On 28 January 1917, seventeen-year-old Carmelita Torres led a group of women who refused to comply with quarantine orders at the US-Mexico border, igniting what would come to be known as the Bath Riots. The quarantine orders—issued by Senior Surgeon Claude Connor Pierce with the full support of El Paso Mayor Tom Lea—required Mexican-heritage people to undergo a lengthy, highly toxic delousing procedure before crossing the Rio Grande River via the Santa Fe Street International Bridge that connects El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Authorized under the pretense of typhus prevention, compulsory delousing transformed the bridge into a barrier for Mexican migrants.Footnote 1 Unlike Chinese and southern and Eastern European migrants, Mexican migrants had previously crossed the border unrestricted and were exempt from restrictions put forth in the 1917 Immigration Act. Mexican women, many of whom lived in Ciudad Juárez and worked in El Paso as domestics and laundresses, were disproportionately affected by public health control over the border.Footnote 2

According to the El Paso Morning Times, rioting began when United States Public Health Service (USPHS) officials ordered the women to get off the streetcars that transported them to the bridge every day and enter the newly refitted disinfection plant on the other end.Footnote 3 A closer look at newspaper coverage of the Bath Riots reveals that Carmelita Torres and her peers were not just protesting Pierce’s unprecedented border quarantine. More precisely, the Bath Riots resulted partially due to “rumors among servant girls” that officials had photographed women in the nude while subjecting them to the final stage of delousing: spraying the body with a kerosene-based chemical solution (“Order to Bath Starts Near Riot among Juarez Women” 1917).

Both scholarly and popular literature have frequently cited the Bath Riots as a singular and spectacular moment of resistance to the USPHS.Footnote 4 Yet it is viewed as just that, a moment with no lasting effects on public health control over the border, especially since compulsory delousing continued for years to come, even as part of the Bracero Program (1942–1965). Specifically, little attention has been paid to allegations that officials had photographed women in the disinfection plant when in fact these rumors evidence the buried traces of another story. By engaging archival materials with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza, I show how rumor raises critical questions of knowledge production that fundamentally recast the Bath Riots from a spectacular moment to a repository of unofficial history.

In particular, I analyze popular press articles—national and local newspaper coverage of the Bath Riots—to focus attention on the racialized and sexualized construction of working-class Mexican women as disease carriers in need of regulation. I then trace the presence of archival absence by analyzing four USPHS photographs, one of which depicts the women’s baths, included in a published article on the delousing procedure by Senior Surgeon Pierce. I operationalize Anzaldúan concepts of “wild tongues” and la facultad to argue that the absence of rumored photographs disrupts the existing historical record and lays bare issues of propriety and perversion central to the material production of racialized sexuality. The USPHS photographs in Pierce’s article repeatedly appear as documentary supplements to contemporary writing on the Bath Riots.Footnote 5 I employ Chicana feminist theory as a methodological framework to approach the “archive-as-subject,” or site of knowledge production, rather than a source of information about the Bath Riots (Stoler 2002, p. 93). In doing so, I build on the work of Howard Markel, Alexandra Minna Stern, and Natalia Molina, who have drawn attention to the long, intertwined histories of race, medicine, public health, and Mexican immigration—histories that John Mckiernan-González (2012) dates back to the mid-1800s.Footnote 6

Published in 1987, Borderlands La Frontera had a watershed impact on late twentieth-century feminist of color literature, women’s studies, and Latinx studies inside and outside the academy.Footnote 7 The book begins with seven mixed-genre chapters in which Anzaldúa develops a theory of borderlands as not only a specific geographic locale—the US-Mexico border where she was raised—but also an embodied landscape “present wherever two or more cultures edge each other” (Anzaldúa 1987, p. 20), producing an open wound. A “third country” nevertheless emerges from this liminal space defined by violence, including a distinctly bordered language, subjectivity, agency, and consciousness that undermine patriarchal nation-centric paradigms (p. 25). In short, Anzaldúan borderlands theory situates the site of wounding squarely within the racialized and sexualized body, which simultaneously conditions alternative ways of being and knowing.

