Wednesday, February 11, 2026: Jason de León, "Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling"

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Join us on Zoom for our monthly Borderlands Literature and Film Circle. This month we will be joined by Jason de León:

Acclaimed anthropologist and author Jason De León helps us understand the complex human landscape of the migrant trail. Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA and a 2017 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, de Leon is also Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project, which documents the lives and deaths of those crossing the Sonoran Desert. His work focuses on the "material culture" and raw human experiences of the borderlands.

Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling takes us on a visceral journey along the "vertical migrant trail" through Mexico. This book is the result of seven years of "deep hanging out" with the men often flattened into villains by the media: the smugglers themselves. By embedding with these individuals, Jason reveals a world shaped by extreme poverty, policy-driven violence, and the desperate hope for survival that defines life in the clandestine migration industry.

The New York Times describes it as "a work of staggering empathy and exhaustive research," while Publishers Weekly notes that "De León’s writing is as grit-and-dirt immersive as it is analytically sharp... a masterpiece of ethnographic storytelling." These insights provide a necessary, if often uncomfortable, look at the systemic forces that create the "coyote" industry.