Everything we know about Carmelita Torres
is from a few newspaper accounts in 1917.
They called her an "an auburn haired Amazon."
Just 17 years old.
She led angry women in anti-American rioting and shut down the US-Mexico border.
But hidden within her story...is something
much bigger than a single riot.
It’s a story about American paranoia at
the border,
about a toxic campaign of disinfection and
discrimination,
and a US practice, that would go on to inspire
Nazi scientists.
At the border between El Paso, Texas and Ciudad
Juarez, Mexico, thousands of people cross
back and forth for work and school everyday.
They line up in Juarez and often wait for hours to get through the US checkpoint.
But the border, didn’t always look like this.
Crossing this border used to be free and unrestricted.
People would come and go without a passport.
But after 1917, Juarez and El Paso became two separate communities.”
It was a turbulent year at the border.
The Mexican revolution was ongoing. And the US was about to enter World War One.
All of a sudden you have the war hysteria created by World War I.
People here in El Paso that are deathly afraid that the Germans are going to attack from Ciudad Juarez.
The fear of invasion brought tensions to the border, while across the US, a different movement was gaining strength.
The eugenics movement, based on junk science, aimed to create a genetically and morally superior population.
That meant stricter controls on immigration… only allowing those deemed fit to enter.
On Ellis island, one of the busiest ports
of entry at the time,
US health officials were tasked with weeding out immigrants they thought were unfit, or disease carriers.
And across the country, that process coincided with the stereotyping of Mexicans as inferior and unclean.
Dozens of film titles included the word “greaser,” a derogatory term used to describe Mexicans.
This racist sentiment was strong at the US-Mexico border.
El Paso’s Mayor Tom Lea had developed an obsession with cleanliness, and it defined his political platform.
This obsession with not only racial purity
but physical purity.
He was going to literally clean up El Paso from all these ‘bad elements’
and by ‘bad elements’ he often meant racially bad elements.”
One of Mayor Lea's biggest fears was a disease called typhus, spread by lice.
So under the pretense of "sanitary betterment work"
he helped lead a campaign to inspect “every house” in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood.
If the inspectors found lice "occupants were forced to take vinegar and kerosene baths,
have their heads shaved and clothing burned."
Hundreds of homes were eventually destroyed.
Lea also expanded the supposed ‘health measures’ to include inmates in the El Paso jail.
They had to strip naked. Take
a bath inside a tub full of kerosene.
And on one occasion, it seems somebody lit a match.
27 prisoners, majority Mexican or Mexican American, burned to death
in the fire that the newspapers called “the jail holocaust.”
But, despite the tragic fire, Mayor Lea pushed forward with even more aggressive plans.
He sends a telegram, a Western Union telegram, to Rupert Blue who is the surgeon general up in Washington D.C.
and basically — well let me just read it.
"Hundreds. Dirty. Lousey. Destitute. Mexicans arriving at El Paso daily.
Will undoubtedly bring and spread typhus unless a quarantine is placed at once."
The government didn’t agree to a full quarantine,
because evidence suggested that typhus wasn’t a major threat in the area.
But instead, they funded a new disinfection
plant at the border in 1916.
In this facility — every immigrant considered a “second class citizen” had to strip naked.
Their clothes were sent to a large
steam dryer,
and then fumigated with toxic pesticides inside “the gas room”.
An inspector would check each person’s body, including private parts, for lice.
If they found lice, immigrants would have to shave their head and body hair,
and bathe in a mix of kerosene and vinegar.
Some even had their eyelids checked for things like pink eye.
And many had to complete puzzles or simple IQ tests — to prove that they were fit for entry.
After this process, they’d receive a ticket,
as proof that they were disinfected.
But they would need to go through this every eight days in order to re-enter the US.
So many people didn't speak about it.
They didn't talk about this humiliating process. They kind of internalized it.
It's that psychology of shame.
The toxic baths and dehumanizing inspections at the border set the stage for a revolt
led by the 17-year-old maid from Juarez
who defied the order to bathe.
So Carmelita Torres was, I’ve compared
to the Rosa Parks of the border.
In the morning of January 28th, 1917.
There's this electric trolley full of mostly women that are crossing every day.
She convinces the majority, if not all the women in that trolley, to just say no. And to refuse.
And they start a spontaneous protest.
There are accounts that in addition to the humiliating delousing procedures —
for women, there was also sexual humiliation.
There were rumors that you know when they entered the plant and then they were told to strip,
the officers were taking their photos
and then posting them in bars.
So I can't even imagine the kind of feeling
like the feelings of violation and the feelings of, you know, outrage.
She was called an instigator, a ringleader.
But she was just a young woman that was just sick of the injustice, the humiliation that other women had gone through.
What started with just 200 protesters that
morning, slowly grew to a crowd of 2,000.
Reporters said "the scene reminded one of
bees swarming"…
"the hands of the feminine mob would claw at the tops of the passing cars."
When the American officers tried to disperse the crowd, they were met with bottles, rocks and insults.
Protesters even laid down on the tracks in front of the trolley cars to create a blockade.
They were joined by men — in what’s called the Bath Riots” —
and they shut down this border for three days.
