In April 2018, the Sandinista government of Daniel Ortega faced a series of student protests against the reform of Nicaragua's Social Security Institute. A coalition of university students, peasant organizations, trade unions, businessmen, and the Catholic Church took to the streets against the Ortega government. They succeeded in repealing the reforms, but at the same time met with repression and jail. Two decades of peace vanished in three months of protests that reignited a long-standing tradition of popular mobilizations spearheaded by students, a tradition that Claudia Rueda's book Students of Revolution reveals as a constant counterpoint to the Somoza family dictatorship during the twentieth century.

Rueda provides us with a well-researched political history of the student movements in Nicaragua between the rise of the Somoza regime in the 1930s and the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979. Rueda uses a combination of Nicaraguan and US sources to explain how university and secondary school students carved a democratic space in the middle of an authoritarian regime through the politics of coalition-building. She unearths previously overlooked aspects of student resistance against Somoza while contrasting the history of Nicaragua's student movements with developments in other Latin American countries during the 1960s. The result is a concise and clear text that upends typical narratives about the role of students in revolutionary politics and contradicts the idea of the 1960s as the peak moment of student activism in Latin American history.

Students of Revolution contends that

Rueda builds this argument in constant conversation with the historiography of student revolts in the 1960s and Cold War politics in Latin America but breaks with the idea that what happened in larger countries was duplicated in Nicaragua in the same fashion and time. In order to support her argument, Rueda relies on archival materials from student organizations at Nicaraguan universities, reports on student protests and activities from the US embassy in Nicaragua, newspaper articles from La Prensa, and oral history sources. The variety of sources allows her to jump from an analysis of the broad political impact of student mobilization and the individual experiences of women participating in street demonstrations to political organizing in Managua's slums. The book reads like the story of a revolutionary vanguard in search of revolution; it is a tale of persistent defeat and hidden victories.

Nicaragua's case shows how a set of culturally conservative forces, including progressive Catholicism and traditional concepts about the role of women, mobilized in the struggle for democracy and social justice (p. 117). Those forces were essential for the Sandinista Revolution to finally triumph. They faced the paradox of women being an essential element in a revolutionary coalition that downplayed women's liberation or countercultural leanings. It is only through an emphasis on shared values and the use of the symbolic power of religion that students in the 1970s overcame their self-imposed sectarianism from the 1960s. When they occupied Catholic churches and allied with the rising star of Catholic progressivism, students in the 1970s were able to form a sustainable coalition that previous student movements had been unable to accomplish since the 1930s.

Rueda places an essential role in those struggles on what she calls “weapons of the relatively privileged” (p. 13). In the history of Nicaraguan student movements, we can see how university students’ privileged position as future members of the economic and political elite allowed them to push back on Somoza's authoritarian regime. The middle chapters discuss the defense of student dignity (pp. 63–86) and the emergence of a “small great republic” (pp. 87–119) in the autonomous university where the subversive nature of student privilege unfolds. These chapters connect early mobilizations against Somoza and the first steps in creating autonomous higher education institutions like the Free University with the later radicalization of the student body during the 1970s that led to the Sandinista Revolution of 1978–1979.

Rueda also responds to recent histories of student activism by underscoring the constant emergence of student movements in Nicaragua during the twentieth century. In that sense, she asks us to pay attention to the mobilizations of the 1930s and 1940s, which fought for democracy against the rise of the first Somoza, then the next generation of movements that struggled for autonomous universities in the 1950s, and finally to 1970s militancy in the private Universidad Centroamericana, and secondary schools. While many scholars center their research on the global movement of 1960s protests that ravaged Mexico City, Berkeley, Paris, and Beijing, Claudia Rueda forces us to reconsider the long history of Latin America's student protests that began with the Cordoba movement in 1918. In each chapter, she describes the social evolution of a revolutionary tradition among various generations of university students in parallel with the rise and fall of the Somoza regime. This insight sheds new light on the political evolution of such well-known figures as Carlos Chamorro, the conservative newspaper editor of La Prensa, and Sandinista leader Carlos Fonseca Amador. Through a careful revision of their role in building powerful student movements first and using those experiences to create awareness in the rest of Nicaraguan society, the book illustrates the role students played as articulators of coalition politics.

Notably, Rueda avoids the trap of an essentialist view of university students as a revolutionary subject. Her descriptions of the ambivalent reactions of Nicaraguan students to the Cuban Revolution are particularly noteworthy. She indicates in chapter five that the “Cuban Revolution was deterring some students from adopting more radical activism” (p. 148). The growing popularity of Christian Democracy in the middle of a timid effort to democratize Nicaragua (1960–1968) was a path not taken. However, it connects with a broader history of moderate responses to the problems usually related to the rise of guerrilla movements in Latin America, a history that we are just beginning to explore and an essential contribution of Rueda's work.

Students of Revolution provides innovative research on the role of student movements in the history of revolution in Latin America during the twentieth century. Although the book focuses on university students and their impact on national politics, it also provides glimpses into new research avenues: the transnational politics of student exchange during the Cold War and the role secondary schools played in radicalizing student protest. The insights the author develops may help us understand the 2006 “Penguin Revolution” in Chile and contemporary mobilizations in western Europe demanding action against climate change—movements not centered with university students. Rueda's window into the fascinating history of Cold War politics and youth culture in Latin America is of special relevance for those interested in the history of social movements and politics in institutions of higher education.