Researcher and professor Jason De León wanted to tell a different story about human smuggling and its relationship to undocumented migration between the United States and Latin America.
“For me, one of the problems with the American public is that we are bombarded with stories about migration, and we have been for a very, very long time. To the point that we think we already know that story,” he says. “I think it’s really hard to tell a different kind of story about migration, but we need to so that we can get people to think about it differently.”
In his first book, “The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail,” he details six years of research on the social process of undocumented migration. In his latest book, “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling,” he offers a view of smuggling as a symptom of a number of larger social problems. On May 9, he’ll discuss his new book as part of a three-part event beginning at 3:30 p.m. at the Museum of Us in Balboa Park. The event includes the discussion, a book signing, and a walk through the “Hostile Terrain 94” exhibition, an interactive map installation with more than 3,200 handwritten toe tags representing migrants who have died while trying to cross the Sonoran Desert in Arizona.
De León is a professor of anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles; director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA; and executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a research, arts, and education collective raising awareness about global migration issues (which also created the “Hostile Terrain 94” exhibition). He took some time to discuss his focus on smuggling in “Soldiers and Kings,” the U.S.’s “prevention through deterrence” immigration strategy rerouting people to more remote and difficult areas to cross the border, and telling the kind of story he hopes will make people think differently about undocumented migration. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: In your 2017 MacArthur Fellow interview, you talk about working on your dissertation and conducting field work in Mexico, where you met people who’d had traumatic border crossing experiences. Can you talk about what you were hearing and thinking about during those conversations that compelled you to alter your path toward what would become this focus on incorporating archaeology and anthropology with undocumented immigration and migration experiences?
A: Those conversations really started happening as soon as I went to Mexico to do field work, so probably 2001 is when I was meeting people, working on excavations. I was thinking about archaeology in a very traditional kind of manner, but was just hearing all of these stories about people’s experiences in the desert, people almost dying. It really kind of forced me to rethink what it was I wanted to do with my life and what were the things that I found to be of interest. I think the thing that really struck me was that, when I started this project, there really wasn’t a lot of work being done on clandestine migration. There’d been a lot of work done with immigrant communities once they were already here in the United States, but what was happening at the U.S.-Mexico border — in terms of what does clandestine migration look like, what do border crossings look like — there just wasn’t much out there. That was the first thing that really stuck with me, was that why aren’t we paying attention to this thing that is so important? It’s happening globally, but nobody is spending a lot of time looking at the kind of nitty gritty of it. Then, I think more importantly, I really wanted to find a way to help people tell the stories about this thing that millions of them were experiencing, yet there was little attention paid to it and it was also something very challenging to look at. For me, as an anthropologist having a background in archaeology, having a background in ethnography, and a little bit of forensic science, I recognize that there were all these different tools in the anthropological toolbox that I could use to try to paint a fuller picture about what was happening at the border.
Q: Congratulations on the release of your second book, “Soldiers and Kings.” I know you’ve previously said that you get asked this often, so forgive me for asking it again, but can you talk about why you chose to focus on the role of smuggling within this broader conversation around migration?
A: I think it’s an important question. I think when people often ask it, it’s like it seems like such a horrible thing to study, or we kind of already know that story. I think people are kind of put off by the subject, right? I mean, what is there to know about smugglers, other than that they’re very bad people? I think that, often, that is the kind of consensus. For me, part of the rationale was, 15 years ago, there wasn’t much written anthropologically about border crossings; and when I started looking at smuggling, there wasn’t much written about smuggling, either. There are a few people who were kind of looking at it here and there, but not really from the kind of ethnographic lens that I wanted to use, and that was really striking to me because, obviously, undocumented migration is a global phenomenon. It’s at the core of so many political and economic conversations, and smugglers are there at every aspect of it, yet we know so little about who they are, what they do, why they do it, how much they make, all those kinds of basic questions. For me, part of it was that I just wanted to shed a little bit of light on this thing that is pervasive and yet so poorly understood. Then, I would say that the other part of it is that I really got involved in this project because, in 2015, I was in Mexico working on a kind of unrelated project on Central American migration and I got to know a bunch of smugglers. They were telling me interesting stories, they sort of wanted to be heard, so I started working with those folks. Soon after, one of them was murdered. I think, in a lot of ways, this book was kind of an attempt to honor that person, who I promised that we would try to tell his story. I didn’t realize that it would take up seven years of my life going down all of these difficult, dark holes to understand this process. This kid, Roberto, he was a young man from Honduras, he’d been smuggling for a few years, didn’t really like it, was trying to get out and found it to be a very impossible task—one that eventually took his life. I wanted people to kind of understand that; he might have done bad things, but I wouldn’t necessarily characterize him as a bad person, or as the kind of boogeyman that we often blindly attribute to smuggling. His story was complicated, and it changed me and moved me in a lot of ways. This project, in some ways, was an attempt to share that narrative.
