On this day, 28 January 1917, Carmelita Torres, a 17-year-old Mexican maid who worked in the US, 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. However, the practice of fumigating workers with a toxic cocktail of DDT and Zyklon B continued until the 1950s.
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“The Mexican housekeepers who revolted had good cause to be upset. Inside a brick disinfectant building under the bridge, health personnel had been secretly photographing women in the nude and posting the snapshots in a local cantina. A year earlier, a group of prisoners in the El Paso jail died in a fire while being deloused with gasoline. […] The baths and fumigations (DDT and other insecticides were later used) continued for decades, long after the Mexican typhus scare ended.”
“I discovered an article written in a German scientific journal written in 1938,which specifically praised the El Paso method of fumigating Mexican immigrants with Zyklon B. At the start of WWII, the Nazis adopted Zyklon B as a fumigation agent at German border crossings and concentration camps. Later, when the Final Solution was put into effect, the Germans found more sinister uses for this extremely lethal pesticide. They used Zyklon B pellets in their own gas chambers not just to kill lice but to exterminate millions of human beings. But that’s another story.” source