Anzaldúa’s recuperation of loose tongues as “wild” in Borderlands La Frontera—especially in the chapter, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”—highlights the centrality of gender and sexuality to disciplinary discourses, practices, and policies, including those of the USPHS. In a seemingly routine medical encounter, a dentist attempts to control Anzaldúa’s tongue with dental instruments and materials during a root canal treatment. Before delving into the relationship between language, identity, and embodiment, Anzaldúa asserts, “wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out” (1987, p. 76). As a methodological framework, “wild tongues” reveals a counter-discourse to what historian Alexandra Minna Stern calls “eugenic gatekeeping,” or the twofold process of militarization and medicalization at the border.Footnote 8 Together with Anzaldúan borderlands theory, “wild tongues” emphasizes the remapping of “untamed” borders and bodies from an intersectional point of view, which then yields the historiographical revisions demanded by rumor. Through Anzaldúa, I advance another way to read popular press articles and public health photographs, a way that accounts for and addresses the absences constitutive of historical archives.

My study of the Bath Riots contributes to considerations of public health, archival power, and interdisciplinary discourses in Latinx studies scholarship. Taking up Anzaldúa to explore strategies of biomedical containment and subversion at the US-Mexico border makes public health legible as a contested site of Latinx othering. Public health was pivotal to early twentieth-century forms of governance, empire-building, and the making of Latinx difference. However, analytical concepts that privilege race—such as “racialized medicalization”—obscure the ways in which sexuality and other categories of difference emerged in relation to racial formation through policies enacted on the body (Molina 2014).Footnote 9 Practices like delousing, which the USPHS mandated only at the US-Mexico border, shaped and were shaped by the racialized sexuality of working-class Mexican women and are the historical antecedents of current policies targeting the Latinx population, especially in militarized border zones.Footnote 10

Furthermore, this essay shifts the scholarly focus on Anzaldúa’s methodological contributions (e.g., “autohistoria-teoría”) toward engaging with her concepts as methods themselves (Anzaldúa 2002, p. 578). Similar to “wild tongues,” I propose an engagement with Anzaldúa’s concept of la facultad—an embodied mode of perception conditioned by the borderlands—as a method of reading both against and “along the archival grain” to trace and expose issues of archival power (Stoler 2002, p. 100). Anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler argues, “We need to read for [the archive’s] regularities, for its logic of recall, for its densities and distributions, for its consistencies of misinformation, omission, and mistake” to account for the production of imperial state archives as a technology of rule (p. 100). It is precisely by reading into the “rumors among servant girls” that I draw attention to the gendered construction of their claims as rumors and ultimately, false reports. As an archival reading practice, la facultad recognizes a different account of the Bath Riots in which those subjected to delousing appear as agential subjects. Excavating oppositional narratives embedded within the archive is important given that all the archival material on the Bath Riots is produced by the state and therefore from the perspective of state agents.Footnote 11 Rather, la facultad opens up new discursive spaces within the archives of public health practices and policies in order to make these contestations visible while also addressing their erasure.

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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 15 At the same time, labor demands created the conditions of possibility for exempting them from the 1917 Immigration Act.Footnote 16

However, Mexican immigrants were subjected to restrictive public health policies even though immigration restrictions did not apply to them.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.

El Paso Morning Times coverage of the bath riots

The first headline of the El Paso Morning Times coverage reads, “Order to Bath Starts Near Riot among Juarez Women: Auburn-Haired Amazon at Santa Fe Street Bridge Leads Feminine Outbreak” (1917). The report repeatedly references the crowd’s rate of growth, allegedly reaching several thousand by late morning. Here again, quantitative accounting portrays white El Pasoans as helplessly outnumbered victims of an uncontrollably growing force. “One of the street car motormen, finally making his way back to the American side, emerged from the mob with half a dozen women clinging to him, endeavoring to drag him down,” it states (“Order to Bath Starts Near Riot among Juarez Women” 1917). The narrow escape of a single motorman from Juárez depicts El Paso as a safe haven under siege. He manages to cross the border, though not unscathed; the attackers use his body as their host, dragging him down as they enter the United States. Ubiquitous images like this one transform the women from targets of state management to agential embodiments of disease. In short, Mexican women degrade the nation’s social and moral values in the process of infecting white male citizens. The details of the report, as well as its headline dubbing the protest a “feminine outbreak,” point to the simultaneously racialized and sexualized construction of “superspreaders” in what literary critic Priscilla Wald calls an “outbreak narrative” (2008, pp. 4–5).

