Biography Jason De León is an anthropologist, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, and a MacArthur Foundation 2017 Fellow. He studies the migration from Latin America to the United States of clandestine migrants crossing the U.S.–Mexico border. De León is and at the University of California, Los Angeles and Director of the , a non-profit research/arts/education collective aimed at documenting and raising awareness about migration issues. Since 2009, he has traveled frequently to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona to collect artifacts left behind by migrants trying to gain access to the United States. His Undocumented Migration Project includes more than 9000 objects, some of which are on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. He also had an exhibition with some of the artifacts called at the New School in New York City. He is Head Curator of the global participatory exhibition that will be installed in 130 locations on six continents in 2021. Jason Patrick De León, PhD is a 43-year-old male Mexican-American who grew up by McAllen, Texas near the Mexican border in the Rio Grande Valley. His native language is English and he is also fluent in Spanish. Outside of his academic work, he is a musician who has been involved in various bands and musical projects over the years. He hosted a television show on the Discovery Channel in 2011 called "American Treasures."
Education and Degrees
Dr. De León received his BA in anthropology in 2001 from the University of California in Los Angeles, CA. He received his MA in 2004 anthropology from Pennsylvania State University, PA where he completed his thesis titled, “Aztec Salt Production in the Basin of Mexico: A Domestic Perspective. He received his PhD in anthropology in 2008 from Pennsylvania State University, where he completed his dissertation titled, The Lithic Industries of San Lorenzo-Tenochtitlán: An Economic and Technological Study of Olmec Obsidian on the 10 years he spent in Mexico excavating obsidian tool artifacts left by indigenous people thousands of years ago.
Dr. De León’s self-described areas of interest and methods include undocumented migration and deportation, human smuggling, violence, materiality, archaeology of the contemporary, photo-ethnography, and forensic science. His work has been described as a multidisciplinary approach to Latin America to US migration and involves ethnographic analysis of migrant stories, forensic science, and archaeological research. It has also been described as an “intersection of physical geography, cultural geography, and archaeology,” as he uses tools like GPS to document sites. He says that archaeology is “studying the past through material traces." We tend to think these must be ancient things” and asks us to question, “What happens if you think about the archaeology of the recent past, as recently as this morning in some cases”?
Undocumented Migration Project (UMP) and Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94)
As Executive Director of the long-term Undocumented Migration Project Inc., a 501 that began in 2009, Dr. De León uses fieldwork to “collect, catalogue, and interpret nearly 10,000 objects left in the desert by migrants making the treacherous, undocumented border crossing from Mexico into the United States” and says these objects become artifacts. The UMP project has focused on the last 150 years, but broadened more recently in 2020 to include longer histories of migration, labor, and environmental changes centered on Arizona, which is a main area of undocumented crossings from Mexico; they will conduct interviews and collect oral histories. As part of UMP, Dr. De León directs Hostile Terrain 94, a participatory art project resulting in an exhibition of “3,200 handwritten toe tags that represent migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019. These tags are geolocated on a wall map of the desert showing the exact locations where remains were found”. HT94 was shown in the US and around the world, debuting a virtual exhibition on July 17, 2020.
