Ep. 341 Am I Supposed to Be Here with Jason De León

Written By Megan Caballero

This week, we’re joined by anthropologist and author Jason De León to discuss his latest book, Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling. We explore the ethical complexities of ethnography, the distinctions between human smuggling and trafficking, and Jason’s decision to place himself as a character in his work. Jason also shares how his experiences at the U.S.-Mexico border have shaped his approach to storytelling and what he believes could help address the ongoing humanitarian crisis.

The Stacks Book Club pick for October is The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. We will discuss the book on October 30th with Franklin Leonard returning as our guest.

 
 

Everything we talk about on today’s episode can be found below in the show notes and on Bookshop.org and Amazon.

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TRANSCRIPT
*Due to the nature of podcast advertising, these timestamps are not 100% accurate and will vary.

Traci Thomas 0:00

Welcome to The Stacks, a podcast about books and the people who read them. I'm your host, Traci Thomas, and today I am thrilled to welcome Jason De León to the show. Jason is an anthropologist and professor at UCLA, best known for his work documenting the experiences of migrants crossing the US Mexico border. His new book, soldiers and kings survival and hope in the world of human smuggling is a finalist for the National Book Award. It offers an in depth look at human smuggling, focusing on the people involved in this dangerous underground network and the resilience and survival strategies they employ. Today, Jason and I talk about the difference between trafficking and smuggling, why he wanted to write a book that focuses on smugglers and how this book has impacted him mentally and emotionally. Don't forget, our book club pick for October is the nickel boys by Colson Whitehead. We will be discussing the book on Wednesday, October 30 with Franklin Leonard. Everything we talk about on today's episode of the stacks can be found in the link in the show notes. And if you love this show and you want inside access to it, or just to show us a little support, you can go to patreon.com/the stacks, and join the stacks pack for just $5 a month. You get to be part of our amazing discord community. You get to come to our monthly virtual book club meetups. You get a bonus episode each month, and you get to know that that money is going to help make this podcast possible. Another fun perk is that you get a shout out on the podcast. So thank you to Claire E, Alexis, Bogardus, Kelly, Kane, Anna H and Karen Kavanaugh. I also have a newsletter that you can subscribe to at Traci thomas.substack.com where you will still get those bonus episodes, hot takes on books and pop culture and so much more that also goes to supporting the show and keeping you up to date with whatever I am up to. So again, go to Traci thomas.substack.com and subscribe. All right. Now it is time for my conversation with Jason De León.

All right, everybody. I am so excited. I am joined today by National Book Award long listed author Jason De Leon, whose book is called soldiers and kings survival and hope in the world of human smuggling. Jason, welcome to the stacks.

Jason De León 2:29

Thank you so much for having me real pleasure.

Traci Thomas 2:31

Congratulations. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Was that an exciting day? Or what

Jason De León 2:35

it's it's pretty unreal. I mean, this is a book about people who aren't supposed to have a voice, and who, you know, kind of live on the margins of everything, and for for it to be recognized as an important story has just been really I'm more excited for those guys, I think I am, than I am even, even for me. But complete, complete shock.

Traci Thomas 2:55

I love it. Very exciting. I guess we should actually start with What's the book about? So in about 30 seconds, will you tell folks about soldiers and kings?

Jason De León 3:03

Yeah, soldiers and kings is a long term study of what it's like to be a human smuggler moving migrants across the length of Mexico. I had been studying migration for a long time, but usually from the perspective of migrants themselves, and just knowing that there's this important component to the story that just hadn't really been told. And so I spent about seven years with Honduran smugglers who were moving their fellow country, people from from Honduras, across Mexico into the United States.

Traci Thomas 3:32

Okay, I have so many questions for you. I started the book after the long list was announced, and after about, I don't know, 50 pages, I immediately reached out to your team, and I was like, I have to talk to this person. It's one of those books that brings up so much in the content of the book. But for me, as a person who reads a lot of investigative journalism, I had a lot of questions about, sort of like, the ethics and the procedures behind ethnography and the anthropology aspect of what you do, um, on a really basic level, can you kind of share which you do share in the beginning of the book, but can you share with listeners, what is sort of the difference between journalism and anthropology or ethnography, you know as techniques? Yeah, I

Jason De León 4:18

mean, I think it's an important question, because there are definitely journalists who do ethnographic sorts of things, and there's, there's quite a bit of overlap. I think, for me, the major difference between ethnography and journalism, one of the major differences is just time. You could think about ethnography as like the most extreme form of slow journalism, where, you know, the projects take years, sometimes decades to to work on. And it's, you know, spending so much time in the field with people, doing interviews, observing, taking notes, and that just goes on for a very, very long time. And so, you know, we don't really have a deadline, right? So there's no, there's no that's why these, these things can, can take a while. I think the other thing about ethnography that differentiates it from. Some forms of journalism is that we also spend a lot of time being concerned about what it is we're actually doing. I mean, with journalism, it's like, okay, you've got to be there. You're chasing a story, and the goal is to, is to meet a deadline and to and to get the story up. In the world ethnographers, it's more like, okay, it's thinking about the process itself. Why am I here? Why am I doing this? What are the implications of the work that I'm doing? What what could happen in the long run if I publish these things, if I write about these kinds of things, and I think I say in the book, I we're sort of the, I think of us as like the Larry David of social science, and it's like, it's constantly overthinking and saying out loud all of our worries and concerns, which I think keeps the discipline a bit a bit grounded, yeah.

Traci Thomas 5:41

I mean, I think the thing that I noticed also is that you are really a part of this story. And I don't know if that's common in ethnography or if that's just this book that you've written in this story, but I guess, what is the, what is the goal with an ethnography? Why write that instead of, you know, spending time and doing a reported piece? Yeah. I mean, I know that sort of a big question, because you sort of dedicated your

Jason De León 6:06

life to this. Yeah. I think when I think about ethnography, or why do I do it, partly is because I'm just so fascinated by the world, like people just I find to be I'm the last person to leave a party. I'm the person who will, who will have a prolonged conversation with a stranger about all kinds of stuff. And for whatever reason, people like telling me all kinds of stuff about their lives. And I think part of it maybe is because I'm so deeply interested, like, I'm really like, oh man. Like, how cool is that? I think everybody has an interesting story. And so I'm drawn to ethnography, partly because of that. But you know, the goal is often to, I think the goal of anthropology, which is what ethnography sort of falls on, you know, it's a major, primary tool that we use within the discipline. The goal is to get us to think about the world in a different kind of way, and perhaps in a non expected way. One of the one of the anthropology taglines is, it's making the the familiar, strange, and the strange, familiar. And so with ethnography, it's, Oh, you think you already know the story, but have you thought about it from this perspective? And you know, for me, that's what I love about it, is that, you know, anthropologists bring this weirdness to the table that you oftentimes don't see in in journalism or in other, you know, social science kinds of approaches. I mean, we're the weirdos who look at the world in a strange way, and, you know, and try to tell a different kind of story.

