Future

Dear listener, I'm going to take you back to 2015, and author Jason De Leon is at a migrant shelter in Chappas, Mexico.

He's there for research, and he sees this trip as his goodbye to studying migration

because he wants to move in another direction, away from that subject matter.

And one of the nuns says to me, whatever you do, don't go outside.

And I said, why not? She's like, well,

because outside, that's where all the delinquentes are, all the malandros. And so this kind of

interests, Jason, he's not one to listen to this kind of advice. He's a very curious guy. He's an

anthropologist. And so I was like, well, I'll just go outside and see what's kind of going on.

And as soon as I got out there, I run into this group of kind of rough-looking young men who are hanging out.

You hear this like regga-ton, this is blasting.

It's a giant cloud of marijuana smoke.

And me as like someone who kind of grew up around guys like that

and context like that. Jason is half Mexican and half Filipino and he's a self-proclaimed army

brat. He grew up in places like South Texas and in Southern California. And he got good at

moving to new places at figuring out how to be the new guy. He got good at moving to new places, at figuring out how to be the new guy.

He got good at connecting with strangers.

So when Jason saw the pot smoke and these rough-looking young guys outside, he wasn't turned off or scared.

He was intrigued.

I, of course, immediately gravitate towards this group of young men who are like, who are you,

what do you want?

I said, oh, I'm an anthropologist.

...