October 1, 2023
To tell the story of human smuggling in Soldiers and Kings, MacArthur fellow and UCLA professor De Le�n traveled over seven years with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico. Prepub Alert.
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March 1, 2024
The men, women, and children who arrive at the border crossing to the U.S., whether coming as families or alone, are united by purpose: to seek refuge from the dangers and poverty of their homelands and make a better life. Illegal immigration has remained a contentious and hot-button topic as the number of people attempting to cross the country's southern borders continues to increase. The role of coyotes, people who ferry migrants through unforgiving areas for a fee, is often misunderstood. While many coyotes are connected to an underworld organization, others do the work in order to fund their own treks northward to peace and prosperity. These guides assume that each voyage comes with danger and could be their last. Anthropologist and MacArthur fellow De Leon (The Land of Open Graves, 2015) offers a staggering view of the people who help move asylum seekers. His conversations with participants in a vast migration put human faces to a shadowy concept, and his story is illuminating and often heartrending in its telling.
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Starred review from February 1, 2024
A harrowing account of the work of human smugglers in bringing aspirational immigrants to America's southern border. Anthropology professor De Le�n writes of the men--almost always men--who work as smugglers bringing undocumented immigrants from Central America through Mexico to the U.S. There's a world of difference between smugglers and traffickers, and while they're commonly called coyotes, polleros, and the like, at least one of his subjects prefers to call himself a gu�a, a guide, "a designation with potentially less negative semantic baggage and one that directly reflects the work." Traveling to Honduras and throughout Mexico over seven years, De Le�n encountered numerous such guides, who have a difficult job requiring a split-second decision on whether to trust someone, especially someone like him who was asking invasive questions. Notes one police officer whose job it is to keep coyotes and would-be immigrants from their homeland, "Many migrants that I've interviewed have also told me they would prefer to die en el camino than stay home and wait to die from gang violence or hunger." Both outcomes are entirely possible in lands riven by internecine gang wars and poverty, as in the case of Honduras, being second only to Haiti as the poorest nation in Latin America. Importantly, De Le�n writes, both outcomes are also the product of late capitalism, as is the very movement of masses of people to places of greater economic opportunity, less violence, and better environmental conditions. Many of the author's informants die along the way, as do some of their charges, and many others seek to change their lives and do something else. To his credit, so does De Le�n in dispirited moments when he laments "peddling stories of other people's misery." An exemplary ethnography of central importance to any discussion of immigration policy or reform.
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Starred review from October 28, 2024
Smugglers who help Central Americans traverse Mexico and cross into the U.S. are not the “slick haired... kingpins” portrayed in popular media but are usually themselves poor migrants who got waylaid and caught up in the trade, according to this outstanding, luminously written account. Drawing on seven years spent embedded with people smugglers in Mexico, anthropologist De León (The Land of Open Graves) depicts a hardscrabble world of almost mythically impossible proportions: terrorized by corrupt Mexican cops, fearful of being returned back to the brutal conditions of their home countries, and constantly at risk of violence from gangs, the smugglers serve as guides to desperate souls who’d “rather die on the train tracks in Mexico than be murdered on a street corner” back home. De León’s elegant prose brings pulsing life to this benighted underworld, observing it with a sharp eye and a noirish sensibility (“It is impossible to avoid him. It is unhealthy to run from him,” he quips about a gang leaderwho perches as “the guardian at the gate... the troll under the bridge” at a waypoint along the notorious La Bestia train route). His fluid storytelling builds to a gut-wrenching finish as De León reflects on the heartless reception his ethnographic work with smugglers receives from academic audiences, contrasting it with his own emotional fallout after the death of Roberto, a carefree, lively young smuggler he’d befriended. It’s a knockout.