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Aviva Chomsky

Aviva Chomsky’s most recent book is "Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal." She is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts.

Articles by this author

	Views Tuesday, August 06, 2019 Jobs, the Environment, and a Planet in Crisis When it comes to heat , extreme weather, wildfires , and melting glaciers , the planet is now in what the media increasingly refers to as " record " territory, as climate change's momentum outpaces predictions. In such a situation, in a country whose president and administration seem hell-bent on... Read more
	Views Thursday, November 29, 2018 Making Native Americans Strangers in Their Own Land Amid the barrage of racist , anti-immigrant , and other attacks launched by President Trump and his administration in recent months, a series of little noted steps have threatened Native American land rights and sovereignty. Such attacks have focused on tribal sovereignty, the Indian Child Welfare... Read more
	Views Tuesday, March 13, 2018 Talking Sense About Immigration The immigration debate seems to have gone crazy. President Obama’s widely popular Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which offered some 750,000 young immigrants brought to the United States as children a temporary reprieve from deportation, is ending ... except it isn’t..... Read more
	Views Wednesday, February 28, 2018 Why "Black Panther" Is Revolutionary, Even Though It Isn’t Of course a Marvel Comics, Hollywood, high-budget capitalist product isn’t going to be actually revolutionary. Or isn’t going to meet every revolutionary purist’s standards. But there is a lot that is revolutionary about this movie. How many Hollywood films delve into the political economy of... Read more
	Views Monday, August 21, 2017 How (Not) to Challenge Racist Violence As white nationalism and the so-called “alt-Right” have gained prominence in the Trump era, a bipartisan reaction has coalesced to challenge these ideologies. But much of this bipartisan coalition focuses on individual, extreme, and hate-filled mobilizations and rhetoric, rather than the deeper,... Read more
	Views Tuesday, April 25, 2017 Making Sense of the Deportation Debate Ever since he rode a Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in June 2015 and swore to build his “great wall” and stop Mexican “rapists” from entering the country, undocumented immigrants have been the focus of Donald Trump’s ire. Now that he’s in the Oval Office, the news has been grim. A... Read more
	Views Tuesday, September 13, 2016 Is Trump an Aberration? The Dark History of the “Nation of Immigrants” Liberal Americans like to think of Donald Trump as an aberration and believe that his idea of building a great wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to prevent immigrants from entering the country goes against American values. After all, as Hillary Clinton says , “We are a nation of immigrants.” In... Read more
	Views Monday, May 23, 2016 The Battle for the Soul of American Higher Education During the past academic year, an upsurge of student activism, a movement of millennials, has swept campuses across the country and attracted the attention of the media. From coast to coast, from the Ivy League to state universities to small liberal arts colleges, a wave of student activism has... Read more
	Views Thursday, February 04, 2016 How the Media Hide Undocumented Workers In our post-modern (or post-post-modern?) age, we are supposedly transcending the material certainties of the past. The virtual world of the Internet is replacing the “real,” material world, as theory asks us to question the very notion of reality. Yet that virtual world turns out to rely heavily... Read more
	Views Monday, August 25, 2014 America’s Continuing Border Crisis Call it irony or call it a nightmare, but the “crisis” of Central American children crossing the U.S.-Mexican border, which lasted for months amid fervent and angry debate, is now fading from the news. The media stories have been legion, the words expended many. And yet, as the “crisis” leaves town... Read more