She is a professor of history and the Coordinator of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts.

[1] She previously taught at Bates College in Maine and was a research associate at Harvard University, where she specialized in Caribbean and Latin American history.

Her paternal grandfather, William Chomsky (1896–1977), was a Hebrew scholar at Gratz College, where he served as principal for many years.

She credited this experience with sparking her "interest in the Spanish language, in migrant workers and immigration, in labor history, in social movements and labor organizing, in multinationals and their workers, in how global economic forces affect individuals, and how people collectively organize for social change".

It also shows how the workers, including many Jamaicans of African descent, developed their own parallel socioeconomic system.