The saddest shelf in any university library is the collection of doctoral dissertations written by graduates of their Ph.D. programs. All those man-years of research scholarship, billions in public funding and self-inflicted loan debt, entire forests of felled trees. Just sitting there in bound microfiche printoffs. Collecting dust.

And the only thing even sadder than that sad shelf? The U.S. Department of Education — which funds most doctoral research in the United States — requires universities to keep a hardcopy of all their doctoral dissertations. Otherwise they wouldn’t even waste the shelf space.

Of course, the ugly truth is that most doctoral dissertations suck. Writing a dissertation is like writing a first novel. You don’t know what the hell you’re getting yourself into. Just when you think you’ve got the hang of it you realize you actually don’t. It seems like a third-generation Bush will be president before you finally finish the goddamn thing. And in the end you don’t birth it or anything grandiose like that, you just shit it out.

Your dissertation is also an extraordinarily narcissistic project. For the first time in your entire grown-up life you’re doing exactly and only what you want to do. Devotedly following your academic muse. Diving into shit that fascinates you and maybe 10 other people on the planet. Listening to your voice reverb off the bored faces of colleagues, your spouse or fuckbuddy, the drunk on the next barstool.

Are these dissertations really making a contribution to the universal body of knowledge? Advancing their respective fields? All those other cliches invoked to glorify the process? I’d like to think so, but I’ve got eyes and they’re wide open. Mostly I see grad students like me jumping through their last hoop of flaming bullshit, that’s all. You’ve proven you can slap a couple hundred pages of so-called scholarship together. Here’s your Ph.D. Good luck in the academic job market, shitbag.

Maybe that’s why even good dissertations stick out like they’re great. I still remember the way people were gushing about Eduardo Caysemos’ study of Andean mystics — and just so you know, I like Eduardo a lot — but Jesus Christ on a tanning bed, the dissertation itself was only mediocre. Yeah, he got a book contract for it, but Duke University Press made him rewrite it cover-to-cover.

No matter how my dissertation turns out, it’ll be remembered for its role in preserving the Korea Textile maquiladora archive and making its documents available to future generations of scholars — or just people googling across it on the World Wide Whatever. And my name will tag along. Nick Roberts, the dude who discovered that maquiladora archive and released it to the public. Because it’s not every decade that a new source of primary research material is brought online, especially one having to do with the private sector. Who knows what kind of dissertation-worthy dirt lurks in the archives of corporations?

Problem is, I’m realizing this half of the Korea Textile archive doesn’t have any dissertation-worthy dirt. There’s Human Resources stuff about labor unrest and lockouts and punitive firings, and the Finance department was bribing every governmental agency under the Baja California sun, but that’s dog-bites-man shit in Mexico. I want to find the man-bites-dog angle, the revelation that transforms a sucky dissertation into an immortal one.

The Mexican family that owned the Korea Textile maquiladora hung onto the other half of the archive, comprised of tax records — now embargoed by a messy and protracted lawsuit, and stored in the municipal jail of Chirbampo. That sounds like the juicy half of the archive. And I’m being paid to digitize it. But there’s still a risk — probably a big roulette-wheel risk — that I’ll never even glimpse that half of the archive, let alone gain working access to it. It’s in a Mexican jail, duh. Even if I do gain access, Nooshin and I could waste months in a flyspeck town, trying to strike gold in a cardboard fruit box of moldy papers — and still come up empty-handed.

Compare that to focusing on this half of the archive and fieldwork here in the maquiladora zones of Tijuana. I could pile up months of research interviews, interrogating ex-Korea Textile workers like a CIA waterboarder. The requisite for a sociocultural study of hardship (a.k.a. “capitalist oppression”) and working conditions (”NAFTA-based labor exploitation regimes”) and blah blah blah. Too bleeding heart for most people, but guaranteed to make ivory tower Marxists like Hercules flip their wigs. And meanwhile Nooshin and I could keep enjoying the bright lights big city of Tijuana, so close to America, so far from God.

Truth is, I already made up my mind a week ago and put all the arrangements in place. We’re going south. I’ll take the digitized half of the archive with me, along with the taped interviews I’ve done. That way I can stay productive — even write a couple chapters of my dissertation — while trying to gain access to the tax records in Chirbampo’s municipal jail. Nooshin will get to experience the real Mexico, which starts where Tijuana stop. And maybe we’ll even be safer, if you believe the U.S. State Department and their safety advisory for American citizens to avoid the borderlands.