Sancho’s Journal: Exploring the Political Edge with the Brown Berets by David Montejano (review)

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Sancho’s Journal is a narrative account of the author’s seven-months among the San Antonio Southside Brown Berets, along with critical reflection on the ethical dilemmas of ethnography, the politicization of batos locos during the Chicano movement, and the advancement of a more humanizing portrait of barrio life. The book, characterized variously by its author as narrative, journal, intellectual autobiography, story, ethnography, and failed dissertation is based on journal notes taken during David Montejano’s “field experience” (19) while “embedded” (10) with the Southside Berets from August 1974 to April 1975. During this time of observing how its recruits acquired “political literacy” (9) and negotiated this with locura, a lifestyle defined by an underground economy of theft, drugs, and gangs, Montejano was made the chapter’s minister of information in exchange for “hanging out” (ix) with them.

Montejano explains in the first chapter that following his affiliation with the Southside Berets he faced the irreconcilable ambiguities and inherent inequalities of the “ethnographic confrontation” (3) between observer and observed, and thus discontinued writing the book, the dissertation he initially intended. Montejano describes Sancho’s Journal as the belated third book of a trilogy—preceded by Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (1987) and Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1981 (2010)—that completes “a line of inquiry” (17) started over thirty years ago while a graduate student at Yale about how political consciousness transforms behavior.

The book contains ten additional chapters, the first seven providing periodic excerpts from Montejano’s journal notes capturing his raw observations. In chapter two, “Regeneración,” Montejano introduces the Southside Brown Berets as a sixteen-member “second generation” (43) chapter comprised of veteran members and new recruits, gang members, tecatos (addicts), and mainly high school dropouts. Also discussed is the importance of ritual practice to member camaraderie, for instance handshakes and the wearing of the beret to symbolize carnalismo (brotherhood). Chapters three and four, “Por La Causa” and “Somos Camaradas,” consider the Berets’ disciplinary measures to maintain appropriate public etiquette and rapport with other Texas chapters, and ultimately to contend with its members’ competing “deviant and revolutionary impulses” (70). Chapter five, “A Dallas Vamos,” recalls the Southside chapter’s attendance at the statewide Brown Beret executive meeting, and Montejano’s observation of how the ideological force of Chicano cultural nationalism unified the diverse interests of all the chapters. While in chapter six, “Negotiating Locura,” Montejano explains how the wearing of the beret “regulated code switching between ‘offstage’ or private behavior and ‘front stage’ or public behavior” (106) for the Southside Brown Berets, chapters seven and eight address member participation in illegal activity and concern over FBI infiltration.

The concluding three chapters of Sancho’s Journal address the roughly thirty-year period following Montejano’s field experience during which the ethnographic material was allowed to age and “become harmless” (174), leading to the gradual resolution of the ethical and political dilemmas that originally paralyzed his writing. Montejano recounts his search for an elusive “bridging metaphor” (205) to make sense of the political...