PhD Oral Exam - Arturo Esquivel Carrillo, Social and Cultural Analysis

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

Research on the U.S.-Mexico border commonly focuses on the institutions, social movements, or policies that shape the lives of border crossers. Here, people’s lives go unnoticed. This thesis fills that gap. It looks at people’s everyday struggles to make sense of their harsh realities. The ethnographic record on the U.S.-Mexico border concentrates on the U.S. side of the border. This thesis levels the playing field by directing its attention to a catholic migrant shelter in the city of Tijuana, Mexico. At the shelter, migrants, asylum seekers, and deportees grappled with the difficulty of their realities. Storytelling was integral to making their experiences of violence thinkable. I approach people’s everyday struggles with wording their experiences through an ordinary language philosophy lens. This approach emphasizes how meaning is not secured by language, but depends on how people use language to say, mean, or avoid saying, and meaning things. In this way, the use of language depends on another to pay attention to people’s words. The recognition of people’s lives through their life stories by another was important in rendering themselves accessible. This approach is as much an approach to language as it is to ethics and aesthetics. By wording their world, people learned something new about their world. But this sort of knowledge, in learning to see and make differences, hinges on others’ response. That acknowledgement was never guaranteed. The grueling details of people’s stories made people disavow their words. This thesis takes stock of the “problem of skepticism”, or being shut out from the world, as an ordinary dimension of people’s lives at the U.S.-Mexico border. In foregrounding people’s narratives, I show how words are vulnerable to, and depend on, our experience of the world. Words or concepts are not static screens through which we gaze upon reality, apart from it. This thesis concludes that if there are no grounds for language other than its use, attention to the practices around the use of language brings us closer to the connection between us and others; to the way we engage the life of the other.