Interview with National Book Award Winner for Nonfiction 2024, Jason De León
by Rey M. Rodríguez
Few scholars have reshaped our understanding of migration, violence, and human dignity with the empathy, kindness, depth, urgency, and interdisciplinary vigor of Jason De León. As Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and the Loyd E. Cotsen Endowed Chair of Archaeology at UCLA—where he also serves as Professor of Anthropology and Chicana, Chicano, and Central American Studies—De León stands at the forefront of a new, ethically engaged archaeology, one that insists on illuminating the lived realities of those who cross borders under perilous conditions.
De León is also the Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a 501(c)(3) research, arts, and education collective that, since 2009, has used ethnographic, visual, archaeological, and forensic methodologies to document the human consequences of clandestine migration between Latin America and the United States. The UMP’s groundbreaking work—featured widely in academic and popular media—has expanded public understanding of the borderlands as both a physical landscape and a humanitarian crisis.
He is the award-winning author of The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail, a landmark ethnography featuring photographs by Michael Wells, and Soldiers and Kings, which received the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction. In recognition of his visionary approach to scholarship and public engagement, De León was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2017.
Beyond his research, De León plays an influential role in archaeological training as a member of the Academic Board of the Institute for Field Research, which operates more than 40 field schools in 25 countries. His academic path traces back to his undergraduate years at UCLA—where he first conducted fieldwork in Tlaxcala, Mexico—followed by a Ph.D. in anthropology at Penn State University, early teaching appointments at the University of Washington, and a decade on the faculty of the University of Michigan before returning to UCLA. His dissertation focused on Olmec political economy and stone-tool production, revealing the deep temporal roots of his interest in material culture and power.
And yet, De León’s intellectual life is only one facet of his creative expression. A longtime musician, he sang and played guitar with the Long Beach hardcore-punk-reggae band Youth in Asia in the 1990s, performed with the Americana band The Wilcox Hotel in Pennsylvania during the mid-2000s, and currently plays bass with The War Pigs, while participating in various musical collaborations, including periodic reunions with The Wilcox Hotel.
Together, his scholarship, activism, and music reflect a career committed to revealing truths, challenging systems, and amplifying the voices of those too often unheard. It is a privilege to sit down with Jason De León to discuss his work, his inspirations, and the urgent stories that continue to shape his research and his art.
Jason De León, what a privilege to have you here at Storyteller's Corner of Chapter House, the literary journal for the Institute of American Indian Arts. We are so privileged to have you, and thank you for your willingness to be interviewed.
Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure.
How did you become a writer, and why do you write?
That's a great question, because I feel like I have never considered myself to be a writer.
And it's funny, Ruth Dickey, from the National Book Foundation, said, “You know, you actually have to start talking about yourself as a writer these days. It's probably time for you to accept that designation.” I was always an avid reader. And then I started playing in bands around the age of 15, when I started writing songs.
That was where I felt like I was writing. Later, I studied anthropology. I went to graduate school. I was writing articles and dissertations. When I was doing that work, I never thought that I was a writer. If you write a dissertation, it doesn't mean you're a writer, right? If you write a journal article about ancient stone tools, then I don’t consider that to be writing.
When I was at the University of Michigan, I was tasked with writing a book. It threw me for a loop because I had never intended to write one. For tenure there, they said, you're going to have to write a complete book. I thought that I could get tenure by just writing a bunch of articles, which I hated doing. I thought a book was about 10 articles, and if I hated writing one of those, now I have to write ten of them, and that bummed me out.
When I started to think about a book, I realized that the only way I was going to write one was to write it in a way that felt rewarding and fulfilling, and something I could get really excited about. I had to seek another way.
The first book, Land of Open Graves, was painful because I didn't know where to start. I thought to myself, “Well. Let's start over.”
I'm going to stop reading ethnographies. I'm going to stop reading anthropology. I want to go back and start reading books that I love.
I realized at that when I went to graduate school, I started to hate reading because I was reading material that was intellectually interesting, but not well written.
