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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Students of Revolution: Youth, Protest, and Coalition Building in Somoza-Era Nicaragua by Claudia Rueda Anna Kathryn Kendrick Students of Revolution: Youth, Protest, and Coalition Building in Somoza-Era Nicaragua. By Claudia Rueda. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. xii + 291pp. Cloth $45.00. Building on the rich historiography on resistance to the Somoza dictatorship in twentieth-century Nicaragua, Students of Revolution is the first book to center the catalyzing role that university students played across four decades of protest and reform. Beyond the political history of mobilization, it excels in offering sensitive insight into the ways students acted as organizers and educators in their communities, though literacy, song, theater, and protest. In the process, Rueda convincingly demonstrates how networks of students and community leaders steadily built a cross-section of support over decades. This effort eventually led to the flight of Anastasio Somoza Debayle from Nicaragua in 1979 and, with symbolic and practical significance, empowered the revolutionary [End Page 454] Sandinistas to begin the task of governing through a mass literacy campaign led by a corps of 55,000 literacy workers—largely high school students and other young people. Authoritatively researched and clearly written, Rueda's study begins by setting forth a pivotal moment of dissent against the regime: the takeover of the National Cathedral in Managua by forty students at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) on September 26, 1970. Accompanied by priests and bolstered by a diverse array of allies, the student action led to the release of an imprisoned student, information on others' whereabouts, and an official human rights visit. Rueda contends that this incident was more than a manifestation of the global student protests of the "Long Sixties" that have dominated historiography in recent years. Rather, it represented the culmination of several decades of engaged student protests, coming in waves of organizing, building, training, repression, and response. These "students of revolution," Rueda argues, were driven by Catholic religious and democratic ideals rather than international networks of communism or Marxism. Though the book does expand extensively on the international anticolonial and anti-imperial networks forged by conferences, publications, and travels in the late 1950s and 1960s, the students had likewise been deeply engaged in organizing for democracy through their neighborhoods, parishes, schools, and families since the rise of the senior Somoza in the 1930s (Anastasio Somoza García, in power 1936–1956; his sons would alternately hold power until 1979). Drawing on an impressive array of oral histories, archives, and secondary literature, and structured across seven chronological chapters, Rueda shows how a Cold War–era, evolving resistance centered students as a privileged class with a wealth of weak ties that allowed them to influence and persuade individuals beyond their immediate circles. In a country in which school attendance was low, Rueda shows how secondary and university students held symbolic power that initially protected them from state violence as the future stewards of civil society. Who precisely these students were changed radically over time. During the early 1930s, at a time when the number of university students nationally totaled approximately two hundred (27), their elite status arguably allowed the development of a particular political consciousness of themselves as students with both privilege and responsibilities. As Rueda shows, early protests were largely self-protective, defending the status of professional titles and university autonomy. But the nature of student anti-regime protest changed as students increasingly initiated cross-class coalitions with workers and other democratic uprisings across Latin America, demanding the fundamental freedoms ostensibly promised by Nicaragua's close economic and political relationship with [End Page 455] the United States. Violence—tear gas, beatings, arrests—and the kidnapping of a law student in 1944 initiated a new phase of "democratic effervescence" (42) that ended with brutal repression in 1948, with the torture of dissidents and the murders of two high-profile student activists. Successive cycles of coalition building, protest, violence, quiescence, and rebuilding through to the book's temporal close in 1979 reinforced themselves across decades, lending symbolic power to opposition forces through the memory and practice of protest. Across these decades, Rueda is particularly effective in bringing forward the underrepresented contributions of women and families to anti-authoritarian...