Soldiers and Kings

Summary

An ethnographic study of the human smugglers, or "coyotes," who guide Central American migrants across Mexico toward the United States border. Drawing on seven years of fieldwork alongside the smugglers themselves, De León portrays them as men shaped by poverty, cartel violence, and the asymmetries of global migration policy rather than as simple villains. The book complicates dominant narratives about the border by examining the workers who profit from and suffer within it.