And so, I got immersed in literature to motivate myself to write. I also realized the importance of music. When I was a graduate student, I was often told that my musical interests and my interest in art were very separate or should be separate from anthropology.
I realized that my favorite writers were often musicians and lyricists. I started thinking about lyrics and poetry. I took all of those influences and tried to put them into conversation with the anthropological thoughts that I was having.
My first book was an attempt to bridge the anthropological writing I had been doing with this more creative, literary writing that I was inspired by and interested in.
By the time I finished that book, I had rediscovered my love of writing. In the next book, I knew to be free of the constraints of academic writing. When I started writing Soldiers and Kings, I was fully immersed in novels, in storytelling, and thinking about writing as an art form. By the time I was done with it, it felt good to me. I was finally in love with writing again. I wanted to do it, and then that book went and did whatever it did. Maybe the reason that I'm always so hesitant to call myself a writer is partly that I don't get to do it very often.
When people say, When is the next book coming in? I say, well, the first one took 10 years and the second took me 7 years.
I have to do all the research, and then I don't get to write a lot during that moment, and even right now, the only writing I'm doing is writing emails.
But yes, I like the idea that I get to be a writer now. I just get bummed out that I don't have enough time to do it. And I also feel a lot of my friends who are novelists and who get to do it every day are the people who are the real writers. I'm just this person who moonlights when I have time to do it. Sometimes I have these fantasies of quitting my job so I can write full-time, and then my friends who are writers who don't have teaching positions say, “Don't do it! Keep the health insurance.”
Another reason I'm often hesitant to call myself a writer is that my success as an academic doesn't hinge on whether or not the books do well. There are a lot of other things that are asked of me.
I'm more of a reader who then likes to get inspired to put words on paper. But it is also a very intimidating designation. I don't say that I'm a musician, despite playing guitar for 40 years. I have friends who are guitar players, and I'm like, those guys are guitar players. Yes, I'm just an interloper.
Well, I read both of your books as if they were novels. Unfortunately, both are real and not fiction. Regarding your work, much of it stems from immigration activities in El Paso, where the immigration authorities decided to create a policy that they didn't know would become the national policy. Not enough people know this story. Can you take us into this history?
Once you start digging into these polarizing issues that are often presented in simplistic ways, it complicates many things. When people talk about the evils of the Border Patrol, and then I go, well, okay, look at the ethnic demographic of the Border Patrol, right? Why is the Border Patrol more than 50% Latino, right? These things get more complicated, interesting, and insightful about the world, beyond what we normally understand. For example, “Prevention Through Deterrence” is a policy that uses a variety of different obstacles, many of them, what we would term natural, like the landscape, the environment, as a weapon against migrants.
This policy all came out of a human rights protest in El Paso. Latino students at Bowie High School, which is right along the U.S.-Mexico border, were getting harassed by the Border Patrol, who were patrolling the campus, trying to catch undocumented border crossers. The officers couldn't tell who was undocumented and who wasn’t, so they were racially profiling students. The students said, This is a violation of our civil rights. They took it to the courts, and the courts agreed with them.
So the Border Patrol decides, if we can't tell the difference between documented and undocumented folks, if we can't racially profile people, then let's put some infrastructure so immigrants won't be crossing in areas where there are people that might look like them. Border Patrol establishes a strong show of force in the city of El Paso, and it pushes migrants to the edges of town, out into the wilderness, where now you can't hide among the local population. You have to hop the fence and then double back to get into town. Suddenly, you're just much easier to spot and potentially easier to catch. But then the Border Patrol says, well, what if we push them even farther out, and now they have to walk 20 miles to get back into town or to get to a highway.
They will experience extreme hardship because of the environmental conditions, the weather, and the terrain, and that's a great way to slow them down. It's easier to catch someone if they're exhausted, or wounded, or dead, and so they start to use the natural environment in this way.
