Aviva Chomsky - Central Americas Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration

This is a text that is sorely needed, and there is nothing like it available, a brilliant, deeply researched, and concise forgotten history, not only of Central America but also of US military occupations and interventions that have created the refugees at the US-Mexico border.

ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ ,
author of An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States

Aviva Chomskys Central Americas Forgotten History is essential reading, an antidote to mainstream coverage that ignores the larger context of the crisis. Its roots, as Chomsky concisely and convincingly reveals, are deep, and many of them snake back to Washington, to a century of catastrophic security and economic policies.

GREG GRANDIN ,
author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

In this breathtaking book, Aviva Chomsky reminds us of the intertwined histories of Central America and the United States. With compelling arguments and rigorous evidence, Chomsky demonstrates how US policies allowed corporations to build astronomical wealth by impoverishing and exploiting the lives and labor of the people of Central America. Equally important, Central Americas Forgotten History chronicles Indigenous organizing and international solidarity movements that should guide contemporary efforts to reform US foreign policies vis--vis the Global South.

PAUL ORTIZ ,
author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States

For decades, policy makers and the public have grappled with the problem of undocumented immigrants and have at the same time ignored the reasons why so many Central Americans, in particular, are fleeing in caravans of thousands to the US. These reasons lie in the history of that regiona history in which the US government is implicated in forcefully establishing the conditions so intolerable as to impel people to flee. Until we understand the US role and continued complicity in perpetuating these conditions, a true solution to the immigration problem will remain out of reach. Professor Chomskys book illuminates this willfully forgotten history.

PATRICIA MONTES ,
executive director, Centro Presente

Central Americas Forgotten History is more than a compelling account of how colonialism made and remade Central America and the United States from the distant past to Trumps border wars. With rich detail and accessible analysis, Aviva Chomsky demonstrates how the colonial crucible itself is ultimately a fight over how history is rememberedand why such history is so important for advancing popular struggle.

STEVE STRIFFLER ,
author of Solidarity: Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights

I have been waiting for Central Americas Forgotten History for the past decade. This thorough and thought-provoking book revives the history that has long been severed from the Central American experience in US discourse, especially around immigration. Chomsky demonstrates that you cant divorce centuries of colonialism and settler colonialism, US-supported dictators and death squads, and decades of neoliberal economic deprivation and dispossession from the people who arrive every day to the militarized US frontier. And just as important, in the long history of cross-border organizing she chronicles, there might be a solution in the solidarity to this crisis of displacement: not in more misguided border enforcement butand this will be quite clear when you set the book downin justice-based reparations.

TODD MILLER ,
author of Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security

C entral American migrants carry the inheritance of centuries of history, much of it forgotten or obliterated. Indigenous identities were suppressed in Nicaragua and El Salvador in projects of nation building and the aftermath of repression. Activist and revolutionary projects have also been crushed, and evidence of massacres and violence buried. The United States has labored to erase its role in creating the crises in Central America. While historical memory projects struggle to recover histories, many Central Americans simply hope to survive or to escape. In the United States, Central Americans remake identities to adjust to their new context. Most US Americans, even those who decry the abusive treatment of immigrants, remain blissfully oblivious to the histories migrants carry.

What is memory? Different disciplines give different answers. For psychologists, memory may be individual, part of an individuals construction of self and identity. But memory is also collective. Societies and cultures preserve and create memory through oral traditions and religions, and through written records and shared commemorations and narratives. The way a society or group of people understands its past infuses its culture and the way people understand and act in the present.

All memory is, in a sense, constructed. As individuals or as members of groups, we privilege some memories over others, and we create coherent and meaningful stories and understandings of our past and present out of fragments of memory.

Forgetting is an inevitable part of memory. By highlightingrememberingcertain details, events, or interpretations, we erase or forget others. We forget because our individual and collective histories overflow with detail that would form a chaotic blur if we did not form them into coherent narratives. But when we rely on one narrative, we may be suppressing others.

Historians think a lot about memory. We create memory by writing histories. We read primary sources from the periods we study, understanding that even though they are original documents or firsthand accounts, they still tell us only part of the storyoften the perspective of educated elites who are literate and control the resources to preserve and document their version of the past. We try to read them again, against the grain, to find clues as to what some of the invisible, unheard voices hidden within them might have to say.

When we listen to individuals talk about the past, too, we know that their memories are selective and often shaped by things that may have happened after the incidents they are describing. Even two people who witnessed or participated in the same event may have very different recollections of it.

Struggles over historical memory can be very political. History, we often hear, is told by the victors. The victors have every interest in justifying their own victory, celebrating their greatness, and decrying the misdeeds of the vanquished. They may suppress the language and the culture of those they vanquish in their attempts to suppress their memories.

Many Americans are aware of clashes over historical memory with respect to World War II. Sometimes its too simple to claim a clear distinction between victor and vanquished, and battles over who controls the historical narrative continue. Germany and Japan were defeated in World War II. But both of them are thriving, wealthy countries. Some of the leaders of their wartime regimes were punished, but others escaped or continued to hold political and economic power. The Jewish population of eastern Europe was decimated, even if they were not officially on the losing side of the war. Who, then, were the winners and the losers? Who gets to tell the story?