Knight Library
Browsing Room
1501 Kincaid St.
A Lecture by Aviva Chomsky (Salem State University)
The problem of undocumented or “illegal” immigration is in some ways new, but in other ways is simply a new incarnation of older systems of labor control under capitalism. In every period, laws and cultural beliefs have rationalized and sustained unequal statuses that justify the super-exploitation of certain groups for their labor. This talk will explore contemporary ideologies of “illegality” and the creation of “undocumented” people in the context of the history of systems of exclusion and labor control.
Aviva Chomsky is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Her books include Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class (2008), A History of the Cuban Revolution (2011), They Take Our Jobs! And 20 Other Myths about Immigration (2007), and The People Behind Colombian Coal: Mining, Multinationals, and Human Rights (2007). She is also coeditor of The Cuba Reader (2003) and Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean (1998). She has been active for 30 years in Latin America solidarity and immigrants rights organizations.
Presented by The Americas in a Globalized World Initiative, the Latin American Studies Program, and the Department of Planning, Public Policy, and Management. The event is cosponsored by the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, the Department of Education Studies, the Department of History, the Global Oregon initiative, the Labor Education and Research Center, and the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics.