Sociologist David Montejano's Sancho's Journal: Exploring the Political Edge with the Brown Berets is his account of “hanging out” with a group of Chicano Brown Berets over a period of seven months in San Antonio, Texas in the mid-1970s (1974, to be exact), but it is also about the longue durée of a research project (begun as a dissertation idea) that may still not have found the right moment for its completion. In order to find some closure with the project, which he views as a companion volume to his book Quixote's Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1981 (2010), in which he studied several organizations and events in San Antonio, Texas, Montejano frames this account of his time with the Southside Brown Berets as a kind of intellectual autobiography or companion ethnography to that study.

The Brown Berets were founded in East Los Angeles in the late 1960s with numerous chapters organizing quickly around the US, including the Southwest and the Mid-west. As a self-defined community defense organization, they provided security for marches, conferences, and events, with some chapters establishing free-meal programs and clinics or engaging in other political actions. While there is no national analysis of the organization to date, Montejano offers a glimpse of the state-level organization of the Brown Berets in Texas, where, after the initial period of founding and intense activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of chapters went through changes. In San Antonio, after the demise of the Westside Brown Berets in 1973 due to internal and external conflicts and challenges, a small group moved to rebuild a Southside chapter, in a part of the city that included the most impoverished.

Constructing himself as the “Sancho” figure, the companion (and servant) who accompanied Don Quixote on his fanciful adventures, he accompanies the Southside Berets in a search for the answer to his initial question about how a group of marginalized men of color claim their political agency and assert those politicized identities within a social-justice movement. In his reflections, Montejano touches upon gender identities, class identity, and, briefly, sexuality. He explores how these men, ranging in age from late teens to early thirties – among them many who are unemployed and underemployed – struggle to maintain a sense of organizational coherence and meaning as Brown Berets. Montejano's dilemma of representation is how to understand the political agency of a group that expresses ideals of social justice and community uplift while some of its members engage in the less than revolutionary practices of drug dealing and consuming, petty theft, and gunplay.

Protocols, rituals, and codes of conduct, including guidelines tied to the public wearing of the beret (42–44), reveal a collective will to demonstrate their political commitment to la raza. Despite guidelines about proper conduct and discipline, these Berets drink constantly and some individuals have substance-abuse issues that become occasions for requiring them to remove or even to turn in their beret and leave the group. (The one member who holds a very solid job at the local military base and who spends the most energy trying to keep the group together and “disciplined” eventually gives up and leaves the group.) In a sense, these Berets are a kind of self-help group, and yet they lack integration into a recovery network. They also organize during a time when the movement was already waning in Texas, so there were fewer networks to fortify their sense of a social-movement politics that went beyond the very local.

What stands out most to me in Sancho's Journal is the fact that power relations and inequalities inside and outside the academy from the 1970s to the present made it difficult for Montejano to represent the Brown Berets of Southside San Antonio in all their complexity as human beings beyond the objectifying categories of the Marxist lumpenproletariat (dismissed as not having revolutionary potential) or sociological concepts of deviance and pathology. In Sancho's Journal, he makes transparent the contexts and complexities of the institutional environments and social-science discourses in which he was and is located as an academic while he also hails from the same communities as those he writes about. His project is a valiant attempt to communicate an understanding of the lives of marginalized men of color within US society and their expressions of political agency. The political edge that Montejano seeks is the politics of the complex existence of marginalized men of color who seek out the Brown Beret concept as a space of possibility and promise. This in itself speaks to the relevance of the beret, which continues to have meaning for a disenfranchised people, as he notes in the last chapter of the book.