Rumors as counter-discourse

Following historian Luise White’s (2000) proposal that rumors tell more precisely because they are essentially uncertain, determining whether these particular rumors are true or indeed false reports is not necessary to appreciate what they reveal about the Bath Riots. Furthermore, I argue that these rumors are evidence of what anthropologist James C. Scott calls a “hidden transcript” or “discourse that takes place ‘offstage,’ beyond direct observation” (1990, p. 4) by those in power. Paradoxically, the newspaper’s dismissal of the allegations as rumors points to a dialectics between border surveillance and subversion rather than a solid wall of dominance. Far from idle chatter, rumors refuse a respectable performance of consent with what we might otherwise consider to be a totalizing narrative that only spectacular moments of resistance can rupture. As historian Louise E. Walker (2013a, b) explains in her studies of intelligence archives, rumors pose a methodological challenge and opportunity through which one can “flip the gaze” to reconstruct history from the perspective of those left out of the extant historical record. As a critical part of everyday political culture, rumors not only express discontent with the public transcript, but they also perform dissent. These particular rumors destabilize the legitimacy of public health and newspaper reporting alike.

As Anzaldúa explains, rumor, like gossip, is a gendered category of speech; its lack of credibility stems not from each rumor’s uncertainty but from the association between rumor and women with loose tongues. In contrast to “well-bred girls” who never speak out of turn, “ser habladora was to be a gossip and a liar, to talk too much” (1987, p. 76). Anzaldúa goes on to explain, “hocicona, repelona, chismosa, having a big mouth, questioning, carrying tales are all signs of being mal criada” (p. 76). Gossip is therefore an illegitimate source of knowledge—to be a gossip is to be outside the bounds of proper femininity. In the fifth chapter of Borderlands La Frontera, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” she maps a complex linguistic terrain fraught with externally imposed and self-perpetuated borders. Language is “twin skin” to ethnic identity, yet always already a “male discourse” (p. 76). For Anzaldúa, overcoming silence involves reclaiming the many languages she speaks—Chicano Spanish, Tex-Mex, Pachuco—as well as the many voices in which she speaks them—her woman’s voice, her sexual voice, and her poet’s voice (pp. 77–81). Rumor is thus a multiply transgressive form of speech that poses a threat to patriarchal state authority and authorship. Just as the “outbreak narrative” portrays microbes as being indifferent to boundaries, so too do rumors spread, resisting capture at every turn.12

Constructing disease, constructing difference

It was this idea that typhus, a disease transmitted by lice, could spread on border-crossing bodies that Pierce leveraged to justify delousing with noxious chemicals and later (in the 1920s) with Zyklon B, the same fumigation agent used in Nazi Germany (Romo 2005, p. 223). The USPHS legitimized quarantine on the basis of many factors, including but not limited to El Paso’s rapidly changing demographics as a result of the ongoing Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and the expanding western and southwestern economies.13 By 1920, the Mexican population of El Paso was not only the largest in the United States, but it also surpassed the city’s American population.14 A typhus outbreak in a Los Angeles–based Southern Pacific Railroad work camp greatly contributed to the “racialized medicalization” of Mexican immigrants, who the press continuously portrayed in unsanitary living conditions.15 At the same time, labor demands created the conditions of possibility for exempting them from the 1917 Immigration Act.16

However, Mexican immigrants were subjected to restrictive public health policies even though immigration restrictions did not apply to them.17 The USPHS turned to the Angel Island Immigration Station in the San Francisco Bay as a point of reference to develop regulatory practices in El Paso. In contrast to the “six second exam” at New York City’s Ellis Island Immigration Station, Angel Island medical staff conducted extensive physicals.18 Under Pierce’s orders, the USPHS conducted nearly 900,000 medical exams between January and June of 1917 in the name of typhus prevention, but officials did not report a single case of typhus (Stern 1999). Yet El Paso differed significantly from its West and East Coast counterparts. Here, the USPHS focused on delousing by way of gasoline “baths” first mandated in the local hospital and jail.19 Even before the El Paso Health Department selectively approved of these baths in 1916, similar campaigns had been waged against the predominantly Mexican Chihuahuita neighborhood of El Paso. As historian John Mckiernan-González points out, the USPHS drew a medical boundary line between bodies that were otherwise in immediate and close proximity. Mexican women who worked as domestics and launderesses bore the brunt of racist public health campaigns in El Paso as well as at the border. However, Mckiernan-González explains that newspaper coverage consistently “obscured the circuits that connected public space and private health in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez” (2012, p. 197).

