December 15, 2017 Dear ,
When you hear the call--Build the wall, take a moment and tell someone about Carmelita Torres.
This 17-year-old girl sparked a protest on the Juarez/El Paso border in 1917 when customs officials ordered her to undress and submit to being doused with gasoline.
The kind of guys in charge back
then were the same kind of guys we have in charge now. So, unfortunately, Carmelita's courageous action did not bring change.
But women's voices are being heard today, in way they never have been before. It's Time We Tell Carmelita's Story Carmelita Torres freely crossed the border from Mexico almost every
day to work as a maid for an American family. She wasn't alone.
Farmers and ranchers in the Southwest were completely dependent on Mexican labor. White families in El Paso could easily afford the wages they paid Mexican girls and women to do their cleaning and laundry.
So many Mexicans from Juarez came to El Paso
every day for work that a trolley was set up for them to ride across the Santa Fe Bridge between the two cities. But El Paso Mayor Tom Lea, Jr. feared Carmelita and the other workers, whom he called "dirty, lousy, destitute," would carry lice and cause a typhus epidemic in
his city.
Rates of typhus infection were no higher in El Paso, than they were in other large American cities. But in January 1917, Mexicans were suddenly required to show a certificate to cross the border, a certificate indicating that "the bearer, …………, has been this day deloused, bathed, vaccinated, clothing and baggage disinfected.” Carmelita and the others were forced to strip nude for inspection, bathe, and be drenched in gasoline to kill any lice that might be on their bodies. Their clothing and shoes were fumigated and put through a steam dryer.
The women were subjected to lewd comments and there were rumors that nude photographs of them were showing up in nearby bars.
Sunday morning, January
28th, 1917, Carmelita reached the end of her trolley ride and was told to get off, take a bath and be disinfected. She refused.
Carmelita convinced thirty other women on the trolley to refuse as well. By 8AM the crowd of protesters, mostly servant girls, grew to 200 and packed half the
bridge. Some of the women stopped the trolley by laying down on the tracks. By noon some 2000 people stood with Carmelita. Both Mexican and American soldiers showed up to subdue the crowd, and Monday morning it was back to fumigation as usual.
There's little trace of Carmelita Torres in the pages of history. She's named in the newspaper for leading what came to be called "the bath house riots," and we know that she and eight other women were arrested and went to jail for "inciting riot" that day.
Their stories may have been passed down the years orally, but the white men writing the newspapers and making the
rules preserved a different story.
The reporter for the El Paso Morning Times wrote that once Mexicans got familiar with the bathing process, they would welcome it. He said the Mexicans "came out [of the
bath house] with clothes wrinkled from the steam sterilizer, hair wet and faces shining, generally laughing and in good humor."
Raul Delgado, a man who went through the "cleansing" gave his description decades later. “An immigration agent with a fumigation pump would spray our whole body with insecticide, especially our rear and our partes nobles. Some of us ran away from the spray and began to
cough. Some even vomited from the stench of those chemical pesticides…the agent would laugh at the grimacing faces we would make. He had a gas mask on, but we didn’t."
American politicians used typhus as an excuse to dehumanize Mexicans, spraying them with toxic chemicals like DDT for more than 40-years, decades longer than Adolf Hitler used it as an excuse to round up
Jews.
"These records point to the connection between the U.S. Customs disinfection facilities in El Paso-Juárez in the 20s and the Desinfektionskammern
(disinfection chambers) in Nazi Germany...."
I discovered an article written in a German scientific journal written in 1938, which specifically praised the El Paso method of fumigating Mexican immigrants with Zyklon B."
In 1939, the Nazis started using Zyklon B to fumigate people at border crossings and concentration camps. Later, they used Zyklon B pellets in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other camps, not to kill lice, but people.
Below: Bracero workers, hired for seasonal farm work, are sprayed with DDT after crossing
the U.S.-Mexico border in 1956. (Smithsonian Institution) In 1917, after Carmelita's protest, customs officials first closed the US/Mexican border, prohibiting anyone from crossing without authorization. That year alone, 127,000 people suffered humiliation and were doused with toxic
disinfectant at the El Paso end of the Santa Fe Bridge. Photos thanks to https://elpasogasbaths.weebly.com/
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