It is generally held within Latin American and Caribbean social sciences that the history of student movements in our region spans more than one hundred years (Ordorika, Rodríguez Gómez, and Gil Antón, 2019). Considering the current literature that has addressed this broad timeframe (Marsiske, 2017; Donoso, 2017; Ordorika, 2022; Dip, 2023), the history of Latin American and Caribbean student movements and activism can be dissected into four cycles of protest, each presenting its own particular political and educational challenges.

The first phase began with the Córdoba University Reform of 1918 and its spread to various parts of the region during the first half of the 20th century, with experiences that centered on demands for student participation in university governance and for the autonomy of these institutions. The second phase encompasses the 1960s and 1970s, with the ideal of revolutionary change as its core principle and critiques of the educational policies propagated by the United States within the context of the Cold War. The third phase is situated in the last quarter of the 20th century, a time when student movements emerged that confronted authoritarian regimes, such as those in South America, demanding democratic practices and the restoration of their student unions. In turn, these experiences, along with others arising in non-dictatorial countries, challenged the structural adjustment policies applied to education by multinational organizations. Finally, the last cut corresponds to the first decades of the 21st century, where student groups coalesced around heterogeneous demands: from those related to the privatization policies of education to those linked to widespread social violence and gender violence within institutions.

Regarding the first cycle, it is common to refer to the "modern" history of student movements in the region as beginning with the 1918 University Reform in Argentina, which branched out and acquired its own particularities in different countries of Latin America and the Caribbean (Marsiske, 2004). Its main emblem was the demand for student participation in university governance. Other demands attributed to the reform movement include free tuition and university autonomy. However, these were not part of the initial demands but were incorporated later. Recent historiographical contributions have contextualized the reform experience, previously considered a watershed moment in student participation, by recalling the celebration of the First Congress of American Students held in Uruguay a decade earlier (Cuadro Cawen, 2018). Furthermore, they have shown the tensions between the Reform as a historical experience and the subsequent reinterpretations of it in other contexts and temporalities through different political-intellectual operations linked to history and memory (Buchbinder, 2008; Bustelo, 2018; Funes, 2021; Dip, 2023).

The second defined cycle is marked by the year 1968, a time of diverse student movements throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Current scholarship situates this date within the broader context of the global protests of the 1960s and 1970s that impacted Latin America during the Cold War (Markarian, 2018; Veliz Estrada and Loesener, 2022). However, it is often overlooked that during those same decades, Latin American social sciences engaged in significant debates about whether the collective actions of students could translate into broader social change. Works such as those by Aldo Solari (1967), Marialice Mencarini Foracchi (1969), and Juan Carlos Portantiero (1971; 1978) nuanced this question. While they acknowledged the contributions of student protests, they considered them insufficient on their own to drive radical transformations of social structures, especially due to limitations based on class or specific social stratum.

The third cycle described includes experiences with significant public impact at the national and Latin American levels, such as the Mexican student movements of 1986 and 1999 (Ordorika, 2019; Meneses, 2019), although other, less well-known movements existed, such as those of secondary school students in Argentina (Larrondo, 2015; 2019). However, in the 1980s and 1990s, when the revolutionary fervor of the preceding years seemed to be waning, social sciences saw the emergence of analyses that emphasized the loss of political prominence of Latin American and Caribbean student activism. Perhaps the most relevant contribution to this discussion was that of the Chilean scholar José Joaquín Brunner (1986). In his view, although student movements had not disappeared as political actors per se, their practices were increasingly focused on local contexts and particular interests. However, the most drastic readings, made by North American academics such as Philip G. Altbach (1989) and Daniel Levy (1991), claimed that the great student movements were in retreat and almost extinct in Latin America and the Caribbean.

During the last decades of the 20th century, these types of discourses were increasingly emphasized. However, tranquility was far from the norm in the educational environment. During this period, various social movements emerged related to educational issues that did not go unnoticed, such as the teachers' and professors' protests that spread insistently throughout the region during the 1990s, or the social initiatives that advocated for alternative education in rural areas neglected by the State (Gentili et al., 2004; Montiel Martínez, 2020). Even in the last year of the 20th century, the longest strike and occupation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) took place in protest against tuition increases, an event that had continental and global repercussions that still require further analysis (Ramírez Zaragoza, 2018; Meneses, 2019).

