August 8, 1977 marked a turning point for those in Largo de São Francisco. Around 2,000 young people gathered around professor Goffredo da Silva Telles Jr., who, drawing society’s attention to the abuses committed by . It was a gesture in favor of democracy, which served to mobilize students and launch a fight against the military regime there.
The document would be read three times, each time to a larger audience. The choice of Telles as speaker was strategic: the lawyer had a horror of Marxism, having supported integralist action in his youth.
The struggle of Largo de São Francisco students against is now rescued in the book, written by José Ruy Gandra, historian and former reporter for Sheet. “My enthusiasm for researching the book was heightened by the reality in Brazil. We saw the coup being tolerated and encouraged by Bolsonaro, so this work ended up gaining political and historical relevance”, says he, who studied at the university.
To create the book, the author did research in the collections of the country’s main newspapers, including the Sheetand interviews with contemporaries of the generation that frequented the arcades of the historic building, between 1976 and 1980.
Founded in 1827, in its neocolonial style building, it trained seminal writers of the country’s literature, such as the poets Alphonsus de Guimarães and Oswald de Andrade, as well as the novelist José de Alencar. Among the notables are jurists Hélio Bicudo and Miguel Reale Júnior, in addition to the former president and , who presided over the Constituent Assembly.
In addition to the research, “The Spirit of a Time of Struggle” stands out for its memoirist underpinnings. The author was there, saw and heard everything and understood that it was important to tell the story, also considering what was happening beyond the arcades.
Gandra remembers his generation as a heterogeneous group, experiencing the contradictions of the time. “It’s a generation that, in the first half of the decade, had a Sartrean anguish, because sexual freedom was beginning, but there was great shyness. This anguish took the path of confronting the dictatorship right when the Brazilian economy stopped booming and entered a serious crisis”, he recalls.
The sentimental contradiction of those young people mirrored, according to the first chapter of the book, what the author called the split decade. On the one hand, the repressive apparatus of the dictatorship became present with censorship and . On the other, the military regime’s propaganda machine used the country’s victory as a self-promotion strategy, also trumpeting the economic miracle.
The reading of the letter, in Largo de São Francisco, provoked different reactions: it engaged the youth, but incited the military against the university environment. Strictly speaking, since the beginning of that year, the students had organized several marches, narrated in detail in the book. In August, police troops surrounded the college and threw stun bombs from armored vehicles.
Three months earlier, young people reiterated Largo de São Francisco’s status as a “free territory” and called for a protest against the arrest of three students and three trade unionists, who were distributing leaflets to engage workers in the ABC region of São Paulo.
Little by little, says the book, the USP student movement separated into ideological subgroups, such as Libelu, Refazendo and Caminhando.
The engagement of the USPians would culminate in, where students from different faculties gathered for the National Student Meeting. Around 900 people were detained, some of them sent to the Dops (Department of Political and Social Order).
As the author shows in the book, the arrival of, in 1980, was decisive for democratic opening.
João Paulo 2nd, recalls Gandra, became the patron of his generation, even though the majority were secular. “All the movements took a ride from him, because you had a progressive figure there, who was a huge relief for everyone who was suffocating in there”, says the author. “He attacked poverty, land concentration, defended the favela residents and exposed the dictatorship to the world.”
