He spent years shadowing smugglers in Mexico. This is what he learned

Jason De León spent seven years shadowing smugglers who guide migrants through Mexico to the US. Their work, he argues, is dangerous and far more complicated than typical media portrayals suggest.

The nuns inside a migrant shelter in southern Mexico gave Jason De León an ominous warning: “Whatever you do, don’t go outside. That’s where all the bad people are.” De León sensed there was more to the story. “Of course, the first thing that I did was go outside and find the ‘bad people,’” De León recalls. “You know, the ‘bad people’ were just a bunch of young men hanging out on the train tracks.” The men asked De León what he did for a living. He told them he was an anthropologist — “like a journalist, but I’m more annoying, because I stick around longer and I keep asking the same question for years.” The professor soon learned what the young men did for a living, too. They were human smugglers — or, as they put it, guías (guides) for migrants traveling through Mexico and trying to reach the US. De León had thought he was done writing about migration. He’d documented deaths along the US-Mexico border in his first book, and it was devastating. But that conversation along the train tracks in southern Mexico in 2015 led him in a direction he hadn’t been planning to go. One of the young men asked a simple question: “Why don’t you write about us?”