Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling

Smugglers who help Central Americans traverse Mexico and cross into the U.S. are not the “slick haired... kingpins” portrayed in popular media but are usually themselves poor migrants who got waylaid and caught up in the trade, according to this outstanding, luminously written account. Drawing on seven years spent embedded with people smugglers in Mexico, anthropologist De León (The Land of Open Graves) depicts a hardscrabble world of almost mythically impossible proportions: terrorized by corrupt Mexican cops, fearful of being returned back to the brutal conditions of their home countries, and constantly at risk of violence from gangs, the smugglers serve as guides to desperate souls who’d “rather die on the train tracks in Mexico than be murdered on a street corner” back home. De León’s elegant prose brings pulsing life to this benighted underworld, observing it with a sharp eye and a noirish sensibility (“It is impossible to avoid him. It is unhealthy to run from him,” he quips about a gang leaderwho perches as “the guardian at the gate... the troll under the bridge” at a waypoint along the notorious La Bestia train route). His fluid storytelling builds to a gut-wrenching finish as De León reflects on the heartless reception his ethnographic work with smugglers receives from academic audiences, contrasting it with his own emotional fallout after the death of Roberto, a carefree, lively young smuggler he’d befriended. It’s a knockout. (Mar.)