Aviva Chomsky - Biography

Aviva Chomsky (born April 20, 1957) is an American historian, author, and activist. She teaches at Salem State College in Massachusetts, where she is also the coordinator of the Latin American studies program. 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 (1896–1978), was a Hebrew scholar at, and principal of, Gratz College for many years.

Her book West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica 1870–1940 relates the history of the U.S.-based companies which built railroads and cultivated bananas on the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica and merged to form United Fruit in 1899. It also describes how the workers, including many Jamaicans, originally of African descent, developed their own parallel socio-economic system. The book was awarded the 1997 Best Book Prize by the New England Council of Latin American Studies.

She has also co-edited books, including The People Behind the Coal, Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State, and The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Latin America Readers).

Publications

• A History of the Cuban Revolution, Wiley-Blackwell, New York, NY . Paperback. 224 pages. October 2010.ISBN 978-1-4051-8773-2
• Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class. Duke University Press,Durham, North Caroline. 2008. ISBN 0822341905

• The People Behind Colombian Coal/Bajo el manto del carbon, Aviva Chomsky, Garry Leech, Steve Striffler (Editors), 2007. ISBN 9589799558

• They Take Our Jobs! and 20 Other Myths About Immigration. Beacon Press, July 2007. Paperback: 236 pages . In English. (ISBN 978-0807041567).

• West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870–1940. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-8071-1979-2

• Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring People of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, (Comparative and International Working-Class History), Aviva Chomsky and Aldo Lauria-Santiago (Editors), 1998. 404 pages. Duke University Press, Durham, North Caroline, (ISBN 978-0822322023)

• The Profits of Extermination: How U.S. Corporate Power is Destroying Colombia, Francisco Ramírez Cuellar, Common Courage Press, (ISBN 1-56751-322-0), 2005. (Translation and introduction by Aviva Chomsky)

• The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics, Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, Pamela Maria Smorkaloff (Editors), Duke University Press, Durham, North Caroline, January 2004. (ISBN 978-0822331971).

• The Dispossessed: Chronicles of the Desterrados of Colombia (ISBN 1-931859-17-5) Author: Alfredo Molano (Introduction by Aviva Chomsky.)

External links

• http://www.avivachomsky.com
• Faculty profile at Salem State College.
• Review of The Costa Rica Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Steven Palmer and Iván Molina, eds. Durham: Duke University Press, Durham North Caroline, November 2004.