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

Acknowledgments

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Acknowledgments O√ering formal thanks to the many people and institutions who have assisted me in this project over the years is my own small act of commemoration : a celebration of others’ immense generosity, and, by extension, a reflection on this book’s long history. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to do so. Some of the questions that first motivated this project emerged in discussions with my fellow graduate students seeking to organize a union at Yale. As we inquired into the history of graduate students’ interactions with the university, it became apparent that there was no organic student memory of our collective past, even of relatively recent events, since students by definition regularly graduate or move on to other pursuits, and we realized that this pattern led us to constantly renegotiate previously hard-earned rights. Our fierce debates within the union about the best methods for organizing others and institutionalizing a kind of student memory sparked my original interest in the mechanisms and uses of cross-generational student memory. My curiosity deepened during an exploratory research trip to Rio de Janeiro in 1998, the thirtieth anniversary of the student protests of 1968 and a moment when the university students I met were deeply concerned about both remembering the student movement past and drawing connections to its present. As I joined them in an all-night meeting to plan the reenactment of a famous protest march of 1968, I witnessed them taking great pains to both learn and divulge the history of this event and the military regime under which it took place and to tie it to the ongoing strike at numerous federal universities. It was then that I began to consider seriously the special constraints and importance of student memory under conditions of dictatorship, censorship, and strict limits on civic action and soon thereafter embarked on this book. x acknowledgments These two early sources and scenarios of inspiration—the Yale campus and a lively gathering of Brazilian activists—point to two critical centers of support for me and this project: the team of scholars who mentored me through graduate school and helped me write a doctoral dissertation on this topic, and the many figures in Brazil who made this research possible. At Yale I was privileged to receive the incomparable guidance and warm friendship of Gil Joseph and Stuart Schwartz, who together o√ered the perfect blend of constructive criticism, brilliant insight, and unflagging encouragement that allowed me to undertake and complete this project. I also benefited enormously from the famously detailed comments of JeanChristophe Agnew, the instruction (both inside and outside the seminar room) of Emilia Viotti da Costa, Glenda Gilmore, and Nancy Cott, and the exuberant creativity of Seth Fein. And I am forever grateful to the late, much-beloved Patricia Pessar, who often chimed in with her own sage words of advice or encouragement whenever I called on Gil at some sticky moment. Her ability to blend fierce intellectual mettle and deep personal warmth always made her a welcome presence. Finally, I benefited enormously from having brilliant fellow graduate students (who have now gone on to become brilliant colleagues at other institutions), who read my work, shared their own with me, and generally made me a better student and scholar. Thank you, Nara Milanich, Amy Rasmussen, Mark OvermyerVelazquez , Amy Chazkel, Andrea Becksvoort, and many more too numerous to mention here. In Brazil I never ceased to be amazed at the kindness and expertise of the archivists who helped me hunt down a wide variety of materials and then earnestly welcomed me each day as I spent weeks and sometimes months hunkered over papers at my assigned desk. Special thanks go to the team at the Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, who helped me tirelessly on this project for a very extended period only to read one day in the Jornal do Brasil that I had decided to jettison it all and write instead about the hijacking of city bus no. 174. Their dismayed faces the day they showed me this totally erroneous story—the product of two overly inventive journalists I spoke to while photographing the improvised memorial at the hijacking site—demonstrated more than anything else how invested they had rightfully become in ‘‘my’’ research project, and how much all of us who do archival work owe to professionals like them. At the Arquivo Nacional in Rio, Sátiro Nunes and Marcelo Siqueira...