In May of 2024, I had the pleasure of talking with Jason De León about Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling at Bookshop Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz, California. De León is the director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, the Lloyd E. Cotsen Endowed Chair of Archaeology, and a professor of anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a 501(c)(3) research, arts, and education collective that seeks to raise awareness about migration issues globally.

His first book, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (2015), is an unflinching chronicle and trenchant critique of “Prevention through Deterrence”: a policy that has sought to curb undocumented migration to the United States by making undocumented migration more perilous. Since the implementation of Prevention through Deterrence in 1994, Mexico (in a process known as externalization) has blocked many migrants from reaching the United States. In response, human smugglers—or guías (guides), as they call themselves—help migrants make their way through Mexico, as well as get to and across the US-Mexico border.

These smugglers are the protagonists of Soldiers and Kings, as they transport many of those undocumented migrants from Central America through Mexico to the United States. De León’s second book is singular for highlighting the prominent role these human smugglers play in migration from Latin America to the United States—but also for trying to understand a group of people who tend to be demonized or ignored, because they fall outside the category of the “good” immigrant. Far from a sanitization or lionization, Soldiers and Kings reveals human smugglers’ complexity, contradictions, violence, and vulnerabilities.

Since our conversation at Bookshop Santa Cruz, Soldiers and Kings has gone on to win a National Book Award for Nonfiction, and Donald Trump—a man who has built his political career vilifying undocumented migrants—has begun his second term as president of the United States. What follows is an edited excerpt from our conversation.

Catherine S. Ramírez (CR): Why write a book about human smugglers (or guías, as your research participants call themselves)? What can the figure of the human smuggler tell us about migration and the world in general in the 21st century?

Jason De León (JDL): I ask myself that same question a lot. This project was an incredibly risky endeavor. Early on, people were saying, Oh, you are writing a book about smugglers. I hope you are not going to humanize them. I was getting this visceral response. But what happens if we start with the assumption that they are, in fact, humans? That we can learn about their world through their own stories?

I always thought that there were three reasons that this book happened. One was that I met a young smuggler named Roberto, who I was working with pretty closely. He was murdered, only a few months after we met. His death set me on this total spiral, and made me really question what I was doing with my life and with my research, and whether I needed to just walk away from all this stuff. It was feeling like it was too much. But, also, I had made this promise to him that I was going to try to tell his story.

Next, we know that smugglers are crucial to the process of undocumented migration. Still, it quickly became very clear that we know practically nothing about who they are, their lives, the structure of the job. So I realized that looking at smuggling could fill in this important gap in our knowledge.

But lastly, and this is part of my broader concern, it is really hard to tell a story about migration that people haven’t already heard. And so, for me, the idea of the smuggler, it was like sneaking the vegetables into the spaghetti sauce. Yes, I was thinking, this is a story about smuggling, but it is also about capitalism, it is about climate change, it is about labor, it is about race. Even I already had all my preconceived notions about these folks. So it was a productive challenge.

CR: What were some of those preconceived notions?

JDL: Like many people, I imagined that smugglers were rich, were bad, that everybody hates them: all these really simplistic kinds of things. For example, there is a story in the book where “Flaco” is telling us that he is helping these people. … He says, I would never rob anybody, I’m a good person. And then, at the end of the day, Flaco ends up robbing this person and leaving him high and dry. Yet that same person—only a month later!—messages me and says, Hey, can you hook me up with Flaco? I want to talk to him about some other stuff and maybe he can help a friend of mine. And I thought to myself, This is the person who stole about $3,000 from you, and yet … even though he cost you more money than you were anticipating … still, he got you there.

Things like that were pretty surprising to me, that people could overlook some of the brutality, because they ended up getting to where they wanted to go, even if it cost more money in the long run or more suffering than they were imagining.

CR: This is very much a character-driven narrative, in which you introduce us to a lot of really complicated, fallible people. Flaco, Alma, Papo, Chino, Santos, Kingston, Roberto—these characters are compelling, they are fascinating.

What really struck me about these smugglers is the profound irony that shapes their lives: they are just as desperate and vulnerable as the migrants they sometimes lie to, take advantage of, and abandon. And although they push the boundaries—literally getting people across an international line—still, they themselves can’t cross that line.

Take Kingston, for example: a smuggler who has helped countless people get to the US, but is unable to move his own family here. Similarly, many of the smugglers you interviewed left home to flee violent gangsters who threatened them; yet they have to become violent and, in some cases, gang members themselves to survive. So in effect, they become the very people they are running from.

How did they make sense of that paradox, that contradiction? How did they reckon with it? What did they tell you about it?

JDL: They all have a complicated relationship to the work and even to their identity as guías. Take the title of my book: Soldiers and Kings. The “king” comes from the fact that a lot of Honduran men that I worked with would refer to each other as “king,” as a term of endearment. But the term is also about how these mid-level smugglers are constantly trying to perpetuate this idea that they are in full control, that they are the king of their realm. But even so, these kings live in these incredibly precarious positions, where it is all show.