Then, of course, the federal government says, “What are you doing?” And, Sylvester Reyes, a Latino Border Patrol sector chief, who has created this monster, goes rogue, and then they decide this policy could work in California, where we're having the same issue. San Diego is being overrun by undocumented folks, so let's put it there. Push people out into the mountains of San Diego. So they start enforcing the policy.
The government then creates this federal program that now starts to weaponize the desert against migrants. It leads to the death and disappearance of thousands of people over the years across all border states.
The kids at Bowie High School had no intention to create this monster. Now it has become a security paradigm globally, where people think they can get away with brutalizing migrants. If they drown in the Mediterranean, if they die in the jungles of southern Mexico, if they die in the deserts of Arizona, if they die in nature, the government can say, “It's not our fault. They put themselves into harm's way. But we can create the infrastructure to increase the likelihood that they will die without accountability.” When you take a deeper dive into that idea, it gives you a sense of this very complicated issue that cannot be solved simply at the border. It connects to all of these more complicated things. The running joke is always that anthropologists are very good at complicating the simplest things.
I would hope that we're not complicating things to be difficult, but we're complicating them because we want people to know that it's that layered. Then this complexity means that there is no quick fix. And if there's no quick fix, it means we have to deal with these issues individually or collectively in a much more nuanced way.
But obviously, in this country, we want quick fixes. We want very simplistic answers. History has shown us that that's never the case.
Yes, let’s talk about the experiment with the pig.
In the beginning, when I started working in Arizona, people had been talking to me about the number of folks who had been dying out in the desert. There had been lots of speculation about whether bodies were getting mummified. Whether the desert was preserving them, or whether they were disappearing because of animal scavenging. No one could give me a good answer. There had been no good research on this. It was all speculation. And so, I became very interested in trying to understand what was happening to people who died out there. How many people are dying? What does it look like? In forensic science, there's a long history of using both animals and cadavers in different experiments, forensic experiments. There are the body farms in Tennessee and in Texas. They leave people out there in different conditions to understand what happens to them as a way to solve crimes and other research.
I got the idea to try something similar using the bodies of pigs.
As a way to replicate what could potentially happen to a migrant's body out in the desert, we used animals that were dressed in clothes similar to what migrants would be wearing. We gave them personal effects, and then monitored their decomposition over several weeks with trail cameras to see how quickly the bodies decomposed. What types of scavenging activities are occurring? What does it look like after a week, after three weeks, after a month? Could you identify this individual, or how much of the body remained?
And one of the things that shocked us was the speed at which these bodies decompose. Pig bodies are the closest proxy that we have to the human body. But within a matter of, sometimes 36 hours, 72 hours, you could have a fully dressed, fully fleshed body be completely defleshed and disarticulated and scattered far and wide, and with much of it actually disappearing.
What that research showed was that we are probably drastically undercounting the number of people who die, if we're basing it on what's been recovered, because many of these people are probably not ever going to be recovered because the environment destroys them so quickly.
And unfortunately, this happens in the middle of nowhere, no one is paying attention, and there are no cameras on this horror.
We have more than 10,000 individuals found over the last 30 years along the U.S.-Mexico border. You could probably double or triple that number, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of the number of people who have died while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. That doesn't include those people who die crossing Mexico or further south.
Thank you for saying that. I know that that's not easy to explain or describe, both emotionally and from personal experience with the border. The tragedy is overwhelming.
What's the relationship between your first book and your second book, and how do you view them as parts of a larger arc?
They definitely build on each other. They represent the evolution of my own writing. They represent the evolution of my attempt to engage with the general public. I'm increasingly interested in making scholarship accessible to non-experts, and so Soldiers and Kings is an attempt to say, okay, here's a book written by an anthropologist, but you don't have to be an anthropologist to understand it.
When I finished the Land of Open Graves, which really focused on migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border through the Sonoran Desert. It focused on the stories of people who have lost their lives during that process, and the aftermath that the families have to deal with. When that project was done, and the question was posed to me, well, what is next?
I didn't know. Actually, I thought what was coming next was going to have nothing to do with migration. I wanted to move on to something completely different, and that's partly because I'm constantly trying to reinvent myself. After all, I don't want to ever get stale. I want to put myself into a new scenario, which forces me to think about things differently. And so, I had attempted to go completely away from migration. I ended up going to southern Mexico. I was interviewing some folks there for a side project. While I was there, I fell in with a bunch of smugglers, and then that project developed after my friend Roberto was murdered. It made me want to understand who he was, how he had become involved in smuggling.
Wait, so you can't say you just fell into a group of smugglers and then just keep going.
I'd met these smugglers, including this kid, Roberto. He started telling me his story. I found it to be super interesting. They were saying things to me, like, “We have interesting stories too. How come no one ever talks to us about this?”
And part of me was, well, because you guys are the bad guys. I already know this story. And, in fact, I didn't know any of it. After his death, I wanted to fulfill this commitment that I had made to him. I'll try to tell your story. I didn't think it was going to be a book; I thought it would be an article.
And then after his death, I sort of recommitted myself to trying to understand this element of the process. In hindsight, it was because I wanted to write about migration, but I didn't want to repeat myself. And people have been saying to me, maybe you could go to Texas and study the stuff there. I said, Well, I'm going to be doing the same thing I was doing in Arizona, except now I'm in Texas.
I tell my students that you have to think carefully about migration stories and border stories, because we don’t need more of those. There are so many out there, and it is so difficult to tell a new thing. If we think about it in terms of writing books, it's literally a saturated market. There are a million books written about the U.S.-Mexico border, and I think what you have to try to do is find a different way of thinking about it. And so, you can't talk about undocumented migration without talking about smuggling, even if it's implicit. And most of the time, when smugglers come into the conversation, it's, well, those are the bad guys, those are the exploiters.
I thought to myself, they're the elephant in the room, and yet we don't know anything about them. And so I thought, okay, if I'm going to write about migration, then I have to write about the bad guys, or this thing that I'm so uncomfortable with, that it'll force me to think about it differently. It'll put me out of my comfort zone, and then I thought, okay, now it will add some new layer to the story, hopefully, in an unexpected way. Whatever comes next, if it is about migrants or about migration, it'll force me to say, okay, if this is a trilogy, the third part has to be radically different from the first two. It should complement them in some ways, but it cannot be the same thing with new packaging on it, which is hard, and why the books take so long. I have to sit on it and think deeply about what story I want to tell.
I try to think about these things like albums. I think about bands all the time, and when they make records. I deeply appreciate Neil Young because every record he makes is different. He's constantly reinventing himself. They don't all work. I mean, some of them fail in different ways. Maybe not to him, but to the outside listener, but I appreciate that he's fully committed to saying, okay, well, I gave you this country folk record, and now I'm going to give you my German techno record. He is following that passion, or where the spirit moves him, and for me, too, that's an important reminder to go where my gut is leading me, and not necessarily what's a book. I am looking for what is unexpected. I need the unexpected for my own thinking. I need it to be more thoughtful and more creative about my work.
After reading your two books, I feel that you come to them almost as if you're writing a poem. By this, I mean you don't force the idea that you are trying to express. Instead, it comes to you. The whole idea of working from the found articles of immigrants in the desert and using them to tell a story. Many poems are inspired by found objects. They had something to say, right? And in a sense, nobody was telling that story. It was right there in front of you. And then the same thing with Roberto, his narrative had to be told. Your curiosity leads you to this essential story.
I teach a creative writing class to students who want to become lawyers. And I told them, whatever they do, never give up your creative life. They thought that to be a great lawyer, they needed to let go of their creative life and only focus on the legal. What you said resonated with me when you were told that to be an anthropologist, you must be dedicated only to anthropology. But it seems that was not the best advice. You need poetry, literature, and music to inform your best work. I'm curious if you agree?
