“Unusual Crimes”: Student Protest and the Politics of the Everyday in Brazil’s Military Dictatorship

In Brazil, as in much of the Global South, both scholars and activists themselves see the 1960s as a high-water mark of student politics, after which activism became virtually “extinct” amidst government repression. This paper challenges such a narrative and expands our understanding of the “political” among students by exploring the ways quotidian issues helped students maintain and reshape political activism from the 1960s to the 1980s. This paper argues that, amidst an increasingly repressive political climate, students continued to successfully challenge military rule by shifting their emphasis away from the nature of dictatorial rule itself and toward everyday issues that were the result of military policies. Focusing on issues like increasing educational fees, the declining quality of classroom experience, and even issues as basic as infrastructure or food on campuses, students continued to struggle for reforms within the educational system and within Brazilian society more generally, even as they widened their repertoire of protest activities and their discourses of democratization. As a result, this paper argues for a reconsideration of student “politics” by focusing on quotidian issues that transcended overtly political and ideological parties. While repression made the mass protests and mobilizations of the 1960s more difficult, that did not preclude students organizing and challenging military rule. Rather, students’ moral economy regarding higher education and its social rewards became the mechanism through which students organized, mobilized, and politicized their experiences under military rule, setting the stage for the return of national student movements and redemocratization itself by the 1980s. In the process, this paper argues, students’ mobilization and resistance at the local level gradually developed into regional and even national connections that allowed for unification while providing new cogent critiques of military rule and of the lack of social justice in Brazil.