Welcome to connected by controversy i'm your host sabir ali we've just passed the 40th anniversary of the massacre at el mossote which took place in december of 1981 in northeastern el salvador i used to actually take students there for a number of years and the last time was on the 30th anniversary and so we haven't been back ever since then mostly because of the escalating violence up in morrison province in any case there were around 900 unarmed civilians that were murdered by the salvadoran military which was armed and trained by the u.s at the time and still is in fact the three u.s reporters who documented it at the time were denounced in the u.s press,
And the Reagan administration almost immediately certified that the salvador military was in compliance with human rights standards allowing for the release of another year's worth of us weapons so they could essentially do the same thing afterwards i used to take my students there and we would find things like bone fragments bomb craters bullet holes shell casings shrapnel and even clothing left behind from the mass murder when you see a site like that and you read mark danner's book on the subject or dr chomsky's book or her father's books on this as well you can't help but wonder what kind of force could inflict such destruction on innocent people it turns out it was the u.s working with the salvadoran government that made this happen and we have to imagine what the results of something like this would be the survivors just remain or would they flee,
And if they flee where would they go some of my friends and i know some of dr chomsky's friends as well who later joined the some of them fled across the border to colomoncagua honduras and other refugee camps there were many others that uh ended up fleeing to the united states like some other friends of mine who live in l.a whose parents were murdered because they were part of the teachers union and so all of these people are what we call immigrants who were given a choice that was no choice at all we live to talk about choice in the u.s well is that the kind of choice we'd ever like to have with that kind of choice between death and immigration be something we would prefer others to have people that are close to us is that kind of choice we want them to have,
I start with this because it shows how essential concrete knowledge is when we're discussing anything controversial platitudes about freedom and free will and choice are beautiful but they also have political uses as well so today's topic immigration is one of those most controversial ones that we have in our political social and cultural landscape it splits americans down the middle but there's also a lot of range in between some believe in open borders others believe in closed borders and so when donald trump in 2015 announced his presidential campaign he basically established a line and tapped into a narrative that american people knew quite well which is that we should view mexicans as uh criminals essentially that they're something to fear and he needed a cause to rally for his cause,
And uh for his political campaign but who knows if he really knew anything about the complexities of immigration you might have believed like many americans that there's a clear legal channel for everyone who wants to come here and that it's equally applied to everyone seems reasonable enough but if you look at the actual history this is an illusion there's one group of latin americans who have been given somewhat special treatment and that's cubans and a lot of them have been able to kind of shape the narrative because they say things like well i came here the right way or my parents brought me here the right way so why don't the salvadorans and mexicans etc do the same and as our guest points out in her books on immigration those fleeing the violence in their homelands or even seeking better jobs in the america,
Have long been condemned to come here illegally the legal channels are literally closed to almost all of them so that disparity of access matters but it's not known to most americans and our guest today does an excellent job in her books to counter that narrative welcome dr chomsky thank you thanks for having me on so professor aviva chomsky is a professor of history and coordinator of latin american latino and caribbean studies at salem state university she has written a number of books on modern latin america from the cuban revolution to central american history and latin american immigration so today i wanted to talk primarily about her book central america's forgotten history her latest book but we can also draw upon her other works as well including undocumented,
And they take our jobs to name a couple of them so i wanted to ask you first how did you get interested in this topic that's a very long story sure you want to hear it all yeah so after my first year of college i um decided to take a kind of a late gap year it hadn't been called named a gap year yet back in those days but i felt like i needed to do something different and more meaningful um and i ended up volunteering for a year with the united farm workers and i guess you know to make the long story short that's what got me interested in a lot of the issues that i've ended up dedicating my life to labor labor history the history of commodities the labor and exploitative relations that are embedded in commodities the way racism works uh immigration anti-immigrant racism the spanish language um so so i guess i would say that's where the seeds were planted um i also lived for several years um in a house of colombians in barcelona,
And that's where i really learned spanish and also got connected to latin america in a different way through exiles who who had fled colombia's violence and lack of opportunity to spain or to catalonia um and i ended up going back to well i went back to college and majored in spanish and portuguese and then i and i was in school in berkeley uh during the 1980s um which of course as you uh were telling us in your introduction is when there were revolutions going on in central america a lot of refugees fleeing a lot of them to the san francisco bay area oakland san francisco um and ronald reagan was elected president and um carried out a very aggressive u.s policy towards central america,
Then the nicaraguan revolution also triumphed in 1979 so at the time that i went back into college with already fluent spanish and doing my spanish and portuguese major um all these political things were going on that uh that really compelled me so i got really involved in the solidarity movement and working with refugees and being able to make use of my spanish skills that way um working in um health care issues and as a paralegal helping people and learning about undocumentedness really for the first time and then i decided i needed to go on and get a phd in latin american history because i was so shocked to discover the depths of my ignorance in terms of why all these things were happening and what the u.s role had been and what the history was and i kind of discovered that a lot of what i had learned during the united farm workers really characterizes latin american history in central american history as well in terms of forced migrations and labor exploitation and racism plantation agriculture u.s investment,
Political violence from above to to maintain a very unequal system so i that's that's the short version of my long story it's very interesting um i was in the bay area in the same time in the 1980s in san francisco san jose corridor and met quite a few salvadoran refugees at my high school and i became a translator for them and learned some of their stories but did not understand the political context as a high school student this would have been 1991 by that time and so uh then there's there's quite a bit of activism going on in the bay area at that time as well sister city programs and uh activism to try and stop the weapons from going down there as well like brian wilson wasn't that far away from there too right yeah and i actually um when brian wilson wilson was the concord never weapon station was close obviously to where we were um and after his protest was violently taken over.
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