These experiences that marked the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st largely redefined the debate about the disappearance or continued relevance of student movements in Latin America and the Caribbean. Pedro Krotsch (2002), the renowned scholar of educational and university issues, drew attention to this shift. In his view, the diagnosis of the death of widespread student activism, rather than demonstrating its disappearance, revealed a change in focus and the limited vision of some social scientists, who were primarily concerned with institutional issues rather than the interventions of political and educational actors. For this reason, readings such as Krotsch's allow us to revisit these questions, but from perspectives more concerned with the political and social groups that influence the configuration of society and education in contemporary realities: What is the presence and influence of student protests in 21st-century Latin America and the Caribbean? And what particular characteristics do these experiences adopt today that distinguish them from previous historical periods?

In response to these questions, the central objectives of this working group are:

- To define and analyze the main protests and mobilizations led by Latin American and Caribbean student movements and activism in the 21st century.

- To investigate and discern their most important organizational anchors, such as the type of educational, political and social demands they construct according to the relationships and conflicts in which they are immersed.

Student movements have played a leading role in Latin American and Caribbean history. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, in particular, large-scale student organizations and protests have challenged the actions of their educational institutions, the conditions of their role as specific social actors, and even the societal projects in which they are involved, among other issues.

Generally, academic analyses argue that student movements and activism have a dual nature (Vommaro, 2013; Donoso, 2017; Dip, 2023). On the one hand, this group refers to a dimension linked to an educational space. It is composed of students, and in that sense, many of its protests can be based on educational demands that sometimes remain at the center of the discussion.

Furthermore, their social status lends them a political dimension related to the organization and demands they make against an adversary that may be found within an educational setting, but also extends beyond it. Students' political activity can remain diffuse, with little participation and practices that seem disconnected from the broader political and social landscape. However, these actions can translate into large student groups that involve broader demands, members, and participation. This allows, at times, the formation of significant student organizations that either endure or disappear once their demands are met or denied.

Often, references to this "double face" of Latin American and Caribbean student movements focus solely on collective actions and protests carried out by university students, as when discussing the large student mobilizations of 2011 in Chile and Colombia or the #YoSoy132 movement in Mexico. This bias is shared by much of the literature and has been nuanced in recent efforts (Larrondo, 2015; 2019; Otero, 2018; Rocha, 2023; Santa Cruz, 2023; Cejudo and Dip, 2023). This is especially relevant in light of secondary movements with disparate media impact that marked the first decades of the 21st century. The most widely publicized and studied is undoubtedly the 2006 Chilean student movement known as the "Penguin Revolution," considered a landmark experience in 2006 activism. Although there are other movements with less media coverage at the regional level, such as the uprising of Paraguayan youth in secondary schools between 2013 and 2017, which demonstrated strong female leadership in its protest actions (Lachi and Rojas Scheffer, 2020), it is also important not to overlook the various feminist student protests that marked the years immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic in different countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.

From this perspective, we propose five lines of analysis to systematize the most relevant protests and demands of the Latin American and Caribbean student movements and activism of the 21st century:

1. Questioning the predominance of key milestones. The first issue raised by the field of student movement studies is the need to move beyond focusing solely on 1918 or 1968. Excessive attention to these emblematic dates has limited the study of student events linked to the 21st century. In turn, it has obscured the question of how contemporary student movements reinterpret these earlier experiences.

2. Recognize the heterogeneity within the movements. It is crucial to establish lines of analysis that consider their discourses and actions within the interactions, conflicts, and disputes in which they are involved. This allows for an investigation of their participation at different educational levels (not only university) and in diverse geographical, political, social, economic, and cultural spaces, where they interact with a broad network of actors.

3. To project the educational issue in a broad sense. The controversies surrounding educational projects or debates in which Latin American student movements participate are another significant dimension for re-discussing and deepening the research agenda. It is necessary to consider that the political and social disputes in which these movements are immersed are often connected to controversies linked to the educational sphere or to the specifically student-oriented nature of the movement.

4. To escape geographical reductionism. Analyses of student movements are generally biased by focusing solely on experiences in the capital cities of each country. In contrast, the aim is to develop a comprehensive picture and map of student protests across Latin America and the Caribbean.

5. Recognize the diversity of political identities. In this way, an open approach that is capable of exploring different analytical avenues must consider that the spectrum of political trends in student movements can include political forces with different ideological orientations, such as left, right, and other political currents that escape the classic dichotomies.