Abstract:

I examine the first performance of Los empeños de una casa in the context of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's experiences with finance and investment, arguing the centrality of the enslaved Juana de San José to her namesake's engagement with concepts of debt, worth, and price. I analyze these entanglements by considering economic historians' discussions of accounting's role in the formation of capitalism as a political economy. I then read the Sarao of Empeños as an accounting abstraction that includes Black voices of New Spain via Sor Juana's reckoning with marronage along silver routes; these were salient to the site of the first performance: the house of Fernando de Deza, the factor for the Spanish crown in New Spain. I thus explore the abstraction of Blackness in the Sarao, which, I contend, is like the fetishization and erasure performed by double-entry bookkeeping vis à vis commodities.