On the morning of January 28, 1917, Carmelita Torres boarded the trolley that carried her from her home in Juárez, Mexico, to work in El Paso, Texas. At 7:30 a.m., the trolley stopped at the Santa Fe Street International Bridge. There, customs officials asked all Mexicans to exit the trolley and make their way to the disinfection plant, a two-story brick building that housed screening processes to determine eligibility to enter the United States.
Rather than comply with another round of mandated disinfection and inspection, Torres exited the trolley and convinced 30 other women to protest the humiliating process. After just an hour, the crowd grew to more than 200 protestors, and soldiers from nearby Fort Bliss were sent to break up the growing protest. But the women doubled down—they laid down on the tracks and they hurled insults at custom officials. They even reportedly clawed the trolley motor controllers from the hands of the motormen, effectively halting all bridge traffic for the day. Known as the Bath Riots, this event was much more than the refusal of a bath. It was a statement against the medicalized violence imposed on racialized bodies on the US-Mexico border.
Built in 1910, the Santa Fe Street Bridge plant “disinfected” Mexicans well into the 1920s and ensured that Mexicans were clean enough to work in the United States. More specifically, it ensured they wouldn’t carry any perceived pathogens into the homes of wealthy El Pasoans who relied on Mexican domestic labor, inspecting, on average, 2,830 people a day. The disinfection process, overseen by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS), began with corralling Mexican border crossers into sex-segregated lines. Crossers were then forced to strip naked so their clothing could undergo a chemical bath. USPHS agents then inspected each head for lice. Men with lice had their head shaved on the spot, while women were given a mixture of kerosene and vinegar to apply to their scalps. Then came the bath. Everyone was sent to showers to be sprayed with soap, kerosene, and water, and later, disinfectant Zyklon B. After the body was cleaned according to USPHS standards, clothes and certificates of disinfection were distributed. Entry, however, could still be denied based on perceived physical and mental deficiencies.
In the words of El Paso historian David Dorado Romo, “1917 was a bad year for the border.” Over that year, resentment toward nonwhite immigrants developed into institutional practices that justified and normalized racism in the name of public health. The ongoing Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and typhus outbreak of 1916 had already caused El Paso mayor Tom Lea and the white elites to advocate for closing the border and implementing a quarantine of ethnic Mexicans in Juárez and El Paso. The Immigration Act of 1917 solidified the perceived differences between Mexicans on both sides of the border and the white elite. It also mandated and justified exclusion based on perceived contagion, a preexisting practice at the US-Mexico border that now had broader support.