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Every year since 2006 my colleague Steve Striffler and I have organized a delegation to the Colombian coal mining region of La Guajira with the help of Witness for Peace. One of the communities that we’ve been working with since the start is the indigenous community of Tamaquito. When we first met with Tamaquito community leaders, they were fighting to get the mine to recognize the destructive effects its operation had on the community, and agree to a collective relocation. The community did not want to leave its ancestral land, but the mining operation had rendered the area uninhabitable. Jairo Fuentes Epiayu, the Indigenous Governor of the community, presented us with the petition that appears as Primary Source 2 in Chapter 1 of this volume. (He’s also quoted in Chapter 16, and Tamaquito is discussed in Chapter 15.) We spent many hours discussing the petition and how we could fulfill some of what was being asked of us. After many years of local organizing in La Guajira and an international campaign to support the community, the mine finally agreed to many of Tamaquito’s demands and the village was relocated in 2013. Even after the relocation the struggle has continued to force the company to fulfill its promises to provide clean water for domestic and agricultural use to allow the new community to become sustainable. In June 2018 I interpreted for Jairo as he explained the history of his community and its struggle to our delegation, at the community center in the relocated village.

ߝAvi Chomsky, March 2019

Some chapters of this book have never been published before. Others were previously published in different magazines and media and republished here with the following authorizations:

“The Logic of Displacement: Afro-Colombians and the War in Colombia,” in Darién Davis, ed., Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007.

“Salem as a Global Village: Industrialization, Deindustrialization, and Immigration in a New England City,” in Cathy Gorn, ed., U.S. History in Global Perspective. National History Day Teacher. Resource Book: Internationalizing History. Longview Foundation, 2013.

“America Runs on Undocumented Labor.” TomDispatch. February 5, 2016.

“A Central American Drama in Four Acts,” in Michele López-Stafford Levy, ed., Children from the Other America: A Crisis of Possibility. Sense Publishers, 2016.

“The Real Story Behind the ‘Invasion’ of the Children.” TomDispatch. August 24, 2014.

“Making Sense of the Deportation Debate.” TomDispatch. April 25, 2017.

The Dark History of the “Nation of Immigrants.” TomDispatch. September 13, 2016.

“Talking Sense about Immigration: Rejecting the President’s Manichean Worldview.” TomDispatch. March 18, 2018.

“How (Not) to Challenge Racist Violence.” Common Dreams. August 21, 2017.

“Why ‘Black Panther’ Is Revolutionary, Even Though It Isn’t.” Common Dreams. February 28, 2018.

“On the History of Immigration to the United States” in The Yale Politic. September 24, 2016.