Nicaragua is a country in need of urgent attention. In 1982, the Sandinista Revolution materialised that urgency and made Silvio Rodríguez sing, for the first time, ‘Canción urgente para Nicaragua’ (‘Urgent song for Nicaragua’) in a euphoric and victorious Managua. Yet, another political urgency has been noticeable since April 2018, when a multitude of young people from the Nicaraguan student movement started an ongoing opposition against the dictatorship of the Ortega−Murillo family, which has ruled the country since 2007.
Claudia Rueda's Students of Revolution: Youth, Protest and Coalition Building in Somoza-Era Nicaragua offers explanations for understanding this urgency and answers one of the most pressing questions about the country's past, which is connected to the history of its student movement. It is well-written and has a compelling storyline.
I read this book through the lens of a Central American historian who wonders about the historical roots of a turbulent, politically unstable present and uncertain future. I read it with the urge to understand the historical origins of the student movement that put an end to the Somoza family dynasty. The pages of this book visibilise these same students dressed in guerrilla clothing, in one of the most prominent revolutionary movements of the Cold War. The same movement that, decades later, knows how to critically read its past and return to challenge another family in power, whose dynastic characteristics are evident.
Rueda's book stands out among the very few studies on the Nicaraguan student movement and serves as an example of what this type of historiography on Central America should aspire to. The book's seven chapters reconstruct the pieces needed to recreate the trajectory of the Nicaraguan student movement in a non-traditional manner. Using a time frame of four decades, from 1937 to 1979, the book contextualises that youth movement during the Somoza era, presenting it as one of the most important actors in the Sandinista insurrection.
As I read the first pages, I asked myself, how did Rueda study a social movement that is transitory in nature and whose leadership is constantly changing? This methodological challenge, typical of studies on student movements, was solved by the author with a powerful methodological proposal and a research hypothesis that guides the entire text. Rueda reveals the Nicaraguan student movement's ‘genealogy of dissent’, which, throughout her period of study, generated a ‘culture of insurrection’ (p. 14). This genealogy spread, according to Rueda, from generation to generation, transmitting Somocista opposition and imagining a future devoid of that dictatorship.
This argument is present from the beginning of the book. The first chapter opens with a careful synthesis of Nicaragua's political history from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, in which Rueda explains Somocismo and its opponents from their origins. Prominent in her explanation are the historical signs of nineteenth-century Nicaraguan political culture, such as local alliances and US support for the Somocista regime. This was also the start of domestic disputes because the assassination of the revolutionary leader Augusto César Sandino, by order of Anastasio Somoza García, triggered the first demonstrations of youth resistance against Somoza, which were led by students at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Rueda's text highlights an argument marginalised by the historiography of the Latin American student movement, which emphasises the privileged character of university youth. The book offers evidence to affirm that, in the Nicaraguan case, this privileged status was more notable. The university students were from economically favoured sectors and from well-known families in the country. Therefore, the student movement was a source of social prestige and was imagined by society as the future of the country.
Members of the student movement capitalised on this social prestige for their political ends, although this certainly did not exclude them from being victims of repression, arrests, torture, violence and assassinations during the 1940s. The second chapter analyses the student movement's actions during this period, which were characterised by scenarios of violence that provided fertile ground for a process of radicalisation. The university students became the most visible opposition movement in the country, with their own newspaper and a university campus where they developed protest actions against a repressive dictatorship.
The third and fourth chapters delve into this argument in a fascinating way. In both, Rueda explains the student movement's main denunciations, related to the university environment and against Somocismo. Students of Revolution shows that these denunciations were ambiguous in some contexts because they sought to make a pact with the authorities to stop the repression, without long-term results. Thus, this book relies on the memories of the 1950s and 1960s to show how the student movement became the main political enemy of Somocismo, which intensified intolerance and illegalised university youth organisations.
In the fifth chapter, Rueda provides a solid discussion of Nicaragua in the context of the Global Sixties. Her book presents a strong argument against the idea of this decade as a period of global radicalisation and asserts that, by this time, the Nicaraguan student movement had experienced so many scenarios of repression that 1968 was a year characterised by the political timidity and caution of the youth and not by large, radicalised mobilisations, as proposed by the Global Sixties.
The last two chapters illustrate that the Nicaraguan student movement's period of radicalisation was the 1970s. In that decade, student actions, in union with other sectors of society, put an end to the Somocista era. According to Rueda, it was the trajectory of four decades of student dissidence that allowed the emergence of organisations such as the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front, FSLN), with the support of young university students, their families and communities.
Although many university students took up arms, this book demonstrates that the most powerful weapons that characterised the Sandinista Revolution were language and artistic expressions. While guerrilla fighters were relevant in the mountains, in the cities the university students fulfilled a prominent mission. They sought urban communities’ sympathy with the revolutionary process through the knowledge they had acquired in their professional training, which they adapted to fit the political context of their country.
Rueda's book transcends the student scenario. Her history resembles a carefully prepared theatrical staging, in which her actors progressively take the floor and position themselves in a leading role, despite walking on a stage of violence and political repression. This scene presents the student movement as a collective actor, in which women and men alike used their youth to oppose their dictators for four decades. Those interested in Students of Revolution will not just find the history of a single country. Instead, Rueda's book also reflects the influence of the United States, thus offering a complete history of the Cold War − a history that does not focus on a generation of young people united in a revolution, but on a culture of youthful dissidence, inherited over four decades and which gave life to the last revolutionary process of the Cold War in a fervent territory like Central America.
