“Wild tongues can’t be tamed”: Rumor, racialized sexuality, and the 1917 Bath Riots in the US-Mexico borderlands

Abstract

On 28 January 1917, a group of women led by seventeen-year-old Carmelita Torres defied quarantine orders at the US-Mexico border, where Mexican-heritage people were required to undergo delousing. According to local and national coverage of the protest, rumors that United States Public Health Service officials had photographed women in the nude ignited what would come to be known as the Bath Riots. This paper engages archival materials with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza to show how these rumors disrupt the existing historical record. Specifically, I analyze newspaper reports to highlight the racialized and sexualized construction of Mexican women as disease carriers in need of regulation and public health photographs of the El Paso disinfection plant. By employing Anzaldúan concepts of “wild tongues” and la facultad as methodological tools for reading state archives, I reveal a counter-discourse to biopolitical subjection in the transmission of rumors among working-class Mexican women.