“If You’re Looking to Radicalize an Archaeologist, Force Them to do Something Traditional:” An Interview with Dr. Jason de León
Jason de León is transforming anthropology. A trained archaeologist and MacArthur Genius (2017), as well as Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies, University of California—Los Angeles, he directs the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP) at the University of California—Los Angeles. By combining ethnography, forensics, visual anthropology, and museology with archaeology, the UMP is changing the way we think about the U.S.-Mexico border. For our “Translocality” issue, I spoke to de León about his intellectual trajectory, his upcoming book and exhibition projects, such as Hostile Terrain 94, and the future of our field.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
LGM: How did your interests in anthropology and material culture begin?
JDL: I have been interested in archaeology since a very young age. I come from the era of Indiana Jones, where many kids were intrigued by this very problematic representation of archaeology. I would say that popular culture did get me interested in history and artifacts…I’m also kind of a hoarder – I’m really into stuff. It only made sense that I would come into archaeology at one point in my life. As a kid, I went to Teotihuacán in Mexico City and was overwhelmed by the pyramids and artifacts.
Later on, I took an art history course in high school. The instructor noticed that I was kind of rudderless, but also saw that I was interested in history and archaeology. He was the first person that clued me into the fact that this could be a potential career. So, I went to college and I was a declared anthropology major my freshman year. As I started taking classes, I began trying to figure out what archaeology was and how I could get involved with it.
LGM: Your dissertation work focused on lithic technology in Olmec communities – very ‘traditional,’ almost old-school archaeology. What happened? Where did the shift towards your current work on migration happen?
JDL: I think if you are looking to radicalize an archaeologist, force them to do something incredibly traditional.
I have a deep appreciation for archaeology. I was trained in a very traditional manner, and I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. My graduate advisor always jokingly says, “what happened to you?”. He never takes any credit for the work that I do now but it is because of this traditional training that I have a deep respect for methods and transparency.
However, I soon found traditional archaeology to be a bit uninspiring. I was doing lithic analyses for about ten years, looking at items under a microscope and with tweezers. As I was doing that – coming of age, travelling to Latin America – I realized what really interested me was the people that I was working with in the field. Travelling to Mexico and meeting people helped me recognize that as an anthropologist I was in a position where I could do any type of research that I wanted.
I am trained as a four-field anthropologist, and even though making a leap from ancient stone tools to studying modern people was scary, the thing that gave me comfort was that it is all anthropology at the end of the day. I told myself that since I was trained to do research on people, I should be able to make these types of jumps through time. I really credit the four-field approach I was trained in at UCLA for giving me the tools to move across genres. So, in the midst of a dissertation, I realized that doing ancient stone tools might not keep me inspired for my entire career.
LGM: That must have been really scary and very intimating.
JDL: Oh, absolutely. I remember being in the middle of dissertation work being like, ‘What am I doing?’
I went to Mexico to do my dissertation fieldwork. When I first got there, I was in the lab, working eight to ten hours a day, five days a week. And then, as time went on, it was four days a week, and then it was three days a week, and then it was like, ‘Okay, I'm working two half days a week and spending the rest of my time traveling across Mexico City meeting with folks.’ All of the signs were there, but yeah, it was pretty scary.
Career-wise, I had applied for a job at the University of Washington, where I had been hired as a lecturer to teach both archaeology and sociocultural classes, and I was lucky because it operated as a miniature post-doc. I taught six new preps for two years straight, and I end up teaching eleven new preps over the course of two years, and it was all in a different sub-discipline. So, that was really helpful for me to get into this new kind of space.
LGM: It sounds very serendipitous that everything came together in the way that it did.
JDL: I knew that even if it didn't work, I could not keep doing what I was doing because my heart just wasn't in it anymore. This is kind of my approach with everything – I would rather fail doing something that I love than be successful with something that I despise. I mean, it’s not like anybody gets into anthropology for the money.
LGM: Absolutely. I had a somewhat similar shift (though less dramatic); a portion of my undergraduate degree was in archaeology, in which I focused a lot on archaeological science, lithic analysis, and pXRF. Now, I’m a museum anthropologist. I found it really difficult and uninspiring to do that type of work when there are all these other conversations happening in representation and community engagement.
