True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall

In Chapter 26, the kids meets a cowboy. Inmate Victor Martinez skillfully rides a horse, owing to his time growing up on a ranch. Victor is at home on the horse in a way he is not anywhere else. This is an aspect of him no one knew about and causes them to completely reconsider their opinion of him. When Victor is finished riding, the cowboy tending the horse tells him he could work training horses and teaching riding; this is not something Victor has considered, and he is immediately taken aback.

This moment speaks to the undiscovered quality of each of the inmates, which their time and presence in juvenile hall closes off. Eventually, the inmates learn to see themselves wrongly; i.e., in the narrow framework of their prison environment. The symbolic aspect of this episode is not Victor's skill with the horse, but his surprise at the knowledge that horse husbandry was an option for him, that this possibility still existed. While it seems natural and obvious for those on the outside, the way the author presents this scene, and Victor's personality up to that point, highlights how the limited expectations and prejudices of this environment work on both the readers, and the student-inmates.