Immigrant Debt: Daisy Hernández and the Cripping of the American Dream

Abstract: Memoirist and literary journalist Daisy Hernández has addressed racial health disparities across a career that spans more than two decades, but her contribution to crip theory has not received scholarly attention. This article demonstrates that contribution in a somewhat counterintuitive way, focusing on her first memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed ( 2014)—a text with relatively little discussion of the US healthcare system compared to the rest of her work. By focusing on this text and specifically on its exploration of debt, this essay argues that the significance of Hernández’s work for disability studies lies not only in its explicit depiction of the healthcare system but more importantly in its theoretical alignment. In particular, the treatment of debt in A Cup of Water Under My Bed provides an occasion to reexamine a central theoretical intervention of disability studies: its conceptualizations of independence, interdependence, and dependence. This article elaborates theories of interdependence in crip theory and disability justice activism; demonstrates how Hernández’s debt narrative challenges both a cultural imperative towards independence and a binary framing of debt (as good/bad or just/unjust); and finally examines how Hernández’s treatment of debt reveals an alignment between disability justice and immigrant justice.