| This dissertation is a study of youth political culture in Nicaragua in the 1960s and 1970s with broader significance for the study of student politics in Latin America and the role of transnational youth culture in anti-colonial struggles during the Cold War. The study seeks to explain why so many young people in Latin America were drawn to the revolutionary option in these decades, the influence of a global counterculture on these young revolutionaries, and the gender promises and limitations of such movements. A social and cultural history of the student movement associated with the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), the dissertation examines the importance of student politics and youth culture for the growth of the FSLN, the negotiation of gender identities within the movement, and the relationship between popular and state-driven memories of the Sandinista struggle against the Somoza dictatorship. Making use of oral histories and archival documents collected during more than twelve months of fieldwork in Nicaragua, it argues that the FSLN was able to broaden its popular appeal as a viable political alternative by building on a history of student political activity. As all aspects of university life became highly politicized during the 1960s and 1970s, FSLN recruitment efforts among both middle- and working-class youth were aided by students' self-appointed role as nationalist intellectuals, a dynamic student movement with an activist orientation, and a politicized youth culture that questioned the social, political and economic status quo. The dissertation thus explains precisely what conditions placed Nicaraguan youth, and students in particular, at the forefront of oppositional political activity in these decades. |