JDL: I used to think that the ten years that I spent excavating, working with museums, and researching in labs had really been a waste. I came to realize that it really helped me to understand the fundamentals, and then connect them to the things that I was interested in doing. If I hadn't spent all that time getting a basic understanding what it is to do archaeology, I don't think that the project would have been taken as seriously as it has been.
Photograph by Michael Wells for the Undocumented Migration Project. Image courtesy of Jason de León and the Undocumented Migration Project.
LGM: So, that brings us to the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP). As a non-profit research-art-education-media collective, it has a lot of moving parts. In addition to ongoing research, you and your team are organizing both a field school a travelling exhibition, Hostile Terrain 94. Can you introduce readers to the scope of the UMP?
JDL: It all started very organically. I was doing fieldwork in Arizona, so I needed a name for my research and I needed a team. Pretty soon, I started to realize that there was so much more that we could be doing. I wanted to do field research while also training students, so we developed the field school. And along the way, it was a lot of thinking about how this work could be translated to different audiences. As a result, in 2012, we started thinking seriously about exhibition work.
In all of the work that I do, I’m always asking ‘How is this going to be translated? Who are my audiences, who are my publics, and how can we best communicate this knowledge?’ This project has always been about research, and it's always been about education. This new commitment to public outreach through the arts has been a really exciting step for us. It is built into our core mission to be constantly working on public-facing projects.
Photograph by Michael Wells for the Undocumented Migration Project. Image courtesy of Jason de León and the Undocumented Migration Project.
LGM: There’s such a trend right now for anthropologists to call themselves public anthropologists. It can be so meaningless at times.
JDL: I never describe myself as a public anthropologist, partly because it used to be a very disparaging phrase. But today, everybody and their mom is a public anthropologist, which I think is really disingenuous. Just because you write an op-ed piece or you have a blog post, that doesn't make you a public scholar. It's a funny moment right now, with everybody worrying about the world and the relevance of their research but also a lot of bandwagon jumping because people think that rebranding themselves as a “public anthropologist” is simply a good career move.
LGM: Absolutely. And alongside public anthropology has also come a shift towards community collaboration, and making sure that your research is directly benefiting the communities that you're working with. How are you collaborating with the communities that you're studying? What does your collaborative approach to such a contested topic look like?
Photograph by Michael Wells for the Undocumented Migration Project. Image courtesy of Jason de León and the Undocumented Migration Project.
JDL: I’m always trying put migrant voices at the forefront of whatever I do – my job is to facilitate their voices being heard. I often give people cameras, they take pictures, and we have long conversations about what I should publishing and what I should be writing about. But it is always hard. With certain types of fieldwork, it's not always easy to kind of have the deep collaboration that we want.
The public-facing aspect of my work, for me, is where the best forms of collaboration come in. For example, with Hostile Terrain 94, we're putting the exhibition in multiple locations, partnering with folks in those locations, and having them build the exhibition. It is oftentimes hard to collaborate on a journal article or a book, especially when you're working with non-literate people. So, that's been one of the things I’ve really liked about the exhibition – it allows me to really partner with folks and have them be visible and present.
LGM: Can you talk a little bit more about the participatory element of the exhibit? It seems as though the material, tangible part of creating the installation is where the real power is situated.
JDL: The first exhibition we did was called State of Exception, which did really well, but it closed in 2017. The problem with that exhibition was it was expensive, which meant that most spaces did not have the money to organize it, and the places that did have the money weren't necessarily communities that we wanted to work with.
So, I wanted to come up with something that was more accessible and affordable. Hostile Terrain 94 developed out of an exhibition that we first put up in the fall of 2018, which was called Hostile Terrain. It was a multimedia show that had a wall graphic of migrant deaths printed on red vinyl. It was essentially a map with 3,200 red dots. Initially, I thought that would be really powerful, but it kind of fell flat as a visual. In response, we organized a follow-up version of that show at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where we replaced vinyl dots with handwritten toe tags for the dead. Part of the curatorial work as filling out the tags. Immediately my lab students told me how emotional the work was. By the end, everybody was exhausted and just overwhelmed after writing out information for thousands of people who have died. As a response to this, we decided to collaborate with community partners and have them build the exhibit.
