This article seeks to understand the impressive scale of recent student protests in Chile. It underscores how relative institutional closure to student demands created, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a growing cleavage between the movement and the political establishment, leading to major innovations in movement identity and organisation. These innovations rendered the movement more attractive to non-activists, helping in later years to diffuse contention from traditional hotbeds of student activism to schools and universities with little history of it.
