“Here, We Pay Everything”: Student Activism and Catholic Universities in Brazil, 1968–81

1968 was a momentous year in Latin America. The Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellín marked the institutionalization of Liberation Theology, the new form of social Catholicism that advocated a greater focus on social justice and spread throughout much of Latin America in the 1970s. In Brazil, 1968 was also a transformative year, albeit for very different reasons. The military dictatorship issued Institutional Act 5, which ushered in the regime’s most repressive phase, one that, like liberation theology, lasted well into the 1970s. In this context, even as Catholic activists built their identities around Liberation Theology to mobilize and transform society and politics, Catholic university students in Brazil faced a challenging context of repression that hindered such mobilization or identification.

 This paper uses this historical context to explore the ways Catholic students constructed identities that they could use to resist and challenge military rule in Brazil between 1968 and the 1980s. I examine how progressive Catholic students under authoritarian regimes mobilized and self-identified in ways that went beyond Liberation Theology. I examine how Brazilian Catholic university students alternated between their identities as Catholics and their status as students in order to forge new understandings of both their grassroots movements and of the nature of democratic struggles under authoritarian rule. In the process, these students both shaped and were shaped by Brazil’s broader history of student mobilization and by the politico-social context as the country moved from repression toward democratization. Thus, this paper will reconsider traditional narratives of both Catholic and student activism in the hemisphere, while also considering how political and social contexts shaped Catholic activists’ identity as much as Catholicism itself did. Additionally, this paper fits within recent 1968 scholarship that seeks to move beyond narratives of exceptionalism to consider the longer historical processes of social mobilization.