Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil

Notes

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes Introduction 1. Dunn, Brutality Garden, 137. 2. Octávio Costa, in D’Araujo et al., Os anos de chumbo: A Repressão, 264. 3. Dunn, Brutality Garden, 148. 4. Dunn, Brutality Garden, 137. 5. Here I follow the lead of the many Brazilian historians of this period who initiated this terminology. As one example, see Daniel Aarão Reis Filho’s argument in favor of this usage in Ditadura militar, esquerdas e sociedade. 6. ‘‘Secundarista oferece uma rosa amarela à pm,’’ Jornal do Brasil, October 11, 1968. 7. ‘‘dops prende quem mostra entusiasmo pela canção de Vandré defronte às lojas,’’ Jornal do Brasil, October 12, 1968. 8. The expression ‘‘the years of lead’’ (os anos de chumbo) emerged in the 1980s and is a Portuguese paraphrase of Die Bleierne Zeit, the original title of a film from 1981 by Margarethe von Trotta. The film is a fictionalized version of the real story of two sisters, one of whom is a member of the Red Army Faction in the 1970s and dies in prison, while the other sees her life destroyed by the repression and disruption of the period. For English-language audiences the release title was Marianne and Juliane. 9. Aldo Rebelo interview, Projeto Memória do Movimento Estudantil (hereafter pmme). 10. Acronyms in Brazilian Portuguese, when feasible, are typically spoken as words, not spelled out as they are in U.S. English. Therefore, rather than ‘‘the U.N.E.,’’ UNE is pronounced as a single word, ‘‘oo-nay’’ and is treated as a proper noun. 11. The literature on student activism in the 1960s around the world is too vast to note in its entirety, but see, for example, the following comparative histories: Boren, Student Resistance; Caute, The Year of the Barricades; Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt; Klimke, The Other Alliance; Suri, Power and Protest. 250 notes to introduction 12. Journalist and cultural commentator Inimá Ferreira Simões wrote of filmmakers in the first year after the coup who used this kind of dark (and, I would add, gendered) humor to label the military regime a ditabranda, or ‘‘soft dictatorship.’’ Some have occasionally employed the term to contrast it with the undeniably ‘‘hard’’ ditadura that followed. But when in February 2009 a columnist in the Folha de São Paulo newspaper referenced the entire 1964–1985 period with the ditabranda label in an attempt to cast the Brazilian dictatorship as milder than those of its Southern Cone neighbors, the event elicited outraged letters to the editor, an online petition signed by well-known academic and activist figures, and physical protests in front of the newspaper headquarters. The controversy demonstrates that the repression wrought by the regime is, for many, its defining characteristic and that denying this human and ethical failing is today an o√ensive act. See Simões, Roteiro da Intolerância, 78. 13. See Araujo, Memórias estudantis; Ribeiro do Valle, 1968: O diálogo é a violência; Fávero, A une em tempos de autoritarismo; Martins Filho, Movimento estudantil e ditadura militar; Sanfelice, Movimento estudantil: A une na Resitência ao golpe de 64; Albuquerque , Movimento estudantil e consciência social; Lerche Vieira, O (Dis)curso da (Re)forma Universitária; and Saldanha de Oliveira, A Mitologia Estudantil. 14. Some older scholarship does indeed posit events in Europe as a catalyst for those in Brazil, but this idea is no longer accepted. See Mendes Junior, Movimento estudantil no Brasil, from 1981. 15. The collection of interviews and photographs about 1968 assembled by Daniel Aarão Reis Filho and Pedro de Moraes is one such example of an important book that notes the context of 1968 but does not integrate it into the main part of the text. They include a detailed chronology of the year, listing Brazilian and international events side by side but without explanation. Other examples come from volumes that include articles or chapters on student movements from multiple national locations, presumably in the hopes that readers could forge their own comparative understandings of the international dimensions of 1968. See Aarão Reis Filho and Moraes, 68: a paixão de uma utopia; Garcia and Vieira, eds., Rebeldes e Contestadores 1968: Brasil, França e Alemanha; Scherer, Nussbaumer and di Fanti, eds., Utopias e distopias: 30 anos de maio de 68, Santa Maria; and Martins Filho, A Rebelião Estudantil. 16. ‘‘Why those students are protesting,’’ Time Magazine, May 3, 1968. 17. Suri, Power and Protest. 18. Wallerstein, ‘‘1968, Revolution...