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Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
by Jason De León
Book Reviewed by:Anthropologist Jason De León spent seven years with smugglers in Central America, and what he learned about those who cart human cargo beyond borders for profit is that they are intimately acquainted with violence and fear while darting through and around rugged terrains. De León's documentation of their culture—Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling—received the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Gently, he offers a different perspective on immigration and the role smugglers play beyond the trope of lazy and greedy hustlers. Smugglers, he observes, suffer the wounds of impoverished people from corrupt countries. They have dreams and struggles. They can be silly, and they can be in a rage. Many are lonely.
As context, De León weighs the human cost of violence and poverty in a country like Honduras, where hundreds flee every single day only to be immersed in a different kind of killing field. Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the world. The violence of gang culture is catastrophic. De León guides us through Honduras-normal: A local gang demands 40% of profits from a family business. If they don't pay or cannot pay, someone in the family, usually the matriarch, is murdered. The killings continue until the debt is cleared. Male adolescents often choose to join a gang to save their own lives. Others flee. It is one of the main reasons why Central America is the backbone of human smuggling.
Two decades ago, the traditional profile of the undocumented migrant to the United States was the Mexican teenager looking for work in San Diego or Los Angeles. He had family in Southern California and once he was established he would send money back home to Mexico. The Central American migrant of today faces a much tougher path. They must travel much farther to reach the border, crossing through several countries, evading and avoiding multiple danger spots and villainous actors. They need a smuggler, often referred to as a guía (guide). The guía takes the migrant across the border, manages the difficult and changing terrain, the gangs and their fees, the opportunity for violence, the harsh conditions, the checkpoints.
De León writes, "Cracking down on human smuggling is largely impossible for the simple fact that it is a beast with many heads."
While De León painstakingly illustrates the stories of smugglers who have accepted him into their clique, he cannot separate his own story from theirs. His parents divorced and he lived with his father in South Texas, a few miles north of the US-Mexico border. He fought loneliness by meeting strangers and listening to their stories. He was familiar with tempting fate. Once, high on Vicodin, he dangled from a roof. Another time, he put a stick of dynamite in his mouth and tried to light it as if he was sucking on a cigar. He was reckless. "Deep down, though, I was also trying to fill a hollowness that lived inside me: a darkness that manifested itself in bouts of crippling depression, intense feelings of isolation and rage, and a playful death wish that loomed over my teenage years and early twenties."
He finds something similar in Chino, Jesmyn, and Santos, tapping into their loneliness and rage. He understands their motivations and the unspeakable: PTSD, bad dreams, anxiety about surviving.
Happy-go-lucky Chino left school at the age of 12 to help his grandfather farm but it could only provide the basics. He was still poor. He worked in construction for 5 dollars a day and liked the work, he felt a sense of freedom. He began drinking at the age of 13, from grief triggered by the death of his older brother, who was a father figure to him. He joined a gang and was pretty good at assaulting strangers and robbing them. Smuggling gave him more money, more weed, more control over his unstable life.
Because female smugglers are surrounded by men, their defense mechanisms are rooted in wariness. Jesmyn is skeptical of men and strange situations while acknowledging the possibility of sexual assault. Barely five-foot-two, ambitious yet strategic, she is still a dreamer. She tells De León, "I feel it in my heart that one day I'm going to be in the United States and I will be able to take care of my parents. I will give them the life they want and pay them back for all they have done for me, because life in Honduras is difficult."
Santos, a former drug mule, escaped the Honduran gangs only to be captured by the Zeta cartel, tied to a chair, his forearms cut open. The torture was transactional. They wanted a phone number. He escaped, refused to return to Honduras, entered South Texas, but was discovered by the Border Patrol there. He became a smuggler working for the gangs on the migrant trail. He knew how to be invisible. It's been his life's work, difficult work, and he's practical in acknowledging what it is and what it isn't: "Sometimes guías bring people who say they have money, but it turns out they don't and there is no one who can help them pay for the trip. Other times you connect with someone who says, 'I'm going with you because I am afraid, but I can pull my own weight.' But then they turn out to be useless on the trail and don't help out at all. Then you end up having problems with the people you are bringing. Believe me, working with migrants is not easy."
While Soldiers and Kings offers little political commentary, it exposes the structural problems of troubled countries and the loose barriers in place that cannot prevent migrants from leaving their homelands. Despite De León's engaging and conversational prose, it isn't an easy story to read. The actors on all sides are complicated and sad; yes, some are monsters. Others are trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents.
A year ago, I took an online class at the University of London titled "Refugees in the 21st Century." I learned about the Global North and Global South. I learned the jungle of the Darién Gap, from Colombia to Panama, is one of the most dangerous migration areas in the world, responsible for hundreds of deaths. I learned that migrants leave their country for economic or family reasons while refugees are forced to leave because of persecution. The distinction matters because migrants must adhere to immigration policies while refugees can, theoretically, ask for asylum. I learned the US is hostile to refugee protection. But what the course was thin on, by design, was the migrant experience, and so Soldiers and Kings gave me a perspective I didn't have that I appreciated.
Jason De León is the Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), whose goal is to raise awareness about issues that affect migrants while assisting the families of missing migrants who tirelessly search for their loved ones. He's a UCLA anthropologist and archaeologist and his data and notes on migrant flight are exemplary. Even if Soldiers and Kings hadn't won the National Book Award it still would be a landmark achievement. De León had to skirt danger and death, he had to earn trust and give trust, he had to convince violent people his project was worthwhile. It's a project that gives us as much as it gave him. It gives us a better understanding of why our borders have become so traumatic, congested, and desperate, and his research advances the study of migrants and their troubles.
This review
first ran in the January 15, 2025
issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
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