In Memoriam: James D. Cockcroft (1935–2019)

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19853269
• Date: 01 September 2019
• Published date: 01 September 2019
• Author: Dale Johnson
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X19853269

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 228, Vol. 46 No. 5, September 2019, 209

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19853269

© 2019 Latin American Perspectives

209

In Memoriam

James D. Cockcroft (1935–2019)

Another comrade passed away on April 17: Jim Cockcroft. Jim was a his-

torical sociologist. All his many books and articles proceeded from the perspec-

tive 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 inter-

est is Outlaws in the Promised Land (1986). He was also a pioneer in the develop-

ment 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 organiza-

tions, 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 estab-

lish 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 imperial-

ism and sometimes as “the gringo who loves us.”

—Dale Johnson

853269LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X19853269Latin American Perspectives

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