Abstract
Another comrade passed away on April 17: Jim Cockcroft. Jim was a historical sociologist. All his many books and articles proceeded from the perspective of bottom-up history. Writing as frequently in Spanish as in English, he was the author of 50 books on Latin America, Latinos, culture, migration, and human rights. He was a leading expert on Mexico and immigration. Given the recent efforts to build the Great Wall of Trump, one book of great current interest is Outlaws in the Promised Land (1986). He was also a pioneer in the development of dependence theory, which for a time was the main approach to the underdevelopment of Latin America. With André Gunder Frank and me, he wrote the first book on the subject, Dependence and Underdevelopment: Latin America’s Political Economy (1972).
Jim was not just another lofty intellectual sounding off in academic journals. Always a political activist, he participated in most of the solidarity organizations, among them the Fair Play for Cuba Committee of the early 1960s and the Chile Research Group that he and I organized while at Rutgers University after the 1973 coup. He and I edited a pre-coup book, The Chilean Road to Socialism (1973), and he later wrote a book on Salvador Allende. He was righteously fired up in recent years by the imperial program of regime change in Venezuela, and before that he was a vocal critic of U.S. interventions in Central America.
Jim became my lifelong buddy when we were graduate students at Stanford University. While a conservative elite university, in the better days of the 1960s it had a large contingent of radicalized students. We related closely to its Latin American Institute, where we became good friends of Ron Chilcote, Tim Harding, and others who later established Latin American Perspectives, for which Jim was an editor. (Jim got his M.A. in English, and his way with words, even poetry, was amazing.) Stanford University abolished the Institute, but both Jim and I were able to prevail on the university administration to allow us to establish interdisciplinary Ph.D. committees. We were both fortunate to have on our committees one of the world’s leading Marxist economists, Paul Baran.
Living his later years in Montreal with his third of three remarkable wives, Jim picked up French to add to his literacy in Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese, and even Farsi—he wrote books on Iran. Up to the time of his death he was overwhelmed with requests to speak all over Latin America, where he could discourse in Spanish or English and was known as the North American who understood and supported the struggles of peoples against American imperialism and sometimes as “the gringo who loves us.”