She is the eldest daughter of linguists Noam and Carol Chomsky. Her paternal grandfather, William Chomsky, was a Hebrew scholar at Gratz College where he served as principal for many years.
Career and education
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 earned a B.A. in Spanish and Portuguese in 1982, an M.A. in history in 1985, and a Ph.D. in history in 1990. She began teaching at Bates College, and became an associate professor of history at Salem State College in 1997, the Coordinator of Latin American Studies in 1999, and 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. It 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. Chomsky has been active in Latin American solidarity and immigrants’ rights issues since the 1980s. She is a member of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee. Her articles on immigration rights have appeared in The Nation, HuffPost and TomDispatch, a project of The Nation Institute, and she has delivered lectures across the world on labor rights and immigration rights.
Publications
Books
Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal, Beacon Press, Boston Massachusetts. 2014.
Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring People of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, , Aviva Chomsky and Aldo Lauria-Santiago, 1998. 404 pages. Duke University Press, Durham, North Caroline,
The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics, Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, Pamela Maria Smorkaloff, Duke University Press, Durham, North Caroline, January 2004..
Chapters
The Dispossessed: Chronicles of the Desterrados of Colombia, Alfredo Molano, Haymarket Books,, 2005.
The Profits of Extermination: How U.S. Corporate Power is Destroying Colombia, Francisco Ramírez Cuellar, Common Courage Press,, 2005.
Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Darien J. Davis, Rowman & Littlefield,, 2007.
Salem: Place, Myth and Memory, edited by Dane Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Northeastern University Press,, 2004.
Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, edited by Aviva Chomsky and Lauria-Santiago, Duke University Press, 1998.