I'm so mad that I spent all this time in my 20s and even into my 30s keeping these two things separate. When I moved to graduate school in 2001, 2002, I left LA. I'd been in bands for a long time up to that point, about 10 years of playing music, and I sold all my equipment. I moved to rural Pennsylvania with one guitar and a cat. And I had very little…me and the cat and the guitar, and the guitar sat there for a long time.
My first few years of graduate school were pretty miserable. And one of the things that saved me was that I had a very dear professor, who struggled off and on with mental health issues, as I had at that time, and continue to do so.
When I got to graduate school, my first semester there, he said to me, “Hey, I hear that you play the drums.” And I said, “Well, yeah, I played the drums in the high school marching band, and I played a little… but I don't do that stuff anymore.” And he goes, “Well, you're in my band now. You're gonna be in my terrible departmental cover band.” And I was like, “No, man, that sounds fucking awful.”
But he was a senior professor, I was a first-year graduate, so I said to myself I guess I'm playing drums in this band. And it saved me. He told me, “You gotta do this stuff.” And so I started playing with him, and I started enjoying playing music again.
Then a guy that I had been in a band with in LA moved out to where I was living. He was couch surfing at my house and moved in with me. We started playing music again, and by the time I was finishing graduate school, I was in a band. We had done two tours in the U.S. and Mexico, and we had made two records.
My advisor told me this stuff's going to get in the way of the work. And I kept saying, the only way the work's going to get done is if I can play this music.
Later on, it became even clearer to me. I was being interviewed as a curator, and someone said, Well, who are your big influences?
And I had never been asked that? As an academic, people would say, Well, who are you engaging with theoretically? What are your frameworks? But when someone says to me, Who are my influences, I immediately rattled off musicians and writers.
And who are those? I would love to know who those are.
One of the first bands that impacted me was an LA band called Fishbone. They are an all-black punk, rock, reggae, ska band who are heavily political, and they are this genre-bending band that puts everything together and makes something new out of it. I have a picture of lead singer Angelo behind me. It is a photo I took of him several years ago.
They were this DIY, unapologetically anti-racist band that showed me that I could take all the things that were important to me and put them into this thing, together, and make something new out of it.
And I've approached everything I've ever done with that kind of punk rock mentality. I don't care about genre, I don't care about boundaries. I am really trying to be outspoken about the injustices in the world. Those guys have informed everything that I've ever done since, from the beginning.
And so, this person says, “Well, who are your influences?” I'm like, it's Fishbone, it's Bad Brains from DC, another all-black punk political reggae band. Then there are storytellers like Steinbeck, Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, Bruce Springsteen, and Jason Isabel. People who are writing stories that are these working-class narratives that are simply told, but moving. People who can string together seven words and literally break your heart. Those are the things that have always resonated with me. And I can't live without music. I can’t live without books. I can't do the anthropology without those things.
I wish I had learned that earlier on. And I tell my students now, you have to embrace all of this. It makes you a better person in general, it makes you more attuned to so many different things, and it just makes things way more interesting.
I'm a lifelong learner. I want to be challenged, I want to learn new stuff. The arts, literature, and humanities are so crucial to so many things.
Your research and writings pertain to the U.S.-Mexico migration, but also to Central America and the broader Latin American context. How do you see the Mexican-Chicano cultural space, such as the arts, literature, and memory, intersecting with the migration and smuggling worlds you explore?
It's interesting, I'm half in Chicano Studies at UCLA and anthropology. But we've been renamed from Chicano Studies to Chicana, Chicano, and Central American Studies, which I think is great. I mean, obviously, in Los Angeles, we have the largest Central American diaspora anywhere, and it's such a vibrant intersection of so many different things.
It's funny that I'm in Chicano Studies now. I've never taken a Chicano Studies class. When I was at UCLA, studying anthropology, I was apolitical. My politics were punk rock politics, where I didn't like racists, I hated Nazis, and that was it. But I was not paying attention to much else.
Now that I'm in a Chicano Studies department, I feel I've been doing Chicano studies my entire life; I just didn't know it.
