The path to Jason De León’s groundbreaking book Soldiers and Kings, which documents the experience of the smugglers hired by migrants to help them cross the U.S. border, began with an array of stone tools. The technical term for this area of study is lithics, but the mechanics of it are easy to envision: De León ’04 MA, ’08 PhD Lib, working on his dissertation in a lab at an archaeological site in Veracruz, Mexico, measuring obsidian blades one by one to compare the size of their cutting edge to their mass. “If you want to understand ancient economies in Mesoamerica, it’s a fantastic thing to be studying,” says Craig Goralski ’08 PhD Lib, who was in De León’s doctoral cohort at Penn State and now teaches at Cypress College in California. “But it is mind-numbing, because all you’re doing is weighing and measuring and weighing and measuring.”

“[De León] was alone in a room, working on pieces of stone and analyzing them, and it’s just about driving him crazy,” his adviser, emeritus professor of anthropology Ken Hirth explains. “He had these huge collections to work with from this very early, important site, but there were no people. What he enjoyed about that whole experience was talking with [people]. He has the absolutely unique ability to social network and connect with everybody.”

It was those off-the-clock conversations, as much as the research he was doing about ancient Mexican civilizations, that sowed the seeds for De León’s ensuing years of work on migration at the U.S.–Mexico border. Speaking with people in Mexico, hearing about their experiences and broadening his own as a result, turned out to be the young researcher’s strength.

“Being in academia, I had been told that if I wanted to be successful in this straight, white, male kind of world, I had to figure out how to hide any difference and play the game, because I didn’t have the pedigree,” De León says. “But when I started talking to folks in Mexico, for the first time in my life I realized that being working class, brown, bilingual, and having immigrant parents weren’t impediments to doing the work I wanted to do. They were actually super beneficial. I didn’t have to hide myself anymore—I actually had been on this trajectory the whole time.”

That trajectory has led him to new heights of visibility and acclaim that are rare for any academic, much less one whose work started with dusting off ancient artifacts. De León, who now works at UCLA as a professor of anthropology and Chicana/o studies and the director of the university’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, has cast new light on not just immigration, but one of the most misunderstood aspects of the border economy: human smuggling. In 2024, Soldiers and Kings was named the winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction. De León, who in 2017 was recognized with a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” credits much of the success of his unlikely, cross-disciplinary journey to his studies at Penn State, which helped him see just how far those lithics could take him.

De León was nomadic even before he took on research that found him following people on the move. “I sort of grew up all over the place,” says De León, who calls himself an “honorary Pennsylvanian” because of his time at University Park, a few childhood years spent in Philadelphia, and his marriage to a Pittsburgh native. Both of his parents spent more than two decades in the military, which meant that De León lived not just in the Keystone State but in California, Missouri, and Germany all before the age of 10.

“I think having moved around quite a bit sort of prepared me for the anthropological work that I would do later on, which also involved a lot of moving around and meeting new people and trying to figure out where I fit in,” he says.

De León’s mother, originally from the Philippines, immigrated to the U.S. when she was a teenager; his father grew up between South Texas and Mexico. Neither finished college. After they divorced when he was 8 years old, De León spent a few years living with his father in Texas, near its border with Mexico—his first encounter with the region that would become so central to his career. “I spent a lot of time in Mexico as a kid, going back and forth and seeing poverty while doing that,” he says. “Eventually, I realized that growing up in South Texas around working-class Spanish speakers wasn’t something I had to overcome to succeed in academia—it actually gave me privileged insight and access. I started to look at all of that in a very, very different way.”

Los Angeles is where he’s lived the longest, and where he lives today with his wife and children. De León graduated from high school in nearby Long Beach and started college at UCLA, before dropping out a little over a month into his freshman year to tour with the punk band he started in high school—all of which he describes vividly in the introduction to Soldiers and Kings. “I felt like higher education was unwelcoming to a brown first-generation student like me,” he writes. “I also believed there was life outside the classroom I needed to experience.”

A few years later, jaded about his prospects as a professional musician and seeking a path that might lead to a steady paycheck and health insurance, De León made his way back to UCLA. There, he started anthropology courses to follow through on his childhood reverence for Indiana Jones. (Archaeology is considered a discipline of anthropology.) It was less glamorous than Harrison Ford made it look, but De León stuck with it and eventually started applying to Ph.D. programs; he was drawn to Penn State (where he would also earn a master’s degree) for its renowned anthropology program, and specifically the mentorship of Ken Hirth—“the reason I wanted to be at Penn State,” De León says.

But he initially struggled to adjust to the Ph.D. program. He had moved across the country, from an enormous city to the much cozier State College, and he was taking on an entirely new kind of work; to make matters more challenging, he’d accidentally rented an apartment far from campus (having found it remotely), isolating him and his cat “in the woods,” as he puts it. “I was super depressed,” he says. “I was really struggling to figure it out.”

De León credits the late anthropology professor Jeff Kurland with helping him finally find his footing at Penn State. “You’ve got to figure out how to be healthy and happy,” Kurland told him early on, before continuing with a non sequitur: “I hear you play the drums. You’re going to be in my cover band now.” 

