Renowned anthropologist Jason De León was at a migrant shelter in Chiapas, Mexico in 2015 when he was getting ready to say goodbye to what had been already a long time researching migration.
“ I had finished my first book on migrants crossing the Sonoran desert and I really wanted to do something totally different,” Jason told Latino USA. “Part of it was because it’s really difficult to tell new kinds of stories about the border, about migration.”
That’s when one of the nuns at the shelter advised Jason not to go outside because there were a lot of “delinquents.”
“I was like, ‘well, I’ll just go outside and see what’s going on’ and as soon as I got out there I run into this group of rough looking young men who are hanging out,” he said. “You hear this like reggaeton is blasting. It’s a giant cloud of marijuana smoke.”
Jason introduced himself to the group of young men. He told them he was an anthropologist.
“They just sat me down and said, ‘you wrote a book about migrants, how come no one ever listens to us ever? No one ever asks us our stories. They all think we’re bad guys, but it’s much more than that’,” they told Jason.
This encounter would lead Jason to spend the next several years embedding with human smugglers and the end result is his latest book “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling,” which was the winner of the 2024 National Book Award in the Nonfiction category.
In his book, Jason introduces the reader to the people behind the world of human smuggling. He dives into their day-to-day lives, how they got involved in the industry and explores why human smuggling exists, as well as its connection to the United States.
“I think people fail to realize that human smuggling is the outcome of border policies, changes in border security, the drive to have undocumented labor in the United States. Smuggling is responding to those things,” Jason told Latino USA. “All these guys, they know that human mobility is unstoppable. There is nothing you can do to stop people who are desperate to find some new and better place.”
Jason’s book is intimate, and oftentimes heartbreaking. He said working on this book messed him up, but it also started to allow him to self-reflect and heal.
“As I started writing this stuff up, I realized there’s a kinship that I share with these guys,” Jason said. “I was a very self destructive young person, so I saw it in these guys, and the intense kind of self harm. Everyone that I worked with, that I wrote about, had been around violence, had survived sexual abuse, and I had to come to grips with and come to a place of accepting that I had been the survivor of childhood sexual abuse. That many of my self-destructive behaviors had been the result of that.”
On this episode of Latino USA, host Maria Hinojosa sits down with Jason De León to talk about his book, the world and business of human smuggling under the Trump administration, as well as if Jason believes there can be a world without the need of human smuggling.
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Produced by Reynaldo Leaños Jr. Edited by Andrea López Cruzado. Mixed by Julia Caruso.
Featured image by Michael Wells.