There is a moment with Kingston: he has this fancy apartment, he has all this stuff; and then someone steals it all. Suddenly, all he has are the clothes on his back. So he goes from this supposedly powerful person to nothing. And, actually, a lot of these folks recognize that their role is a temporary position and most of them don’t want to do it. At the same time, however, smuggling is the only thing that they are good at, it is the one place where they feel powerful, even if that power is fleeting.

But they really struggle with this identity. Someone like Kingston or Flaco, they hate the work because it is risky and they worry about dying. They like the money when it is there, but they recognize that the money goes really quickly. And yet, it is the only moment in society where people actually have any respect for them, even if it doesn’t last very long.

CR: You spent seven years conducting fieldwork and got to know some of these smugglers quite well. Despite the cutthroat nature of their work, many of them are likeable.

For example, we see an unexpected side of Kingston when he tries to enter a club after having been burglarized. Before going to the club, the two of you go to his home and are shocked to find that it has just been stripped clean. The place is empty. Suddenly, as you noted a moment ago, all Kingston has are the clothes on his back and the chanclas (flip-flops) on his feet. Still, he’s supposed to meet someone at the club. You accompany him there, but he’s turned away at the door because his chanclas are inappropriate attire. Yet instead of getting angry, Kingston—a violent and relatively powerful man—backs down. He doesn’t put up a fight; he doesn’t try to explain that he just had everything but his shoes stolen. This is an admirable show of patience and self-restraint for someone who has just experienced what sounds like a traumatic loss.

While you spent a considerable amount of time with Kingston and got to see these different sides of him, you also write that you tended to steer clear of people from whom you got what you call a “bad vibe.” What constitutes a bad vibe?

JDL: That is a good question and there was a book review that came out recently where the reviewer said something like, How come you didn’t interview the really scary people? And I thought, There were a lot of people that I hung out with who were super scary, murderers. People like Priest and Payaso.

CR: Payaso, the one who was always knitting?

JDL: Yeah, yeah.

CR: With the needles?

JDL: Yeah, these were sicarios (hired gunmen, assassins). But I liked them, and we got along and so they gave off a friendly vibe, even though they were so scary. There were other folks like Bin Laden, the Breadman, these others who I write about; they were coming around and they just made me nervous. Even though they weren’t talking about the things that these other guys were—a lot of these other guys were actively talking about violence they were committing—Bin Laden and the Breadman weren’t. But I got this sense that they were doing bad stuff and I was quite wary.

But that was the hard thing: I fell in love with a lot of really scary dudes and we ended up having these difficult relationships. I cared about them, I liked them, but they also just scared the hell out of me.

CR: There’s tenderness and there’s humor in Soldiers and Kings, but there’s also a lot of fear. When did you feel most afraid during your fieldwork or your writing, and how did you respond?

JDL: You know, that was a question that came up really early for me: Is this going to get too scary? And honestly, guys like Kingston were scary, but also incredibly protective of me. And so I had to put a lot of trust into these folks. I never really felt unsafe with any of them. We would be in rooms with scary guys and Kingston would be vouching for me and there were always people telling me what was okay, what was not okay.

For me, the scariest time in the fieldwork process was probably when the police started following me, and they saw that I was hanging out on the train tracks with migrants and smugglers. There is a scene in the beginning of the book where someone gets deported, because we had been followed for days. And the police come and start harassing us. The cop makes it clear that if I don’t stop poking around, things are going to get a lot worse for everybody.

The law enforcement stuff was super sketchy. For example, I spent a bunch of time with the border patrol in Honduras and those guys were maniacs too. Really, the people who were supposed to be doing the protecting were the ones that I ended up being the most afraid of.

This book unlocked or excavated a bunch of stuff for me that maybe I wasn’t prepared to deal with. For example, as I wrote in the beginning, I had this connection to these folks because they are maniacs and they are living on the edge, and it is a live fast and die fast approach. That was a big part of my own adolescence and my early 20s; I was just ready to push it to the end when I was younger.

I ended up connecting with a lot of these guys out of this shared childhood trauma. And out of this affinity, something like, We are just a bunch of maniacs hanging out and let’s just see what trouble we can get into. It wasn’t until the writing process that a lot of that stuff really started to come up for me personally. And that is when it started to get very scary, but, also, therapeutic.

CR: I want to talk about that writing. You’re a very deft storyteller. You go into the nuts and bolts of smuggling, the political economy of it: The migrant pays X number of dollars, N percentage of it goes to this two-bit smuggler, who gets the migrant from point A to point B, and then another portion of that money goes to another guy, and then to another one, and so on. For me, for an Anglophone, North American reader, learning about this pyramid—of which the smugglers you got to know were just one tiny part—was a revelation.

