Three voices on how the Chicano Moratorium still fuels the Eastside’s fight for justice
Department: Chicano & Chicana Studies
Latino USA: The Real Lives of Human Smugglers with Jason De León
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.
Laura C. Chávez-Moreno receives 2025 Book of the Year Award from the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education
Her book “How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America” received the Early Career Category recognition
UCLA Social Sciences
Stanley Wu Photography/composite by Trever Ducote/UCLA
Laura C. Chávez-Moreno, assistant professor in UCLA’s César Chávez Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies and UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies, received the Book of the Year Award, Early Career Category for her acclaimed book, “How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America” from the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE) at a ceremony held March 8, 2025.
Chávez-Moreno’s book examines how educational institutions shape Latinx students’ racial identities, often in ways that reinforce systemic inequities. Through in-depth case studies of bilingual education programs, her research reveals how schools—despite good intentions—can perpetuate racialization and social stratification.
Drawing on her background as a former public school teacher and her academic scholarship, Chávez-Moreno advocates for “ambitious teaching” that centers race in the curriculum. Her work challenges educators to foster environments where students are encouraged to interrogate racial dynamics and develop critical consciousness.
AAHHE’s Early Career Category recognizes a book by an early career scholar whose initial career shows promising levels of productivity and excellence. The criteria to be considered by the selection committee are the impact of the candidate’s work, where quality reflects the highest standards of writing, research, and excellence and impact is demonstrated through evidence that the work has advanced the research field of Latinx and education.
The AAHHE Books of the Year Awards are a celebration of Hispanic culture, history and research excellence and are presented to Latinx/a/o authors to celebrate and recognize their contributions to higher education.
Learn more, here.