The secondary school student movement has been a key player in social mobilization processes in Latin America. However, its historical study has been marked by gaps, especially regarding the role of women. To help bridge this gap, the Dicyt 2025 project, led by academic and director of the History Department, Dr. Rolando Álvarez, in collaboration with historian Dr. Yanny Santa Cruz, proposes a comparative and gender-based look at the experiences of secondary school women’s participation in the Southern Cone between 1957 and 1976.
“The title of the project, ‘Nunca más secundarias’ (Never Again Secondary Women), has a double meaning. On the one hand, it refers to secondary school students, but it also seeks to challenge their historically secondary place in the official accounts of the student movement,” explains Santa Cruz. The research focuses on Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, countries that shared similar processes of political radicalization, the emergence of new leftist movements, and subsequent dictatorships. “We were interested in seeing what was happening with secondary school students during that long decade that has been so widely studied at the university level, but little at the school level,” she adds.
The study is based on a methodological observation: sources on secondary school students are scarce and scattered. This has led the team to undertake a rigorous review of press articles, school archives, and interviews. “Studying secondary school is more difficult than university because the records are fragmentary. But that’s part of the challenge of writing social and feminist history,” says Santa Cruz.
One of the project’s main focuses is to investigate how women participated in these movements, especially in contexts marked by single-sex education. “In Chile, for example, girls’ high schools allowed for greater space for politicization. In mixed federations, however, leadership remained male. We want to understand these internal dynamics and how female leaders interacted with male leaders,” she says.
Far from focusing solely on exceptional figures, the research seeks to rescue collective protagonism. “Often, the first female doctor or scientist is highlighted. But behind them were many other women who sustained the struggles and daily life. What interests me is thinking about gender as a collective experience, not as something exceptional,” she emphasizes.
In addition to its academic dimension, the project is also linked to active memory initiatives. Yanny Santa Cruz has promoted the Liceanas Memories Archive and Project, which seeks to bring these historical processes closer to today’s educational communities. “It is essential that our research does not remain only in articles that no one reads. We have to take it to schools, talk to students, reconstruct the historical meaning of their own struggles,” she says.
The work seeks to engage with the present from a critical and situated perspective. “Even though we are studying the 1960s, many of the gender and power struggles are still relevant today. This is even more so now, with the rise of conservative discourses that deny the political agency of women and student movements,” she concludes.
With this research, the team hopes to contribute to a more inclusive reconstruction of the history of the student movement, positioning the voices of young women as active agents of transformation. At the same time, they reinforce the Faculty of Humanities’ commitment to a critical, feminist history that is deeply linked to the social struggles of the present.