Jason De León’s Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (2024) is a work of narrative nonfiction and ethnography that provides an immersive look into the lives of human smugglers, or guías (guides), operating along the migrant trail in Mexico. The book centers on a group of young Honduran men who guide fellow migrants north toward the United States, focusing on a guide nicknamed Chino, whose life and eventual death frame the narrative. Haunted by his inability to help Chino escape the violent industry, De León documents the structural forces—poverty, gang violence, and restrictive border policies—that push young men into this illicit economy. The book explores themes including The Long-Term Consequences of Anti-Immigration Policy, Making Moral Compromises to Navigate Oppressive Systems, and The Performative Relationship Between Masculinity and Violence.

Jason De León is a professor of anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American studies at UCLA and the executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a research and arts collective. His work, which combines ethnographic, archaeological, and forensic methods, earned him a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017. Soldiers and Kings is a thematic follow-up to his award-winning 2015 book, The Land of Open Graves, shifting focus from the lethal consequences of US border policy in the Arizona desert to the complex human economy of smuggling that emerges in response to it. Drawing on seven years of immersive fieldwork, Soldiers and Kings won the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was longlisted for the 2025 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.

This guide refers to the 2024 hardcover edition published by Viking.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, death, physical abuse, emotional abuse, addiction, child abuse, substance use, racism, antigay bias, mental illness, suicidal ideation, and cursing.

Summary

Anthropologist Jason De León spent close to seven years following human smugglers along Mexico’s migrant trail, from the jungles of southern Chiapas to the deserts of the north. Soldiers and Kings traces the lives of several young Central Americans, mostly Hondurans, who become guías, or guides, escorting fellow migrants toward the United States. De León draws a firm distinction between human smuggling, in which migrants willingly pay for passage, and human trafficking, which involves force or coercion. He opens with the death of Roberto, a young Honduran smuggler known by his nickname Chino, whose murder received only three error-filled sentences in a local newspaper. Chino had asked De León for help escaping the smuggling life, and the author’s failure to save him haunts the book.

De León frames the smuggling industry as a response to a worldwide migration crisis driven by poverty, violence, political instability, and climate change. The book’s opening chapters establish the structural forces behind migration from Honduras, the second-poorest country in Latin America, devastated by hurricanes and plagued by gangs such as MS-13 and Barrio 18, transnational criminal organizations with roots in East Los Angeles. De León describes Programa Frontera Sur, a 2014 Mexican immigration enforcement initiative pressured into existence by the Obama administration, which increased Mexican deportations of Central Americans and made the journey more dangerous and expensive, inadvertently fueling the smuggling industry.

De León introduces the town of Pakal-Ná in Chiapas, near the Maya archaeological site of Palenque, as his primary fieldwork location. During an anthropological field school in 2015, he wandered onto the train tracks and met the young smugglers who became his central subjects. He outlines the basic smuggling process: a mid-level broker sends coordinates for migrants near the Guatemala border; low-level guides walk them nearly 200 kilometers through jungle and highway before catching la bestia, the dangerous freight train network. Upon arrival in Pakal-Ná, migrants must pay fees, called cuotas, to MS-13 enforcers who control the tracks. Each migrant eventually pays around $7,000 to reach the US-Mexico border, passing through multiple extortion points.

The book’s first section introduces the low-level smugglers. Chino, abandoned by his teenage mother and raised by his grandmother in rural Honduras, lost his older brother to an electrocution accident at 13, turned to drugs and gangs, and was nearly killed in a machete attack at 16. He fled to Mexico, where he learned to survive on the tracks and began guiding migrants. Santos, orphaned at 11, left Honduras at 13, was kidnapped and tortured by the Zetas cartel at 16, and was eventually deported after a brief, happy period working in construction in Phoenix, Arizona. The two bonded over shared childhoods of abandonment and became partners, escorting migrants between Pakal-Ná and the city of Celaya for a few hundred dollars per trip.

Jesmyn, a 20-year-old Honduran woman, defies the stereotype of the vulnerable female migrant. Raised by her grandparents, she learned after who she thought was her teenage brother’s death that he was actually her biological father. She spent her teenage years being stalked by a powerful gang member whose death freed her to leave Honduras. She fell in love with Chino, and their relationship became a catalyst for his desire to change. Papo and Alma, a couple who met on the trail, complete the group. Papo was deported from Texas and returned to Honduras, where gang members targeted him for a crime he did not commit. Alma, abandoned by her mother as an infant and later extorted by gangs, fled to Mexico with her young daughter Dulce and secretly gathered intelligence for MS-13 in Pakal-Ná.