Q: The website for the Undocumented Migration Project, the research organization founded in 2009 to understand the multiple layers involved in the border crossings between Latin America and the U.S., talks about the implementation of the U.S.’s prevention through deterrence strategy that increased security at more populated sections of the border and left more remote areas less secure in an effort to reroute migration to places like Arizona’s Sonoran Desert where crossing conditions are much more difficult and often fatal. While we understand that a lot of this history is incredibly vast, are you able to briefly talk about the backdrop that this strategy was developed under, what migration tended to look like before, and how that strategy has shaped migration into what you’ve described as a more organized and violent process that we see today?
A: It’s kind of linked to two things. One, was a story about a bunch of students at a place called Bowie High School in El Paso, Texas. Most of them were Mexican-American students and that high school is right on the U.S.-Mexico border. People were crossing, hopping the fence, and running across campus trying to get to the United States. The Border Patrol started chasing migrants across campus. Along the way, they couldn’t differentiate between migrants and between these high school students, and they started detaining these high school students. So, these students filed a federal complaint against the Border Patrol to get them kicked off campus. One of the responses that Border Patrol did was to then increase the security at the border in this urban zone, so it made it impossible for any migrants to cross through this high school. Now, they had to go out into the woods, to maybe go five miles out of town to hop the fence and come back in. They realized that they could redirect migrants away from these urban zones where it was hard to distinguish who was undocumented and who wasn’t, and push them out into the woods. They realized, if you push them out into the woods, that’s more work to get across. Around the same time, in San Diego, we have all of the racism that’s happening in the early ‘90s against Latinos. You’ve got Gov. Pete Wilson at the time, who is kind of running on this anti-immigrant campaign with all of this footage of San Diego and people coming up to San Ysidro at dusk on the Mexican side, hundreds of people waiting for the sun to go down and hopping the fence and running into downtown San Ysidro en masse, and the Border Patrol is catching as many of them as they can. They recognized what was happening in El Paso and they said, ‘OK, let’s do that here and we’ll force people away from the port of entry, out into the mountains of eastern San Diego County.’ So, they start realizing that they don’t necessarily have to stop people, but if they can redirect them from the urban zone, they can keep pushing them further and further out into the woods. Eventually, that’s when the Sonoran Desert becomes important because it’s hundreds of square miles of extreme environmental conditions that are quite difficult to get across on foot. Then they realize, ‘Oh, this is a policy that we can both make undocumented migration less visible, so people in San Diego aren’t complaining about the visibility of this “invasion,”’ but then they can also start to savvily use the environment as a weapon against migrants.
Q: “Soldiers and Kings” has been described, in part, as “seeking to dispel stereotypes” about smuggling and the people involved. Can you talk about some of those stereotypes and how they compare to what you witnessed during your work on this book?
