The settler states relationship with Puerto Rico can’t be disentangled from the imposition of colonial debt – the overturning of Vaello-Madero is the latest “gift” to the territories that will balloon the coercive debt burden to infinite proportions

Because we are invaluable, we can never pay for ourselves. Nevertheless, we are required to pay. Incessantly we pay what can’t be paid. We pay, and pay, and pay, but not to own. Even our mothers, even our children, are not ours. We never come to terms, and this is too terribly beautiful for words. Our indebtedness is all we have, and all we have is what we owe to “one another.”

—Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “Indent (to Serve the Debt)”

What happens to the notion of crisis as a heuristic for understanding a specific moment in history when it is stretched into the foreseeable future? How does the longue durée of debt modulate crisis? Does the debt crisis in contemporary Puerto Rico represent a discrete event, or does it instead describe a new normal, that is, a permanent state of affairs? In this essay, I am working to discern and describe a different future for Puerto Rico, one that does away with crisis thinking as a point of departure for analyzing the politics of debt without thereby disavowing the real effects of ongoing colonialism, economic recession, and ecological disruption. Ultimately, I am interested in the ways Puerto Ricans have claimed and enacted forms of historical memory, social life, and political resurgence that challenge the hegemonic narrative of crisis.

Under the current fiscal plan orchestrated by the congressionally appointed Federal Oversight and Management Board—created by the 2016 Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act, or PROMESA (meaning “promise” in Spanish)—it will take the people of Puerto Rico approximately forty years to pay over $120 billion in debt.1 In reality, this debt will likely never be paid in its entirety. Despite the rhetoric and all appearances to the contrary, creditors do not actually expect Puerto Rico to pay off this debt. What investors expect and desire is for Puerto Ricans to continue paying interest on this debt, which has been inflated through speculation in financial markets.2 In other words, for the people of Puerto Rico the future holds the dreaded promise of more debt service, more payments to pay what cannot be paid.

For some, however, the combination of the crises generated by the debt burden since 2006, Hurricane Maria’s impact in 2017, and the earthquakes that shook the island in January 2020 has forcefully established the urgency of decolonization as a political-economic, epistemological, affective, and cultural project in Puerto Rico.3 While people are concerned about the economy and their own ability to survive, there is also much skepticism among Puerto Ricans today about the individualist values and consumerist ethics that underlie the economic life of what Efrén Rivera Ramos calls the “modern colonial welfare state.”4 There is now a shared awareness for everyday people in Puerto Rico that they have or can count on only what they can give to one another, a reality laid bare by Hurricane Maria and the botched recovery that followed and reprised by the effects of the earthquake swarm of 2020. For those of us in the Puerto Rican diaspora, too, the urgencies of our contemporary moment demand answers to the questions of whether and how we are implicated in and called on by those networks serving people’s needs in the face of governmental inaction on the islands.2