Toe Tag Wall Prototype, Phillips Museum of Art, Franklin & Marshall College. Image courtesy of Jason de León and the Undocumented Migration Project.
The most crucial part of it is that when you come to the exhibition, you spend half an hour writing out names and information for the dead – you really are bearing witness to this thing. You are breathing life into these toe tags through this manual labor that we're asking people to carry out. Of course, it has other elements (including an augmented reality component that highlights migrant voices and also the viewer to tour the desert) , but it is really about that commitment to sit down and say, ‘I'm going to write down this information out because I care and because I want to learn.’
LGM: That is really an incredible impact – visitors will have a tangible and emotional investment the exhibition, which will make them so much more invested in the ideas behind the show. It really is a whole new way to think about what a museum and an exhibition can be.
Photograph by Michael Wells for the Undocumented Migration Project. Image courtesy of Jason de León and the Undocumented Migration Project.
LGM: With all of these different facets of the Undocumented Migration Project, you're really looking at migration from such an intensely interdisciplinary lens – archaeological, ethnographic, forensic, visual, and museological. How do these approaches work together? Have you found them to be at odds at times?
JDL: They work well together most of the time. Given the expertise of my collaborators, we are able to put it all together fairly easily. However, I will say that the exhibition side of things has been a challenge – for me, the hardest part of this whole project has been negotiating the museum spaces because we're coming from radically different backgrounds and have had to make compromises.
LGM: Definitely – museum work requires such a careful balancing act. Along those lines, can you speak to the forensic side of things, and how that intersects with the other aspects of the work?
JDL: We had been doing forensic work in Arizona for a while, trying to understand what happened to the bodies of migrants who died in the desert, and we soon realized that there had been no research done in that area, only anecdotal, so I decided to take a crash course in forensics. This allowed us to start asking questions about bodies in direct sunlight, shade etc., which then gave us the tools to document the decomposition patterns in the desert using pigs as proxies for humans. This new step in the research was vital for filling in gaps in knowledge about the number of deaths that are happening – the death counts out there are likely severely underestimated because bodies decompose so quickly in the desert. We then struggled with the question of what happens when you take forensic data and put it into an art space or into a museum space?
In general, I think forensic science has been a bit siloed within anthropology. They’re seemingly not having critical conversations with other sub-disciplines, and I have no stake in in maintaining that silo. So, I'm happy to dive in, steal as much as I can, and bring it back into larger anthropological conversations.
LGM: That’s a really interesting point – to be honest, I’ve never even really thought about forensics as part of the discipline that I am a part of.
JDL: I've been at five academic institutions and I've never had a forensic scientist as a colleague. I mean, they're in a few key locations and are kind of doing their own thing. From what I can tell, they're kind of running on a parallel track, and it's only now that you're starting to see people engaging with them from other sub-disciplines.
LGM: Okay, so to switch gears a little bit and backtrack – your first book, The Land of Open Graves, was published in 2015. A lot has changed since then. What impact has the current socio-political climate had on your research?
The Land of Open Graves. Image courtesy of Jason de León.
JDL: Well, my book is being read a lot more now than it was when it came out. Unfortunately, I thought it would be dated by now – I was overly optimistic that things were going to get better in wake of Obama. In some ways, this current political climate has raised more awareness about these issues.
I think there are a lot of people who, in November 2016, were like ‘What do we do now? I'm just going to go and hide in a closet for the next four years and, and hope things get better.’ We’ve all had those moments. And then we snap out of it, get back to work – for me, I've been more energized by this administration than anything else.
LGM: Can you talk a bit about your current book project, Soldiers and Kings, which looks at Honduran smugglers moving migrants?
JDL: Research for this forthcoming book began around 2015 – it started in the early stages of the Obama administration starting to crack down on Central American migrants crossing Mexico. It is about smugglers and the relationship between border enforcement and the American political economy. It also looks at how the global system of inequality encourages, facilitates, and drives the movement of undocumented people, while at the same time fuels the smuggling industry. I look at these issues through the day-to-day lives of smugglers while also looking at the circumstances that make it necessary for the people to be smuggled.
