The episode featuring Jason De León and his book “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling” aired on March 14, 2025.

UCLA Social Sciences

UCLA professor Jason De León who won the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction for his book “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling” discussed his book on a recent episode of Latino USA with host Maria Hinojosa.  

Drawing on seven years of on-the-ground ethnographic research and interviews, “Soldiers and Kings” gives voice and unprecedented context to the people, most of them young men, who make a precarious living smuggling migrants from Central America and Mexico into the United States. 

During the interview, De León talked about the sociopolitical conditions that drive human smuggling: “I think people fail to realize that human smuggling is the outcome of border policies, changes in border security, the drive to have undocumented labor in the United States. Smuggling is responding to those things,” he said. “All these guys, they know that human mobility is unstoppable. There is nothing you can do to stop people who are desperate to find some new and better place.” 

Listen to the full interview here.  

De León is the director of UCLA’s Cotsen Institute for Archaeology and professor of anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American studies within UCLA’s Division of Social Sciences. In 2017, he was a 2017 MacArthur Genius fellow.