Soldiers and Kings

Soldiers and Kings is a rare book length ethnography of the people who move migrants for money, and it takes readers where no journalist embed had gone: seven years inside the world of the smugglers, the guías and coyotes, who walk Central Americans through Mexico toward the United States. Jason De León, a UCLA anthropologist and MacArthur fellow whose earlier The Land of Open Graves documented how American border policy channels migrants into the killing deserts of Arizona, turned this time to the guides themselves, mostly young Honduran men, veterans of the gangs and the streets they are helping others flee, working the train yards and safe houses of Chiapas in the years after Mexico, under American pressure, militarized its own southern border. He follows a handful of them for years, through aliases, disappearances, and reappearances, and the portraits he brings back burn: charismatic, damaged men who are soldiers of the smuggling economy dreaming of becoming its kings, protectors and predators by turns, moving human beings through a system in which every checkpoint raises the price and the risk. De León refuses both available cartoons, the coyote as monster and as folk hero, insisting instead on the economics: smuggling exists because the demand to move is inexhaustible and the legal doors are shut, and hardening the road only enriches the hardest men on it. The book won the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and its funeral of an ending, grief doing the work of argument, stays with every reader who reaches it.