American · b. 1977
Jason De León is an American anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds appointments in anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American studies. He is the founder and director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a long-term study of migration between Latin America and the United States that combines archaeology, ethnography, forensic science and visual media. His first book, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (2015), examined migrant deaths in the Sonoran Desert and the border enforcement policies behind them. He later co-created the photography and oral history project Hostile Terrain 94, which uses handwritten tags on a wall map to mark where migrants have died. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017. His book Soldiers and Kings (2024), based on about seven years of fieldwork with human smugglers in Mexico, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.