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Students of Revolution: Youth, Protest, and Coalition Building in Somoza-Era Nicaragua

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 101; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-8898366

1527-1900

Jeffrey L. Gould,

Latin American socio-political dynamics

I remember standing to the side of a crowd of angry Nicaraguans in OPEN 3 (now Ciudad Sandino) a few days after the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in July 1979. A small group of Somocista orejas cowered inside a small jail. The crowd wanted to kill them for their complicity in the recent execution of neighborhood kids. Four armed muchachos stood in front of the door. One stepped forward and shouted, “We must create a new Nicaragua, and this must be a different kind of revolution—a humanist revolution. These orejas will be tried, no paredón!”I was struck by those words uttered over 40 years ago, and I still try to grasp their meaning. Did they announce a utopian path not taken? Or were they just rhetoric blown away by the idiot winds of history? Regardless, a young boy of 16 or 17 uttered those words. At the time, the incredible youth of so many of the Sandinista militants was obvious, and the vital role of youth in the revolution was a given to even the most casual of observers. Yet many historical givens are rarely interrogated. The great merit of Claudia Rueda's Students of Revolution is that it offers a careful and nuanced historical account of student movements from the late 1930s up until the revolution, revealing in convincing and intriguing detail their continuity and accumulated strength.The first two chapters narrate the emergence of university students as the center of the anti-Somoza resistance. The student movement emerged with such force for reasons shared by student movements throughout the continent: their reception of the Rooseveltian message of democracy and the demographic increase of university populations (which in Nicaragua doubled during the war). Nicaraguan students actively supported and were inspired by their counterparts who overthrew dictators in Guatemala and El Salvador (though in the latter country military authoritarianism persisted). In those countries the military regimes had also repressed the opposition movements, but in both cases students and other sectors, notably labor, had formed solid alliances. In Nicaragua, that alliance was more fraught, as Anastasio Somoza García displayed a populist style with some substance that his fellow dictators largely eschewed during the early 1940s. Rueda supplements earlier research by emphasizing the particular nature of student consciousness and agency. She stresses the unique space of free speech that students carved for themselves in an otherwise authoritarian society. Though often not respected by the regime, student free speech became a rallying cry that at once allowed them to spearhead the anti-Somocista movement and isolated them from other groups due to their special status, rooted to some degree in their class background (though the university was becoming more diverse).In the following chapters, the book makes important contributions to Nicaraguan historiography. With much attention to important and previously unrecorded details, the chapters on the 1950s underscore the heightened development of a particular form of student consciousness and organization, especially around issues of university autonomy (a Nicaraguan student battle cry again in 2020). Rueda emphasizes how the students' struggles unmasked the linkage between the Somocista state and the National University's board of directors and pushed forward the movement for autonomy. After the regime granted the university autonomy in 1958, students were able to consolidate their organizations and use their autonomous space to launch defenses of political prisoners such as future Frente Sandinista de la Liberación Nacional (FSLN) leaders Tomás Borge and Carlos Fonseca. They also opened the university to sustained debate about Nicaraguan society and politics as well as launching outreach efforts to marginalized social sectors.Although the study carefully delineates the demographic transformation of the universities during the 1960s—notably, significantly more female students and greater class diversity—Rueda posits that the major political changes took place during the 1970s as violent state repression created exponentially more student activists. The university's autonomous status allowed students the opportunity to organize often in support of the Sandinistas and revolutionary change. Students were not only inspired by the FSLN and leftist texts and icons; many became radicalized through liberation theology and via participation in Christian base communities. At the same time, university activists began to organize among the vastly increased secondary school student base who would eventually participate en masse in the mobilizations and insurrections of the late 1970s. One of the book's most significant contributions is to chart the myriad ways in which university students, including a high proportion of women, often working with the Sandinistas, managed to forge alliances with popular classes, whether in secondary schools or in marginal barrios.Students of Revolution makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Sandinista Revolution, certainly one of the most important events of twentieth-century Latin American history. As one who spent years researching modern Nicaraguan history, I very much appreciate her achievement, buttressed by impressive archival research. She also performed numerous oral history interviews. However, greater critical appraisal of the oral historical sources would have been useful. There are also a few very minor problems with the text. The invocation of the Cold War, although salient in that one cannot understand the longevity and US support of the regime without it, at times impedes understanding (e.g., the reference to “Cold War revolutionary organizations” [p. 177]). There is also very little discussion of the power of Somocista populist discourse that for many years isolated the student movement. Those very minor errors do not in the least detract from this scholarly achievement. Moreover, Rueda writes in a highly accessible narrative style that will make it very useful in undergraduate and graduate classrooms. For me, thanks to her study, I can now reimagine that 17-year-old speaking to an angry crowd of a humanist revolution as a product of the Nicaraguan student movements.