Traci Thomas 7:27

I think I feel so I see a kindred spirit in the sort of curiosity and interestedness that you're talking about. Because I think I have a lot of that. I mean, I interview people for 350 episodes about their books, and like all these little, silly, tiny, tiny questions that I'm just so fascinated by the process, let's talk about this book. It's about like, as you mentioned, smugglers, and I guess I'd never really thought about it, but can you tell people sort of the difference between a smuggler and a trafficker? Because I think those words are used interchangeably a lot in popular conversation, but they're very different things 100%

Jason De León 8:04

I mean, you oftentimes. I mean, we're hearing it a lot right now because of a it's because of the election, and people want to talk about border security, and people will say, you know, our goal is to stop trafficking at the US Mexico border. What they really mean is migration. And I think that there's a reason the general public doesn't understand the difference, because we conflate those terms all the time. Terms all the time. And so it's really simple. I mean, people are trafficked against their will. People are smuggled, typically, because they want to be. And so a smuggler is someone who you could think about provides a service to a client. I need to get to this place. I'm going to pay you money, and you are going to get me to that to that place. At the end of the day, a trafficker says, I'm taking you now. You have no longer any control over your destiny, and I'm going to sell you into slavery or whatever else. I'm going to move you against your will, right? That's not to say that you can't hire a smuggler who you think is going to provide a service for you, and they can't, you know, betray you and then start to traffic you. And that happened. That does happen, but at the end of the day, they're two very distinct things. And, you know, smugglers, we could think about them as, yeah, they are the the service providers in the realm of undocumented migration. I mean, people are rating them, they're recommending them, they're writing them bad reviews, I mean, and they're literally writing reviews of them on like Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, so it's out there. I mean, it's a service that people are actively seeking out and paying for, but it's totally demonized because, you know, you only really hear about smugglers when, when somebody dies, someone people get left in the back of a truck and they die, they walk through the desert, and then they're abandoned by their smuggler and they die. And the government loves to bring that, those points up and to say, well, you know, 1000s of migrants have died in the Arizona desert because smugglers have have abandoned them there, or have brought them to the desert. But you really people cross through the snore desert of Arizona because of border policies that purposefully funnel them there. And it got to the point people said, well, the only way I'm going to get across this desert is with if I find a smuggler to. To bring me, to bring me through this, this journey. But so we have to think about them. If they were all bad people, they only did bad things to folks. It would cease to exist as a business. But the fact that there are just enough of those smugglers who, who you know, come through at the end of the day on the agreement that the the system keeps functioning. But obviously, you know, Smugglers Run the run the spectrum from really good ones to really bad ones, and everything in between. And so a big part of this book is just about the grayness of this and how it's it's this huge economy. People rely on it every day around the globe, and yet we don't really understand what it is to be a smuggler, what it looks like on a daily basis. Yeah.

Traci Thomas 10:39

I mean, one of the choices you make in this book, again, you talk about this. I mean, you sort of lay out everything in the introduction. It's a very, very good introduction, a plus. But you sort of talk about how you're not really focused on the stories of the people being smuggled, and this is really a book about the smugglers. And I'm wondering, was that a difficult decision? Was there ever a point where you thought, I'm going to try to tell both sides of this experience? When did you know it was just going to be about the smugglers like and also, what did we what do we lose from doing that, and what do we gain from doing that?

Jason De León 11:16

You know, when I finished my first book, The Land of open graves, which really is about migrants who who are crossing the East Mexico border. It's about people who die in the desert. It's about families of the missing who go looking for their lost loved ones. When that book was done, I didn't want to think about migration at all ever again. I mean, my goal was to shift gears completely. I wanted to do a new project on something totally unrelated to migration, on what, um, at that point I, you know, I'm always thinking about things that are going to make me uncomfortable or things that are going to really challenge me. So at that point, I was going to do a whole thing on cops and and I was, I was like, going to commit five to seven years of just being with, actually, with homicide detectives. And I'd gone to Mexico. I had taken a group of students, and they wanted to, you know, interview folks. And so I took them to a migrant shelter, was kind of getting them set up. And I said, Well, I have no interest in being in the shelter anymore. The, you know, I'd been in migrant shelters for many years. I didn't want to interview migrants anymore, because I just felt like I couldn't tell a new kind of story at that point. And these nuns who ran the shelter, they were like, Whatever you do, don't go outside. There's really bad people on the train tracks. And so, of course, me being like,

Traci Thomas 12:25

oh yeah. Like, where are the train tracks?

Jason De León 12:27

Which way? So I go out there and and immediately run into all these, you know, young guys who were, who were involved in smuggling and and they were just like, wanted to talk. They, you know, I found them to be really fascinating. And the fact that they wanted me to they were like, saying to me, nobody ever asked us about our side of the story. And I said, Well, I'm totally curious, and let's, let's start chatting. And so early on, when that, you know, when that happened, I became fully committed to that story, and I knew that it would make people uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable leaving out, you know, the migrant voices as much as I did, but I just felt like I didn't. I wanted people to understand it to be its own thing. I mean, and there's a million books about about migrants, and it's pretty it's pretty easy to write a sympathetic book about migrants. I think most people, or a lot of people, not everybody, feel empathy for those folks. And I knew that it would just be way more challenging to write about this group and focus on them. I wanted to do that both because I think that's an important story to tell, but I also wanted to get out of my own comfort zone, and I'm because I'm constantly worried that I'm going to get stale. And so it's like, okay, let's do some new whole new thing, get get uncomfortable, and hopefully that will generate, you know, new ideas and and a new excitement around the topic, but it's also, you know, this anthropological thing of, I wanted to tell a story. What happens if you tell a story about migration from this unexpected perspective? And you know that that was, that was the goal, and I think that's kind of the goal with most things that I do these days. I

Traci Thomas 13:58

mean, I think you did such a good job with that, because I have read many books about migrant experiences and stories, both reported journalism and memoir and all and sort of that whole world. And then also, I've even read some books from border patrol people really, not fun, not great, not interested. Well, there was that one book that came out a few years ago where it was like, I became a border patrol agent, and I was like, I was like, Oh, this will be interesting. And then I was like, Oh, I hate it here. And then I was like, I'm never doing this again. But your book really challenged me in a few different ways, one of which is that it really changed how I was thinking about the power dynamics in this situation. I think, you know, we're often told that the people who are migrating are powerless and they are escaping horrible things, which is true from my understanding, but that the people who are doing the smuggling are. Are these really powerful people and that they have all of this money and access and all this stuff. And I think what you show in this book is that, for the most part, at least the people you're talking to, they're equally fleeing horrible situations. They're equally pretty powerless. They might have, you know, slightly more power than the person they're smuggling in those moments. But, you know, I don't know. I thought that was really interesting. And so I'm wondering, were you surprised by that? Like, did you go into this book sort of having a sense about what it was like to be a smuggler, or, like, having a sense of how the power dynamics worked, or were you really sort of figuring it out as you were going. I know you spent time talking to migrants, so you obviously were probably more familiar with smuggling than like a regular person. But how was the power stuff for you?

