This dissertation explores the social relations of indebtedness. In this project I read Latinx and Latin American texts not often placed in conversation—Tomás Rivera’s …y no se lo tragó la tierra, Carlos Fuentes’ La Frontera de Cristal, Rosario Ferré’s Maldito Amor, and Angie Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee—and explore their thematic and formal engagements with debt. I consider the problem of the visibility, representation, and understanding of indebtedness and argue that, to engage with the invisible logic of debt requires engaging the formal logic—the temporal, narratological, and rhetorical features—of the text. Each chapter treats each of these texts as a case study, and analyzes a different historical context and a different form and scale of debt—from the individual and informal in Rivera’s text to the sovereign and neocolonial in Ferré’s. Unlike other scholars who read for representations of high finance, the stock market, and debt relations, I read texts where questions of credit, finance, and the market are represented in subtle ways, attending to how the ideologies that precede debt are negotiated in the intimate spaces of the home and the family. I ask questions like what kind of ideas about the American Dream, family sacrifice, and national progress prop up debt regimes or what ideas about national progress justify sovereign debt to understand the generation and maintenance of an indebted subjectivity, not merely on an institutional and abstract level, but from below. Reading for debt’s logic is not an attempt to expose the latent ideology of the text or how it mimetically reflects reality but rather to show how the text’s critical engagement of related ideologies—those of progress, development, and liberalism—also encode questions related to credit, debt, risk, and loss. The texts I bring together offer a certain comparative, theoretical, and historical value in foregrounding narrative’s ability to generate relationships of debt and expose the literary techniques deployed to conceal debt’s logic. I show how attending to debt in these texts reframe struggles that tend to be thought of in spatial terms—displacement, migration, expropriation, extraction—and help us see them in temporal ones. Unlike engagements of finance and indebtedness that focus on its asocial and alienating qualities, I show how these texts render visible the deeply intimate nature of indebtedness and how debt mechanisms both produce and are produced by social relationships. Throughout the project, I argue that the relations of intimacy—the stories told that produce closeness, the care from which value is extracted for the production of profit, and the relations created between the debtor and the creditor—are the necessary conditions for contemporary debt and finance across the Americas.

This thesis argues that social debt profoundly transformed the environment in which literature was produced and experienced in the early modern period. In each chapter, I examine the various ways in which social debt affected Renaissance writers and the literature they produced. While considering the cultural changes regarding patronage, love, friendship, and debt, I will analyze the poetry and drama of Ben Jonson, Lady Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Middleton. Each of these writers experiences social debt in a unique and revealing way. Ben Jonson's participation in networks of social debt via poetry allowed him to secure both a livelihood and a place in the Jacobean court through exchanges of poetry and patronage. The issue of social debt pervades both Wroth's life and her writing. Love and debt are intertwined in the actions of her father, the death of her husband, and the themes of her sonnets and pastoral tragicomedy. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596), Antonio and Bassanio’s friendship is tested by a burdensome interpersonal debt, which can only be alleviated by an outsider. This indicated the transition from honor-based credit system to an impersonal system of commercial exchange. Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One (1608) examines how those heavily in debt dealt with both the social and legal consequences of defaulting on loans.