When Jason De León started the research that led to his latest book, “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling,” he didn’t know he’d be at it for so long.
De León, a professor of anthropology and Chicano studies at UCLA and the executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project, became interested in the lives of human smugglers, or guías, after the murder of one of them: his friend Roberto, a man who made a meager living “guiding fellow Hondurans on the Mexican train tracks as they made their way north toward the American dream.”
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Early in the book, the author stresses the difference between smugglers (or coyotes or pasadors, as they are also known) – who aid willing participants – and human traffickers, who clearly do not. “People who are trafficked have that happen against their will, usually through force, fraud, or coercion. Those Roberto smuggled were willing participants who actively sought him out and paid for his services. I repeat, human smuggler and trafficker are very different things, a concept that popular media and the general public often fail to grasp.”
De León, a 2017 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and author of “The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail,” decided to embed with a group of guías in order to understand the world of human smuggling, speaking and traveling with them over the course of seven years. “Soldiers and Kings,” which combines anthropology with oral history, is an often startling look at smuggling, which De León writes “has grown from a mom-and-pop business into a billion-dollar global industry that will only become more important as parts of our planet grow to be less and less livable.”
De León answered questions about “Soldiers and Kings” via Zoom from Los Angeles, where he lives and plays bass in the band The War Pigs. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Q: What made you decide to embed yourself with these smugglers for such a long period of time?
I really wanted to find a new perspective to write from. After my first book, I felt like I had written about migrants and I was looking for something to do next. I took stock of what was missing in the first book, and I really wanted to spend more time with the border patrol. I wanted to spend more time with smugglers. So I was already kind of thinking that the next project needed to be something radically different from the first.
But I did not go into it thinking I was going to write about smugglers. I had been thinking about law enforcement or other perspectives. When my friend Roberto was murdered, that ended up being the thing that really pushed me in that direction. I spent a summer with some folks and thought maybe I could write a little bit about smuggling, but I didn’t expect that I was going to commit myself to as much time as I did. But after his death, I really felt like in order to fulfill a promise about writing about him, I needed to go in and spend a lot of time trying to understand what these people’s lives were like.
Q: You used an anthropological method called participant observation to research and write this book. Can you describe what that involves?
Participant observation, for a normal person, is hanging out. There is a phrase that we use in anthropology where we call it “deep hanging out.” That’s really what it is in a nutshell. You’re spending as much time with people as possible. You’re observing their lives, you’re documenting it, and you’re often participating in it as well. It’s this full-on immersion that takes a lot of time and energy. It’s not necessarily a fly on the wall kind of thing; obviously, the people know that we’re there, but it’s just more, “How much time can I spend with people, and what are the different kinds of things that I can observe?” So you come into it and you have questions that you want to ask, but through the act of just being there, you end up seeing a whole bunch of other stuff that maybe you wouldn’t have asked about or considered if you had not had the luxury of time to observe.
Q: There are sections in the book where it’s just back-and-forth dialogue between you and your sources. Was that a choice that you made to bring the reader closer to these people?
For me, it’s always important to preserve people’s voices as much as you can. In this case, it was hard because it has to be translated from one language into another, and then it has to be put into this context, which oftentimes requires some kind of lead-up to it. My approach with the dialogue was I felt like it was much better coming directly from their mouths, and then you could get a sense of how you’re learning alongside me as well. I’m asking these questions and these are the ways that people are responding. I feel like the more dialogue you get from someone like Flaco or Kingston, the more you hear their voice. It’s really giving them as much space as I can in a book format.
Q: You write about the stereotypes people have about the guides. What kind of misconceptions do you think people are still laboring under even though we should probably all know better at this point?
I think that if we think about migrants in the U.S., migrants are easy to blame for every societal ill, especially right now, in an election year, and they have no voice to speak back, and so it is easy. Whatever’s gone wrong, we can blame them. And I think it’s the same thing with smugglers. Whatever’s gone wrong in the migration process, people want to put the blame firmly on those smugglers, even though they’re part of a much bigger system. Clearly, lots of migrants die in the desert, they die in the jungles. When that happens, the American public says, “Oh, this is the smuggler’s fault.” The border patrol says “This is the smuggler’s fault.”
But no one ever says, “Well, why do people need smugglers? Why are they coming?” A big part of this book is to demystify that, and to say, “Look, smuggling is not the problem. It is the symptom of these much bigger kinds of issues, and it’s too easy to blame smugglers for everything that’s gone wrong. When we do that, we lose sight of the bigger picture and the complexities of it.”
Q: Do you have hope that American society will fully realize what this migration crisis actually entails and demand meaningful change?
I do have hope. I have to have hope. Without hope, it’s really hard to get up in the morning and want to keep doing this stuff, but I do think that people are getting smarter. It takes time. But I do think that people are fed up. They want change, and I’m hopeful that as bad as things can possibly get, at the end of the day, people are good and they want us as a society, as a species, to move forward in positive ways.
