On May 14, 2010, Sandra K. Soto was the faculty convocation speaker for the University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. To a significant extent, she congratulated the parents and graduates and flattered the graduates by crediting them with having learned both skills and information, and urging graduates to make use of their education to make the world a better place. But she spoke in the context of, and made explicit reference to, the raging political debate in Arizona over the passage of two laws: the anti-immigration law, SB 1070 and HB 2281, intended to ban the teaching of ethnic studies in K-12 schools. She invoked not only the historical trajectory of graduation ceremonies, past and future, necessary to give the present one its meaning and force but also, the present conflict over the boundaries and membership of the public sphere in which the ceremony is meaningful. Soto's speech and the reactions to it became an occasion through which the political and racialized dynamics at work in the state were repeated. The speech became another battle in the war over the external boundaries, internal norms, power relations, and resource distribution of the state and nation. The event also highlighted the complexities of the so-called "public sphere," the various institutional sites of discourse and their diverse norms and the constraints on who can speak and be heard, what can be said and be heard. (Contains 25 endnotes.)