Reviews
"Markarian makes sense of the complex and often conflicted interaction of three phenomena: the youth’s rapid conversion to violent repertoires of political contention, their massive incorporation into leftist organizations, and their appropriation of cultural ideas and practices emanating from their contemporaries in Europe and the United States... a significant contribution."—International Sociology
"Uruguay, 1968 deftly brings to light the local experiences of a global revolt."—Contemporanea
"Significant... [the book] influences historians' understanding of student movements, youth mobilization and itsrelationship to the Left, and what motivates protests at politically precarious moments."—Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
"Creatively researched, offers some intriguing interpretations that respond to the perspective of hindsight after collective trauma, and brings to the fore a group of young political actors who clearly were connected to the wider social landscape at that moment: the funeral of their first martyr, shot in the street, drew nearly two hundred thousand residents."—American Historical Review
“
Uruguay, 1968 is a jewel of a book. With rigor and passion, Markarian reveals the creativity, vitality, and bravura of the Uruguayan left, which captured the world's imagination in the 1960s and holds strong in the global memory of that turbulent decade. She also shows how so many assumptions about the era’s radicalism fail to describe the Uruguayan scene—for example, assumptions that the young and the old, or the militant and the communist left, rarely mixed. Markarian
has given us a landmark study that forces us to rethink the histories of Uruguay, Latin America, and the global sixties.”—Jeremy Varon, The New School
“This terrific book sheds new light on the student activists at the heart of Uruguay’s 1968, which, as the author shows, was part of a broader global moment of youthful protest. Markarian moves beyond familiar myths to reconsider the ideas and practice of student politics alongside new currents of artistic expression, consumer culture, and sexuality that characterized the 1960s. Drawing on diverse sources, the author offers a creative and nuanced interpretation of a historical moment too often presented in black and white, and in so doing, she achieves a major advance in our understanding of Cold War Latin America.”—Eduardo Elena, University of Miami
