A Student's Inheritance: Reading Sofía Brito's Path Through Chile's Education Wars

By Andy — 2026-08-04 — Literary News

Sofía Brito walked into the University of Chile's Law School one March morning in 2013. Not much seems to happen in that sentence, but the building was designed to make sure something did—to lodge in your chest, to remind you that power belonged here.

Sixteen Chilean presidents had graduated from this Law School. Their portraits hung in a cream-coloured annex with floor-to-ceiling windows, sixteen black-and-white faces looking down with what the architecture itself wanted you to read as inevitability. This was not accidental design.

Sofía didn't swoon. She had other genealogies entirely. Her father had been part of the Revolutionary Left Movement—MIR, a Marxist-Leninist group that fought Pinochet. He spent most of the nearly seventeen years of the dictatorship in exile, returning with stories that Sofía absorbed as a child the way other kids absorbed fantasy. Chilean students had long organized against the neoliberal privatisation of education, and by the time Sofía was twelve, she'd read The Communist Manifesto and Trotsky, had decorated her room with posters of armed guerrillas, and had joined her first protests. It was 2006.

That year, something extraordinary happened. High school students across Chile took to the streets in what became known as the Penguin Revolution—named for their black-and-white uniforms. Not university students. High schoolers. By May 30, 790,000 students had participated in strikes and marches, the largest demonstration in three decades. They were furious about bus fare increases, about the cost of university entrance exams, about a school system that had been gutted by Pinochet and never properly restored.

The numbers were brutal. Fifty percent of students failed the PSU exam needed for university admission. Only wealthy families could afford private schools to ensure their children would pass. University in Chile was proportionally the most expensive in the world—$3,400 a year in a country where the average salary was $8,500.

What's strange about reading Meaghan Beatley's new book, an excerpt of which appeared this week in Literary Hub, is how it tracks not just the movement itself but how inherited politics works through a single life. Sofía grew up inside her father's nostalgia for a Chile that had nearly achieved socialism peacefully under Allende. That ache became her fuel. She marched with thousands. She occupied schools. She sat on classroom floors in sleeping bags, eating meals cooked on portable stoves.

The Penguin Revolution won most of its short-term demands. But the deeper fight—against the privatisation of education itself, against structural inequality—never really ended.

By the time Sofía was a law student, a different crisis found her. Sexual harassment by a prominent professor. A complaint filed. A university that treated the case as a management problem rather than a structural one. #MeToo arrived in Chilean universities in 2018, and it spread quickly. The same students who had fought for public education now occupied buildings over sexual violence. The same anger about systemic inequality, reframed. Same enemy, different door.

Beatley, a French-US journalist who's worked across Latin America covering feminist movements, spent a decade reporting this. Her book isn't celebratory. It's granular. It names the gossip, the petty arguments, the mundane friction of sustained activism. It traces how ideology becomes personal becomes structural becomes personal again. How a daughter inherits her father's revolution and then has to invent her own.

That's the quiet part nobody writes about much. Not the dramatic march. The morning after.