Jason DeLeon’s trained anthropological eye, coupled with a warmth and friendship that shines through, has led to a modern classic, a must-read for anyone interested in the real-life consequences of border policy, violence, and lingering imperialism.
His previous book, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail, explored border policy and “the ethnography of death,” and his background as a researcher allows him to deftly explore the micro and macro, in the larger view of border deterrence/policy and the lives of those caught in the web of desperation, poverty, violence, and hope.
I spoke with Jason about his National Book Award-winning book and the emotional toll embedding himself with victims and perpetrators took, his varied list of inspiring writers, catalysts for his book, the difference between “trafficking” and “smuggling,” and possible hope.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Pete Riehl
You recently won The National Book Award for Nonfiction for Soldiers and Kings. How are you feeling about the award, having had some time to reflect?
Jason De León
[The National Book Award] is such an honor. The most important part of it was that it’s not really about me. It’s about the fact that this was a book that made people uncomfortable. It was a subject matter that was difficult, and it was about people who aren’t supposed to matter, people whose stories aren’t supposed to [matter].We’re not supposed to care about these folks because they’re the bad guys, because they’re poor, because…a million reasons to kind of write them off, and they’ve been written off in a lot of ways. So, for those stories to be recognized on this national stage, that for me was what really feels super important and gratifying.
Pete Riehl
Who are the writers, whether they write the same genre as you, who inspire and challenge you?
Jason De León
People like Jesmyn Ward-I really love her nonfiction, and I love her fiction.
I think that she’s a really incredible storyteller, and one of the things I think that she has in common with someone like Hemingway and Steinbeck and some of [Cormac] McCarthy’s work is that she can paint this really complicated, moving picture with not a lot of words. It’s not super flowery prose; it’s often pretty direct and succinct and yet can break your heart.
Those are the kind of writers that I’ve always gravitated towards, but [I’m also drawn to] Springsteen, Jason Isbell, Townes Van Zandt, and a lot of Americana singer/ songwriters who are telling these rich stories in not a lot of prose. All those folks really continue to inspire me.
Ernest Gaines is another one, and one of my favorite living writers is Willy Vlautin, who’s from the Pacific Northwest and has written books like Motel Life and Lean on Pete. He’s a novelist of the American West who writes these deep, dark stories about the downtrodden, and I really appreciate the kind of tightness of the prose.
Pete Riehl
How about John Prine?
Jason De León
Oh, yeah.
Pete Riehl
I’m embarrassed to say I don’t really know much about him, but I know his reputation is for writing about the downtrodden and the quotidian.
Jason De León
Prine can write a story with not a lot of words, and there’s definitely a lot of kinship between him and someone like Jason Isbell, who co-produced one of his last records, and wrote some songs [with Prine].
It took me a long time to realize, when someone asked me, “Who are your biggest influences as a researcher, as an anthropologist, as a writer?” It’s a mix of singer/songwriters, bands, and novelists-a lot who aren’t anthropological or even nonfiction writers.
Pete Riehl
I wonder about the research for the book-is it safe to say it was about seven years of work? Were you mostly embedded in it, or was it on and off?
Jason De León
If I was teaching, I was there in the summers. I had a sabbatical a couple of times in the middle of that, and so I was able to spend three to six months at a time doing this [embedded research], with a lot of leav[ing] and then com[ing] back. It was a pretty long, drawn-out process.
With my first book, I think the timeline was much shorter; I was in the field for longer periods of extended time with this one, because of family, because of work. Also, I was having to come in and out because of Covid-there were a lot of things that delayed [the research and writing of the book].
I tried to be in the field as much as I could, and it was always really helpful to be able to go back to a place after spending a lot of time there and being able to clear my head and come back and then look at it with fresh eyes.
Pete Riehl
Early on, you get into the idea of the difference between smuggling versus trafficking. A lot of people know that coyote title-it is also called pasador and pollero.
How would you [describe] the difference between smuggling and trafficking, human smuggling, human trafficking?
Jason De León
Trafficking happens against your will and someone you know sells you into slavery. They take you and they make you do things you don’t want to do. They move you to places that you don’t want to be, and you have no control over that. Smuggling [is when] you are seeking someone out and you’re trying to pay them for their services. No one pays to get trafficked. People pay to get smuggled, but that smuggler might end up trafficking them and kind of double-betraying them.
[Smuggling and trafficking] can intersect, but, fundamentally, one you’re paying for as a service, the other one you’re experiencing as a brutality that you actively don’t want to be involved with, but we conflate those terms all the time. Popular media does it consistently, so I really wanted people to think about smuggling as a service that people are providing, and obviously it’s a highly exploitative system, but it is definitely a service industry.Pete Riehl
I wonder about writing to avoid generalization.
Jason De León
I mean, people are complex, and I think that a lot of times the stories that we tell about communities of color don’t allow for that complexity, right? Like if you write about migrants, you’re supposed to write about the “noble migrant,” right? You’re supposed to write about the person that you can kind of root for. You’re not supposed to write about the bad migrant. You’re not supposed to write about the kind of detestable person. You’re not supposed to write about a person who’s complicated, who you might love and hate, right?
