Jason De León "Soldiers and Kings" (w/ Adriana E. Ramírez)
About this Event
We are grateful to host National Book Award winning author, Jason De León, in-store for an unforgettable evening with local award-winning writer and long-time friend of White Whale, Adriana E. Ramírez.
WINNER OF THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION
A TIME 10 Best Nonfiction Book of 2024
An NPR Book We Love 2024
A New York Times Notable Book of 2024
A Boston Globe Best Book of 2024
“A work of extraordinary reportage and compassion…[it] will shock you, move you, and leave you changed.” —Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Evicted and Poverty, by America
“An enlightening, frightening, unforgettable read.” —Sandra Cisneros, bestselling author of The House on Mango Street
An intense, intimate and first-of-its-kind look at the world of human smuggling in Latin America, by a MacArthur “genius” grant winner and anthropologist with unprecedented access
Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet the real lives and work of smugglers—or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services—are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, internationally recognized anthropologist and expert Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years.
The result of this unique and extraordinary access is SOLDIERS AND KINGS: the first ever in-depth, character-driven look at human smuggling. It is a heart-wrenching and intimate narrative that revolves around the life and death of one coyote who falls in love and tries to leave smuggling behind. In a powerful, original voice, De León expertly chronicles the lives of low-level foot soldiers breaking into the smuggling game, and morally conflicted gang leaders who oversee rag-tag crews of guides and informants along the migrant trail. SOLDIERS AND KINGS is not only a ground-breaking up-close glimpse of a difficult-to-access world, it is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.
ADRIANA E. RAMÍREZ is a writer, critic, and poet based in Pittsburgh. She is the author of The Violence: My Family’s Colombian War (Scribner, 2026), the 2015 PEN/Fusion Emerging Writer’s Prize-winning Dead Boys (Little A, 2016), and The Swallows: Poems (Blue Sketch Press, 2016). Ramírez is also a former critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times’s Book Section and the former columnist and books editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She is the cofounder of Aster(ix) Journal with Angie Cruz. Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, People Magazine, and elsewhere. She once lost terribly on Jeopardy!.
JASON DE LEÓN is Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and Lloyd E. Cotsen Endowed Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. He is also Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a 501(c)(3) research, arts, and education collective focused on raising awareness about our global migration crisis. The UMP has recently launched ¡Listen Up!, a free music outreach program intended to amplify the voices of underserved youth around the globe. De León's recent book Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling won the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction. De León is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and plays bass in the band War Pigs, a kid political punk band he founded with his two chidren.
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