| Summary: | Puerto Rico's $72 billion unpayable debt has prompted one of the largest migrations in its history and austerity measures that strip Puerto Ricans of access to basic services such as health, education, and infrastructure. It has transformed life in Puerto Rico for the worse, in ways both intimate and structural. In this article, I track the poetics of debt articulated in contemporary feminist Puerto Rican poetry. In the span of three years, a number of volumes and poems were published that confronted the unpayable Puerto Rican debt: Roque Raquel Salas Rivera's Lo terciario/The Tertiary (2018), Mara Pastor's Falsa heladería (2018), Nicole Cecilia Delgado's Periodo especial (2019), Mayra Santos-Febres' Huracanada (2018) and a lyrical essay in Ariadna Godreau Aubert's Las propias: apuntes para una pedagogía de las endeudadas (2018). They all share a distinctively transfeminist and decolonial approach towards indebtedness. The poems reveal distinct formal styles and subject positions but share a form of theorizing the condition of indebtedness from a feminist and queer perspective. The condition of indebtedness is a form of subjection, and the feminist and queer poetry I read theorizes along with scholarship on activism on the links between gender and debt oppressions. Because the discourse around debt is dominated by legal, economic, and political perspectives, poetry becomes a fundamental site from which to understand indebtedness as a quotidian, affective, and embodied experience. The poetry of Salas Rivera, Pastor, and Delgado define the indebted position, refuse the moral and colonial culpability of debt, and articulate decolonial futures outside indebted subjection.
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