We don’t make space for that typically, and I really think that we don’t need any more stories about migration that just repeat the same kind of tired tropes. People are complicated; I mean, you read the end of [Chinua Achebe’s iconic novel] Things Fall Apart and it’s a conflicted ending, right? [The protagonist, Okonkwo], who you’ve been watching brutalize others and struggle with the impacts of colonialism and racism and who is trying to do good but just can’t seemingly do it, does lots of bad things, and become[s] sort of detestable and then [dies].
Nobody, I think, at least no one that I know, reads the end of that book and is like, “Well, he got what he deserved right there at the end of it.”
That’s how life often is, [with a] complicated set of feelings and I think we need more stories like that.
I knew people would come in the door if you put the word “smuggling” in the title, because that’s interesting, [wth readers] expecting a kind of salacious sort of thing, but you get them in and then you sneak in this other stuff into the source, “Actually, this is not just this simplistic narrative about how all smugglers are bad, but this is really trying to complicate this thing and show you a full range of people just living their lives, and their lives are complicated. I really wanted people to see the complexities of their experiences.
Pete Riehl
Warsan Shire is the poet, [the British writer born in Kenya whose parents came from Somalia], and her famous poem is called “Home,” with the [memorable line], “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”
I wonder about how you saw that kind of manifestation, with people [in the book] getting caught three and four times. You talk about the one who was tortured by the Zetas, getting caught by ICE and sent back and Border Patrol [as a constant threat], but people are still thinking, I’m going again [crossing the US/Mexico border]. What is it about this shark at home that makes the people, at least in the book, want to keep trying?
Jason De León
That’s the thing to think about, right? I think about when we had all these minors crossing the desert and people and kids being sent out, people would say, “I can’t believe these parents, these these Mexican parents or these Honduran parents, that they would risk their kids lives and put them in the hands of smugglers and have them dragged through the desert-how could you ever do such a thing?”
And I’d say to them, “You can’t frame it like that.”
You have to frame it in terms of how bad must it be at home for that to be the best possible choice that one could make for their child? It’s this idea that somehow foreign poor people don’t love their kids as much as Americans do-these falsehoods.
I can’t imagine being put into a situation where you have to hand over your child to a stranger and hope for the best-I mean, that kills me, but this also signals that things are that bad in a lot of these places and that there is no border wall that is going to deter that. People are running for their lives. They’re trying to save their children, and so they will do whatever they need to do to make that happen.
Pete Riehl
I was just so struck by the [statistic]—around 75% poverty in Honduras right after Covid hit -that’s the shark. How do you blame someone for trying to get a better life, a different life?
You wrote about the poverty in Honduras, wonder[ing] how much of it is caused by American colonialism.
You’re not looking for easy answers [in the book], and there are none, like you said.
One of your last chapters is called “The Future Belongs to Those Who Dream.” There are those looking for and maybe getting some sort of redemption [by the end of the book].
How did you leave the book? Do you have hope? Is that not what it was about, the idea of the future belonging to those who dream?
Jason De León
For me, there are a couple of ways to think about hope. The story ends kind of badly for a lot of folks, but some of these other folks kind of escape. They escape to the US. They find a new life there.
It’s a difficult life, the life of an immigrant, the life of being undocumented, but it’s a better one than they were living in these other places, so some of that gives me hope.
It’s hope, not in this Hollywood [way], like, he gets the girl, they ride off into the sunset, everything. It’s more like he doesn’t die, he falls in with the crew, he’s got a place to live. That’s for me a lot more realistic about the way that things kind of end for folks.
You have to find hope in smaller versions of it like, the hope is I’m still alive today. The hope is I haven’t done something bad.
Today the hope is I have plans for the future that don’t involve going back to the train tracks, that don’t involve having to do dirty work, and so I tried to look for [hope] in those small places, and folks were really optimistic when they talk about these things; they had not lofty aspirations, but definitely had hopeful ones.
There’s a moment where Santos [a young Honduran featured in the book] says that all [he wants] is to sleep on a real bed. God, that’s such a powerful statement and really speaks to his experiences.
This interview is excerpted from Episode 270 of the Chills at Will Podcast. Listen to the complete conversation here. PETE RIEHL is a high school English and Spanish teacher, and the host of The Chills at Will Podcast. Previous guests of the podcast include Deesha Philyaw, Jeff Pearlman, Jean Guerrero, Jonathan Escoffery, Morgan Talty, Taylor Byas, Steph Cha, Gabby Bates, Luis Alberto Urrea, Justin Tinsley, Jordan Harper, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, David Mura, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Allegra Hyde, Matthew Salesses, Dave Zirin, Nadia Owusu, and Father Greg Boyle. You can find him on instagram, @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, @chillsatwillpo1.
