everything we know about Carmelita Torres is from a few newspaper accounts in 1917 they called her 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 u.s. 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 every day they line up in Juarez and often wait for hours to get through the u.s. 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 u.s. was about to enter a world war one all of a sudden you have the war hysteria created by World War one people here in El Paso that are deadly afraid that the Germans are going to attack from cdot Juarez the fear of invasion brought tensions to the border while across the u.s. 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 u.s. 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 Lee 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 Maryland'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 and a predominantly Mexican neighborhood if the inspectors found lice occupants were forced to take vinegar and kerosene bags have their heads shaved and clothing burned hundreds of homes were eventually destroyed Lee 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 laid a match 27 prisoners majority Mexican or Mexican American burned to death in the fire that the newspaper is called the jail Holocaust but despite the tragic fire merrily pushed forward with even more aggressive plans he sent a telegram a Western Union telegram to Rupert blue who was the Surgeon General up in Washington DC and basically well let me just read in hundreds dirty lousy destitute Mexicans arriving at our Paso daily will undoubtedly and spread typhus unless a quarantine this place 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 pinkeye 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 u.s. so many people didn't speak about it they didn't talk about this humiliating process like they kind of internalized it is 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 Carmelita Torres was I've compared her to the grosser parts of the quarter 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 of not all the women in that trolley to say no and to refuse 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 there you know when they entered the plant and then they were told to strip 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 you know but she was just a young woman that was just sick of the injustice of the humiliation that other woman had gone through what started with just 200 protesters that morning slowly grew to a crowd of 2,000 reporter 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 two 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 a hundred thousand 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 have to pay an $8 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 person's physical defectives persons afflicted with Llosa more dangerous contagious diseases 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 the United States was copying Nazi Germany it's the opposite Nazi Germany was copying the United States he found that in the 1920s the u.s. 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 and not C disinfection chambers he included two photos of El Paso's delousing chambers as an example of how effective zyklon-b had been at the u.s. 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 in terms of cyclone B it was used on the border not to intentionally kill Mexican border crosses 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 u.s. farms and railroads as part of a new labor agreement called the bracero program and through the program the border dis infections continued [Music] 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 first-hand accounts from immigrants in the program reveal how little they knew about the fumigations so they talked about how humiliating it was about why do they think we're so dirty they'll call it the white powder I don't know if they necessarily were told were springing you with DDT but they'll call it at all of all the powder 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 there was a Hut in the area when they came in from the Mexican side that they were going going there and they had some sort of it was for lice they said it was you know to disinfect for lice and we never gave it much thought but we did think sort of look what the Nazis used to do you know to the Jews I had heard during lunch breaks that they would spray him and and sometimes there were comments from the men themselves that they would put a host to them I don't know if they knew what they were doing to them I certainly didn't know didn't 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 you want history to be about progress about everybody realizes how powerful it is and then it stops unfortunately you know that that's how it works in movies but this was the border right and 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 coming in with diseases such as smallpox and leprosy and TB that are going to affect our people in the United States just a fact you're gonna 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 but why can't you compare it his to 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 Baths 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 [Music] as always there's so much information that we couldn't fit in this video but I wanted to leave you guys with one last bit of information from David Bravo'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