The book’s second section introduces the veteran smugglers. Flaco, loud and charismatic, left Honduras at 13, eventually entered the United States under Temporary Protected Status after Hurricane Mitch in 1998, joined MS-13 in Los Angeles, and served prison time for a violent home invasion. Deported in 2008, he returned to Mexico’s train tracks, where he made thousands per trip while employing young soldiers like Chino. Flaco told De León that Papo had been murdered, and De León mourned for over a year before discovering through social media that Papo was alive and living in Celaya with Alma. Flaco describes his dedication to friendship and supporting migrants, but he robs a migrant De León knows, Jorge, of $5,000 sent to transport him across the border.

Meanwhile, Kingston develops a complex relationship with De León, a Garifuna smuggler affiliated with the Bloods gang, who was orphaned by 12 and forcibly conscripted into the Honduran military. Kingston fled to the Bronx as a teenager, joined the Bloods, and served nearly a decade in New York prisons for attempted murder before being deported, shot in the head during a home invasion in Honduras, and eventually returning to Mexico to smuggle.

A turning point arrived when Chino, injured but optimistic, began talking about settling down with Jesmyn and finding legitimate work. Before De León left Pakal-Ná, Chino confided that he had refused to continue working for Sombra, an MS-13 smuggler he believed was trafficking women to a brothel, making himself a target for retaliation. De León drove Chino and Jesmyn through Palenque searching for refuge but found nothing and drove them back, a decision he regrets for the rest of his life. In the weeks that followed, Bin Laden and the Breadman, two smugglers who had pressured Chino to help rob migrants, lured him to a secluded spot on the tracks. Bin Laden stabbed Chino in the chest, puncturing his lung. Jesmyn made her way to a hospital where she found Chino alive, and after nine days of recovery, the couple returned to Honduras.

Kingston’s life unraveled as his nephew was murdered, his home was robbed, and he told De León he wanted to retire but had nowhere to go. He later staged a fake kidnapping to extract money from De León, sending a poorly acted video that the anthropologist recognized as a ruse, and their relationship disintegrated. Santos was imprisoned in Mexico for 27 months after being wrongly convicted in a fight, a judgment made largely based on his ethnicity and race. The Garifuna, or Garinagu, are an Afro-Indigenous group from Honduras’s Caribbean coast whose dark skin subjects them to heightened discrimination in Mexico. 

Freed when his brother Marvin scraped together money for a lawyer, Santos reunited with De León in Nogales, having abandoned smuggling to survive by begging and manual labor. Marvin, a decorated ex-soldier, was recruited by a cartel and severely burned in a firefight. When Santos visited him at a remote compound, the cartel held Santos captive for six months because he had seen too much. Marvin threatened the cartel commanders until they agreed to release Santos.

Flaco, brutalized by Mexican immigration agents and deported, took legitimate work in Honduras, but the COVID-19 pandemic and his brother’s murder pushed him north again. De León found him in Tapachula, destitute but devoted to a new wife and infant daughter, dreaming of building a plywood house on unclaimed land by a river. Flaco described how smuggling costs had nearly doubled, with cartels now charging guides as well as migrants. Flaco was left impoverished.

Chino’s story reaches its end in Honduras. Marina, his sister, took him to church, where he confessed his sins and felt a burden lifted. He spoke of finding work and starting over, but his condition worsened. At a public hospital in San Pedro Sula, the family had to rent a ventilator, buy medical supplies, and locate blood donors before doctors would operate. His surgery was delayed for four days, and fluid from his punctured lung migrated to the other. The family pumped air by hand because no mechanical ventilator was available. De León, back in Michigan, learned of the death through a voice message from Jesmyn. Chino died on August 21 at the age of 20 and was buried next to his brother Miguel.

In the epilogue, De León argues that smuggling is a brutal but unstoppable process driven by poverty, political corruption, the drug trade, gang violence, and climate change. Border walls and anti-smuggling task forces are expensive and ineffective; only addressing the conditions that propel migration can meaningfully respond to the crisis. The book closes with brief updates: Santos calls from a truck stop in northern Arizona; Alma texts a photo of Papo helping Dulce blow out birthday candles in Alabama; Jesmyn holds her two-year-old daughter while describing hurricane destruction in Honduras. A final vignette returns to Pakal-Ná, where Chino picks up a rock, charges toward an immigration raid, and screams into the jungle air.