New understandings of disease were readily applied to typhus outbreaks as well as rumors of outbreaks in the United States and Mexico.20 The theory of supernatural origin had long been replaced by nonreligious explanations for the process of disease transmission. Contagionist views of disease had spread widely before the development of germ theory, but these notions became increasingly prominent in epidemiological textbooks of the early twentieth century, such as Surgeon General Victor Clarence Vaughan’s (1922) book Epidemiology and Public Health. Replete with military metaphors, this textbook describes contagion as a battle fought by medical men. According to Vaughan’s conception of contagion, foreign migrants—both human and animal—import disease to the United States (imagined as a discrete ecosystem) from non-Western societies. Vaughan explains that disease is prevalent in places with “relatively large numbers of ignorant people” and especially at borderlands. At the US-Mexico border, moreover, disease has displayed a particularly threatening “virulence” since 1910, which Vaughan claims is directly connected to “race stock” (p. 207). Mexican immigrants not only endanger Americans by refusing vaccination, he warns, they are largely immune to it, making compulsory vaccination laws the only viable solution in this battle against contagion. Couched in the language of scientific objectivity, the words of doctors like Vaughan provided the discursive grounds to justify delousing during a time when public health was gaining more authority as a federal government agency.

Expanding the spatiotemporal boundaries of the US-Mexico border is also necessary for understanding the conditions of possibility for USPHS practices. The US-Mexico border was a “porous” site of mixed communities that shaped and were shaped by racial politics and policies, especially anti-Chinese immigration restriction.21 Before moving to El Paso, Pierce had served as a sanitary officer in the Panama Canal and later curated the Public Health Service exhibit at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, including Angel Island in view.22 Similarly, Vaughan was a sanitation consultant at the World’s Columbian Exposition—better known as the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893—and subsequently studied the epidemiology of disease in army camps during the Spanish-American War.23 Far from banal bureaucratic assignments, the shifting posts of public health officials across sites of imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century links biopolitical subjection at the border directly to colonial medicine. The Anzaldúan approach I draw from Borderlands La Frontera expands the border geographically and chronologically to (1) include these legacies as not-yet-past, and (2) center gender and sexuality within the layered management of racialized bodies. It recognizes the disciplinary entanglements of race, gender, and sexuality across spatiotemporal boundaries and as “co-constituted by settler colonial projects” that played out on the border (Nakano Glenn 2015, p. 55). I now turn to popular press depictions of the Bath Riots in order to foreground the gendered dimensions of medicalized racial formations.

Nationwide coverage of the bath riots

Pierce’s quarantine order was issued on 23 January 1917—the very same week that General John Pershing withdrew US troops from Mexico—and went into effect on 27 January. In the days that followed the Bath Riots, newspapers across the country reported on the protest.24 According to the Atlanta Constitution, compulsory “shower baths” catalyzed riots at the Santa Fe Street Bridge (“Shower Bath Riots Continue at Juarez” 1917). The report nevertheless asserts the necessity of a border quarantine to prevent typhus from spreading. Echoing epidemiological textbooks of the early twentieth century, which posited a causal relationship between racial difference and disease, the press continuously constructs Mexican women as disease carriers who willfully endanger El Paso. The persistent association of Mexican-heritage people and transborder epidemics promulgated what historian Alan M. Kraut calls “medicalized nativism” (1994, p. 2–3), or the belief that foreign bodies—both human and animal—carry disease from non-Western societies to the United States, making the borders of US empire especially perilous (and precarious) contact zones.25 At 5:30 a.m., “200 women followed their sorrel-topped leader in another attempt to rush the bridge,” passing the boundary line before American troops could stop them, reports the New-York Tribune (“Mexican Amazons Injure 2 Soldiers in Bridge Rush” 1917). Both the New-York Tribune and the Atlanta Constitution state that US guards were “showered with stones” as well as broken bottles, framing them as victims of a brutal attack.

Despite the problem of forged quarantine certificates, “more than 200 Mexicans were given baths,” boasts the New-York Tribune (“Mexican Amazons Injure 2 Soldiers in Bridge Rush” 1917). In the Detroit Free Press, it was “nearly 300 Mexicans” (“U.S. Troops Win Battle of Baths” 1917). The Cincinnati Enquirer declares that, “nine hundred and twenty-nine Mexicans were given baths (“Danger of Repetition” 1917). This sum reappears in the Chicago Daily Tribune headline, “Dr. U.S. Bathes 929 Mexicans! And All Survive,” which positions the state as a medical practitioner (read protector of life) on the frontlines of a battle against typhus waged by Mexican women (“Dr. U.S. Bathes 929 Mexicans! And All Survive” 1917). The quantitative accounting of bodies under surveillance, meant to evidence order in spite of the Bath Riots, betrays the dehumanizing effects of USPHS practices. Paternalistic bathing euphemisms likewise expose the imperial rhetoric of benevolence as well as discourses of hygiene, purity, and progress underlying delousing procedures. Most significantly, the New-York Tribune adds that officials on both sides of the border instigated protesters by “avowing that the gringos were taking pictures of women who submitted to the bath” (“Mexican Amazons Injure 2 Soldiers in Bridge Rush” 1917). There’s a similar story in the El Paso Morning Times, which published a lengthy article on the Bath Riots the very next day.

