Restores the region's
fraught history of repression and resistance to popular consciousness
and connects the United States' interventions and influence to the
influx of refugees seeking asylum today.
At
the center of the current immigration debate are migrants from
Central America fleeing poverty, corruption, and violence in search
of refuge in the United States. In Central America's Forgotten
History, Aviva Chomsky answers the urgent question "How did
we get here?" Centering the centuries-long intertwined histories
of US expansion and Indigenous and Central American struggles against
inequality and oppression, Chomsky highlights the pernicious cycle of
colonial and neocolonial development policies that promote cultures
of violence and forgetting without any accountability or restorative
reparations.
Focusing
on the valiant struggles for social and economic justice in
Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, Chomsky restores
these vivid and gripping events to popular consciousness. Tracing the
roots of displacement and migration in Central America to the Spanish
conquest and bringing us to the present day, she concludes that the
more immediate roots of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and
Honduras lie in the wars and in the US interventions of the 1980s and
the peace accords of the 1990s that set the stage for neoliberalism
in Central America.
Chomsky
also examines how and why histories and memories are suppressed, and
the impact of losing historical memory. Only by erasing history can
we claim that Central American countries created their own poverty
and violence, while the United States' enjoyment and profit from
their bananas, coffee, mining, clothing, and export of arms are
simply unrelated curiosities.