“I’d kind of given up playing music at that point—even sold all my equipment when I left L.A.—because I thought, ‘Oh, I need to be a very serious academic,’” says De León, whose primary instrument is guitar. “But one of the things that kind of saved me wound up being that kind of extracurricular activity. [Kurland] got me playing some drums, and I remembered that I love playing music.”

By his third year at Penn State, De León had bought a new guitar and started playing all over State College—not only with the anthropology department band he helped found, but also with a new band that lives on today called Wilcox Hotel. “I was practically living at the Brewery and the Darkhorse for several years,” he says.

Goralski recalls, “He’s sitting in a classroom on Thursday in a grad seminar, and then Thursday night, he’s yelling and screaming in front of 500 people in a bar, playing in-your-face music.”

The music-making that De León did in State College—the music that he studiously tried to avoid—has, unexpectedly, shaped the work of his career. Because of it, he embraced that part of himself, and will name Jason Isbell, Bruce Springsteen, Fishbone, and Bad Brains among his biggest influences—not just as a musician, but as a writer, researcher, and thinker. “All those bands have impacted my political views, my approach to writing, my aesthetics, all that kind of stuff,” he says. There’s even a QR code leading to a playlist made by De León at the end of Soldiers and Kings, which includes Isbell and Gillian Welch as well as rap, rock, and reggaeton.

Keeping that balance between his creative and work outlets has had its risks: In the spring of 2008, when he already had a postgraduate job offer, Hirth asked him, “How much have you written of your dissertation?”

“Not a single word,” was De León’s reply.

Hirth directed him to lock himself in his office and not come out until the dissertation was done. De León had a tour booked two weeks later, though, and insisted on playing it anyway: “The only way that I was going to finish that dissertation was if I had this other thing to balance me out,” he says. “That was kind of the beginning of me realizing that music, art, and literature have always been so important to me and are a huge part of who I am as an anthropologist.”

The unlikely musical connections he made were all a part of the close-knit community De León found in the department, which threw a two-day festival dubbed “Kirkstock” while he was there; De León vividly remembers Hirth, his adviser, directing traffic in the parking lot. “I loved being in graduate school,” he says. “I really did not want to leave.” He’s still close with many members of his cohort, including one in particular—his now-wife, Abigail Bigham ’05 MA, ’08 PhD Lib, who studied alongside him and is now an associate professor at UCLA.

De León’s focus on lithics during his Ph.D. studies was, on the surface, fairly different from the risky, dynamic ethnographic work he’s become nationally known for. “[Hirth] has told me, ‘I feel like I didn’t teach you anything,’” De León says. “But it’s quite the opposite. The type of archeology that I was doing around modern migration, and just my general approach to research and being committed to methods and to putting in the time, really stems from Ken’s inspiration and guidance.”

He also notes the impact of the late professors Bill Sanders and Alan Walker. “People kept saying, ‘Alan is a MacArthur Fellow,’ and I had no idea what that meant,” says De León, who was still years away from his own MacArthur Fellowship. “I took this required class on early human evolution with him, and it was just a really eye-opening experience. I got so much out of conversations with him.”

De León lists other Penn State faculty, such as Dean Snow, David Webster, and Susan Evans as inspirations. “These were folks who encouraged me to think outside of the little thing I was doing, and say, If you want to do this in a productive and meaningful way, you have to broaden your horizons,” he says. “You’ve gotta read outside of your discipline. That was one of the things that was really instilled in me at Penn State, that I was there studying archeology, but I was really there being trained to think about the world anthropologically.” That emphasis on breadth, on interdisciplinary curiosity over the kind of hyperspecificity that academia so often rewards, proved particularly influential.

“Jason has always been kind of fearless as an anthropologist,” says Goralski. “Anthropologists are pretty brave to begin with, but even among all of us at Penn State, his willingness to think outside the box and to chase after research topics and ideas that weren’t the usual was impressive.”

His outside-the-lines approach fermented not long after he completed his Ph.D. All of his ideas about migration and the border came together, and De León decided to conduct a contemporary archaeological study on what migrants were leaving along their path into the U.S. To help document, he called a high school friend, the photographer Michael Wells, who has been working with him since, and whose work appears in Soldiers and Kings. “I just kind of started coming out and taking pictures, before it was really a formed project,” says Wells. “I don’t think he knew what it was going to be at the time, it was just, ‘Hey, we should look into this.’”

That was in 2009, and it prompted the genesis of the Undocumented Migration Project, through which De León collected and catalogued thousands of items left behind by migrants during their desert crossings to better understand their world—a kind of contemporary archaeology, which he shared through various writings and exhibits. That work evolved naturally into his first book, published in 2015, The Land of Open Graves, which examines the treacherous path taken by some migrants through the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona. That book opens with De León coming across a migrant’s dead body on the southern border, in a gut-wrenching scene that shows yet another path for a contemporary archaeologist.

Jason has always been concerned about not just the work, but how the work affects the people around him. He is not just doing it to publish a book or to get a job, but because it matters. He’s never lost sight of that.