Jason De León 15:52

I expected it to be more organized, and I was expecting, like these folks, to have a lot more control over stuff, and that really was a surprising thing for me. I mean, you know, even the the title so soldiers and kings, soldiers is a reference to, like the these foot soldier guys who are moving along the train tracks. And King is because number one, a lot of a lot of the guys I work with would refer to themselves in each other as king in Spanish, Mireille. But and a lot of those kind of mid level smugglers try to give off this impression that they are, in fact, the king. They this is their, this is their, you know, their domain, and yet it's completely frag. I mean, it's a house of cards. And, you know, they can be high and on, you know, top of the world one day, and then immediately the next day at the very bottom, starting over again. And that shocked me, because partly, you know, the mid level smugglers that I was working with, they're always trying to give off the impression that they are the biggest, baddest, strongest, smartest person in the room, and people who have the whole thing figured out. And if you and this is why, with ethnography, it's interesting, because you stick around long enough you see that that's that that's not true. But just to see some of these guys go from having multiple apartments to then live sleeping on a concrete floor within less than a year, was really, was? It was quite shocking. Yeah,

Traci Thomas 17:11

you, as I mentioned, our character in this book, you come up a lot, and one of the things that comes up is money. In this book, you spend money on the people that you're following and covering, which is very different from journalism, I would say, I think that was like one of the things that kind of popped out and and I have had journalists on the show who have done sort of similar ethnographies, Andrea Elliott, who wrote invisible child, where she followed a family in New York City for 12 years or something, and you know, she would help them a little bit with food, or, you know, she would take them out to lunch to interview them, but she would never like give them groceries, right? And she had this very clear idea in her head of what was allowed and what wasn't. And I'm wondering what the ethics kind of air quotes of ethnography are. Are there any How do you balance how far you're willing to go, how much you're willing to spend, how involved you're willing to be in the story, and at what point do you sort of cut yourself off? You know,

Jason De León 18:07

that's a great question, and it's something that I think we all struggle with. I will say one of the things that I try to do in this book was to be really honest about those things, because I could have left all of those details out. Yeah, it's in there. Yeah.

Traci Thomas 18:19

I mean, that's what made me think of the question. It was like,

Jason De León 18:21

is happening? I do think a lot of people leave that stuff out. They just because they worry that that's going to, like, undermine the story in some way, shape or form. And, and for me, those things keep me up at night. And so I want to take owner, you know, from taking ownership of them and putting them out into the world is a way for me to say these things happened. This is how I dealt with it, and this and, and, you know, I'm open to talking about and to being like, you know, this is like therapy for me. In a lot of ways, the writing is like putting all this stuff out there so that, you know, I never, I try not to hide anything from, from, from the reader. You know, within anthropology, there's long history of this, this reciprocal relationship. I mean, and, and, I think in a lot of ways to I, you know, I don't think about it like I'm paying someone for the story, which I think is the worry in journalism is like, if you pay someone money, then you're paying they're telling you what you want to hear, because you're paying them this kind of story, you know. But with ethnography, I mean, you're there for so long this and you're asking the same question over and over again, you're seeing the same, you know, the story get richer and richer, and the details kind of come out. And so I was never worried, like, if I give someone money today or put, you know, it was mostly like phone credit on their phone, buying them food. I'm taking up so much of their time. I mean, ethnography is a completely extractive process, one with deep colonial roots, and is a really uncomfortable, you know. And I'm going to, I'm extracting information from folks. I'm going to go write this book, I'm going to sell books. I'm going to sell books, I'm going to give talks and be paid for those talks. And so for me, and for most, I think anthropologists, we all have, we have to come up with our own idea about, how does one reciprocate those that we work with? A lot of times it happens, it's not just, oh, I bought this family groceries or I put, you know, credit on my friend's cell phone. You know, we become God. Parents to people that we write about, we create these really intense familial kinds of connections that require, you know, oftentimes, a monetary investment. And so for me, it was, every person is different. And when I was writing about migrants, migrants never asked me for money. I mean, pretty rarely. And there were folks that, you know, I have a friend who I wrote about my first book. I'm basically his health insurance now. I mean, it's 15 years later, and I'm totally fine with that, you know? I mean, that's that we we connected in a way that we're linked now for life. But he doesn't ask me that stuff. I mean, I have to call in, like, kind of probe about, how are things going? Are you going to the doctor? Can you afford it? Okay, let me figure out how I can help you with smugglers. It's a whole different ballgame. I mean, these are folks who their entire job is about extracting money from strangers, and so that ended up putting me in kind of difficult situations where I was being asked about money a lot more and had to set kind of ground rules and say, you know, I'm happy to pay for your time when you're not working, when you're losing money, you could be out on the streets doing whatever it is that you're doing. And so, you know, I don't want people to think about me as someone who is taking away from their livelihood, or they're losing money in this whole process, because money for them. I mean, they're living, they're living hand to mouth. But everybody was different. And you know the story about about Kingston in the book, who, you know, extracting as much money as he as he could from me was interesting, because at the end of the day too, I think in some ways, it helped me to understand what it might feel like to be a family member or or of a migrant who he's smuggling and he's constantly calling and asking for money, or being a migrant and being and just being nickeled and dimed at every at every corner. Yeah, but yeah, we, but every anthropologist who goes into the field has to deal with this in some in some way, shape or form. And so we, you know, there's a, there's a long discussion about about, what are the limits of this, right?

Traci Thomas 21:51

And for you, Jason, what do you I guess I think the question for me is, like, there's no such thing as objectivity. Obviously, I think we've been sold this bill of Lot goods about, like, objective, you know, whatever. And I don't believe in that, and I never have, and I think, like, as a woman of color, like, I think that's pretty clear why. But you and I both have our own moral codes, and our both have our own sense of like, ourselves, our own objectivity, when we're being objective, when we're being subjective, and I guess when you're doing this kind of work, I would imagine that those lines get really blurred, because you're constantly trying to figure out, how am I going to get this information, like you said, it's very extractive, but also, how am I going to make sure that what I'm Getting feels like something that I then would be willing to profit off of, or like, be willing to sell. So I'm, I guess I want to get more specific with you is like, how, how were you thinking about what your limits were? Like, how did you Were there times where you felt like, this is too far. I shouldn't do this next time. Or like, Were there times where you felt like, I don't know. I think, I think some of it is answered in the fact that you do disclose it in the book. I think that that part of it lends so much credence to what you've done. Is like, as a reader, I can hear what's happening, but I'm just wondering, like, in those moments, or even as you're putting the book together after the fact, like, how were you thinking of your own objectivity and moral obligations?

