Over seven years of immersive ethnographic research, Jason De León lived among human smugglers —central figures in the migrant trail— tracing their lives from border crossings through Mexico to the U.S. Each journey reveals stories of survival, loss, and longing that challenge the stereotypes of coyotes and cast them as complex individuals striving within a violent global system.
In conversation with journalist John Gibler (I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us, To Die in Mexico), they will explore the moral dimensions of migration, the blurred lines between smuggling and trafficking, and the power of storytelling in bearing witness. How do we reckon with border violence, U.S. policy, and human agency when the people guiding migrants are themselves running from history, exclusion, and death?
Their dialogue offers audiences a rare ethical and emotional reckoning—centered on De León’s Soldiers and Kings, winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction—and invites us to confront a migration crisis marked not by abstraction, but by lives in motion.
