CHAPTER 1

CONSTRUCTING THE "HOUSE OF DEMOCRATICRESISTANCE"

Authority and Authenticity in University Student Politics, 1808–1955

As university student activists gathered in Rio de Janeiro for a NationalCongress of Students in August 1951 they received a booklet to help guidetheir stay: "O Rio para o Universitário: Roteiro Turístico, Cultural e Informativo"(Rio for university students: a touristic, cultural, and informativeitinerary) (figure 1.1). Containing helpful advice about navigating the cityduring the multiday event and suggestions for excursions to museums andother locales, the publication reflected the fact that, for many of the severalhundred students expected to attend, it would be their first trip to theseaside capital and a significant event in their young lives. Further suggestingthe momentousness of the occasion, the cover design centered arounda photograph of a stately three-story building bedecked on either side withelegant palm trees and distinguished by the columns and caryatids on itssecond- and third-floor balconies. Below the picture was the caption, "ACasa da Resistência Democrática" (The house of democratic resistance),an unofficial moniker that would have done visiting students little good inlocating the building at 132 Praia de Flamengo Street. But the attendeeswho carried this guidebook around doubtless needed no such clarificationto recognize the site as the well-known headquarters of the União Nacionaldos Estudantes (UNE, National Union of Students) and the reason fortheir meeting. For this was the fourteenth year in which students convenedto elect UNE officers and debate their forthcoming agenda, and by nowthe prominence of the national union finally seemed secure. MeanwhileUNE's permanence and prestige found no better symbol than the solidityof its elegant headquarters.

As both the showcase for and a symbol of students' political authoritythe stately UNE building played an important role in the history of studentactivism in Brazil. Indeed, the building was quite extraordinary. A symmetrical,Palladian structure that faced Guanabara Bay in the historicallyaristocratic neighborhood of Flamengo, it boasted an elegant dining roomfor over sixty guests, a polished marble and wood bar, and a stately librarywith glass-doored bookcases. The house also possessed a game roomreplete with poker and snooker tables, a ninepin bowling alley, and, perhapsmost breathtaking, an enormous rooftop veranda with unobstructedviews of Flamengo Beach and the famous Sugarloaf Mountain jutting intoGuanabara Bay. Built in 1929 for the Sociedade Germânia (German society),a typical immigrant association of the early twentieth century thatsought to cultivate private social spaces for its members, the building wasin fact the club's second, more luxurious domicile, constructed to replacean earlier building (1900–1929) located a few doors down. With Brazil'sdeclaration of war against Germany in August 1942, however, all propertybelonging to the supposed enemy became part of the national patrimony,including the Sociedade Germânia structure. Almost immediately PresidentGetúlio Vargas granted the building to UNE and to two other studentassociations, and students enthusiastically took over the well-outfittedspace to make it their headquarters.

In the nine years since then UNE members had hosted innumerablemeetings, congresses, and debates at 132 Praia de Flamengo Street as wellas formal dinners, dances, receptions, and cocktail parties. They also cameto run a subsidized student restaurant out of the dining room and a studenttheater from the ground floor. And to the immense organizationaladvantage of the union, the building literally came to house the UNEleadership, as the elected student officers not only managed UNE from theoffice space, but also lived in the modest top-floor apartment for the one-yearterm of their leadership. In this way the students who made up UNEdirectorates could hail from all over the country yet still reside in thenation's capital, close to one another and to the center of national politics.Although, as noted, two other student organizations shared the space—alocal student association and a collegiate sports group—the structure onPraia de Flamengo Street soon became known as the UNE building (a sededa UNE) and was a source of reference for all who participated in the unionas well as a physical validation of the student union's status.

For many people today whose image of student activism is colored bythe innumerable photographs, films, and media accounts that came out ofthe 1960s, this earlier picture of formal gatherings in elegant buildingsmay appear incongruous with visions of student movements as centeringaround tumultuous street protests of rebellious young men and women.Indeed, after the coup d'état of 1964 that led to twenty-one years of militaryrule, Brazilian students in general and those organized around UNE inparticular would become central protagonists in just the kind of violentstudent–police skirmishes and regular front-page news items that helpedto paint this enduring portrait of student militancy. To understand how thestudent activism of this later period emerged, however, one must first askhow students came to see themselves as a group with special claims toparticipate in national political affairs, claims that would be fiercely challengedby the military regime. One must further interrogate what it meantto be a university student in Brazil, where students historically came fromthe elite male sectors of a highly stratified society, but where not only thesocial makeup of the student body would change but the very category ofstudent would become increasingly contested. And one must explore themeans by which students established and asserted their political authoritythrough UNE, whose lavish building would so strongly come to symbolizestudent political...