A: I think one of the things that people think is that smuggling is really organized and it’s a big moneymaker. It’s pretty poorly organized, at least at the ground level, and the folks that I worked with for so many years were just a bunch of grunts, foot soldiers who were making less than minimum wage and who were folks who were often just as desperate, if not more so, than the migrants that they were themselves smuggling. All of the people that I worked with, they were all from Honduras. Some of them were young men involved in gangs, either MS-13, a lot of them were Bloods. They were running from gang violence, running from poverty in Honduras, and then find themselves involved in this criminal endeavor in Mexico, once again involved with gangs, trying to make a little bit of money, but nobody wanted to be where they were. None of the folks that I worked with were happy that they were smugglers, wanted to be there. A big chunk of the book revolves around all of these folks trying to get away, trying to get out, so this notion that the smuggler has all of this money? I mean, there are people who make a lot of money off of this who broker these big deals, but the people who are on the ground, who move migrants from point A to point B? Those folks, oftentimes, are dead broke, half homeless, if not completely homeless, and they’re basically street urchins who can guide you on the railroad tracks because they kind of grew up there, so they know these rough areas and a lot of them were failed migrants themselves.
Q: You’ve said that smuggling is “not the problem to be solved.” What do you mean when you say that? Why, from your point of view, is smuggling itself not the problem?
A: Globally, we have to think about it as these are people who are providing a service for migrants. Migrants are actively seeking out smugglers and saying, ‘I’m going to pay you this money to get me to where I need to go.’ They’re not being trafficked; they might get trafficked later on if the smuggler turns out to be a bad person, but they enter those economic relationships thinking that they’re going to pay for a service. If there was no poverty, if there was no climate change, if there was no deep desire in the U.S. for cheap, controllable, undocumented labor, there would be no need for smuggling. For me, smuggling is a symptom of capitalism, it’s a symptom of this double standard that the U.S. has: we hate migrants at the border, but we love them when they’re in the kitchen and landscaping our yards. So, I think about smuggling as it’s part of this much bigger, bigger problem and it’s not going to go away. I think it’s completely unstoppable and as long as there’s a need for people to get from one place to another, as long as people are desperate enough to try to look someplace else, there’s always going to be an industry for smuggling.
Q: You use multiple disciplines to analyze and document issues of migration. Can you talk about how these varying fields—anthropology, archaeology, the arts, forensic science — can humanize border crossing and immigration, especially in the American consciousness?
A: For me, it’s all about, “How can I tell a different story?” One of the things I love about anthropology is that we’ve got so many different tools in the toolbox to tell the stories — I can use archaeology because the things that migrants leave in the desert, tell the story; I can talk to living people, so the ethnographic side of getting people’s stories; the visual storytelling through photography, through documentary film; the forensic science to understand what happens post-mortem; the art space of the exhibition work where I’m really trying to translate anthropological data for different kinds of audiences. … I’m someone who, I live and breathe migration and I’ll open up the newspaper in the morning and see a story about migration and it’ll take a lot, often, for me to actually open that story because I feel like I already know what it’s going to say…For me, one of the things about, “Why talk about smugglers?,” part of it is because, for all the things that I’ve already said, but people hear this word “smuggling” and they go, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting, maybe I want to learn more about that.’ Then, for me, I’m not so much interested in smuggling, I’m interested in smuggling as part of this much bigger problem. So, I can bring you in because you think you’re going to learn about one thing, but then I’m going to try to tell you a story about climate change, a story about capitalism, about racism, about all these kinds of other things. I think the American public really just needs new kinds of stories about this old phenomenon that we’re just beat over the head with, and this is an election year and we are about to be just bombarded with it. I want people to have a different way of thinking about this process so that they can have better questions and, potentially, be able to engage in more serious conversations about what the actual problems are and how we can start to address some of them.
Q: As we approach the 2024 election this fall, do you have goals for how your work might influence immigration policy, the way that people vote and think about migration?
A: I want people to ask politicians harder questions and I want people to not be fooled by the border security smokescreen. We talk about, ‘Oh, we’re going to secure the border’—securing the border has never been the problem, the problem has been poverty, the problem has been inequality, the problem has been a desire for cheap labor. I think, this year, I want people to ask questions about prevention through deterrence, why have thousands of migrants died or disappeared along the U.S.-Mexico border? I want people to ask why we’re spending billions of dollars on border security when we should be spending billions of dollars on climate change and all the things that drive people from their home countries, as well as getting a better understanding about how much they contribute to the American society. Yet, we constantly demonize them, especially during the election years when they become the lowest hanging fruit to blame for every possible societal ill.
This post was originally published on here
