Aviva Chomsky
| Aviva Chomsky | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 20, 1957 |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Historian, author, and activist |
| Parent(s) |
Noam Chomsky Carol Chomsky |
| Relatives | William Chomsky (grandfather) |
 "How Immigration Became Illegal": Aviva Chomsky on U.S. Exploitation of Migrant Workers, Democracy Now, May 30, 2014 |
|
|
Aviva Chomsky on "Undocumented: The Theory and Practice of Illegality", Pomona College, February 28, 2013 |
Aviva Chomsky (born April 20, 1957) is an American teacher, historian, author and activist. She is a professor of History and the Coordinator of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies at the Salem State University in Massachusetts. She previously taught at Bates College in Maine and was a Research Associate at Harvard University, where she specialized in Caribbean and Latin American history. She is the eldest daughter of linguists Noam and Carol Chomsky. Her paternal grandfather, William Chomsky (1896–1977), was a Hebrew scholar at, and principal of, Gratz College for many years.
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". At the University of California at Berkeley, she obtained her B.A. in Spanish and Portuguese in 1982, M.A. in History in 1985, and Ph.D. in History in 1990, before she began teaching at Bates College. She became an associate professor of history at Salem State College in 1997, and the Coordinator of Latin American Studies in 1999. She became a full professor in 2002.
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. The book describes the history of the United Fruit Company, formed in 1899 from the merger of multiple U.S.-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.
...
Wikipedia