Jason De León 23:26

You know, it's funny. I started really thinking about this after my first book came out, because, you know, I had been really used to, like most a lot of ethnographies, the writer is pretty minimal. I mean, the narrator, the anthropologists, um, purposely, they're edited out, and it's supposed to be, we know, we're a fly on the wall, and, you know, we're looking at people through, you know, a microscope or a aquarium glass, and we're not messing up what's going on at all, which I which, when I started doing ethnography, I was like, this is total bullshit. Like we're fucking up shit all the time, like we're never a fly on the wall. You're the weird dude from some other place who's here recording stuff, taking pictures. And so I got really uncomfortable with this idea that we were somehow, you know, like, the was it like the Star Trek objective? Like, don't ever interfere, you know, I'm like, well, we interfere all the time. This is all the time and so. But I didn't realize, though, was in the when I finished the first book, I realized that my voice, in some in many parts, was very quiet. I wasn't really present. And then there were other moments where it was it was pretty loud, and the moments that it was the loudest was when I was the most conflicted about what was happening. Like, do I take this picture? Do I write about this? You know, do I ask this kind of question and and so there's a way for me to, like, take ownership of the of the difficulties and these moments where you where you're pushing up against this thing that you're like, am I going too far, or, you know, or is this born supposed to be with soldiers and kings? The entire book for me was like, am I supposed to be here? And why am I doing this? What is happening? And, you know, talking. My editor and my agent in the beginning stages, I had kind of written myself out of this whole story. I mean, I was telling it from this other perspective. And what they both said to me was, we need you there as a character, as a narrator, so you can help us understand what's going on and so we can create, we can build some trust with you so we know that you know that you're being hopefully thoughtful about this, and you're concerned about many of these issues that are, that are that are arising. And in order for that to happen, I have, I had to, like, write myself in as as this, this character, and these moments where I'm having there's, I mean, there were so many ethical quandaries and so many just really difficult moments that I don't think I could have written about them in a in a either in an ethical way or even a credible way, without being sort of present. But that was hard. I mean, I didn't, you know, I didn't necessarily want to be in the book as much as I am, but at the end of the day, it felt like, like I needed to be for because there were a lot of things too that I worked, that I had to work out during this project. I mean, this book, this work, fundamentally changed me. I mean, it like broke me in half when my friend Roberto dies, and then these guys and the work kind of glued me back together and taught me so much about empathy and about hope and about the difficult lives that people live in. And so, you know, I didn't, didn't expect to learn about empathy from a bunch of like, roughnecks who, you know, but these guys really changed me a lot. I thought that that ended up being kind of an important part of the story, too, because what does that mean for us to spend all this time in these difficult places and to try to find some beauty and some hope? You know? I think that for me, that was one of the big messages too, is that we can't write these people off. We can't, you know, we can't just think we know what's going on. I mean, there's so much there, and people are are trying to make go of it, and it's important to to see that the richness of the lives that those folks are living in. For me, it was very it was deeply impactful.

Traci Thomas 26:56

Yeah. I mean, as a reader, I think that you really do convey that to I could feel it. I can't speak for every other reader, but I certainly could feel it. And I, as I said, like it was a challenging book to read, because I think I was grappling with some of the same questions that maybe you were grappling with, that you presented, like, from your perspective, sort of like, how do you see these people? And I kept thinking, like, Am I too locked into this? Like, right, wrong binary. I feel like I am like, I feel like I kept pushing. And I'm like, is, is Jason an accomplice? Like, is. And then I'm like, does it matter? Like, why do I care? Does Jason care? But like to be thinking about the people in your book, you know, and thinking about what they're going through, but also to be thinking about how I have been taught to think about them was really, really interesting. And by the end of the book, I think I went on that same journey with you, of like, these are fucking people, like, what are we doing here? And I guess I wasn't gonna save this for after the break, but I'm gonna ask us to you now and then we'll go to break which is, do you think of this text as being maybe an abolitionist text at all? Were you trying to bring a moral ambiguity to the work?

Jason De León 28:13

You know, I have not been asked that question before, yes, but I do think in a lot of ways that it comes out like that, I mean, and it wasn't, wasn't necessarily my intention. It was just that's what I went in to look at this thing. It troubled me. It was complicated. It made me feel weird in all kinds of different ways. And I was just kind of being, you know, what I thought I knew, I didn't know. And, you know, the gray zone, just like the whole thing was, was, is a gray zone. And I started this whole thing like my friend Roberto had died. It crushed me. And so then I thought to myself, I just want to write a story about him so that, so that he can be remembered and beyond the small number of people who knew him and people who had written him off. And you know, it was deeply, it was a very sad kind of thing to think about, like, he's one of millions like that, you know. And, and there's so much suffering in the world, and these systems stay in place and stay functioning, because I think we're, we've been taught to think about them in these kind of black and white sort of terms. And, and even, I think liberal educated people still struggle with with some of these things. I mean, like, I think I talk about in the book, there's a moment where I gave a talk around some of the stuff, and one of my colleagues said I didn't like that talk because it made me feel uncomfortable. It made me start to feel sorry for these people that I don't want to feel sorry for. And you know, my response is that, like, the world is a terrible place, and it's okay to to have complicated feelings about these things, because, I mean, we have complicated feelings about about a lot of stuff, but we seem to want to put some of these political things in, in these boxes that that they don't really want to fit in that. Or when you, when you get up close to them, they they defy these kind of these, these boundaries. Yeah,

Traci Thomas 29:56

okay, I have a question about this, but we're going to take a quick break and. Right back. Okay, we're back to what we were talking about, about, sort of what we're allowed to talk about, what we're allowed to feel in these situations. In the conclusion, you talk a bit about, sort of, people ask you, like, what can be done? And you're, you're sort of like, this is not a fun answer, like, I don't have a thing, but what you do mention is the relationship between security and capitalism and how those things are super integral to smuggling. And I would love to hear you sort of explain that a little more, expound on that a little bit more.

