The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail

Jason De León, the author of The Land of Open Graves, is currently professor of Anthropology and Chicano/a Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. He is also the Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project.

De León acknowledges that being a “male researcher from a working-class Latino background” gives him an advantage in interacting with Latinos on the migrant trail, who are less filtered in their interactions with him, than they may have been with white middle-class researchers (92). De León’s background makes him more comfortable with the caustic, sexually-charged chingaderas and swearing that his subjects use to tell their stories of desert crossing. Nevertheless, he does not assume that he knows what immigrants are going through as a result of his ethnicity, only that he is in a liminal position between objectivity and subjectivity:

The tension between my roles as an insider (Latino male) and as an outsider (a university professor) allowed me to share in the ‘thickness’ of border-crossing culture without foolishly thinking that my ethnicity alone would somehow give me an emic perspective into the desperation required to enter the desert (93).

As a researcher, De León has to allow his subjects to behave as they naturally would as they navigate the migrant trail, recording the details of their journey empirically, and without interfering.