• Date: April 27 , 2006
• Location: Lawrence Heritage State Park, Lawrence, MA



• Address and Directions

• Apply to a Seminar


• Primary resources

• Aviva Chomsky
• Professor of History
• Salem State College
• Ph.D., California, Berkeley, 1990



• Avi Chomsky is a professor of history and coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State College. Her books include "West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940," "Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean" (co-edited with Aldo Lauria-Santiago),"The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics"(coedited with Barry Carr and Pamela Smorkaloff). She created the exhibit "Stopping the Clock: A Time to Remember Salem's Pequot Mill Strike," which was on display at the Lawrence NPS Visitors Center in the fall of 2005. Her new book, "Linked Labor Histories: New England and Colombia in the Long Twentieth Century" looks at globalization as a long-term phenomenon with labor history at its center, as companies made use of regional inequalities to import low-wage workers from poor regions, transfer production to poor regions, and enforce labor discipline.

Bibliography

• Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912. University of Illinois Press, 1993.



• Aviva Chomsky, “Invisible Workers in a Dying Industry: Latino Immigrants in New England Textile Towns”



• Donald B. Cole, Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts 1845-1921. University of North Carolina Press, 2002.



• Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. Columbia University Press, 1988.



• Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton University Press, 2001.



• Ruth Glasser et al, Aqui me quedo: Puerto Ricans in Connecticut. Connecticut Humanities Council, 1997.



• Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation. Cornell University Press, 1991.



• Juan González, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. Penguin, 2001.



• Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Harvard University Press, 1999.



• Ian F. Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York University Press, 1998.



• Ramon Borges-Méndez, “Migration, Settlement and Incorporation of Latinos in Lawrence, Massachusetts”



• Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press, 2004.



• Memoirs and Oral Histories



• James Hoopes, Oral History: An Introduction for Students. University of North Carolina Press, 1979.



• Thomas Kessner and Betty Boyd Caroli, Today’s Immigrants: Their Stories. Oxford University Press, 1983.



• June Namias. First Generation: In the Words of Twentieth-Century American Immigrants. University of Illinois Press, 1992.



• Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets. Vintage, 1997.

Discussion Questions

1. How do immigration and industrialization in Lawrence fit into the larger patterns described by Chomsky?



2. What do industrialization and deindustrializaztion have to do with immigration?



3. What is at stake in today's debate over immigration? Why do the different parties hold such different positions? How can today's debate be related to historical issues?



4. Compare the immigration wave into New England in the early twentieth century to that of the late twentieth century. Reasons for migrating? Challenges facing migrants? Opportunities available for migrants?



5. What accounts for the similarities and differences?



6. How do class, politics, and culture relate in the United States? Does upward mobility necessarily entail assimilation into Anglo culture, including adopting attitudes of racism against blacks and immigrants? Does it entail abandoning working class identity and working class politics?



7. How has industry responded to immigration and immigrants? How have unions responded? Why?



8. How does Ardis Cameron critique the Progressive reformers? Why? What do you think? Are there any comparable organizations or movements today?



9. In what ways have U.S. laws enhanced, and/or curtailed, opportunities for immigrants? Should the law discriminate against immigrants? Why? Can laws that are apparently neutral actually discriminate against some sectors of society? When and why have immigrants broken laws?



10. How has the movement of capital abroad in the second half of the twentieth century affected immigration?



11. What is the "secondary labor market"? Why does it exist, and how does it relate to immigration?

Address and Directions

Lawrence Heritage State Park
One Jackson Street
Lawrence, MA 01840

• From Salem, MA
  Take Route 114 West to Route 495 North.
• From Boston
  Route 93 North to Route 495 North.
• From Route 495 North or South
  Take exit 45 (Marston Street). Take first left onto Canal Street. Go straight through lights then take second right onto Jackson Street. The Visitors Center will be on the right. A small parking lot is located in back of the Jackson Street Visitors Center on Mill Street. In addition there is a private parking garage on Appleton Street (one block west of the Visitors Center). The park is also accessible by bus and train from Boston. Call the park for train schedule.