When I started in anthropology, which is a predominantly white space, it always felt like I was having to adjust myself to fit into that category of anthropology. They would allow you to do a little bit of this stuff, but not much. By the time I had finished my first book, I was going rogue, and just saying, you know what, I can't deal with this shit anymore. I want to do it my own way, and whether you like it or not, that's fine, but I'm so tired of trying to be something that I'm not.
And then come to realize that if I had just been in Chicano Studies this whole time, there would have been a much warmer reception. People are crossing all of these boundaries in ways that I find to be refreshing, and you feel very seen, in a way that I don't think you feel seen in these other spaces.
Obviously, there were people early on that I could see doing this stuff, but it felt like they were doing it in isolation, because I didn't understand that there was this other stuff happening. But now, we talk about the decolonial work that's happening in social sciences. We talk about this critical reflection and this outside-of-the-box thinking. I think Chicano Studies has been doing it, and Ethnic Studies has been doing it for a very long time.
Now, anthropology is going, oh, well, these folks over there, they're trying to pull in a way that they weren't doing before, so it's a great…
I love being in both places now, and being at UCLA makes me feel more seen than I ever have in terms of scholarship and my interests, than any place I've ever been as an academic.
I'm the moderator, or one of the moderators for the Brown Book Club, which is on Facebook and Instagram book group. It has about 8,500 members who are reading Chicano, Latino, and Indigenous writers. I wish I could have read these books when I was growing up. There was no access to them. There were just so few Chicano writers. And now, to be able to read these writers is incredible. What role do you see the narrative arts, like poetry, memoir, and visual arts, in giving voice to those who traverse these zones of migration and smuggling?
We have to find different ways to be accessible.
At the beginning of my career, I was an anthropological writer who was writing these journal articles that were only going to be read by a certain number of people.
Later, something happened to me that changed my thinking about everything that I do. I was at the University of Michigan in 2012, and I was approached by a curator there named Amanda Krugliak. She came to me, and she said, “Hey, I read this article about you, you have all of these objects that migrants have left in the desert, would you be interested in doing an exhibition?”
And I said, “hell no, I have no interest in any exhibition.” And she said, “Well, why not?” And I said, “I'm very skeptical of the Ethnographic Museum, of the Anthropological Museum. I find it to be a very problematic space, a space where we overly fetishize things, where we other, you know, all this kind of stuff.”
And she said, “No, this wouldn't be an anthropological exhibition, this would be an art exhibition.”
And I said, “Well, that's even worse. So now we're gonna decontextualize this stuff, we're gonna overly fetishize this, and I said, “No, I don't want… that's was worse.”
And then she said to me, “No, think about it as a place to experiment, where you can do what you want.” I said, “Okay, and we did an exhibition called State of Exception.”
We did about 5 iterations of that. And each time we did it, I was arguing with Amanda sometimes, I was arguing with our other collaborator about my voice, and I wanted to have more input. I was often told that, like, well, you're an anthropologist, you're not a curator, you're not an artist, so you let us do the artwork. And so I kept pushing back and pushing back, and as I was pushing back, I was learning about these things. The exhibition ended up getting a lot of attention. It was on the front page of the New York Times, the last version of it, which was a shock to me. It went from being this thing that was happening in this small gallery at Michigan to a national thing.
And what most impacted me in that whole process was when we did the last show in New York. There were thousands of monolingual Spanish speakers, people from the Latin American diaspora, who were going to this exhibition, who were engaging with it in all these different ways. And one of my favorite things about that exhibition was that we had a giant wall of about a thousand migrant backpacks. We embedded speakers into these backpacks so you could get close, and you could listen to unedited conversations that I was having with migrants in Spanish.
And people were saying, “Aren't you gonna translate it? How are people gonna know?” And I said, “Do you know how many people who don't speak English have to go into these exhibition spaces and feel like they're just not being seen?” I said, “Well, you can deal with this for this brief thing.” And I was so moved by the number of people who were in that space, and who were engaging with it. It was this wonderful thing for me to say, “Look, these people are never going to read my book, even if it is in Spanish. They may never watch a documentary film that I make, but this is a way to open the doors, and people can come in and engage with it in their own kind of way.”
