The histories we tell: historical consciousness and student protests in a Chilean public high school

ABSTRACT In the last fifteen years, high schoolers became key actors in the Chilean political landscape, as members of anti-neoliberal and feminist social movements. Although social researchers have paid increasing attention to them, few have analyzed how these young people relate to and make use of history in the context of their political struggles. Combining an ethnographic and a microhistorical approach, this article examines a Chilean public high school and a particular and widespread historical narrative about it. I argue that the different ways in which this narrative was invoked, transmitted and contested in a context of massive student protests – and the pedagogical devices and practices of cooperation and conflict used to do so – allowed the students of this school not only to use history in favor of their political agendas, but to participate in the continual production of a political field in which the borders of their historical community and who could be considered members of it were being disputed. In doing this, the article illuminates some of the complicated interactions between historical consciousness, political action and citizenship in modern societies, as well as illustrates the usefulness of combining an historical and an ethnographic lens to visualize the nuances and tensions existing when human beings make use of history. Further, it sheds light on the concept of historical consciousness itself, illustrating how historians and other social researchers can operationalize it to better comprehend how human beings relate with the past, but also the present and the future.