SOLDIERS AND KINGS

A harrowing account of the work of human smugglers in bringing aspirational immigrants to America’s southern border.

Anthropology professor De León writes of the men—almost always men—who work as smugglers bringing undocumented immigrants from Central America through Mexico to the U.S. There’s a world of difference between smugglers and traffickers, and while they’re commonly called coyotes, polleros, and the like, at least one of his subjects prefers to call himself a guía, a guide, “a designation with potentially less negative semantic baggage and one that directly reflects the work.” Traveling to Honduras and throughout Mexico over seven years, De León encountered numerous such guides, who have a difficult job requiring a split-second decision on whether to trust someone, especially someone like him who was asking invasive questions. Notes one police officer whose job it is to keep coyotes and would-be immigrants from their homeland, “Many migrants that I’ve interviewed have also told me they would prefer to die en el camino than stay home and wait to die from gang violence or hunger.” Both outcomes are entirely possible in lands riven by internecine gang wars and poverty, as in the case of Honduras, being second only to Haiti as the poorest nation in Latin America. Importantly, De León writes, both outcomes are also the product of late capitalism, as is the very movement of masses of people to places of greater economic opportunity, less violence, and better environmental conditions. Many of the author’s informants die along the way, as do some of their charges, and many others seek to change their lives and do something else. To his credit, so does De León in dispirited moments when he laments “peddling stories of other people’s misery.”

An exemplary ethnography of central importance to any discussion of immigration policy or reform.