Tracing the presence of absence

About two months after the Bath Riots, Pierce published an article in Public Health Reports addressing other medical professionals in his field. The article, “Combating Typhus Fever on the Mexican Border,” is a step-by-step account of delousing procedures at the El Paso Immigration Station. According to Pierce, typhus is most prevalent and therefore a “recognized menace” in border towns closest to the United States. Although typhus has spread throughout Mexico, he warns that it “is largely limited to the class of the population which is suffering from extreme poverty and is vermin infested” (Pierce 1917, p. 426). Medical professionals likely to come into contact with Mexican migrants are therefore most at risk. To “properly” control the spread of disease from Mexico to the United States, fully equipped plants were built “on American territory at border ports, so that they might be operated entirely under American control” (p. 426). These plants consisted of expanded bathing facilities as well as multiple rooms for sterilizing people’s belongings, clothing, and bodies. The article includes two photographs of the building’s exterior followed by two photographs of the building’s interior, none of which showcase its design. What does an Anzaldúan approach to these photographs reveal?

The first photograph, Fig. 1, shows the plant from the perspective of someone standing on the bridge facing El Paso. The point of view descends onto a group of “Mexicans waiting to be de-loused” (Pierce 1917, p. 427). The photograph centers the group rather than the building, which is further decentralized by its high-angle shot. In this photograph—and the second one, also of the building’s exterior—the camera is above eye level, creating a frame that looks directly down at those in waiting whose faces are not visible. On the right side of Fig. 1 is a blur, presumably the photographer’s hand holding up the camera to exaggerate height. The closer the figures are to the building, the less distinguishable they become, with those at the entrance completely covered by a shadow. The figures that are distinguishable lean casually against the fence, apparently in conversation with one another. Their quotidian stance depicts a sort of “contented subjection,” which the El Paso Morning Times report likewise overemphasizes.37 Figure 2 is another high-angle shot that shows a side of the plant as well as yard from the perspective of someone now standing on the adjacent bridge facing Ciudad Juárez. Here, the perspective is from outside of the fence portrayed in Fig. 1. There are no figures in this photograph, which further emphasizes the fence. In fact, the high-angle shot coupled with the multidirectional angles in the photograph foreground the fence around the building rather than the building itself. A long shadow casts another set of lines onto the building that extend past the fence and cover the yard. In the background is a watchtower. The spatial complexity of both the first and second photograph draws the viewer’s gaze into the same enclosure, albeit as an external observer overlooking from a “secure” distance closer to that of the watchtower.

Pierce declares that since the plant opened, “a noticeable improvement in the appearance of local passengers from neighboring Mexican towns has been observed as regards cleanliness of person and underclothing,” which he attributes to the science of steam chamber sterilization (Pierce 1917, p. 429). Upon entering the plant, people undress in gender-segregated rooms and push their clothing through a large hole in the wall that leads to a disinfecting room. Beneath it is a smaller hole for clothing that cannot be steamed (e.g., shoes, hats, and belts). If deemed necessary, these belongings are exposed to cyanogen (a toxic gas) in another building along with baggage, then marked. Pierce explains how the steam-chambers work in great detail, specifying temperatures guaranteed to kill lice and their eggs. His technical prose emphasizes the scientific regulation of bodies at the border, as well as the precise methods and motions of surveilling “aliens” (Pierce 1917, p. 428).

Figures 3 and 4 show the plant’s interior. The former pictures two uniformed men in the disinfecting room. They are both facing and looking at a steam-chamber carriage filled with bundles of clothing. In this detailed portrayal, the man in the foreground has one hand placed on the carriage, which is closed and ready to be pushed in the steam-chamber, while the man in the background has two hands placed on the steam-chamber. Drying people’s clothing is unnecessary in the dry climate of El Paso, which shortens the process of steam-chamber sterilization by ten minutes, he adds. Despite the altogether lengthy process, as well as the large group of people shown in Fig. 1, the uniformed men appear relaxed. They are paused in a productive posture yet not strained in any way. Figure 3 exemplifies the “quiet efficiency” of the plant cited in the El Paso Morning Times report (“Order to Bath Starts Near Riot among Juarez Women” 1917). The machines are more prominent than their operators, emphasizing the science—and scientific management—of delousing and, I would add, immigration at large.

