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You should look into serfdom or feudal land tenure if you think mortgages are something new. They're just an iteration of a system that has existed for a long time. Also, unsurprisingly, mortgages exist pretty much everywhere. The financialization of them might be more of a US problem indeed but the other points stand.
Serfdom was a consequence of Land Barony, which became a formal process of effectively robbing peasant farmers at swordpoint. Land tenure was a consequence of Enclosure, which was a formal fencing off of public grazing lands by these same land barons. Both of these were prerequisites for the eventual advent of mortgages. But they required a lot more direct application of armed goons. And they were designed to expel native peoples to clear the way for settlers.
Mortgages are a debt vehicle used to move settlers onto seized land, not a military occupation designed to force native people off of it.
Post-WW2 US Hegemony cast a long shadow.
But you see mortgages in places where native people have been expelled, land has been enclosed and financialized, and new settlers have been ushered onto the land under debt peonage. Native people who have held onto their lands don't pay mortgages. They have no one to pay mortgages to, because nobody else has title to their property.