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Aviva Chomsky

Aviva Chomsky Quotes

Historian

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Famous Aviva Chomsky Quotes

“For intellectuals and elites, invisibilizing and forgetting are a way of creating blissful ignorance that allows them to enjoy their privilege without acknowledging its basis in exploitation. Forgetting allows them to avoid the shame that would come from seeing.”

PoliticsHistoryShameExploitationCentral AmericaPriviledge
Book:Central America's Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration
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“The church wanted souls; the government wanted subjects and taxes; the conquistadors wanted gold. In each case, they needed people, and they needed people identified as Indian. But they each sought to remake Indigenous peoples to fit their own desires. The church claimed rights to evangelize Indigenous peoples, the Crown to tax them, and the conquistadors to enslave them. As they jostled for control, they subjected Indigenous forms of religion, governance, and labor to their sometimes-competing objectives.”

HistoryIndigenousColonizationCentral America
Book:Central America's Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration
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“Large-scale Central American migration to the United States dates to the civil wars of the 1980s and came primarily from El Salvador and Guatemala. Most came fleeing political violence, and their presence became politically very inconvenient for the Reagan administration, which was seeking to justify its support for these countries’ governments. Others were economic refugees. Either way, the refugees gave the lie to Reagan’s claims of the governments’ legitimacy and right to US support.”

HistoryImmigrationCentral America
Book:Central America's Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration
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“One of the conceits of forgetting in the United States is the idea that colonialism ended in 1776 when the new country declared independence. Central American countries, too, celebrate their independence heroes and wars as historical milestones. But in both regions, the colonial roots ran deep and profoundly shaped the new countries. In the United States, independence meant a surge of settler colonial expansion that incorporated Central America into its sights. In Central America, colonial racial hierarchies shaped the new nations even as the United States imposed new forms of neocolonial rule.”

HistoryUnited StatesColonialismCentral America
Book:Central America's Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration
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