Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil by Victoria Langland (review)

With Speaking of Flowers, Victoria Langland makes an important contribution to an emerging wave of scholarship on Brazil’s era of dictatorship. On the heels of James Green’s work on the international solidarity movement (2010), and Ken Serbin’s research on the Church’s role in opposition struggles (2000), Langland provides new insight through the lens of student movements. Although a wide array of student organizations are discussed, the book’s central focus is the União Nacional dos Estudantes (UNE). More than just tracing UNE’s history and its impact on Brazil’s transition into and out of dictatorship, the author interrogates the very nature of student activism itself. Why did these young Brazilians choose to engage as students rather than through political parties, revolutionary groups, or other social bodies? How did debates going on within the student movement mirror and influence the dynamics of national opposition struggles? How were memories of this history articulated and reconstructed over the course of multiple generations?

Speaking of Flowers approaches these questions by examining the practical and symbolic role of students in contesting Brazil’s military regime. Langland portrays the duality of students as both militants and martyrs, showing how they were at once some of the dictatorship’s staunchest opponents and a group that was uniquely positioned to use and remake particular memories of struggle and sacrifice. The book’s title and introductory hook borrow from Geraldo Vandré’s 1968 song “Caminhando,” which became the quintessential Brazilian protest ballad of 1968 with its famous line of “Pra não dizer que não falei das flores.” Lang-land uncovers the contoured layers of “Caminhando” and its historical resonance by revealing how different generations of students spoke about these flowers—how they remembered, reconfigured, and affiliated themselves with the various meanings of the 1968 protests.

The book is premised on three main interventions. First, it seeks to explain why the 1968 death of a secondary student named Edson Luís galvanized an opposition movement that drew a record numbers of supporters, but that also triggered an equally unprecedented wave of state repression and violence—a post-1968 escalation of state-sponsored terror known as os anos de chumbo. Second, Langland looks at how gender served to define and justify student activism, exploring how gendered ideas of appropriate political activism shaped the student movement and its interactions with Brazilian society. Finally, the book interrogates the meanings of 1968 as an international process. Here, Langland probes the question of causality that scholars of 1968 have often attributed to the transnational, unidirectional flows of information and solidarity. Rather than measuring the broader influence of global events in Brazil, Speaking of Flowers aims to historicize the direction and ultimate meanings of student activism in Brazil.

It is interesting that for a history of 1968, Speaking of Flowers’ narrative takes over 100 pages to arrive at this watershed date. What might be viewed as an excess of context is, in fact, the theoretical foundation that allows the book to make such compelling claims about the nature of student activism in Brazil—specifically the ways in which the experience of dictatorship drastically changed what it meant to be a student. Langland traces university politics starting from 1808, showing that although limited to white, elite male students, universities were active and influential spheres in Brazil’s body politic. Among the most important aspects of early university life in Brazil was just how much authority each campus had vis-à-vis the central government, a precedent of autonomy and self-awareness that helped instill many of the core components that would define student political movements under military rule. From UNE’s founding in 1937, Langland charts the evolution and tense politicization of various student organizations.

The contested space of student activism was forged in the earliest moments of the dictatorship, when on the same day as the...