The report refers to the protest as an “anti-cleanup demonstration,” further linking delousing procedures to the regulation of racialized sexuality (“Order to Bath Starts Near Riot among Juarez Women” 1917). As early as the 1880s, El Paso conducted cleanup campaigns to displace sex workers already confined to certain areas of the city by law.Footnote 26 Meanwhile, Ciudad Juárez was literally and figuratively developed into an amusement park where social and moral values could be transgressed without consequence. In turn, this rebranded Juárez reinforced hypersexualized representations of Mexican women who, in the report, mercilessly overwhelm American troops while Mexican troops join in their quote “disgusting exhibition” (“Order to Bath Starts Near Riot among Juarez Women” 1917). Disgust expresses a moral judgment directly connected to late nineteenth-century anti-prostitution and social purity movements. In other words, refusing to be cleaned up is a sign of immorality that also undermines Juárez as a site of touristic consumption.Footnote 27

Even though “crowds of spectators” in El Paso watched the “excitement” of “a seething Latin mob scene” from only a few feet away, the women successfully prevented white tourists from crossing the bridge (“Order to Bath Starts Near Riot among Juarez Women” 1917). In fact, immigration officials barred entry for the day, stating that it was a “bad day for Americans” with “the rack [sic] track, gambling houses, and amusement places of Juárez” closed.Footnote 28 The report not only emphasizes injury to white bodies with objects like stones, but also the destruction of streetcars as well as other automobiles:

As soon as an automobile would cross the line the girls would absolutely cover it. The scene reminded one of bees swarming. The hands of the feminine mob would claw and tear at the tops of the cars. The glass rear windows of the autos were torn out, the tops torn to pieces and parts of the fittings, such as lamps and horns, were torn away. (“Order to Bath Starts Near Riot among Juarez Women” 1917)

This passage points to the pervasive conflation of human, animal, and microbial populations, and simultaneously conveys a challenge to the promise of continental expansion reproduced in automobile travel to Mexico.Footnote 29 The women take hold of car parts as weapons, reappropriating the vehicles—in some cases, the very vehicles that transport them every day—to block the Santa Fe Street Bridge. Similarly, automobiles made to transport middle-class white families purposefully malfunction at the hands of Torres and her peers. For one day, the scripting of manifest destiny is forestalled in their hometown of Juárez.

The report goes beyond situating disease squarely within the racialized and sexualized body and instead portrays the women as disease vectors, or nonhuman organisms that transmit disease. At the border, USPHS discourse, practices, and policies that had initially treated Mexican-heritage people as disease carriers then targeted these people as disease vectors, or nonhuman organisms that transmit disease. This more complex and multispecies construction of difference and disease goes beyond defining disease in racial terms and reveals another way in which “the dialogical interplay between empire and neocolony played out across the Rio Grande” (Stern 2005a, p. 52). Torres is an “auburn-haired Amazon,” leading “Mexican Amazons” as the New-York Tribune likewise describes the women (“Mexican Amazons Injure 2 Soldiers in Bridge Rush” 1917). The racialized and sexualized construction of Indigenous as well as Black femaleness undergird Torres’s discursive othering in the report. As Simone Browne explains, Blackness is central to surveillance as both a discursive and material practice that enforces the boundary line of borders as well as bodies (Browne 2015). The ways in which the report conceptualizes the protesting women is part of why their claims cannot be anything but “false.” As racialized and sexualized nonhuman organisms in need of regulation, violence against the protesting women becomes impossible to imagine. Rather, the women’s “impulse was to injure and insult Americans as much as possible without actually committing murder” (“Order to Bath Starts Near Riot among Juarez Women” 1917).

