Background

Aviva Chomsky was born on April 30, 1957 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, into the family of Avram Noam and Carol Doris (Schatz) Chomsky.

Education

Aviva Chomsky received her education at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1982, a Master of Arts in 1985, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1990.

Career

Between 1976 and 1977, Chomsky worked for the United Farm Workers union. She credited this experience with sparking her "interest in the Spanish language, in migrant workers and immigration, in labor history, in social movements and labor organizing, in multinationals and their workers, in how global economic forces affect individuals, and how people collectively organize for social change." She began teaching at Bates College, and became an associate professor of history at Salem State College in 1997, the Coordinator of Latin American Studies in 1999, and a full professor in 2002.

Chomsky's book "West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica 1870 – 1940" describes the history of the United Fruit Company, formed in 1899 from the merger of multiple US-based companies that built railroads and cultivated bananas on the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica. It also shows how the workers, including many Jamaicans originally of African descent, developed their own parallel socioeconomic system.

Achievements

• Aviva Chomsky is highly famous as the author of books "West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940", "Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, 1860-1950", and "Dying for Growth: The New World Order and the Health of the Poor."
  
  Chomsky's book "West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica 1870 – 1940" was awarded the 1997 Best Book Prize by the New England Council of Latin American Studies.

Works

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  • Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal

    (Explores what it means to be undocumented in a legal, soc...)

    2014
  • Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class

    (Exploring globalization from a labor history perspective,...)

    2008
  • "They Take Our Jobs!": and 20 Other Myths about Immigration

    (Revised and expanded edition of the groundbreaking book w...)

    2018
  • The Profits of Extermination: Big Mining in Colombia

    (The Profits of Extermination uncovers the costs of foreig...)

    2005
  • West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica 1870-1940

    (In the late nineteenth century, several U.S.-based compan...)

    1996
  • The Dispossessed: Chronicles of the Desterrados of Colombia 2013
  • The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics 2004
  • A History of the Cuban Revolution 2015

Views

Chomsky has been active in Latin American solidarity and immigrants’ rights issues since the 1980s. Her articles on immigration rights have appeared in The Nation, HuffPost and TomDispatch, a project of The Nation Institute, and she has delivered lectures across the world on labor rights and immigration rights.

Membership

• Association of Caribbean Historians

• American Historical Association

• Latin-American Labor History Group

• Latin-American Studies Association

• New England Council on Latin-American Studies

• New England Historical Association

Connections

Aviva married Jon Aske on October 31, 1986.

Father:

Avram Noam Chomsky

Mother:

Carol Doris (Schatz) Chomsky

Spouse:

Jon Aske

Grandfather:

William Chomsky