Aviva Chomsky (born April 20, 1957) is currently a professor and the coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State College, Massachusetts. She was previously a professor at Bates College and a faculty research associate at Harvard University, specializing in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. She is the eldest daughter of linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky and linguist Carol Chomsky. Her grandfather, William Chomsky was Professor of Hebrew and Principal of Gratz College for many years.
Her book West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica 1870—1940 relates the history of the US-based companies which built railroads and cultivated bananas on the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica and which merged to form United Fruit in 1899. It also describes how the workers, including many Jamaicans, originally of African descent, developed their own parallel socio-economic system. The book was awarded the 1997 Best Book Prize by the New England Council of Latin American Studies.
She has also co-edited books including The People Behind the Coal, Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State, and The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Latin America Readers).
Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class. Duke University Press,Durham, North Caroline. 2008. ISBN 0822341905
The People Behind Colombian Coal/Bajo el manto del carbon, Aviva Chomsky, Garry Leech, Steve Striffler (Editors), 2007. ISBN 9589799558
They Take Our Jobs! and 20 Other Myths About Immigration. Beacon Press, July 2007. Paperback: 236 pages . In English. (ISBN 978-0807041567).
West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870—1940. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-8071-1979-2
Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring People of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, (Comparative and International Working-Class History), Aviva Chomsky and Aldo Lauria-Santiago (Editors), 1998. 404 pages. Duke University Press, Durham, North Caroline, (ISBN 978-0822322023)
How U.S. Corporate Power is Destroying Colombia, Francisco Ramírez Cuellar, Common Courage Press, (ISBN 1-56751-322-0), 2005. (Translation and introduction by Aviva Chomsky)
History, Culture, Politics, Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, Pamela Maria Smorkaloff (Editors), Duke University Press, Durham, North Caroline, January 2004. (ISBN 978-0822331971).
Chronicles of the Desterrados of Colombia (ISBN 1-931859-17-5) Author: Alfredo Molano (Introduction by Aviva Chomsky.)