Jason De León 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 ethnographic, archaeological, 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 currently working on a 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.
Professor De León holds a split faculty position in the Departments of Anthropology and Chicana and Chicano Studies. He is affiliated with the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, which is where his research lab is located (in the same room where he began his undergraduate studies under the mentorship of Jeanne Arnold in the mid-1990s).