Sarah Molinari is a doctoral student in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center. Sarah has six years of research experience in Vieques, Cabo Rojo, and San Juan, Puerto Rico and is currently developing her dissertation project on debt resistance in Puerto Rico amid its historic debt and economic crises. The research will examine how Puerto Ricans across a generational range are experiencing and contesting relations of debt and credit and how different social and symbolic meanings of “debt” take shape. Sarah is also a member of Columbia University’s working group on Puerto Rico’s debt crisis called, “Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy.”

I requested a CLACLS summer travel grant to help fund a follow-up archival research trip to consult La Colección Puertorriqueña at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. I had planned to review the collection of Government Development Bank (GDB) promotional magazines in order to trace how the governmental debt emitting agency “narrated” and promoted public debt emissions that are currently being challenged in the courts and within the citizen movement to audit the debt. However, given the pandemic travel limitations and the closure of the UPR archive to researchers, I was not able to visit Puerto Rico and it is unclear when a visit will be possible. Under these circumstances, I decided to pivot to digitally accessible sources. The CLACLS funding provided the support to purchase online subscriptions to various financial market and other newspapers including theWall Street Journal, Bond Buyer, and The Financial Times, and El Nuevo Día. I am currently reviewing these periodicals’ digital archives and analyzing the media narratives that emerge about Puerto Rico’s public debt to incorporate into my dissertation chapter called “Unsettling public debt: protest and counter-moralities of debt.”