Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1981 (review)

David Montejano’s new work on the Chicano Movement in San Antonio opens with advice from Miguel Cervantes about writing dispassionate history. The quotation is quite ironic, since the book draws the reader into developments that are emotion-packed, particularly for those who lived through them.

As the title indicates, the book focuses on the soldiers of the movimiento, zeroing in on individuals considered marginal in society who provided some of the rankand- file support for the extraordinary efforts in this era that called for the political and economic inclusion of Mexican Americans into the American mainstream. At mid-century, the majority of Mexican Americans found themselves to be an internal colony of unskilled despite the upward mobility of some immigrant elites and a small middle class that emerged from participation in World War II and who benefited from the G.I. Bill and postwar economic prosperity. Those trapped in a seemingly permanent underclass were served by Mexican American social workers who refused to accept the circumstances and saw the need to redirect the energy that went into destructive activities such as gang violence. Gangs, these social workers reasoned, sprang up in neighborhoods ghettoized by extreme poverty and by police supposedly seeking to contain violence rather than eradicate it. The limited horizons of youths in those barrios crushed personal aspirations and fostered group loyalties that engendered unending cycles of violence. When the social workers turned political, they proposed a cross-barrio Chicano identity and introduced new avenues of action and expression for the youthful energy, turning some batos (barrio guys) and some women into soldiers in Brown Beret units that patrolled the barrio and kept order at rallies and marches.

The activists who led larger movimientos were college-educated, articulate and, despite their attacks on the dominant society, optimistic. The new leaders—Montejano had to include the generals along with the soldiers—were heirs to an older Mexican American civil rights activism, but they came from a new generation of men and women who did not all rise from the immigrant elites and who were not as deferential to the Anglo society as their elders (Montejano vividly narrates one famous inter-generational confrontation at a university), and they demanded political and economic self-determination while reaffirming their Indian and Mexican mestizo culture. Despite strident demands that rallied the crowds, the leaders knew they had to find organizational outlets, including a new political party and institutional structures, for their expressions and those of their soldiers.

The treatment of the leaders’ strategies along with the more analytical examination of barrio youth activities complement Montejano’s study very nicely. This reviewer was more familiar with the Chicano Movement’s generals and their activities than with workings of the Berets but found the coverage of both aspects of the movimiento very insightful. In neither case does the author romanticize the outcomes, although there were significant wins, including some decrease in gang violence. The Chicano Movement was multi-faceted and not all efforts could be covered in one book, but Montejano resourcefully taps oral histories and private collections to examine how the movimiento played out among disaffected barrio youth, providing an extensive look into an often-ignored segment of society.

By placing his study in the wider, sometimes very emotionally heated, San Antonio and Texas Chicano context involving Quijote’s soldiers and the generals, Montejano has produced a comprehensive and very satisfying work that will certainly turn up as required reading in several college courses and will be cited by other scholars of the Chicano Movement. Additionally, anyone interested in civil rights movements will find Montejano’s study perceptive and his narrative engaging.