Jason De León 30:35

Yeah. It's funny when I used to get asked about, like, policy questions and stuff early on, I wanted to give people kind of concrete things like, Oh, well, I mean, a guest worker program, or, you know, whatever, whatever wanted to

Traci Thomas 30:49

have, like your party platform, yeah. And then,

Jason De León 30:53

and I used to look at, like, a lot of, like, my more senior colleagues who would just come out and be like, You know what the problem is? The problem is fucking capitalism. And it's like, oh, you're just like, 60s, liberal leftist, you know, and, and I think I was always put off by that, because I think it was always this, like, declarative statement with no kind of context, or, you know, to say, Oh, the problem is capitalism. Let's move on, or abolish capitalism. I think that's hard for a lot of people because, I mean, our society is fundamentally built around that. But I think when you start to look at capitalism and its repercussions, what it does, how it functions and how it's related to all of these things, climate change, border security, the prison industrial complex, you know, racism, every single sec, it's all connected, you know, I think that the that's an unsatisfactory response and but also, you know, as an anthropologist, you know, I like to joke that we, we overly, we think about the stuff in so many different ways at once, which is not conducive for, like, a political slogan, you know, Right? It would be, like, it wouldn't fit on a on a pamphlet. It would be unless that pamphlet was 200 pages long,

Traci Thomas 32:06

unless the pamphlet was a book, a book, right?

Jason De León 32:10

And so, you know, with this stuff now, you know, and with both of my books, people had wanted me to, like, really, kind of dig into some policy recommendations. But I think anything you put down there that's so specific becomes immediately dated. But also, you know, I think that we're looking at like we're putting band aids on this huge on this huge thing, and these little tiny recommendations at the end of the day, I feel like they fall pretty flat, like there's so many things have to be considered at once, and some of them are bigger, and some of them are smaller, but something like capitalism, for me, I'm becoming, you know, this thing that I used to mock when I say, you know, that's the problem, but, but I want to talk about how it's the problem, but then give you some of the specifics that from from my own perspective, and how these things are all are all related. Because I think we want to keep like we're talking about border security, but then we don't want to talk about, like, displacement, political meddling, and third world, all these kind of we want to keep everything kind of separate. And I think if someone comes out and says, like, the problem is capitalism, it has to be followed with a diagram that shows you how these things are all connected, and how fixing this one little thing over here has nothing to do with the root causes that are going to keep this thing in perpetual motion,

Traci Thomas 33:24

right? I mean, I again, I feel, I feel seen by you right now. Though, I'm not an anthropologist, I am a person who thinks a lot about things, because I read so many books about things, right? Like, I'm constantly getting new people's perspective and trying to distill it and figure out, what do I think and what do I believe. And I, too, have sort of moved to the it's just capitalism's the problem, right? And I guess, like, the question is, and this is, like, way, probably bigger than either of us, but just something that I think about a lot is, like, if there is no little fix, and also just getting rid of capitalism isn't gonna happen tomorrow. What are effective things like, what, what is a big fix that could fix a thing within the system that we're in, like, outside of, be changing the entire United States Mission. You know,

Jason De León 34:17

I think for me, it's, it's a kind of multi prong approach to say, okay, like, like, if we want to deal with, like, the global migration crisis, we cannot start at borders, right? So we can, let's, let's think about what's like, you know, I say people like, how do we solve the problem, the US, Mexico border? So Well, let's think about two things, why are people leaving, and then why are they coming? And you can, you can deal with it on both ends and completely jump over this. You could, you can remove the border. If there were, if there was no jobs for people to take in the United States, right, or there was no reason for them to leave in the first place, we wouldn't have this issue. And so for me, it's like giving people to say that we have to look at it from multiple perspectives all at once. That is a big part of it, but then also making more major, substantial changes to the system. You know, when Obama passed the deferred action for child arrivals, DACA, people were super excited about this thing, right? All these kids who had been brought here when they were young to the United States, were going to be able to go to college, were going to be able to work. And that was a great kind of first step. But then we looked at it as like, oh, well, now problem is solved. And it's like, Well, that just helps a very small number of people. If we're going to start something big that's going to last beyond that, we need to make, we need to make some uncomfortable kinds of changes and and I think we're, um, we're not comfortable with with those really major kinds of we want to do small kind of things. And we and part of the reason too, is, you know, the American public does think about immigration as a problem to be solved at the US Mexico border. They don't think about it. I mean, in any with any other geography in mind, or with, oftentimes, with a lot of nuance. I mean, this is why you can say something like, oh, Haitians are eating cats in Ohio, and people are like, Oh, my God, you know, crazy, yeah, that's a so that that group, you can't say to them, let's get rid of the border wall and talk about, you know, private industry and, you know, climate change, or political corruption, these other places that's been fueled by the US interests that gets, you know, that's too complicated of a narrative for a lot of people. And same thing with with, like, capitalism, like, right? It just It turns them off quickly, and they suddenly, like, I knew you were one of those leftist, you know, like, irresponsible, whatever, you know, adjectives they want to use, right?

Traci Thomas 36:39

Do you think about audience? Because I'm thinking about, like, who is reading this book? Who are you writing to? Who are you? Who are you hoping is reading this book?

Jason De León 36:46

Um, you know, audience, definitely not anthropologists. I'm done writing for my people, right? Because I just don't care. I mean, like, I don't read I read ethnography, I read good ones that are recommended to me, or ones that are around a subject matter that's of interest to me, but there's a lot of bad we're putting on a lot of bad stuff in the world because we're writing for this academic audience, and I just think that we're shooting ourselves in the foot, and it's not doing any good for society. My audience was like, people who don't know, I think it was people who don't know anything about the story about migration, and who are going to pick it up and be like, Oh, smuggling, salacious kind of thing, and then be like, Haha, capitalism, you know, climate change, empathy, gotcha, yeah. And so, you know, part of it is, I want people to read this book that know nothing about this process, and to kind of and to be able to walk away from it thinking about, oh, did I just read a story about migration and smuggling, or did I just read a story about a bunch of people who were in difficult situations and who were trying to make it work, who just happened to be smugglers, who just happened to be from Honduras, who just happened to be involved in this global migration crisis? But I also, you know, I want to give the public a different perspective. To me, it's really hard to tell stories about the border or about migration, because we're flooded with them. So many of them, you just change the cover. It's, I mean, it's the same story with within the book. And so I think that's a real turn off for a lot of people, because they go, Oh, I already know all about that. I already read it. Yeah, you know, I read enrique's journey, or I read, you know, Devil's Highway. I already know all about this whole process. And so to add anything new to that conversation is difficult, and part of my goal is to then try to tell a different kind of story about this thing we think we already know so much about, to kind of flip the script a bit. But yeah, I mean, I think I wrote the book for any I mean, I wasn't really thinking it was like I wanted to tell a readable story, and I wanted people to get close to these people that I was close to. But I don't know if I was necessarily thinking like, oh, is this my I think some of the critiques I'm getting from some anthropologists is like, it's not anthropological enough in terms of, like, the, you know, the theoretical kinds of stuff. And I said, Well, that's okay, because that's not the goal of this book. That's a different, different audience. I really just want, I want people who don't ever think about anthropology to want to read anthropology.

