On 28 January 1917, Carmelita Torres, a 17-year-old Mexican maid who worked in the United States, refused to take the mandatory gasoline bath given to day labourers at the border, and convinced 30 other trolley passengers to join her.
Her protest spread in what became known as the bath riots. Torres was one of many workers who crossed the border between Juarez and El Paso each day. In the name of public health, Mexican workers were frequently subjected to degrading and humiliating treatment. They had to strip naked, brave, undergo a toxic gasoline bath, and have their clothes steamed. The stated aim of the programme was to kill lice, which can spread typhus. However, it was not applied to everyone crossing the border: just working class Mexicans.
In addition to gasoline being poisonous, it was also a deadly fire risk. A group of prisoners in El Paso being treated with gasoline were burned to death in an accidental fire. Furthermore, US health workers were secretly photographing naked Mexican women.
On January 28, anger at the practice finally exploded, and within a few hours Torres had amassed a crowd of several thousand mostly women protesters. They blocked all traffic and trolleys into El Paso. They pelted immigration officers with rocks and bottles when they try to disperse them, and when US and then Mexican troops arrived they received the same treatment. The riots were eventually suppressed by the soldiers, and Torres herself was arrested. This appeared to have the effect of discouraging future protests.
The enforced bathing and fumigation of Mexican workers with toxic chemicals like gasoline, and later DDT and Zyklon B, continued until the 1950′s. The use of Zyklon B at the border appealed to scientists in Nazi Germany, who in the late 1930′s began using the agent at borders and in concentration camps for delousing. Although notoriously they later used it to exterminate millions of people in the Holocaust.“
@ the gringos in the notes whining about how they didnt know this and how their education system is shit…
1- the US consistently ranks higher than mexico in education
2- WE dont use that excuse, no one else but you does. google is free, shut the fuck up
3- if youve ever used that excuse you are now legally obligated to read about the following (on the internet, which again is free and you have access to)
- operation condor
- jacobo arbenz and how the US installed a brutal dictatorship in guatemala in order to turn the country into a banana republic
- banana republics in general (no, not the brand)
- the school of the americas + how the US government is directly responsible for most of the violence we have had to face in latinoamerica
- the tlatelolco and corpus christi massacres (see above)
- the mexican dirty war (see above)
- the 43 missing students of ayotzinapa and the CIA and DEA’s role in the mexican drug war + the mérida initiative/plan mexico(see above)
- the plaza de mayo mothers + the death flights and how the US put both Videla and Pinochet in power (see above)
- how the nazis based the holocaust off of the genocide of indigenous peoples comitted by the US (this is something that the nazis EXPLICITLY stated, btw.)
- how the US’s response to the jewish refugee crises of the 1930s led to more people dying in the holocaust
- operation paperclip
- the US-backed dictator fulgencio batista + all of the atrocities that he was comitting in cuba before the cuban revolution
most if not all of these have articles on wikipedia (i linked them), which again you can access for free RIGHT NOW. if you fail to do this i will hack you to pieces and feed you to the dogs. you have no excuses for being ignorant
I don’t know how to break it to some of you, but you will never know everything. Shit’s been happening on this planet for a long time and there’s a lot of people out there – at least a hundred. Schools teach whatever curriculum is approved and for reasons that should be obvious, they focus on basics and general knowledge. Should the schools teach us about atrocities and dark moments in our history? Other countries’ atrocities? Times we failed each other as a society and turned on each other? Maybe! Probably? At least some of them, for sure.
But your school is never going to have the time or the funding to teach you everything. No one knows everything. Every fucking day we learn something we didn’t know yesterday – and if that statement isn’t true for you, that is a personal problem and you need to examine why you aren’t learning and gaining knowledge and experiences.
A bunch of Americans learned their government did some pretty racist and abusive things to Mexicans and instead of learning more about it, or internalizing it as something to be wary of in the future the next time someone starts talking about illegal immigrants or talking about immigrants and migrants bringing illness or infestations across the border (anyone remember the way Chinese-Americans and immigrants were treated during Covid? If you don’t, that’s your new knowledge for the day), a bunch of you decided to make yourselves feel better by wailing and putting on a show about how no one told you.
Yeah, except OP did tell you. They told you just now. You have been educated and now you can choose how you react to that. Engage with OP and ask questions? Look it up and learn additional details and context? Discuss it with other people in the comments? Or are you going to sit there on your phone and make loud, unnecessary protests about how no one else spoon-fed you every bit of knowledge in history because it makes you feel better?
amhrancas 