Since then, we've done the Hostile Terrain 94 exhibition, which is a participatory exhibition. We've done it in about 170 locations around the globe. It's been in Europe, it's been in Africa, it's been in Asia, it's been all across Latin America, and people come and engage with it in all kinds of ways.
We need to be better at that, because not everybody can read, right? Not everybody has the patience to sit through a film. By any means necessary, I want people to feel like their stories are being told. They can come and see themselves represented in these things. With the Hostile Terrain Exhibition, they come in, and they fill out these toe tags, and they help construct these memorials.
That's a way for them to collaborate. We need that more than ever, and we have to think more broadly, because I know the book is great. I love the book, but there are so many other ways that we can be doing this, and this is why the arts are so important, and being versed in these things, and experimenting. That's my favorite part of my whole job, is just thinking about ways in which I can connect with different communities.
I've been invited to speak at the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference in February, and I'm talking on building a cultural superhighway between the United States and Mexico. And I would love to use that as an example. We need to flood the zone in terms of art, culture, music, food and everything that is us.
I think that's a great way to knock down the wall, or at least the walls of misunderstandin,g is doing more of this, but I feel like right now, given the moment we're living in and the misunderstanding of who we are, we need to do whatever we can to leverage the arts for good.
I'll hear folks say things about immigrant communities and say like, I'm giving a voice to the voiceless, and I want to say, they're not voiceless.
You are so right.
You're just not hearing them. Yeah, you're not giving them the microphone.
Yes, I agree completely. Imagine what we would learn if we did listen.
Representation is so important. I didn't read writers of color growing up; those weren't things that were ever assigned to me. I mean, I think the only person of color… Latino author that I read growing up was probably Sandra Cisneros.
And that just felt like a one-off. Like, oh, this is the only thing that counts. And, not really understanding that this is such rich literature. Even going into graduate school, I was told in the beginning that I had to tone it down. I had to try to be more professional, and being more professional meant I needed to be more white. And I just was like, I can't do it, I don't have it in me. That's not me. I told myself, if I ever got to a point where I was going to be a professor, then I wanted to just be as true to myself as I could be, so that other students could look at me and go, oh, we don't have to all fit this mold to do this thing.
Across the board, I didn't grow up seeing people who look like me on TV, in movies. If they were in movies, they were the gangster, right?
Yes.
They were thug number two. The only movies that were made about Latinos were hard luck stories from the ghetto. It couldn't be a love story, right? It couldn't just be an adventure story. It had to have this particular kind of trope. Now, as horrible as the world is right now, all the things that are happening, we are seeing an enormous amount of pushback and coalition building. The last gasps of the old guard are loud right now because they're dying, but everybody else is saying, this is the world that we want to be in. The world that we want to be in is inclusive and diverse.
Yes, it is exciting. When you look back at your fieldwork and the desert crossing. What memory or image stays with you most, and why?
I mean, there are so many. The one that will never go away is described at the end of Land of Open Graves. It ends with the story of a 15-year-old boy from Ecuador, Jose Maria Takuri, who disappeared in the desert in 2013. I was on a book tour for 10 years talking about that book. I was giving ten talks or more a year on that book.
And I'd have to talk about him.
Consistently, the most painful thing that I ever had to listen to was his parents talking about what it means to lose a child. To have a child disappear and not know what has happened to them. And at the time when I did the interview, my oldest son was not even a year old, and so I was only starting to understand what it means to be responsible for someone else in that way. What it means to be a parent. Now, twelve years later, every day that hurts more and more as I know more what it means to be a parent. As I experience more, and have this connection that builds more and more.
And…I always think about him.
