Avi Chomsky
Professional Details
| Title: | Professor |
| Office: | SB-102F |
| Phone: | 978-542-6389 |
| Email: | avi.chomsky@salemstate.edu |
| Resume: | Avi Chomsky [DOC 126KB] |
| Website: | http://www.salemstate.edu/~achomsky |
Professional Biography
Much of my scholarly work can be traced back to the year I spent working for the United Farm Workers union back in 1976-77. I credit that experience with sparking my 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.
Professional Interests
My new book, Linked Labor Histories, looks at globalization as a long historical process with labor history at its center. It examines how employers have used regional inequalities to gain access to cheaper workers through immigration, plant relocation, and by using the threat of these two tactics to discipline their workers. I focus on several interrelated case studies in New England and Colombia, including the textile industry, the banana industry, and the coal industry, to argue that local labor histories are best understood in a global context. I recently published a brief, analytical college-level text on the Cuban Revolution. My current research projects include a global history of coal intertwined with a microhistory of northern Colombia, a history of international solidarity in the Americas, and a book tentatively titled "Undocumented."
Responsibilities
Professor of History and Coordinator of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies, Salem State College
Selected Publications
Books
A History of the Cuban Revolution. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class. Duke University Press, 2008.
The People Behind Colombian Coal: Mining, Multinationals and Human Rights/Bajo el manto del carbón: Pueblos y multinacionales en las minas del Cerrejón, Colombia, ed. Aviva Chomsky, Garry Leech and Steve Striffler. Bogotá: Casa Editorial Pisando Callos, 2007.
They Take Our Jobs! And Twenty Other Myths about Immigration. Beacon Press, 2007.
The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr and Pamela Smorkaloff. Duke University Press, 2003.
Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, ed. and introduction by Aviva Chomsky and Aldo Lauria-Santiago. Duke University Press, 1998.
West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940. Louisiana State University Press, 1996.
Chapters
“The Logic of Displacement: Afro-Colombians and the War in Colombia,” in Darién Davis, ed., Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007, pp. 171-198.
“Salem as a Global City, 1850-2004,” in Dane Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz, eds., Salem: Place, Myth and Memory. Northeastern University Press, 2004.
“Laborers and Small-Holders in Costa Rica’s Mining Communities, 1900-1940,” in Chomsky and Lauria-Santiago, eds., Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State. Duke University Press, 1998.
Articles
“Globalization, Labor and Violence in Colombia’s Banana Zone.” International Labor and Working Class History (November 2007).
“‘Barbados or Canada? Race, Immigration, and Nation in Early Twentieth Century Cuba.” Hispanic American Historical Review 80:3 (August 2000), 415-462.
“The Aftermath of Repression: Race and Nation in Cuba after 1912.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies (December 1998), 1-40.
“Afro-Jamaican Traditions and Labor Organizing on United Fruit Company Plantations in Costa Rica, 1910.” Journal of Social History 28:4 (Summer 1995), 837-55.
“Recent Historiography of Cuba.”Latin American Research Review 29:3 (Fall 1994), 220-36.
“Labor in Costa Rica's Gold Mines, 1900-1940.” Journal of Third World Studies XI:2 (Fall 1994), 407-39.
“West Indian Workers in Costa Rican Radical and Nationalist Ideology, 1900-1950.” The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History 51:1 (July 1994), 11-40.
Selected Presentations
“Solidarity and Divisions: Challenges to Solidarity in the Global Coal Industry,” First Annual “Empire and Solidarity in the Americas Conference,” University of New Orleans, October 2008.
“Labor History as World History: Linking Regions over Time,” Keynote Address, Newberry Conference on Labor History Across the Americas, Chicago, September 2008.
“Afro-Colombia and the Mainland Caribbean,” Latin American Studies Association, Montreal, September 2007.
“Challenging Multinationals on Different Fronts: Labor-Community Alliances and Corporate Accountability in Colombia,” Global Companies - Global Unions, Global Research - Global Campaigns Conference, New York, February 2006.
“Solidarity on the Periphery,” New England Conference of Latin American Studies, Bowdoin College, October 2005.
“Radical Women Organizers and the Race to the Bottom in the 1930s,” Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Scripps College, June 2005.
“Latinos in New England: The Textile Connection,” Greater Boston Latino Studies Consortium, Harvard University, April 2005.
“Linked Labor Histories: New England and Latin America in the Twentieth Century,” New England Conference of Latin American Studies, Boston University, November 2004.
“What's Old, What's New? Globalization, Violence, and Identities in Colombia's Banana Zone,” Latin American Studies Association/Labor Studies pre-conference “Labor and Globalization: Assessing the State of the Field and a Proposing a New Research Agenda,” Las Vegas, October 2004.
“Salem as a Global Village: Industrialization and Immigration in a New England Community,” New England American Studies Association, Salem, Massachusetts, April 2004.
“Labor and Violence in Colombia in World Historical Perspective,” World History: The Next Ten Years, Boston, March 2004.