Traci Thomas 39:04

Yeah, okay, I have two follow up questions. One is, what are some really good ethnographies? Good ethnographies like to you, according to you, not necessarily you know anything,

Jason De León 39:17

anything written by Lawrence Ralph. So he's got a new book out called cito that's about unfortunate about his the murder of his stepson. Oh, I've seen this, yeah. So he's got a book about gang life in Chicago that's really good. His first ethnography, Yeva husianite, she has a new book out called Exit Wounds, which I think is really good. And her book threshold on paramedics at the US Mexico border is really good. I think Philippe bourgois books righteous dope fiend and in search of respect are both really good. You know, kind of in search of respect was about crack dealing in Harlem in the 80s, and it was kind of a the beginning of a new genre. Think of writing for anthropologists. Angela Garcia, she's got a new book out on drug addiction in Mexico City. That's, that's really good. Oh,

Traci Thomas 40:07

yeah, that the ones that lead among the lost. The lead some, yes,

Jason De León 40:11

yeah. I think that that book is, I just,

Traci Thomas 40:14

I might have the some of the words wrong, but among the lost, I think, is how the title ends. Yes. I

Jason De León 40:20

think that's, that's great. Yeah, there's, there's good stuff out there. I mean, I think you just have to, you just have to kind of dig for but it does feel like, also, we're in a moment where a lot of ethnographers are getting more serious about writing for a general audience, and which is really wonderful to see happen.

Traci Thomas 40:36

I like it. I'm interested in in it as a style of writing. My other question is about the cover. One of the things you mentioned is you just changed the cover, and then it's the same story kind of inside. And one of the things I've noticed in the last five or so years is that almost every single book about migration that has come out has a cream colored, tight cover, and your book is blue with yellow, and it really stands out among those books. I mean, I can think of like, five books off the top of my head that are that same, like, sort of tan color. I'm wondering if the Blue was something that you were interested in at all, if you were thinking about this, or if this is just what the team at biking kind of brought to you, and how this cover sort of came to be, if you were at all involved

Jason De León 41:21

the first versions, you know, we, we had been looking at images, and so that photo was taken by my, my collaborator, Michael wells, because we were, we were involved in, we shot a lot of images, and there's a follow up book on the photography of the project. Oh, cool. But initially, like, so we, I had submitted a bunch of images for consideration for the cover, and, you know, and some of them were, like, people on the train tracks, or, like, groups of people walking. And then we just thought, like, do we need another migration book that just shows a bunch of people walking? Right? Like, that's like, the that's like, the go to and so that image is, so is a beautiful image. It's actually a woman. People ask if it's a, what's this guy's name? It's actually the back of a woman's head who had been in one of these safe houses and was, was hanging out with, with, with my buddy, Flacco. But that those are that was, like, we wanted something that was, you know, a little we would hope unexpected. And then Viking came with, I mean, they came with, with the color schemes. And I think we just immediately thought it was wonderful. But there was an early version that was cream tan colored. Yeah,

Traci Thomas 42:27

I'm telling you, it is the tan every book. Yeah, that I'm just like, what it what is this like? What is I'm so curious of like, the psychology behind it from the cover designers, because there's clearly a conversation happening currently about books about immigration must be light, dark, white, yeah. Is there anything that's not in this book that you wish was or could have been?

Jason De León 42:55

I wish there was more humor. I mean, there's a lot of funny moments in the book. Yeah

Traci Thomas 42:59

pants, yeah,

Jason De León 43:00

oh my god. Like, yeah, just, I mean, that guy needs his own. Kingston just needs his own. If it was, if our relationship wasn't so difficult, I would, you know,

Traci Thomas 43:11

he would have his own. Oh

Jason De León 43:12

my god, yeah. You know people, people are funny, and with all you know, the stuff that I've written, people will say things to me like, I didn't expect to, like, I expected to be sad about this book, but I also didn't, didn't expect to have moments where I was, like, laughing about some of this stuff. And it's like, well, you know, especially with like, smugglers, so many of them are so charismatic, so they can tell a good story. Oh, my God. And so I could do a whole book on just like, migrate, humor on the migrant trail, and it's just, and I think that was one of the things that that kept me going back to was that I enjoyed being with these folks, and we were always laughing and just talking shit and just, you know, the things that would come out of people's mouths are just like, holy moly, you know, why aren't you doing stand up kind of thing? And so I think that that was something that I wish I had kind of had more, more space for but there was a lot of, there's a lot going on in the book, and so, you know, some things had to get get pulled out. I think also, so much has happened since the book come out, came out. And I wish that that I'd had some space to kind of update, you know, some of those folks. I mean, especially like someone like Jasmine, who, you know, is still really struggling, and is in Honduras, and it's just a lot of a lot of stuff has happened since, since the book has come out that I think really reflect, especially through things around climate change and just the the general disaster that's happening in Central America right now. So I maybe with, if they ever do a paperback, yeah, updated version, I can include some of that stuff. Yeah. Okay,

Traci Thomas 44:41

this is a little bit about your writing process. How do you write? How many hours a day? How often music or no snacks or beverages in your house? Talk about it. You

Jason De León 44:52

know my my dear colleague at University of Michigan, Ruth Bahar, who is a beautiful writer. And actually, that's another good another good ethnography, anything that. That Ruth has written is just so amazing. But she's someone who writes every day. She's, you know, she has this whole ritual. And I'm someone like, I haven't written anything in almost a year. I mean, the book came out, and then I was busy doing other stuff. I mean, I writing a few things in there. I write in spurts and so, but when I was working on soldiers and kings, I was on sabbatical, and so I was writing every day, I would get up, usually I'd get up in the morning, I'd go for a run, I'd listen to whatever music I needed to be with for whatever what I was writing about. So if I'm writing about Kingston, there's a certain there's certain songs there. If I'm writing about luck, I've got that music. And so I don't know if that's like, my my like, OCD brain or whatever, but it's like, it'll be the same song, just, you know, Spotify. When it gives me my my yearly Roundup, they're like, you listen to this song 4 million times. You listen to six songs this year, yeah, and so. So it's sort of like, I run, I get this, I get the kind of music in my head, and then I'll sit down. I used to be able to write for a lot longer periods of time, like eight hours, and now, because of kids and everything else, and my brain is doesn't work like it used to. It's usually like eight until lunchtime, and then I'll have and then I'll eat. I try not to look at email or anything. And then if I can do a little bit more for lunch, that's great. And then I will just read for the rest of the afternoon. I would say almost 50% of my writing process is reading books like I just I read, and then I go, God, I want, I wish I could write like this person. And then that keeps me getting it gets me excited for the for the for the next day. Okay,

Traci Thomas 46:28

so I know that you were reading Jesmyn Ward while you were writing this book, because it's in the acknowledgement. But what sort of stuff are you reading? Just reading for pleasure, and also on the Jesmyn Ward front, what about her writing? Do you feel like you were using, like, what? What was useful to you about her work?