Before entering the baths, “the naked person passes in front of a male or female attendant” who examines their hair for lice (Pierce 1917, p. 427). The hair of men with head lice is clipped, rolled up in a newspaper, and burned. Importantly, the process differs for women with head lice, whose hair is meticulously washed with a toxic chemical solution for half an hour. “Women with head lice have a mixture of equal parts kerosene and vinegar applied to the head and hair for half an hour with a towel covering the head,” explains Pierce. He continues, “The dilute acetic acid loosens the eggs from the hair and the kerosene kills or stupefies the adult lice, which are removed by washing the head and hair with warm water and soap” (p. 427). This process may be repeated, he confirms, to “dislodge” all eggs of lice and other parasitic insects. Pierce’s attention to hair provides another layer of significance to the selective descriptors focusing on Carmelita Torres’s auburn hair in the El Paso Morning Times. The underlying assumption is that shortening a woman’s hair would not be gender appropriate. In other words, border policing hinges on policing gender simultaneously with other categories of difference through the surveillance of bodies in gendered space. What’s more, delousing procedures literally and figuratively modify bodies under the pretense of protection.

The last photograph, Fig. 4, shows the baths to which women proceed “after being passed by the attendant” again (Pierce 1917, p. 427). In reality, the baths are shower-like fittings that spray what Pierce refers to as “soap”—a liquid solution of soap, water, and kerosene—on the women. He includes directions to make the soap, as well as how an attendant can operate the water system: “The persons bathed do not understand modern plumbing and cannot regulate the flow of hot and cold water through a mixing valve, so one valve at the shower always gives warm water” (p. 428). Once again, Pierce’s technological descriptions serve to situate Mexican-heritage people outside the time of modernity. Doing so likewise justifies the need for delousing as a means of progressing from modernity’s primitive past with the help of a state agent, further framing Mexican-heritage people as an uncivilized child race whom the state must rear into being. “The attendant watches the bathing process” (p. 427), after which the women are permitted to reclaim their clothing in another room. Dressed men and women are “looked over by the foreman” (p. 428), vaccinated, and given a certificate. Only then do they undergo a medical inspection akin to those conducted at the Ellis Island Immigration Station.

At first glance, Fig. 4—a front-angle shot from the attendant’s perspective “looking from undressing room”—seems to emphasize the water system. Pipes on the ceiling connect to shower-like fittings in stalls without roofs or doors. In the center of the photograph is a sink. However, the viewer’s gaze moves directly past it and into the maze of stalls instead. Although Fig. 4 collapses the division between public and private, it conceals just as much as it reveals. We can see beyond the doorway, but not throughout the maze of stalls. Most importantly, there are no women in the photograph; its voyeuristic view excludes the object of our gaze. The absence of women paradoxically emphasizes the racialized and sexualized violence of scopic regimes at the border.38 Rather than preserving a sense of propriety, removing them from view exposes the perversity in delousing procedures to which the rumors speak. Here, in the baths, public health officials photographed women nude—an allegation that Pierce promptly denied. Yet he included a photograph of the very same space in his publication. The “rumors among servant girls” rupture the representation of baths in Fig. 4 as well as the visual and discursive fields that produce difference as disease. Put differently, the rumors work to uncover the conditions under which this representation of baths was made possible, rather than recover women in its frame.

Reinterpreting archives, re-narrating histories

Indeed, methodologically, la facultad moves away from efforts aimed at recovering people who have been disappeared from the archives of history toward more complicated ends. How does absence record history? By emphasizing what’s not easily apparent, la facultad offers one way to access the archive’s “deep structure” and not only to read records differently, but also to engage with absence. Anzaldúa’s concept of la facultad is the kind of “acute awareness” needed to think through unrecoverable holes in historical accounts of the Bath Riots. As an archival reading practice, la facultad reveals the disruptive and disorderly telling that is already there, hidden in plain sight.

In other words, Anzaldúa’s writing is not a stand-in for voices erased from the dominant narrative, but an alternate reflection of archival loss, incompleteness, and partiality that invites another interpretation of archival materials. To summarize, I have argued that USPHS practices were central to the material production of racialized sexuality. An Anzaldúan approach that draws on her concepts of “wild tongues” and la facultad reveals the absences in photographs of the El Paso Immigration Station’s disinfection plant and a counter-discourse to delousing procedures in the circulation of rumors among working-class Mexican women. Anzaldúa’s reclamation of “wild tongues” highlights the potential of these rumors to serve as an entry point for viewing the Bath Riots from the perspective of speaking subjects. And la facultad provides a method to narrate history differently, one that “re-members and recodes the borderlands, bearing witness to the living past, the present, and the future, belying officialdom’s visible and invisible technologies of power to silence, deny, and obliterate” (Castañeda et al. 2007, p. x).