Brazilian youth movements: historical shifts and interconnections with the Chilean context

• In Event: Educational struggles in Latin America: Everyday Protests and Shifting Movements in Chile and beyond

Proposal

Taking a transnational approach to social movements in Latin America, this paper examines the case of youth movements in Brazil in relation to Chilean student movements. The paper focuses on two moments: Brazilian high school occupations inspired by the Chilean pinguinos, and what came in the years after, a project I refer to as articulating (Taylor, 2023) and expanding student activism toward broader struggles beyond university walls. I draw from multi-sited ethnographic research from 2018-2022 focused on Brazilian youth movements, carried out in both in-person/ street and online spaces. During the fieldwork, the Chilean context often arose, and this paper deepens an examination of Brazil in relation to Chile.
In 2015-2016, Brazilian students began to occupy hundreds of high schools throughout the country to protest precarious high school conditions (Gomes and Gómez-Abarca, 2018). #OcupaEscola was influenced by the Chilean pinguino movement. Further, the occupations had a strong presence of young female leaders who went on to form feminist collectives from the occupations, and this young “feminist spring” also grew in relation to feminist organizing in Argentina and Chile, during the time of Ni Una Menos and in replicating street actions such as Un violador en tu camino, which began in Chile and was taken up in Brazil and many contexts across the Americas and worldwide. Further, after the occupations, high school activists - and also influenced also by massive 2013 protests in Brazil - went on to organize in youth movements. Many Brazilian youth activists interviewed through this research began organizing in either or both the high school occupations and feminist collectives. While this first high school “occupation” phenomena has been studied, less attention has been paid to the ways in which Brazilian youth movements have shifted in recent years, and the interconnections with the Chilean context.
Major political and social movement shifts again shook Brazil and Chile in 2018-2019. In Brazil, youth movements continued struggling for material conditions to increase access to the university for its working-class, non-white students, but identified the need to take on broader structures and confront Bolsonarismo. I trace how Brazilian student movements shifted toward a “youth movement” project by seeking to involve youth outside of school and connecting to anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ, ecosocialist struggles. In Chile too, a similar move took place, in which students sought to take on the neoliberal state, in addition to changing education policies.
Studying Brazilian youth movements in relation to Chilean movements sheds light on how protests, movement strategies, and projects circulate and shape one another within and across borders (c.f. Taylor, Gordon, Pereira). They also point to different pathways in Brazil and Chile for an ambitious project: students identified the need to continue struggles in their universities and schools, but realized the urgency of taking on the state and fighting for more inclusive educational and political systems. Youth movements evolved and matured over time, accumulated experiences, and shifted strategies according to the political and social conjuncture including in relation to global and regional political processes and movements.

Author

• Alice Taylor, University of Denver