Colonial Debts

“At a time when many are turning to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María, there is a dire need for sophisticated texts like this that can help unsettle much of the commonsense thinking about Puerto Rico's debt and its colonial relationship to the United States. It is rare to see a book of this theoretical heft so well grounded in contemporary politics. Colonial Debts makes a unique and urgent contribution.”

~Yarimar Bonilla, coeditor of, Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm

“There are few better sites than Puerto Rico to take as a case study for the exploration of the entanglement between neoliberalism, colonialism, and coloniality. Rocío Zambrana offers a creative theoretical account that expands the horizon of examination from financial debts to historical debts and from juridico-political colonialism to coloniality. Colonial Debts provides an indispensable philosophical analysis to understand our current time. It is essential reading in critical and political theory, as well as in Puerto Rican and Caribbean Studies.”

~Nelson Maldonado-Torres, author of, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity

"Offering an account that weaves together philosophies of debt, American exceptionalism, and a description of attempts by various coalitions of leftists, students, women, and workers to resist, Zambrana not only details the experience of economic exploitation in Puerto Rico but confronts its particular effects on an array of marginalized groups, thereby showing that debt knows no divisions between identity and class and that the inequalities it imposes or creates must be met by an equally undivided left."

~Ed Morales, The Nation