The women “kept up a continuous volley of language aimed at the immigration and health officers, civilians, sentries and any other visible American,” the report proclaims. The report continues, “Small stones were thrown, but the missiles were little more dangerous than the language.” Although the report exaggerates the weaponization of language by Mexican women, it also suggests that they had been “insulted” and photographed in the disinfection plant. The second headline of the El Paso Morning Times report reads, “Rumors among Servant Girls That Quarantine Officers Photographed Bathers in the Altogether Responsible for Wild Scenes” (“Order to Bath Starts Near Riot among Juarez Women” 1917). How should we read the circulation of rumor in this key moment of resistance? As I explained earlier, Anzaldúa’s recuperation of loose tongues as “wild” points to rumor’s subversive potential. From an Anzaldúan perspective, the “rumors among servant girls” register a competing narrative to the USPHS, one that alludes to the impossibility of telling a rumored story for which there is no documentary evidence. Indeed, in the case of the Bath Riots, although there are photographs of the disinfection plant in the archives, the photographs mentioned in El Paso Morning Times are nowhere to be found. How then might we account for this absence?

La facultad as archival reading practice

Anzaldúa explains that living in the borderlands forces la mestiza to develop new modes of perception for survival. In particular, she gains a sixth sense called “la facultad” (Anzaldúa 1987, p. 60). Like the “new mestiza consciousness” she attains by crossing external as well as internal borders, la facultad rejects binary oppositions in favor of plurality (p. 99). Most importantly, it allows la mestiza to perceive everything, including herself, through other sensate registers. “La facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface,” explains Anzaldúa, “It is an instant ‘sensing,’ a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning” (p. 60). As an affective archival reading practice, la facultad engages with the limits constitutive of the archives themselves and highlights the presence of archival absence as an ongoing effect of US imperialism.

As historian Julian Lim (2017) states, the archive is “a direct product of the processes of racial differentiation, segregation, and exclusion that occurred in the US-Mexico borderlands a century ago” (p. 8). In other words, the archive perpetuates violence precisely because violence constitutes the process of historical production. Yet state archives regulate what we can know about the Bath Riots and the women who led it. That is a fact. At the same time, la facultad activates the “decolonial imaginary” and, in doing so, reveals a refusal to the terms of biopolitical subjection at the border.Footnote 30

What’s more, the absence of photographs does not eliminate the possibility of tuning in to sound. A rumor is first and foremost auditory, and something we can still listen to. In the words of Tina Campt (2017), what can a “haptic” engagement with the sonic frequencies of absent photographs tell us about the Bath Riots?Footnote 31 How does the story change when we look through the prism of what isn’t there? The “rumors among servant girls” evidence a competing narrative, thereby advancing another interpretation of state archives. In turn, spreading rumors has the capacity to rupture controlling systems of accounting, turning transmission into a kind of protest that registers a challenge to authority and authorship as well as historiographic convention. Even now, we cannot know. Perhaps working-class women who commuted to El Paso on a daily basis exchanged information about delousing procedures through an organized network deemed rumor mill in the aftermath of the Bath Riots. Perhaps they planned to collectively rush the bridge and physically transgress boundaries as their words did despite the constraints of everyday life. Perhaps, if we listen, the rumor of photographs is confirmation enough.

Reading with la facultad

Anzaldúa elaborated on la facultad before and after the 1987 publication of Borderlands La Frontera.Footnote 32 Tracking the concept’s evolution shows that she eventually and explicitly put forth la facultad as a methodology in line with how I bring it to bear on the absences constitutive of historical archives.Footnote 33

While Anzaldúa first introduced la facultad in Borderlands La Frontera, earlier formulations of the concept call attention to its key features. In a 1983 interview, Anzaldúa describes la facultad as “an extra sense” acquired by those “caught between worlds” (2000b, p. 122). She emphasizes that marginalized subjects, particularly the multiply marginalized, develop la facultad in response to oppression “because it’s a matter of survival” rather than choice (p. 122). As she straightforwardly states, “it’s not because we cultivated it; it’s because the world forced it on us” (p. 122). The necropolitical conditions of living in-between activate la facultad, especially to preempt direct violence by knowing “the next person who’s going to slap you or lock you away... the rapist when he’s five blocks down the street” (p. 122). The ability to know the truth even when the truth is not apparent, which Anzaldúa frequently explains as a way of seeing through, makes la facultad akin to the senses but also to extrasensory perception.Footnote 34 Anzaldúa thus situates la facultad within the body and holds that such faculties simultaneously “belong to the other realm” or “other world” or “creative life force” (pp. 122–123). She claims that “this radar” is fundamentally creative and “connected to creativity,” which sets the stage for linking la facultad, conocimiento, and spiritual activism in her later work (p. 123).Footnote 35

