From cultural strategy to political recognition

restart of UFPB students' movements in the 1970s

Abstract

After the Institutional Act number 5 is decreted, in 1968, it was increasingly difficult to keep an organized movement in Brazil. The student movement was not on the sidelines of the situation: being one of the movements more investigated by the national security organs, the student movement sought to go to other paths, whether in armed struggle or inside the student representative organs, watched over by the military dictatorship: the Central Students Directories. In a politic period of the country known by its "safe, progressive and slow distension", one of the challenges of the Federal University of Paraíba (Universidade Federal da Paraíba, UFPB) student movement was the resumption of its biggest representative entity, the Central Students Directory (Diretório Central dos Estudantes, DCE), from 1976. With the resumption of that space, comes up a whole political and cultural project that not only brought together academic students of UFPB, but also part of the civil society from João Pessoa, to the causes that were beyond students' interests. This article is part of researches done for the essay about the students’ movement of the Federal University of Paraíba (Universidade Federal da Paraíba, UFPB) on the 1970s. As result, there is a well structured movement with shared activities between many civil society sectors from Paraíba and many academic students across the country. Cultural practices were priorized in this article.