Jason De León 46:47

You know, I think about her work well, and this is why there's a character named after her in the book.

Traci Thomas 46:54

Oh, right. Because these are all nicknames, yeah, or, like, made up names, yeah,

Jason De León 46:57

you know, with with her stuff, you know, I like the kind of the brevity of the writing style, which, you know, I sort of think she's like a like the and Hemingway kind of does this to me, where it's like, I don't understand how someone can break your heart with six words. And she's really good at doing that and but also really being self aware, which a lot of like, you know, Hemingway, I think, wasn't often, you know, this is kind of heavy handed, and so I appreciate the fact that she can break your heart with five or six words, but also can write in such a sensitive, kind of nuanced way and tell the story in a in a kind of a gentle yet really powerful and kind of heartbreaking way. And, and I love all her stuff, I mean, and including, I mean, her memoir, the men we read, I think it's like, that's like, the,

Traci Thomas 47:48

I think that's her best book, yeah.

Jason De León 47:49

I mean, nobody wants to talk. I mean, that was a book that, you know, I think I read that maybe second or third after I started, and was like, Oh, my God. Why is she writing more of this amazing and it's, it's beautiful, and, you know, so, yeah, I think I'm, I'm always trying to just write shorter sentences, but pack in as much as I can, in a way that, you know, it doesn't feel heavy, but it is Wardian, yeah, exactly. But, like, but, yeah, the reading part for me that's like, I tell people, you know, I'm also a musician. I'm like, you can't make an album if you're not. You're not listening to music all the time, if you're not hearing and this is why, I think the problem with it with anthropology and ethnographers, they're reading other ethnographies, trying to write an ethnography, reproducing, you know, right, some of those bad habits. And part of it is, like, I think when you become an academic graduate school, for me, at least, killed my love of reading, because I was just reading things I didn't, you know, things for work. I was not reading any literature, things that I that I loved. And when I was writing my first book, I had to go back and rediscover my love of reading, because I hated writing, you know, part of my first book as an academic, I hated the writing process. I didn't want to do it. And it wasn't until I was forced to write a book, and then was it enforced also to rediscover my love of reading, that that I just remembered, like, oh, I used to read so much, and I read, I mean, I read mostly fiction. I don't read any non I mean, it's, it's pretty rare that I read nonfiction these days, but I find that, yeah, four or five hours of writing, three hours of reading, you know, rinse, rinse, repeat,

Traci Thomas 49:21

okay. Besides Jasmine Ward, what else are you loving right now,

Jason De León 49:24

I'm rereading a lot of old stuff. I'm teaching this class called archeology the apocalypse, which is half speculative fiction, and it's getting students think about what the archeological remnants of our future disaster could look like. And so I'm teaching Handmaid's Tale. Actually, it lines up.

Traci Thomas 49:39

I just read that for the first time. Yeah, it's a, really,

Jason De León 49:43

it's a, I'm rereading that. It's like, I'm loving rereading that. I mean, loving it also being totally mortified about Yeah. But so I'm reading that right now and really enjoying that. I just read the fact of a body that was,

Traci Thomas 49:58

Oh, yeah. I. Alex Marzano, yeah, something, yeah.

Jason De León 50:02

I really enjoy, I enjoyed that that was, you know, people reckon recommend nonfiction to me that, you know, it's usually something super dark like that. But I just, I really, that book really stuck with me for, you know, I'm still, still thinking about it a month, a month and a half, two months later, I

Traci Thomas 50:17

want to give you a recommendation based on the class you're talking about, which is one of your fellow long listed books, which is magical realism, okay, I think you'd really appreciate it talks a lot about speculative fiction and fantasy and the genres, and also like how they function due to like colonialism and race. And it's just really smart stuff, really good. Another thing you mentioned in the acknowledgements is your therapist, and how therapy is sort of a part of your process. And anytime I see that in a book, I almost always want to ask about it, because so many authors kind of act like the stuff doesn't affect them. And I'm wondering like, what do you feel like? Do you feel like there's parts of this book that you could not have written without therapy?

Jason De León 51:09

No, it was more like this book sent me to therapy, back to therapy, but it was like, as I was writing this stuff out and needing to get it out, going like, Oh, that's interesting. Still thinking about that, huh? I thought we had already resolved that, you know, because I had been, I had been in therapy as a kid, and then I had this kind of very brutal childhood, living, living with my dad that just, I'm still working that out now, but I blocked it out in a lot of different ways. And I think it manifests itself later in life in terms of, like, the kind of maniac that I was for a long time, and all of the like, the struggles that I had with, like self destructive kind of tendencies, you know, working on this book and and writing and working with all these young men who I'm seeing myself. And then was kind of eye opening to be like, oh, you know, because I kept asking myself, like, why do we get along so well with these guys who just feel like they want to die, or who are just like, headed towards self destruction? And then maybe like, oh, it's because this feels super familiar. And so the stuff started to come out, and I was feeling like one that that I was damaging myself by trying to write about this stuff. I didn't have the language to talk about some of these things. Things were were, I think, resurfacing for me, that were really troubling. And it was kind of like, I wrote this book, I put, I put a lot of stuff in there that that I had never really said out loud, or at least not not publicly. And then was like, well, now what? Now I don't like writing, writing about it was sort of therapy. But once the book was done, I was like, I'm, you know, once the book was done, it just felt like, Oh well, I don't have a that was my safety net. And so I needed to go, go back to therapy and and I feel like I went back to therapy after more than 20 years, better equipped to talk about this stuff, because I had just been talking, I just been telling it to the public, right? I just been writing it out. And now I was like, Okay, I'm here to work. I'm here to be open and honest about what, about what's happening. And, you know, my therapist, you know, she sort of came on board. I want to say, you know, I was already at the editing stage, but, you know, a complete, you know, just changed, changed so many things for me. And I just came back from a border, a border conference last week in LA with a bunch of writers and stuff, and that we, the last day, we were just all talking about, you know, how much people love being in therapy. And the people, and the people who weren't therapy were like, well, maybe I need to, you know, we're like, yeah, yeah. Come on, come with us. You know, you love it. It's great. It's a, yeah, I mean, she my therapist, Theresa, was just was so important for me to to to get through those last, last sort of hurdles, and then, more importantly, for me just to feel like I'm in a, I'm in a good place now, and I'm getting to an even better place as I, as I'm, you know, working on, on doing, doing my self work, which I never thought, I mean, when I before I started this book, or even went back to therapy, you know, I didn't, you know, person this idea of, like, personal growth would I was like, what? Who needs that? Like, I'm fine. I've been thinking this stuff, this shit. I'm like, bulletproof, you know, I might. And my first book was, was really depressing and hard. And I think people would ask me like, Well, how do you do this difficult stuff? You know, you're interviewing people who've lost a child and they can't and they're missing you. You're finding a dead body in the desert, you know, how does that? How are you getting through that stuff? And and I used to say things like, well, that's what beer is for. Or, you know, I gotta. I would say things like, I have a thick skin because, you know, I have a high tolerance for terribleness because of, you know, because of who I am, and the older I've gotten to realize that, like, I have a My I'm more sensitive now than I've ever been and, but I also needed to, like, be really honest with with the reader about, you know, this, and this is why, like, I'm not. It. I'm not the fly on the wall or and, you know, I might be in the corner, but I'm in the corner crying. I'm in the corner like people are looking at me and they're, like, adjusting their behavior based on that. And then I'm going home and being like, Wow, that really fucked me up. But I think it's, you know, part of this book, maybe one audience that's more specific, is I wanted to write something for people who are thinking about doing ethnographic work so that they could see how challenging it is and how the you know, how we mess up all the time, and that's okay. I mean, the world is messy, and I'd never wanted to hide that, because a lot of the ethnographies I'd read early on, it seemed like the writer had everything figured out. Everything was perfect. You show up, people tell you their secrets, and you write, you go home and write about it, and nothing bad ever happens. And that has never been my experience. And so I wanted that to be something upfront, so that a student could look at it and go, Oh, this is going to be challenging, but I can do it and and a way to deal with it is just to be, for me at least, is to be really open about about what I'm going through.