When I struggle to get up in the morning and to go talk about this stuff. Even if I'm not talking about him at different moments. I still think about him. Also, I've been talking a lot about my friend Roberto. His story is also one that has fundamentally changed me. But Jose and his parents are always in the background, and I think about them… And I go, “As difficult as that was for me to hear, I can't even begin to fathom what they must still be going through. He has not been found. There's a high likelihood that he will never be found. And so I think about him, and that sorrow that they carry. It is a motivator for me to go on. They don't have the platform to talk about this stuff, but I do.
And so I must muster up the energy to go up and to say, we do this work.
Because those things are still happening, because those things should not happen. It's this horrible thing that thousands of people have had to experience, and… and I can't live with that. The only way that I can live with that in the world is if I know that I'm actively trying to work against that.
And so, I carry him. I've got pictures of him in here.
I've got pictures of him at work. I've things from his house, from his bedroom at work, that remind me. And it's hard to do the work sometimes, because it is so overwhelming and just painful.
But also, it's a great privilege to have been a part, to have these stories shared with me, and so wanting to do whatever good I can with them feels like a mission that I'll carry with me forever.
Thank you, thank you for that. Yes, I was curious how you cope with bearing witness to the trauma and loss and the death.
What I love about your work is that there is hope in it.
I'm curious how you bear witness.
It's an evolving thing for me. In the beginning. I was naive about why I was doing this stuff and how I was handling it. And, I used to say things like, I have a thick skin.
And I've been around this stuff my whole life, and so now instead of experiencing it directly, I'm just studying it. Now, I've come to realize that my skin is quite thin, and this stuff really impacts me in all kinds of ways.
I gravitate towards this stuff, I think, because it is unfortunately familiar to me in a lot of ways, my own childhood trauma and the things that I've wrestled with my whole life.
But what I've come around to now is that even in the midst of all of this pain and the work that I'm trying to do, I'm still connecting with people who I find to be so moving. They give me so much, and I try to give them as much as I can of myself as well. I carry around a lot of my own emptiness and sadness. It's doing this work that really brings me some joy, because I feel we're in community together. Things are tough, but at least we're together, and at least I feel like I'm seeing you. I'm trying to see you. I want people to hear your voice, and that gives me purpose,
Prior to finding anthropology, I didn't have a lot of reasons to want to get up in the morning, and writing about these young men who were struggling with depression and the aftermath of childhood trauma. I didn't realize that that was me, too. I think that's one of the gifts that they gave me, was to start to be reflective about why I'm here, why I'm doing this stuff, and then really trying to say, okay, well because I'm damaged doesn't mean that I can't use who I am now in a more positive kind of way.
The work, despite all of its challenges and the pain, does bring me a lot of joy, because I can be in community with folks. Those folks are also living through it, too. They're trying to find a way to get up in the morning and to feel good about the world. It's these small victories that I think keep us going.
Don't they blow you away with their joy sometimes? Like, their level of resistance is, it is like you can't explain it, right?
I mean, I had someone say to me once I feel so sorry for some of these people. And I said, they don't want you to feel sorry for them. They don't feel sorry for themselves. They are doing it. They are living it, and they are working through the struggle. They are living joyous lives despite all of these things. And I said, Maybe that's the lesson that you take away from it, is that you think your life is hard, and you're just down, and these people are going through this stuff, and they're getting up in the morning, and they are… and they are living. They're finding the joy where they can, and I really am deeply moved by them.
They're extraordinary. Well, I've taken a lot of your time. I could talk to you forever. I'm just wondering, do you have a third book?
I don't yet. I'm trying to figure it out. I need to sit on it for a little bit.
In terms of the world you described, what do you hope will change in the next decade, in terms of policy, narrative, culture, or even individual relationships?
Things are going to get worse, but they're going to get better across the board. We're finally mobilizing. We're finally finding some footing. And so, two steps backwards, three steps forward. That's what I believe.
Well, I appreciate you so much. Thank you for your time, and I hope we'll stay in contact.
Please, let's do it, I'd love to.
Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a non-fiction history of a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute for American Indian Arts' MFA Program. This fall his poetry will be published in Huizache. His other book reviews are at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Charter House's blog, IAIA's journal, and Los Angeles Review.
