Soldiers and Kings: Book Discussion with Jason De León

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.

Ash Cornejo is a Psychological & Medical Anthropology Ph. D. student at UC San Diego working on the U.S.-Mexico border. With a background in ethnobotany, Ash’s work focuses on the health and healing of Mexican farmworkers experiencing forced migration. Her work centers on labor, migration, plant medicine, and ritual. She is currently a UC Berkeley School of Law Human Right Fellow, documenting the reunification of families forcibly separated at the border.

Jason De León is a professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies; and Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He authored the award-winning book, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (UC Press 2015). De León is a 2017 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and between 2013 and 2017 he co-curated the traveling exhibition “State of Exception.”

Michael Wells has served as primary photographer and artistic adviser for Undocumented Migration Project since its inception in 2009. He has photographed the project’s ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork in Arizona, New York, Mexico, Honduras, and Ecuador. A Los Angeles-based photographer, he has created photography projects on post-Katrina New Orleans, the physicality of the US Mexico border in Arizona and California, and Latino communities in the American South.

Elana Zilberg is an Associate Professor in the Communication Department, and the Co-Director of the Human Rights and Migration Program at the University of California San Diego. She is also author of Space of Detention: The Making of a ‘Transnational Gang Crisis’ between Los Angeles and San Salvador (Duke University Press 2011) and co-author of the report Zooming to Border for Human Rights in the Times of Trump and CoVID-19 (2021).