And then all you hear is that,
the ringleaders are arrested and a few of the men are publicly executed.
As for Carmelita Torres —
It appears like she was thrown
in prison.
And as historians we don't know what happened to her afterwards.
We've lost every trace.”
The fumigations didn’t stop after the riots.
In 1917 alone, over 100,000 Mexicans were deloused at the border.
That same year, an Immigration Law made border procedures even more rigid.
Immigrants at all points of entry needed to have a passport,
take a literacy test,
and many would pay an eight dollar head tax.
And later that year, the US Public Health Service laid down instructions
for border agents about who should be kept out of the country.
“‘Imbeciles, idiots, feeble minded persons, physical defectives,
persons afflicted with loathsome or dangerous contagious diseases.’"
The discriminatory policies at the border resembled horrific events elsewhere in the world.
In fact, while researching this — David stumbled upon a detail:
The fumigation of Mexican immigrants wasn’t just reminiscent of Nazi Germany — it was directly linked to it.
It's not so much that that The United States was copying Nazi Germany.
It's the opposite. Nazi Germany was copying the United States.
He found that in 1929, the US started using Zyklon B,
an extremely poisonous acid gas, to fumigate clothing at the border.
And In 1937, in a German pest science journal,
a scientist called for the use of Zyklon B in Nazi disinfection chambers.
He included two photos of El Paso’s delousing chambers,
as an example of how effective Zyklon B had been at the US border to kill unwanted pests.
The same scientist pushed to use it to disinfect concentration camps.
And eventually, it was used in concentrated
doses to murder millions of people.
People, rightly so, say you can't compare what happened in Nazi Germany with other parts of the world.
And that's true. I mean and in terms of Zyklon B it was used on the border not to intentionally kill Mexican border crossings.
But the history of something like the Holocaust doesn't take place in a vacuum.
A few decades after the Bath Riots,
Mexico started sending men to work on US farms and railroads...
as part of a new labor agreement
called the Bracero program.
And through the program, the border disinfections continued.
Here in this facility, some migrants were
sprayed with insecticides.
This time, it was a substance called DDT.
A toxic pesticide, which, decades later,
would be banned for agricultural use by most developed countries.
Repeated contact must be avoided.
They were sprayed in the face. They
were sprayed in their private parts.
And you know they were stripped naked and inspected
and sometimes they're inspected like you would inspect livestock.
Firsthand accounts from immigrants in the program reveal how little they knew about the fumigations.
So they talk about how humiliating it was.
About ‘why do they think we're so dirty.’
They all call it the “white powder." I don't
know if they necessarily were told we’re
spraying you with DDT but they all call it
"el polvo" the powder.
The miraculous white powder that is helping to win the war, against disease.
Many of the employees who worked in the facilities weren’t given many details either.
When I first started my role was a clerk,
I got the job mainly because I spoke Spanish.
There was a hut in the area when they came in from the Mexican side that they would go in there.
And they had some sort of, it was for lice they said. To you know, disinfect for lice.
And we never gave it much thought but we did think, that’s sort of like
what the Nazi’s used to do, you know to the Jews.”
I had heard during lunch breaks that they would spray them.
And sometimes there were comments from the men themselves that they would
put a hose to them.
I don’t know if they knew what they were doing to them, I certainly didn’t know.
It was far-fetched from the world we lived in.
It wasn’t until the 1960s, when the Bracero program ended,
that health authorities acknowledged the chemicals were dangerous,
and the baths and fumigations were finally discontinued.
You want history to be about progress.
about, everybody realizes how horrible it is and then it stops.
Unfortunately you know that's how it works in movies.
But this was the border, right?
And in the border a lot of things never become resolved.
They just keep on repeating themselves.
Decades after the disinfection campaign ended,
the language, the strategy, and the dehumanizing politics of fear and exclusion still linger.
It’s a health issue too because we don’t
know what people have coming in here.
They’re coming in with diseases such
as smallpox, and leprosy and TB
that are going to infect our people in the United States.
It’s just a fact, you’re going to see disease outbreak.
Apprehensions in the El Paso area specifically have spiked more than 600 percent.
They are essentially being warehoused as many as 300 children in a cell.
Without adequate food, water and sanitation.
The United States is running concentration
camps on our southern border.
I don’t like anything compared to the
Holocaust.
Why can’t you compare it - his practices
- to what led up to the Holocaust?
Do we have to wait for the actual Holocaust before we speak out?”
At the border between Juarez and El Paso,
the same space where the bath riots once happened,
hundreds of migrants have been huddled
in makeshift, detention centers.
They’ve been waiting,
to find out if the US government,
deems them fit for entry.
As always, there’s so much information that we couldn't fit into this video.
But I wanted to leave you guys with one bit of information from David Romo’s book.
So in 1918, the southern border region was hit with its worst epidemic in history.
And it wasn't typhus, it was the Spanish Flu.
The best evidence we have suggests it was actually from Kansas, brought to the border by American soldiers.
Just wanted to leave you guys that tidbit.
Thanks for watching, and I can’t wait to share more episodes of Missing Chapter soon.
