In this op-ed, musician and artist René Kladzyk explores the history of the border that divides the United States and Mexico, a highly-contested location where young women have resisted mistreatment for decades.
One hundred years ago, 17-year-old Carmelita Torres inspired hoards of women to block traffic on the Santa Fe International Bridge into El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juárez — the bridge between the United States and Mexico — refusing to move in protest of a horrifying and degrading border policy. A century later, the U.S. is still grappling with the same issues that prompted this uprising.
Carmelita, a domestic worker from the Chihuahua city, has been referred to as the “Latina Rosa Parks,” yet her name is lost in obscurity. That’s likely because she is connected to one of the most grotesque examples of institutionalized anti-Mexican prejudice ever in the U.S., an event that has been erased from most history books.
Preceding the 1916 typhus outbreak in Los Angeles and fueled by stereotypes of “dirty Mexicans,” the U.S. government launched a quarantine policy along its southern border. This policy dictated that in order to enter the United States, Mexicans would be forcibly stripped naked and bathed in poisonous chemicals, including kerosene and Zyklon B.
Carmelita heard about the forced baths and knew that border agents had been taking photos of naked Mexican women and posting them on the walls at a local cantina. She also knew that people had been accidentally set on fire in an El Paso jail after being bathed in kerosene at the border, an event known in the area as the Jail Holocaust. On January 28, 1917, Carmelita approached the border for her daily commute and was asked to get off of the trolley for the gas disinfection, but refused the process. In doing so, she sparked monumental women-led protests — first 30, then hundreds, then thousands of women took to the border crossing, laying down across the tracks of the trolley cars. These protests were called the Bath Riots, and eventually led to Carmelita’s arrest. Despite outcry, the quarantine policy remained in place for another 40 years.
Undercurrents of white supremacy and anti-Mexican xenophobia in the U.S. political system have not dissipated since the quarantine policy ended in the late 1950s. In 1954, the U.S. launched a deportation initiative under President Dwight Eisenhower officially called Operation Wetback, a policy that President Donald Trump has hailed as a model for his anti-immigration efforts. Originally, this policy was created in response to the Bracero Program, a U.S. initiative in effect from 1942 through 1964 that brought an estimated 4.5 million Mexican laborers into the United States, calling on the inexpensive labor of Mexican immigrants for low-wage industries like agriculture, then turning to appease widespread racist and xenophobic pressure. This conflict is evident in the simultaneity of these two programs, both of which Trump is currently working to resuscitate.
Sexism is also endemic to the military industrial complex at the border, with not only female border patrol agents being subject to intense harassment by fellow officers, but also a disproportionately high rate of sexual misconduct among border patrol officers toward immigrant women and children detainees.
Job opportunities along the border are also gendered. When the Bracero Program ended in 1964, Mexico and the U.S. launched the Border Industrialization Program, a predecessor to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that brought thousands of factory jobs to the border. The proliferation of these factories, called maquiladoras, along the border in the 1970s and ‘80s ushered women into the workforce en masse, but the working conditions were often dire, characterized by low pay, long hours, unsafe working conditions, penalties for any attempt toward unionization, and sexual harassment. Since the vast majority of maquiladora workers were women, the risks associated with this work also disproportionately affected women.
Additionally, the murders of women in Juárez, termed “femicides,” have also been connected to the infrastructure of maquiladora employment, with some blaming the killings on a “fatal indifference” toward Mexican women by the international corporations that profited from their labor.
I grew up crossing the bridge between El Paso and Juárez and because of that, I’ve seen the borderlands change with shifting U.S. policies. So when I learned about the brutal history of Carmelita and the quarantine policy, I wasn’t entirely shocked. Racist, sexist, and xenophobic ideologies that made it possible are still very much present in U.S. institutions today. I’ve experienced it first-hand by growing up here, although I experience it along an axis of privilege based on my fair skin, my U.S. passport, my socioeconomic status, and my perceived gender. Growing up on the border has shaped my identity profoundly and made me deeply aware of how I am connected to broader geopolitical processes. Sometimes when people ask where I’m from, I say that I’m a child of NAFTA — I spent my early childhood in Michigan while my dad worked for the automotive industry, and after the passage of NAFTA in 1994, when all those jobs left Michigan and moved to the border, so did my dad. He married my stepmom, who is from Juárez, and I became a fronterizo (a borderlander). I have found that the dynamic between El Paso and Juárez is a microcosm of the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico, revealing interconnections and divisions between the two countries in more extreme ways than anywhere else.
The last time I was there, my dad and I walked out toward the spot on the border where the U.S. Border Patrol shot and killed a 15-year-old unarmed Mexican boy in 2010, shooting from the U.S. side into Mexico. We ended up talking to the border patrol agent who worked that zone of the border. He described himself as an amateur historian, born and raised in El Paso with Mexican ancestry. We talked about the quarantine policy, the Bath Riots, and the dark history of the border. We talked about how Adolf Hitler had complimented the U.S. on the border quarantine policy — the Third Reich even modeled the way Zyklon B was used in concentration camps based off of how it was used in “gas chambers” in El Paso-Juárez.
It’s when I think of these horrifying undercurrents to border policy that I become even more amazed by the courage of Carmelita Torres. I can only imagine how she felt when she stood up to the U.S. Border Patrol in opposition to their demands. I marvel at the strength of spirit it must have taken for Carmelita and the women who joined her to resist when faced with the violent power and strength built upon the landscape at the border. The El Paso Times described the protesters that day as “Amazons,” and said “the soldiers were powerless,” even though the cavalry that was brought out to quell the Bath Riots were known as “the death squad,” bearing sabers and insignia with skulls and crossbones.
I was thinking about Carmelita and her Amazonian posse when I recently made a music video for my song, “El Paso,” on the downtown bridge between El Paso and Juárez. I gathered together a group of femme friends, and we filmed each other with our phones as we swayed, skipped, and ran across that contested and violent line. We experienced small doses of the power structures embedded there, with Border Patrol agents forcing us to delete footage and sexualized threats of violence by cat-callers, but it was also a moment of being acutely aware of our privilege. Growing up on the border, I often think about how profoundly my awareness of it is shaped by my ability to cross the borderline. Yet for so many who live on the southern side, it’s an impenetrable divide.
The creation of policies like NAFTA make it easier for products and money to flow across borderlines, while the mobility of people across the border is becoming increasingly constricted. This tendency of simultaneous interconnection and division has characterized the relationship of the U.S. and Mexico for its entire history, reflecting an ambivalence between twin pillars of capitalism and racism. It’s especially evident in places like El Paso-Juárez, which was one city before the borderline was placed there, but it’s echoed throughout the world in landscapes carved by colonization and economic imperialism. Regardless of our location, we embody these power structures in our daily lives, through the products we consume and the way we navigate the world. The lines of institutionalized inequality run deep, and I believe the task is for more people to embody them like Carmelita Torres — with resistance, courage, and conviction. The first step is knowing her name and her story.
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