When Jason De León ’01 was handed the trophy for winning the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction last November, the first thing on his mind was who handed it to him. That would be Timothy Morton, an accomplished author, English professor at Rice University and judge for the competition. While De León was thrilled to have bested several top-drawer competitors for the honor — among them Eliza Griswold, Kate Manne and Salman Rushdie — to win, he was nonetheless lightheartedly let down that it wasn’t the ceremony’s host who handed him the hardware.
The first words of De León’s acceptance speech from the podium were, “My children will be very sad to know I didn’t get to hug Kate McKinnon.” The audience laughed. “Maybe that’s still a possibility, though.”
Seconds later, to the delight of everyone in New York’s Cipriani Wall Street ballroom, the former Saturday Night Live star and Barbie’s “Weird Barbie” rushed onstage to give De León a giant hug and a peck on the cheek.
“If you manifest it,” the UCLA professor and director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology joked post-hug, “it will come.”
De León is the second consecutive UCLA professor to win the National Book Award, arguably the most prestigious prize in American literature. In 2023, English professor Justin Torres walked away with the prize for his novel Blackouts. Now, months after his own honor, De León is still absorbing the significance of winning it for only his second book, Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling. The result of seven years of ethnographic research in Central America and Mexico, the book is a compelling exploration of the complexities and misunderstandings around the lives of human smugglers and migrants along the U.S./Mexico border.
“I really feel like I was competing with my first book [2015’s The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Sonoran Desert Migrant Trail],” De León says today. That first work earned him five literary honors, including a Margaret Mead Award. “Now, I’m like, ‘That’s never going to happen again. I’m never going to win another National Book Award.’ So it takes off a lot of pressure.”
Researching the book, De León was exposed to plenty of horrors and hardships, including the murder of his central character, Juan Roberto Paredes, and watching a man getting beaten nearly to death in a bar in the port city of Veracruz, Mexico. “The book,” he said during his acceptance speech, “broke me in half.” He then thanked his therapist for helping put him back together.
“I would wake up in cold sweats,” he says today, “and, by the end, I just couldn’t take it anymore. It was too much.”
For his next book, he’d like to play it safer and confine his reporting to the U.S. “I see all of these projects as part of a linear trajectory,” he says. “My first book was about migrants crossing the desert, my second about those who help migrants cross the desert. I think the next project will explore what life is like once you’re here, examining the American dream.”
He would know. With a National Book Award under his belt, he’s living it himself.
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Hispanic Heritage History Month
This series is part of an ongoing effort to feature stories from across the UCLA campus spotlighting Latino voices, histories and research.
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IN FOCUS: National Hispanic Heritage Month
