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.

1917 年 1 月 28 日，由 17 岁的卡梅丽塔·托雷斯领导的一群妇女在美墨边境违抗隔离令，要求墨西哥裔美国人在那里进行除虱。根据当地和全国对抗议活动的报道，有关美国公共卫生局官员拍摄女性裸体照片的谣言引发了后来被称为巴斯暴动的事件。本文将档案材料与 Gloria Anzaldúa 的Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza结合使用展示这些谣言如何破坏现有的历史记录。具体来说，我分析了报纸报道，以突出墨西哥女性作为需要监管的疾病携带者的种族化和性别化建设，以及埃尔帕索消毒厂的公共卫生照片。通过使用 Anzaldúan 的“野语”概念和la facultad作为阅读国家档案的方法论工具，我揭示了在墨西哥工人阶级妇女之间传播谣言时对生命政治服从的反话语。