But Soldiers and Kings is also ethnography. You are in the mix with your research participants. You’ve interspersed this ethnography with what we in academia call “critical fabulation”: a narrative in which the scholar imagines an episode in someone else’s life, often the research participant’s or the historical actor’s past. One instance of critical fabulation in your book is when you recount for your readers “Jesmyn” witnessing her father’s murder when she was a little girl. Presumably she (or a composite of your research participants) shared this story with you, and then you recount it in a way that reads a bit like fiction.

What does critical fabulation offer that conventional ethnography does not?

JDL: That is such an important question. And it was one that I really wrestled with a lot. There are moments where people will tell a story and it is in their own words (and, indeed, there is a lot of just straight dialogue in the book: I said this, they said this). And then there were other moments where they would tell me a story and maybe they told it to me three different times, and each time there was a different detail in there. So I was struggling, thinking, How do I piece this together in a way that is going to be readable? And so there were moments where I thought, This was a crucial moment and I want it to feel more like how it is told to me and how I was imagining it. But it couldn’t necessarily be conveyed verbatim.

It is hard to paint that picture of someone just through the things that they say. You don’t get a sense of it all: what the room is like, what it smells like, what it sounds like. And so adding those details in helps to move the story along, and with a lot of the backstories that felt important. Because then there would be some continuity between what was happening and what I was observing directly, and what was being told me in the past. So part of it was just trying to keep the narrative connected.

I knew that these were such crucial moments. And so I was worried that they would lose their power if I didn’t write them in a way that felt more fictional or novelesque or with a driving narrative.

With the writing process, I always start with a storyboard. So I have my characters, I have the themes, and then I have all the important moments, some of them are backstory, some of them are moments that I witnessed. I put them on the board and go, Okay, how are these going to fit together? And then how am I going to get you from here to here?

I remember with my first book, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail, I gave a copy to my friend John Mitani, who was a primatologist at Michigan who has recently retired. In the book, there is a semifictionalized account of a border crossing in the beginning. This was a composite that I built from a bunch of different stories. And I used that story to include details that I didn’t want to just write as a laundry list of facts, like in the desert, the average temperature is X, there are this number of species of snakes, blah-blah-blah. I wanted to write a story where you learn those things as you are walking through the desert with these individuals.

And John said, Oh, I love that section. But then you go into this theoretical thing and it is so boring, oh my God, it was terrible, I had to stop reading. And so I always thought about that later on: Okay, the next time I do it, how can I maintain some continuity so that the reader does not say that to me?

Smugglers are complicated people, just like the rest of us. They happen to be involved in this insane and violent occupation that millions of people a year rely on.

CR: Our conversation shows why it’s important for anthropologists like you to talk to literary critics like me. In recent Latino literature about migration— for example, the work of former US poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and Mexican novelist Valeria Luiselli—there’s been a shift away from narrative to the list: one backpack, two empty water bottles, a child’s left shoe, a tattered Bible, a toothbrush. The experience of migration for so many people is so brutal and traumatizing that some writers have abandoned storytelling; instead, they are trying to represent the experience of undocumented migration as non-narrative, via utterances or images, or as ineffable.

JDL: For me, the narrative has become more important. I’ve got some upcoming projects that are pretty far removed from what people would consider to be anthropological. And that is partly just where my interests are going. …

CR: And, fortunately, in an interdisciplinary space like Chicano studies, you’re not bound by the limits of the discipline.

JDL: When I was at Michigan, I was strictly in anthropology and didn’t seem to fit. When I got to UCLA, I ended up partly in Chicano studies. All of a sudden, I thought, Oh, I’m finally legible. People understand what I want to do and what I’m doing. It was an incredibly refreshing experience.

CR: I want to return to the subject of emotions. There are a lot of emotions in this book. Fear, trust, hope, a little bit of joy, a lot of humor. What feelings would you like Soldiers and Kings to inspire in your readers?

JDL: A little bit of all those things. I laughed a lot doing the work of this book, which I didn’t expect. After all, I’m thinking, Oh, I’m hanging out with smugglers in this incredibly violent context. I didn’t imagine that there would be so much humor.

But I should have known that. When I was working with migrants in my previous project, there was a ton of humor. With this book, I want people to go on the emotional rollercoaster that I went on: where you have these highs, these lows, the fun moments, and then moments that just broke my heart.

I want people to look at these folks and maybe approach the subject with a bit more of an open mind, so as to understand the complexities of it and the full range of experiences people have. Smugglers are complicated people, just like the rest of us. They just happen to be involved in this really insane and violent occupation that millions of people a year rely on.

I hope readers come away from the book with a more complicated sense of the issues at hand and the many problems that need to be addressed. But I also want them to know that even in these dark places there is a lot of hope. For example, the book begins with my friend Roberto’s murder. He was a person that was supposed to be nobody. Nobody was supposed to care about him; but they did. He was supposed to not be important; but he was.

At the end of the book, Roberto shows up again. I bring him back in this really funny moment. For me, that was a personal thing. I want to remember him like that. I want to remember him where he was laughing and making me laugh. And, now—in this story, at least—he gets to live forever. 

Featured image: Jason De León.