Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling

Co-Presented by SITE SANTA FE and the School for Advanced Research

Jason De León, speaker
Loyd E. Cotsen Endowed Chair of Archaeology, University of California at Los Angeles
2024 Winner, National Book Award for Nonfiction

In 2014, Mexico (with financial and logistical support from the Obama administration) launched Programa Frontera Sur, a security enforcement project aimed at stopping Central American migrants from reaching the US-Mexico border. Under this program, Mexico dramatically increased arrests and deportations while simultaneously making the migration journey more arduous and deadly. In response to this heightened security, migrants have turned to transnational gangs such as MS-13 who have become increasingly involved in the human smuggling industry. In 2015, I began a long-term ethnographic project focused on understanding the daily lives of Honduran smugglers who profit from transporting migrants across the length of Mexico. In this talk, De León presents stories from his recent book—2024 National Book Award-winning Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling—and examines the complicated relationship among transnational gangs, the human smuggling industry, and migrant desires for safety and well-being.

2017 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and former SAR Weatherhead Fellow, Jason De León combines archaeology, ethnography, visual anthropology, and forensic science to examine migration, violence, and material culture. De León is the director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and the Loyd E. Cotsen Endowed Chair of Archaeology at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he is also a professor of anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American studies.

As executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a nonprofit research and education collective, he has led groundbreaking studies of clandestine migration since 2009. His award-winning books, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (2015) and Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (2024, National Book Award for Nonfiction), reveal the human impact of migration and its systemic complexities.

De León received his BA from the University of California at Los Angeles and a PhD from Pennsylvania State University.

Host or Publisher School for Advanced Research