- Marcos Gonzalez Diaz
- BBC News Mundo Mexico correspondent
Credit, Courtesy NO MORE
The story of Carmelita Torres is so little known that there are not even pictures of her.
Little did the US authorities imagine that a 17-year-old Mexican girl would become, more than a century ago, the leader of the first protest against their policies for immigrants at the border.
Carmelita Torres, a resident of Ciudad Juárez who crossed the neighboring country every day to work as a maid in El Paso, Texas, refused to go through the bathing and disinfection process they were subjected to at the border to, supposedly, prevent typhus from spreading in the U.S.
The process was humiliating. Mexicans had to take off their clothes to be disinfected with steam. Afterwards, their naked bodies were sprayed with chemicals like gasoline and kerosene to kill possible head lice, which, if detected, meant that men and women were forced to shave their heads.
But on January 28, 1917, when Torres was asked to get off the trolley crossing the border at the Santa Fe Bridge to be fumigated, she desisted and persuaded another 30 passengers to join her.
The women left the vehicle to protest against this degrading and discriminatory practice. A short time later, the group already consisted of 200 people. According to the local press, after a few hours, there were about two thousand.
This protest would later be known as the Bath Riots.
Protest against discrimination
The reasons for the protest were many. The women feared that the fire at the El Paso jail, which months earlier had killed about 30 inmates of Mexican origin after being doused with gasoline, could happen again. This event has been sadly dubbed the “Holocaust”.
In addition, they also heard rumors that some American soldiers were taking naked pictures of them during inspection and then spreading them around the canteens.
Credit, UNITED STATES PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE
Mexicans’ clothes were disinfected in steam irons.
The group led by Torres began throwing rocks and bottles at US soldiers and blocked traffic between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. The demonstrators were so angry that the country’s troops were unable to contain them and called for Mexican intervention.
At that time, in the middle of the Mexican Revolution, the government of Venustiano Carranza feared that this protest against an American practice was also, in some way, a support for the enemy guerrillas of Pancho Villa, who months before had led the attack against Colombo, in the US. U.S
For this reason, they decided to send in the death squad commanded by General Francisco Murguía, one of their most feared soldiers. Although both armies surrounded the women, they continued to engage them.
Credit, El Paso Morning Times
The El Paso press referred to Torres as “the red-haired Amazon.”
“The threat that the United States perceived at the time was that of the Villistas, that classic Mexican figure in the war. For this reason, Carmela’s performance is almost unprecedented, due to the unexpectedness of such fierce and popular resistance by a young woman at that time”. , Abraham Trejo Terreros, a historian specializing in migration on Mexico’s northern border, told BBC Mund.
Two days later, the riots ended after the arrest of several of the participants. Carmelita Torres was also arrested, whose whereabouts are unknown among historians.
Some versions suggest that she could have been brought before a US judge who claimed she lacked jurisdiction to rule on an event that took place in Mexico. Whether she went to prison, she returned to Ciudad Juárez, or whether she was executed… It’s a mystery.
Why did they “disinfect” the Mexicans?
The appearance of typhus cases in central Mexico in 1916 set off alarm across the border.
In the border town of El Paso, local authorities moved and destroyed the homes of hundreds of families of Mexican origin, fearing they were sick.
They also searched house by house for possible traces of lice in order to spray those people with pesticides.
But El Paso Mayor Tom Lea believed this was insufficient and asked the US Public Health Service to impose tough measures to prevent typhus from reaching his city.
“Hundreds of dirty, squalid, miserable Mexicans arriving daily in El Paso will undoubtedly bring and spread typhus unless a quarantine is implemented,” he wrote in a telegram to Washington.
Credit, United States Public Health Service
This is the telegram in which Lea asked the health authorities in Washington to impose a quarantine on Mexicans entering the country.
Federal authorities did not consider this measure necessary, but ordered that all people entering the country through the border be “disinfected” with chemical baths against lice and other diseases.
Unfortunately, the protest led by Carmelita Torres did not put an end to this practice, but continued until the 1960s with another type of pesticide that was equally harmful to health: the cyanide-based Zyklon B, which was later used by Nazi Germany, or the DDT used on millions of Mexicans who temporarily migrated to work in the United States as part of the Bracero program.
For David Dorado Romo, author of “Unknown Stories of the Mexican Revolution in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez”, including that of Carmelita Torres, the fact that this practice continued so many years later makes it clear that the typhus alarm in Mexico was not the justification for its implementation.
“The USA maintained this policy and it was no longer for the initial reason, but for clear reasons of eugenics (the discipline that aims to improve a race or the human species)”, says the American historian of Mexican descent in an interview with BBC Mundo.
“(The typhus) was nothing more than a pretext to start this fumigation process that continued and for which, until today, the United States never apologized officially for this discriminatory treatment of Mexicans”, he criticizes.
Credit, US National History Museum
Farmers and workers who participated in the Bracero program decades after the Baños riots continued to be fumigated upon entering the United States.
In the same year of 1917 in which the Riots of the Baths were registered, the United States imposed the first barriers to the Mexicans in its border, that until then crossed the country freely and without any type of document.
“The first US immigration laws were based on the same eugenics and targeted countries that they considered to have genetically inferior people. Although you don’t see that official reasoning today, that legacy or imprint continues to this day in the country,” says Dorado Romo.
Ignorance of history
And it is that, despite the fact that more than a century has passed since the protests led by Carmelita Torres, experts believe that much of what happened then is more current than ever.
They refer, for example, to Mexicans who at that time began to try to avoid these controls to enter the US and began to cross irregularly.
“Since these types of measures were established, both medical and carrying passports, etc… all these requirements inaugurate these irregular crossings through unauthorized points that we hear so much about today, of course”, says Trejo Terreros, professor at the Centro de Economic Research and Teaching in Mexico.
Credit, United States Public Health Service
Mexicans lined up every day at the disinfection facility in El Paso before entering the United States.
Or they also point to the connection between those sanitary measures against typhus and those recently implemented against covid-19, such as the Title 42 that the US implemented to facilitate the expulsion of asylum seekers for reasons of public health during the pandemic, but which remains active almost three years later.
“Despite the discovery of disease-causing pathogens that do not respect the borders invented by humans, we once again believe that it is easier to control the bodies that cross these borders”, says Trejo Terreros.
“And this deeply racist idea of associating certain diseases with certain nationalities persists to this day and we saw this with the restrictions in the time of covid, which were greater depending on where they came from or how people looked.”
Despite her courage in defying the authorities, Carmelita Torres’ story is little known in both the United States and Mexico. That is why in 2020 “NO MÁS” saw the light of day, a radio and online drama that tells the story of the young woman and the riots.
“I’ve lived most of my life in El Paso not knowing of its existence. It’s not taught in schools. Instead, we all grew up knowing the name of (former mayor) Tom Lea but never knowing the horrible story about I honestly felt cheated when I found out,” says Meagan O’Toole-Pitts, author of the book.
Credit, United States Public Health Service
This was the women’s restroom and locker room area at the El Paso disinfection plant.
“I decided to pay homage to Carmelita in a way that I hope will continue for the next generation. I would have liked to have grown up looking up to her as an example”, he told BBC Mundo.
Historian Dorado Romo agrees that these facts do not have the necessary recognition, despite Torres “leading the first Mexican protest at that moment when the United States begins to stop having the border open for them”.
“History is not only made by men who fire bullets, but often comes from people who you see as ordinary, but who do extraordinary works of endurance and courage. History ignored Carmelita Torres for decades and only now is it re-evaluating this history”, concludes.