SALEM — A Salem State University professor received a prestigious award from the Latin American Studies Association and Oxfam America for her commitment to activism and scholarship.
Aviva Chomsky, professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University, was named one of the two recipients of the Martin Diskin Memorial Lectureship for 2022, from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and Oxfam America. The second award went to Arturo Escobar from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“This would be a gargantuan honor in any year, but it is especially meaningful as Salem State moves toward Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) status,” said Andrew Darien, chair of the History Department.
The LASA is the world’s largest professional organization for Latin America experts that brings together more than 13,000 members, while Oxfam is a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice.
Chomsky was chosen for the 2022 award on the basis of her passionate commitment to social justice and the way she combines scholarly and activist work to confront U.S. policy towards Central America, Cuba, and Colombia, and on immigration and climate change, Darien said.
“My academic and activist work have been so intertwined over the past 40 years that it is impossible to disentangle them,” said Chomsky. “Teaching at a regional state university has also helped me to transcend the gap between academics and activism.”
Almost all of her students at Salem State University are first-generation college students, and many are immigrants or the children of immigrants from Latin America.
“Teaching them about Central American revolutions, worker and peasant movements, the depredations of U.S. policy, and the causes and nature of global economic inequality creates a cross between college and popular education,” said Chomsky.
Chomsky grew up in Massachusetts in the 1950s and the 1960s when there was almost no Spanish-speaking population in the state, so she was not exposed to Spanish language in childhood.
She started college in Philadelphia in 1975, but felt lost and unmotivated.
“I didn’t really understand why I was there and what I was doing,” Chomsky said.
At the time, United Farm Workers were organizing boycott campaigns in cities around the country, asking people to boycott supermarkets that were selling non-union grapes and lettuce. She talked to some union representatives, attended lectures, and ultimately decided to take a year off and work for the farm workers.
“This was my first exposure to so many things that affected my entire career, including the Spanish language, but also the issues about commodities and consumption,” said Chomsky.
She moved to California, where she became involved with the Central America Solidarity Movement and saw Mexican migrants work in agriculture in abysmal conditions. Later, she worked with Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees trying to help people get access to services, especially undocumented people who were fleeing into the United States from revolutions and wars in their countries.
“This was under the Reagan administration, when the United States was supporting right wing dictatorships in Central America and trying to overthrow the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua,” said Chomsky. “Being caught up in the whirlwind of activism made me realize that I had no idea why all these things were happening.”
To be able to talk, write, or argue about Latin American political issues and movements prompted Chomsky to go back to graduate school and study history. She received a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and Portuguese from the University of California, before that, in 1982.
“My historical work from the very beginning was aimed, in a way, at being a better activist,” Chomsky said.
During the 1980s, Chomsky lived for a time in revolutionary Nicaragua, working on her research. Her interest in revolutionary movements and revolutionary transformation took her to Cuba in the 1990s where she officially researched migrant workers on US-owned plantations in Cuba in the early 20th century, but unofficially took a deeper look into the Cuban Revolution.
Since coming to Salem in 1997, Chomsky continued to be involved in the immigrant workers rights issues, both through activism and writing and research.
In Salem, she learned that a local power plant used to burn coal from Colombia, which was produced by a U.S. corporation there. This discovery led to her work in Colombia.
“I have always been really interested in the sort of invisible local connections, how our lives are so closely tied to the lives of people in Latin America, but we tend not to know about it,” said Chomsky.
Most recently, Chomsky has turned her attention to climate change, which she considers one of the existential crises that humanity is currently facing.
“Global economic inequality, which is one of the big issues that has been underlying all of my activism and scholarship, is really intertwined with climate change, in that the cause of climate change is basically overconsumption,” said Chomsky.
She believes the global economic order causes climate change, because U.S. corporations are producing too much and Americans are consuming too much, while the main victims of climate change are people who are displaced by the coal mine in Colombia, for example.
“They have been displaced from their subsistence economies. They have no water, they have no electricity, they have no food. And the exacerbation of the drought there has caused horrific destruction of the indigenous peoples,” Chomsky said. “Everybody in the United States is both a victim and an actor in this global economic system. We all participate in it and it affects us all in detrimental ways, as well as beneficial ways.”
Chomsky hopes that her teaching work helps awaken students and gives them intellectual tools for understanding the world better.
“I have always been surprised at how open students are to hearing the kinds of critiques that I have to give,” said Chomsky. “I really get the sense that a lot of young people have a sense of unease, like they know something is wrong with the world but they are not able to articulate it.”
Many students are struggling with a lot of financial securities and debt, Chomsky said. They work a lot and find it hard to juggle work and education, while having a vague sense that the planet is really unequal and climate change is really drastic.
“People just kind of compartmentalize and put those in the periphery of their minds and just try to enjoy their everyday lives,” said Chomsky. “But I think students are frequently grateful to have somebody finally mention these things, which is like the elephant in the room that we are not allowed to talk about.”
Chomsky is the author of a dozen books, including Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions about Climate Justice (2022), Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration (2021) and A History of the Cuban Revolution (2015).
Alena Kuzub can be reached at [email protected].