LGM: That sounds really exciting, and a good compliment to The Land of Open Graves. Do you have a goal for when it would be published?
JDL: Hopefully by the end of 2022.
LGM: Looking forward, what do you see as the future of anthropology and material culture studies? Do you envision an increase in ‘activist anthropologists?’
JDL: I really do think that we are moving forward – we are making small steps towards decreasing borders between sub-disciplines. I come from a generation where those borders were very, very rigid. I'm encouraged by the undergraduate and graduate students who are coming to the table without being committed to these divisions. They’re like ‘Hey, I want to do ethnography and archaeology. I want to do biological anthropology and ethnography. I'm an artist and I want to incorporate my artistic practice into my ethnographic practice.’ And so, I do think that we are moving towards a more interdisciplinary way of thinking about the world. It’s not the discipline itself that's doing it –it's the students who are coming up and seeing the possibilities. That is what makes me excited about where we're going.
Photograph by Michael Wells for the Undocumented Migration Project. Image courtesy of Jason de León and the Undocumented Migration Project.
Then, in terms of the materiality questions –thinking about how far archaeology has come since when I was in college to now – I think that there's so much more space for people to be thinking about materiality in different ways. When I was in college, contemporary archaeology was fringe and lonely; it was always described as this kind of quirky application of archaeology like the Tucson Garbage Project that was kind of a ‘one and done’ sort of thing. Now, seeing all the great work that's coming out tells me that archaeology is about to have another moment and its influence on material culture studies will make a huge impact.
It is just a very exciting time – we’re on the up and up.
LGM: It sounds like you really enjoy working with your students. What advice would you have for younger anthropologists or archaeologists looking to do more socially engaged, participatory work?
JDL: First of all, find something that you're super passionate about, because you're going to end up hating it, no matter what. If you’ve found something that inspires you, and you're getting pushback, all that means is that you're not finding the right support groups. You're not surrounding yourself with the right mentors, faculty members, collaborators, or co-conspirators. You need to surround yourself with people who see your vision and want to help support that.
Once my students tell me what they’re passionate about, I ask them ‘How can we bring these things together, and then let’s build a community around that project so that you will feel that you're supported.’ I think you have to find like-minded people who are going to be pushing you in the direction that you want to be going.
LGM: Absolutely – as an early-career museum anthropologist, I think that’s incredibly helpful advice. You shouldn’t have to fight for support.
LGM: Fundamentally, what inspires you?
JDL: One really inspiring part of the work is my engagement with students. I'm someone who benefited so greatly from mentorship – I wouldn't have finished college if not for the people who supported me, facilitated the work that I wanted to do, and nurtured me. Seeing my students go from freshman in college, to graduate students, to faculty is a really inspiring thing.
The other thing that really inspires me is the relationships that I have with people that I collaborate with, whether it's migrants or smugglers or whoever. I get so much from those personal relationships and those commitments that we make to each other.
I want you to feel as strongly as I do about these people – I want you to like them, love them, and understand them like I do. I think that if you do that, then you'll see them in a different way and perhaps appreciate people who are not like you in a deeper way. I always want to educate the public, and I want them to learn more about these issues. That’s a huge part of the work, but really, what drives the whole thing is these relationships that I have on the ground with people that inspire me to go, ‘Okay, you've trusted me for the last five years, you've told me all these things, you've helped me to learn, and you've committed to me personally, and now it's my job to go out and do something with that information.’ If I didn't have relationships with people, and if I wasn't able to connect with folks in a deeper way, I wouldn't be doing the work at all.
Anybody could raise awareness about the cause of migrant deaths. Anyone can tell that story. But, for me, it's asking myself ‘How I can give back to these communities that have inspired me and changed my life in so many ways? How do I go out and do something important with it?’
Further Resources:
Twitter: @jason_p_deleon @UMP_Michigan @HostileTerrain
Instagram: @undocumentedmigrationproject @HostileTerrain94
