Jason de León (UCLA) “Undocumented Migration Project”

Jason de León Professor of Anthropology and Chicano/a Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. He is an anthropologist whose research interests include theories of violence, materiality, Latin American migration, photoethnography, forensic science, and archaeology of the contemporary. He directs the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a long-term study of clandestine border crossing that uses a combination of archaeological, ethnographic, visual, and forensic approaches to understand this phenomenon in a variety of geographic contexts including the Sonoran Desert of Southern Arizona, Northern Mexican border towns, and the southern Mexico/Guatemala border. He is working on book manuscript tentatively titled “Soldiers and Kings” that uses the lens of photoethnography to examine the daily lives of Honduran smugglers moving migrants across Mexico. (Over Zoom)