HIST 343
Student Movements, Youth Politics, and the University in Modern Latin America and the Caribbean Spring 2025
Division II D Difference, Power, and Equity

Students and universities in Latin America and the Caribbean possess a unique and unusual ability to politically mobilize and shape their society’s political culture. Unlike the university system in the United States, students in universities across Latin America have voting power in their university’s bureaucracies, hold positions of power in the governing structures of the university, and garner vast political support and moral legitimacy from their nation’s citizens. In fact, most Latin American icons of political revolution like Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, and Subcomandante Marcos, emerged from the radicalizing spaces of the Latin American university. This course examines the political, cultural, and social history of the university’s evolution in Latin American and Caribbean history from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. This course will consider how student politics, the university as a geographic space of political socialization, and their relationship to the larger swath of their nation’s population were central to the political and social history of modern Latin America and the Caribbean.