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, looking 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 to ethics and aesthetics. By wording their world, people learned something new about their lives. But this sort of knowledge, in learning to see and make differences, hinges on others’ responses. That acknowledgment was never guaranteed. At the shelter, the grueling details of people’s stories made others 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 and concepts are not static screens through which we gaze upon reality, apart from it. This thesis contends 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.