This essay focuses on the first two Spanish-language texts published in the United States: Santiago Puglia’s 1794 El desengaño del hombre (Man Undeceived) and the anonymous Reflexiones sobre el Comercio de España con sus Colonias en America, en tiempo de Guerra (1799). Read together, these works illustrate how exchange – economic, linguistic, and cultural – informs the beginnings of US Hispanophone literature and reveal how the logic of exchange reflects the uneasy transitions from colony to republic, monarchy to democracy, and agrarianism to commerce. Ultimately, the Hispanophone literature of the period reveals an undecidability between such terms that is itself indicative of both the literature and politics of the early nineteenth-century Americas.