/A_CONF.151_26_Vol.I_Declaration.pdf. It refers to the responsibility that multiple actors may have for a specific issue. In relation to debt, the state, creditors, and others share responsibility for the violation of human rights that derive from austerity and the economic crisis provoked by debt. Nevertheless, the responsibility of each is distinct and varies according to criteria including power and influence, the role they have in relation to the debt, and their ability to provide reparations. To distinguish between responsibilities is as urgent as pointing out those responsible.

21.

For a more ample discussion of this topic, I suggest Mark Blyth, Austerity.

22.

Lazzarato, Making of Indebted Man, 30–31. This text beautifully attends to the genealogy of public debt as well as to the genealogies of guilt and responsibility under neoliberalism.

23.

Translator's note: The hashtag #TodasRespondemos is associated with recent feminist movements in Latin America including Ni Una Menos.

24.

The activism of the women defenders of human rights has led to the widespread—albeit insufficient—recognition of the disproportionate impact that austerity has on women. The Independent Expert established this in his 2012 report about women and debt. See UN General Assembly, “Effects of Foreign Debt and Other Related International Financial Obligations of States on the Full Enjoyment of All Human Rights, Particularly Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,” A/67/304 (August 13, 2012), www.undocs.org/A/67/304.

27.

Thanks to the work of defenders of human both rights within and outside Puerto Rico, on January 9, 2017, the Independent Expert expressed this regarding public debt in Puerto Rico. Undoubtedly, this is a significant step in the discussion of the relation between violations of human rights and austerity. For his statement, see Bohoslavsky, “Puerto Rico's Debt Crisis.” Nevertheless, the Independent Expert failed to recognize the antidemocratic character of the Junta, as well as the relationship between colonialism and the economic crisis afflicting the island. This aspect has been discussed in greater depth in Godreau-Aubert, Las propias, 39–48.

28.

The resolution of the United Nations General Assembly that marks the removal of Puerto Rico from the list of territories that have not reached self-government is UN General Assembly, “Cessation of the Transmission of Information under Article 73 e of the Charter in Respect of Puerto Rico,” A/RES/748(VIII) (November 27, 1953), www.undocs.org/a/res/748(VIII).

30.

In 2015, a delegation of Puerto Rican activists appeared during a public hearing before the Inter-American Comission on Human Rights to denounce the treatment of women in Puerto Rico. The findings presented were collected in Clínica Internacional de Derechos Humanos, “Puerto Rico: Territorio Hostil para las Mujeres.” 

32.

The intensification of the economic crisis and the lack of employment have led to a rise in emigration principally to the United States. Between 2006 and 2015, Puerto Rico has had a 9 percent decline in population. According to the United States Census Bureau, there were 3.47 million inhabitants on the island in 2015. See Krogstad, “Historic Population Losses.” 

36.

These statistics come from the Puerto Rico Community Survey in 2016 (Bishaw and Benson, “Poverty”).

37.

PROMESA, Section 403.

42.

Translator's note: La Milla de Oro is the wide boulevard in San Juan's financial district where the banks and financial institutions are located.

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