De León stretched even further with Soldiers and Kings, which he wrote to complicate clichés around smugglers—otherwise known as coyotes or, more specifically with the people De León profiles, guías. “It connects two very different worlds—I wrote it in this academic world, and that’s about as far away as you can get from the things that I’m actually trying to write about,” he says. “I’m still not always very comfortable with that duality.”

As Hirth puts it, “It’s funny that he got into archaeology, of all things, and now he’s working with the most contentious current issues that everyone is trying to solve.” There’s nothing ancient about the people De León is writing about; most were at least 20 years younger than him.

De León spent almost seven years learning about the lives of the guías, many of whom come from Honduras and other Central American countries and are trying themselves to get across the U.S. border—learning the route north by trying and failing numerous times to make it, or by making it and then being deported. He did not bear witness to the actual smuggling, which would have not only made him something of an accomplice, but would have been more dangerous for everyone involved. He did develop close relationships, though, with the people whose experience he spotlights, through those months and years spent meeting them all around Mexico, the U.S., and Honduras, hearing their stories, their worries, and their hopes. All are chronicled in Soldiers and Kings, which through all the gut-wrenching details about violence, cruelty, and trauma maintains its focus on the systems that create such abject desperation rather than voyeurism of their victims.

It’s an intense and complicated story on a topic about which most Americans have only a superficial understanding, and there are certain misunderstandings he encounters over and over again. For one: Smuggling, the subject of his book, is not the same thing as human trafficking. “That distinction is so important,” he says. “Once you understand that smuggling is a service and a form of labor that’s a part of this much bigger economic system, I think that can help complicate your understanding of migration.”

Another fact he hopes readers take away from the book is the extent to which Americans are tangibly invested in every aspect of the smuggling economy, no matter how far away it might seem. “Migrants benefit from the smuggling industry, but so do American consumers and employers,” De León says. “And politicians know that if they demonize migrants, that’s one good way to hide the economic inequality and exploitation that’s happening to the American people.” Soldiers and Kings is also a potent illustration of just how much people are willing to risk to come here, in spite of the exploitation that is likely to greet them when they cross the border. It’s not just the thousands of dollars required to make the journey, it’s trekking through jungles, facing off with cartels and corrupt police alike, and generally taking your and your family’s lives in your hands—all for an increasingly likely deportation at the end of the journey.

De León’s vivid, critically acclaimed account won the 2024 National Book Award for nonfiction, helping it reach a considerably wider audience than most academic books. “Just the fact that people are reading it is amazing,” he says. “I didn’t write this book because I ever thought it was going to win any awards.” He had discussions with the publisher about putting “Honduras” in the title, given that the country figures heavily into the book’s story; they decided against it, thinking that the story was niche enough as it was. “The fact that people are reading about these folks from a country that no one seems to care about most of the time, folks who are on the margins—for me, that’s the thing that feels really, really important,” he says.

For as fraught and hotly debated as the subjects covered in Soldiers and Kings are, De León refrains in the book from making any pointed claims about which “side” is right, or what might be done—instead, he privileges the stories of the people he got to know, writing candidly about their lives and the lives of those like them. “The world is complicated, and there’s no easy solutions,” he says. “If you meet these people [in the book], maybe you can see a little bit of yourself. The next time someone talks about a ‘migrant’ or a ‘smuggler,’ you have a point of reference that’s not a statistic or a salacious headline. I want people to get to know these folks, and to be as moved by them and as challenged by their narratives as I have been.”

De León’s next project remains uncertain, but he is already imagining something that will continue the work of The Land of Open Graves and Soldiers and Kings—probably, he thinks, about the experience of undocumented people living in the U.S. “Ask me in five years,” he says with a laugh.

The anthropological world, and the broader immigration debate, will inevitably remain fertile ground for De León’s voice and work. “Jason has always been concerned about not just the work, but how the work affects the people around him,” says Eric Jones ’04 MA, ’08 PhD Lib, another member of De León’s cohort and now an associate professor at the University of Colorado. “It’s this very holistic approach, where he is not just doing it to publish a book or to publish papers or to get a job, but because it matters. He’s never lost sight of that.”

Adds Goralski, “He’s a rock star—a literal rock-star musician, and an anthropological rock star. None of us are surprised by the heights he’s reached.”

Now, when De León’s not taking the stage to accept awards or give talks, he’s playing in a new band called The War Pigs alongside some unlikely bandmates: his two children, aged 9 and 12. Being a parent helps provide De León with a holistic perspective on the academic celebrity he’s earned and the dire circumstances he’s intimately engaged with as a researcher.

“I’m not even supposed to be here, much less writing a book, much less doing the things that this book has done,” De León says. “There were moments in the process of making this book that reminded me that I actually feel very lucky to be alive and to be here doing this—and since that’s the case, I want to take it very seriously and utilize whatever platform that this can give me to talk about the things I think are important. 

“I’m not here to tell people how to feel about the world,” he says. “I just want them to kind of see a different part of it.”  

Natalie Weiner is a writer living in Dallas.