Schoolhouse Publics: Childhood, Politics, and Paper in Chile under Pinochet

This paper examines childhood and the politics of paper in dictatorships. Its specific focus is the vibrant print-world students built under cover of the highly regulated space of the school. In the schoolhouse, students made and circulated a complex range of pamphlets, letters, brochures, booklets, broadsheets, and newspapers, a rich but often ignored public sphere of political dissent that students began to knit together in the very early moments of dictatorship and sustained over the course of more than a decade and a half of student activism. They fashioned a complex sphere of communication and debate, crafted new political identities as youth, as students, and as activists, and created innovative tactics and strategies that would drive national protests movements that roiled the regime in the early- and mid-1980s, and emerge again and again well into the 21st century.