Traci Thomas 55:58

Okay, I have, we're, like, sort of out of time, but I have like, two and a half really quick questions. One is, what's a word you can never spell correctly on the first try?

Jason De León 56:06

It's oftentimes words with, like, ei or IE, like, yeah, like, impossible. And AI is making my life. I mean, I'm just like, yeah, what you know is it autocorrects everything. Yes,

Traci Thomas 56:18

I just leave typos. Now, I'm just like, I know it's wrong, but I can't figure it out. You get the point? It's fine. My other little mini half question, it's not really a question, it's more of a statement. You're a Dodgers fan. How dare you? Okay, next. So I'm a Giants fan, and I was reading when I was in the acknowledgments, I was like, what's happening here? Why am I taking strays right now? Like, you're like, hate you're like, to my best friend ever, a Giants fan. Oh, Jason, I liked you, but now I don't. My sister

Jason De León 56:49

is a big Giants fan, and she gives me so much shit.

Traci Thomas 56:51

She's got good taste. I

Jason De León 56:53

was born in San Francisco, but, you know, raised in LA

Traci Thomas 56:57

and I was born in Oakland, or born in Oakland, raised in Oakland, but my dad is from San Francisco, and my godfather is dusty Baker. So in my childhood, I was raised a Giants fan. Now I've become, I mean, I'm still a Giants fan, but I rooted for many teams as he's traveled around the league, but I've always, always hated the Dodgers deeply. He was a Dodger. He was a Dodger, but not in my lifetime. He was a Dodger before I was born. So it doesn't count, and I still hate the Dodgers. You know how it is. You just have to, I have to have an enemy. Last question, if you could have one person dead or alive read this book, who would you want it

Jason De León 57:37

to be? Oh, that's a good question. I'm always trying to get Jason Isbell to read my stuff, so that he'll write a song, okay, based on this. And so that's, you know, he's in the he's in the beginning of the book. He's on the soundtrack. Yeah, you know, I feel like,

Traci Thomas 57:54

did you send it to him?

Jason De León 57:55

I didn't send. I should send him. I sent him. I gave him a copy of my first book. Send a note. But I should, yeah, because I just feel like, I mean, he would, these are characters that he like, that he would write about, and probably find some, you know, some some, some kinship with. But, you know, I yeah, I mean, I, I think I use these books as, like, an attempt to, like, ingratiate myself with him, because I find him to be such a, I mean, and that was the thing too. Like the like, not just the reading as part of the writing process, but also listening to music, especially music with, you know, with lyrics like Springsteen, Jason Isbell. You know, a lot of, there's a lot of American the soundtrack on the on the for the book is really, you know, truly was what I was listening to and being kind of inspired by, as I was trying to, you know, work through it.

Traci Thomas 58:37

Did you make a Spotify playlist for all of us to listen to? It is

Jason De León 58:40

yeah. So it's Yeah. I think there's the book, I think has a QR code, but definitely, if you go to the website,

Traci Thomas 58:46

the penguin will link to it in the show in the show notes, yeah,

Jason De León 58:49

there's definitely a playlist without, with all of that stuff, I love

Traci Thomas 58:53

this, this thing that books are doing now where they're sharing their playlist for the book. I think it's so fun. I went to

Jason De León 58:59

I went to them and said, Can we do a playlist? Because my buddy Willie vlaughton, who's a who's a novelist, you know, up in the Pacific Northwest, his books, a lot of his books, have had soundtracks that he just composes, like a score. And so I got, I kind of stole that idea from him, but I was like, what if, you know, and, and I think in my first book, I referenced a little bit in acknowledgement, some of the songs, but with this one, I was like, let's just give it. Give it to you. So you can, you can kind of be, be in that space with me, because, you know, for me, sound ends up being being so crucial to to a big part of the storytelling.

Traci Thomas 59:29

Wow. Okay, this was amazing. Thank you so much. Jason, everyone you can get soldiers and kings survival and hope in the world of human smuggling, wherever you get your books, it is out in the world. Now. I read some from the page. I also listened to Jason's amazing narration of the audiobook, so I can give an A plus stamp of approval to that as well for my audiobook, people, the book is on the National Book Award long list. Congratulations, so well deserved. And thank you so much for being a guest today. Thank

Jason De León 59:57

you so much for having me. It's

Traci Thomas 59:59

been a real pleasure. And everyone else, we will see you in the stacks.

All right, y'all that does it for us today. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you again to Jason De León for joining the show. I'd also like to thank Rebecca Marchand and Julia Ricard for helping to make this conversation possible. Don't forget the stacks book club pick for October is the nickel boys by Colson Whitehead. We will be discussing that book on Wednesday, October 30, with our guest, Franklin Leonard. If you love this podcast, if you want inside access to it, some bonus perks, go to patreon.com/thestacks and join the stacks pack and be sure to subscribe to my newsletter at tracithomas.substack.com. Also make sure you're subscribed to this podcast, wherever you're listening to podcasts, and if you're listening through Apple podcasts or Spotify, please leave us a rating and a review for more from the stacks. Follow us on social media, @thestackspod on Instagram, threads and Tiktok, and @thestackspod_ on Twitter, and you can check out our website at the stacks podcast.com Today's episode of The Stacks was edited by Christian Dueñas, with production assistance from Megan Caballero. Our graphic designer is Robin McCreight, and our theme music is from Tagirijus. The Stacks is created and produced by me Traci Thomas.

Megan Caballero
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