Abstract

CHAVES, Randall. A heroic legend. History and public memory of the Costa Rican student movement, 1970-2020. Diálogos rev. electr. hist [online]. 2020, vol.21, n.1, pp.1-37. ISSN 1409-469X.

In April 1970, thousands of high school students and students from the University of Costa Rica (UCR) were the protagonists of the most remembered student movement in the country ever since. The chain of protests, which was driven by the student opposition against the transnational company Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), generated widespread media coverage and has been commemorated by its leaders for half a century. The following pages are a historical interpretation of public memories about these protests. The first part of this paper explains how the university students were included in the legislative discussion on Alcoa, while the second part analyzes the series of protests that were carried out in opposition to the project. Both sections use a variety of written, oral, and audiovisual sources from different media outlets to study the public memories of the protagonists of the student movement. This paper concludes with a review of the most significant interpretations made known by the generation of Alcoa, and it proposes that this memory was characterized by oblivions, omissions, and silences motivated by the gender of those who remembered their youth, resulting in the formation of a masculinized memory.

Keywords : Costa Rican history; memory; gender; masculinities; young persons; youth movements; protest movements; social movements.

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