From Free Bus Fare to Legal Abortion: Politics in Secondary Schools in Democratic Argentina (1983-2018)

MARINA LARRONDO; PEDRO NUÑEZ

When Students Protest

Rowman & Littlefield

Año: 2021; p. 55 - 70

This chapter analyzes the trajectory of the secondary school student movementin Argentina from 1983 to 2018. This time span allows us to identify not onlythe changes and continuities in the practice of politics in secondary schoolsbut also the demands made by student activist groups and the repertoire ofcollective action during three distinct historical periods. We pay attention tothe socio-historical context, the education system, and the various shapes thestudent movements took as they engaged in political mobilization. The firstperiod, from 1983 to 1990, is described as the transition to democracy and ischaracterized by the democratization of Argentina?s education system. Therewere, of course, tensions between different factions of the secondary schoolmovement and the government, but it was in line with the broader expansionof civil liberties. During the second period, from 1990 to 2001, the schoolsystem went through a process of decentralization and underfinancing whileyoung people moved away from traditional forms of political participationand engaged in new forms of identity construction. In the third and last period,which spanned from 2010 to 2018, there was a resurgence of student activismexpressed by a combination of direct democracy in the form of schoolassemblies and different forms of participation and construction of studentcollective identities. Furthermore, in this period the student movement wasable to reconcile the formal mechanisms of participation, such as engagementwith political parties while also engaging in new political causes.We describe and analyze the political participation of students inArgentinian schools and the changes to the organization of the studentmovement throughout the years of democracy. We rely on previous researchand our own investigations, which include extensive fieldwork in secondaryschools and analysis of historical documentary sources. We use key conceptssuch as collective action frames and demands (Mc Adam et al. 1999), activistcauses, configurations of militancy (Pudal 2011), and ideal types of politicalparticipation (Núñez 2018) to capture the diversity of political practices. Wetentatively identify three predominant ideal types of political participationthat characterize each period: civil republican, autonomist, and alternativeparty identity. We understand that these ideal types show and synthesize thevarious political styles that emerged in secondary schools in all three periodsand that these ideal types allow us to account for the most visible politicalpractices.Our hypothesis is that changes in the ways of doing politics along withthe pre-eminence of a certain representation of the citizen and politicalparticipation in the schools happened at the same time as political transformations.In general, secondary school students were able to expand theirautonomy and established their own agenda by identifying with and engagingin militant causes while refining their repertoire of collective action. Inthis journey, they managed to link their demands to broader social demands,achieving increasing visibility. The purpose of this chapter is to give someinsight into the journey students took from fighting for a ?free studentunion? in 1983 to claims for legal, safe, and free abortion thirty-five yearslater.