The sociopolitical crisis that flared up in Chile starting in October 2019 laid bare tensions in how different social groups understand citizenship and political mobilization. These tensions evinced clear generational differences coupled with the emergence of new forms of understanding and doing politics among youth. This article presents the results of an ethnographic study conducted at a vocational school in the marginalized suburbs of the Santiago metropolitan area, focused on analyzing how the practices and discourses that students deployed at the school challenge the definition of school and the citizen practices inside of it, and through these, make the school a public space. The results show that the situated response practices undertaken by the students served to contest and transform the school space, redefining the concept of citizenship, in the sense that student mobilization challenged the conceptualizations of citizenship prescribed by the curriculum, teachers, and the broader adult world. Accordingly, this article posits a reading of the school not only as an institution responsible for education and teaching but also as a place seen from the spatial perspective in a context of conflict, understanding that academic spaces are constantly produced via situated practices of appropriation, signification, and occupation, which are themselves not exempt from conflict.