GEOFF BENNETT: Tonight, a different lens on the tension at the U.S.-Mexico border, one that applies deep-dive anthropology and in-the-dirt archaeology to learn more about migration.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks to a National Book Award-winning author whose work explores the clandestine world of human smuggling.

The report is for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

JASON DE LEON, Author, "Soldiers and Kings": We're pretty far north.

At this point, we're close enough that people are getting ready to get picked up.

And that's why you're starting to see lots of clothes and other items being left behind.

JEFFREY BROWN: It's a different approach to seeing and understanding migration at the U.S. border, through the stuff, the things they carried that offer clues to the people and the paths they have taken.

It's been an ongoing focus of anthropologist Jason De Leon, captured in the 2019 documentary "Border South."

JASON DE LEON: Every one of these things tells a story.

JEFFREY BROWN: This past December, De Leon, a professor at UCLA and director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, showed us some of his archaeological finds now collected in his lab, clothing, shoes, water bottles, part of his Undocumented Migration Project.

Why collect this stuff?

And why house, archive it?

JASON DE LEON: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: Why?

JASON DE LEON: This is archaeology.

People go, oh, well, this is garbage.

This is trash.

And I said, well, what do you think archaeologists study?

So I think these objects can tell a lot of different stories and really connect us, I think, to this thing that happens far away, that happens in the middle of nowhere.

And I really think archaeology can help us bring it closer to home.

JEFFREY BROWN: In fact, De Leon, a 2017 MacArthur fellow, began his archaeological career in a more traditional way, studying the ancient Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica.

It was local workers in rural Mexico helping dig ditches for archaeologists who changed De Leon's course.

JASON DE LEON: And so these guys were just telling me stories about the Arizona desert, about their hopes and dreams for migrating.

And I ended up becoming increasingly more interested in those stories than the things that were coming out of the ground.

JEFFREY BROWN: That forensic work on the ground led to his first book, "The Land of Open Graves," which told the human drama and often deadly consequences of border migration.

His 2024 book, "Soldiers and Kings," which won last year's National Book Award for nonfiction, focuses on a key but little understood aspect of the migration story, the foot soldiers and mid-level smugglers, or guides, as they call themselves, who move migrants across Mexico and into the U.S. JASON DE LEON: You can't have undocumented migration without smuggling, without the smuggler.

And yet we know very little about them.

JEFFREY BROWN: Who they are.

JASON DE LEON: Who they are.

And it's often a caricature.

I want people to understand that smuggling is a - - it's a service.

It's a business.

And we only hear about it when it goes brutally wrong.

But if it only went wrong all the time, it wouldn't exist as a business.

And so I think that, most of the time, it functions as a service that migrants are looking for.

JEFFREY BROWN: A service De Leon sees as existing within a larger exploitative and often violent system, one in which we're all implicated and therefore should understand.

JASON DE LEON: I had someone ask me once, they said, well, does smuggling have to be so exploitative?

And I said, well, we can think about it as, like, does undocumented labor have to be so exploitative?

I mean, and it's like the crux of that industry is to exploit migrant labor.

So, unfortunately, these folks who are involved who are being smuggled, they're exploited at every and every possible turn.

JEFFREY BROWN: De Leon makes clear he's not trying to romanticize smugglers, but, rather, give insight into their day-to-day experience and through them to the larger migration system.

His subjects are from Honduras, the Central American country still reeling from pervasive gang violence and poverty.

And they found themselves on the migrant trail having escaped danger and lack of economic opportunity back home.

JASON DE LEON: Nobody wakes up in the morning one day and goes, you know what, I'm going to be a smuggler today.

This is like my dream.

JEFFREY BROWN: De Leon writes about a veteran smuggler of Afro-indigenous descent named Kingston, who fled a violent childhood in Honduras, eventually making it to the U.S., only to be deported after nearly a decade-long stint in prison.

JASON DE LEON: He told me at one point, he says, I have become this brutal, violent person, but what else did you think I was going to become with all the things that have happened to me?

And those guys would say, well, I can utilize this skill set now in this new context.

And for a lot of them, they sort of see the smuggling work as a kind of form of redemption in some way.

Like, I did bad stuff on the street before.

Now maybe I can use these kind of skills to help people, although, at the same time, they're still exploiting folks in all kinds of ways.

JEFFREY BROWN: Right.

JASON DE LEON: None of them really want to be doing it.

They all want to get out.

And what they find is that they don't have a lot of options.

JEFFREY BROWN: De Leon calls his anthropological method deep hanging out, his version of the age-old ethnographic commitment to spending years embedding oneself to gain a deeper insight and understanding of people and cultures.

But this method also comes at a cost.

Boundaries he's tried to set for himself work well, until they don't.

He writes in very personal terms of his relationship with Kingston: "It's like I have completely forgotten all my own rules.

I have become a pushover and practically open my wallet whenever he asks, which is often."

It was, he says, the most ethically difficult project he's ever worked on and one that made him question the role the anthropologist plays in his subjects' lives.

JASON DE LEON: At the end of the day, I mean, those people are still poor.

They're still in these incredibly violent contexts.

Some of them are dead.

And it's oftentimes something I really struggle with.

Like, I want to tell those stories.

Those folks have moved me so much.

They have given me so much.

I feel for them.

And so I want to take that and try to raise awareness about it.

But raising awareness about this thing and getting people to read this book, that's not going to bring back some of these folks from the grave.

That's not going to change the situation in Honduras.

And so I carry a lot of guilt about that.

JEFFREY BROWN: De Leon says he opposes building walls and other steps he calls Band-Aids that aren't effective and don't address root causes of migration.

You write that anthropologists don't have answers.

What do you tell people?

JASON DE LEON: What I try to do as an anthropologist is to give people food for thought, so that they can understand how these things are connected and then begin to start making, I would hope, both everyday small changes, but then thinking about the much bigger picture.

JEFFREY BROWN: For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in Los Angeles.