In one of her later essays, “Geographies of Selves,” Anzaldúa once again emphasizes that la facultad is a survival response (and tactic) for those “forced to negotiate the cracks between realities” (2015, p. 79). However, la facultad also plays a central role here in reimagining identity and, more specifically, an alternative sense of self beyond binaries. “When we adapt to cambio (change),” explains Anzaldúa, we develop new terms, definitions, “and la facultad (the ability) to accommodate mutually exclusive, discontinuous, and inconsistent worlds” (pp. 79–81). The shift in consciousness from an us-versus-them or nos/otras mentality toward what she calls “nosotras” requires la facultad, which allows for a hybrid self that encompasses both different selves and others. At the same time, la facultad is itself a non-Western form of knowledge that necessarily rejects Enlightenment ideals.Footnote 36 Anzaldúa expands the concept from an ability that primarily marginalized subjects possess to an onto-epistemological reimagination of identity (including selfhood) to, unsurprisingly, a way of reading that further complicates identity.

In “To(o) Queer the Writer,” Anzaldúa proposes the idea of “reading with a queer facultad” to challenge deterministic assumptions about identity, reading, and writing (2009, p. 170). She argues that a collaborative process of meaning-making and, consequently, identity formation, unfolds between reader and writer whether or not they share the same identities. To illustrate this point, she provides several examples of feeling more understood by straight white readers than fellow queer people of color. For Anzaldúa, this occurs because recognition is not determined by the reader’s identity (or the writer’s aesthetic) but the “sensibility” with which they read (p. 170). Reading with a queer facultad allows non-queer readers to “see into” and “see through” to unconscious falsifying disguises by penetrating the surface and reading underneath the words and between the lines” (p. 171). “As outsiders, they may see through what I’m trying to say better than an insider,” she asserts, “For me then it is a question of whether the individual reader is in possession of a mode of reading that can read the subtext, and can introject her experiences into the gaps … deciphering a “strange,” that is, different, text” (p. 171). Anzaldúa goes on to say that she herself developed the facultad to read against the grain despite having learned to distrust her sensibilities in school (p. 173).

Importantly, Anzaldúa is concerned with reading “as in the act of reading words on a page, but also “reading” reality and reflecting on that process and the process of writing in general” (2009, p. 169). In this way, Anzaldúa’s own reconceptualization of la facultad—as a queer reading practice that can decipher what’s underneath and between—is consistent with how I take up la facultad to read archives. Both engagements with la facultad as a method bring to the fore issues of knowledge production by reading text (in my case, the archive-as-text), subtext, and structure. Herein lies the transformative capacity of an archival reading practice based on la facultad: it reads for the “unconscious falsifying disguises” that make up state archives. Put differently, it gives prominence to how various types of violence, including colonial dispossession, structure the archives and, in doing so, negotiate the impossibility of archival recovery. By scrutinizing the process of historical documentation, la facultad perceives the power-laden construction of text and subtext and, specifically, systematic erasure. To penetrate the archival surface—what is visible—la facultad deciphers absence—what is not visible—and challenges the archive’s evidentiary claims.

For me, absence is distinct from subtext, which is precisely why deciphering it calls for a different way of reading. The archive records minoritized subjects as absence. Numbers stand in for those subjected to delousing in newspaper coverage of the Bath Riots. Torres likewise becomes apparent only through the absence of her personhood. As I have shown, an Anzaldúan reading of rumor does not recover Torres’ first-person narrative but makes known its structurally produced absence. What I refer to as the presence of absence indexes a counter-narrative that yields a “strange,” that is, different, text. The presence of absence is evidence, albeit alter- or anti-evidence, much like José Esteban Muñoz’s “ephemeral” is proof of queer subjects, histories, and lifeworlds (Muñoz 1996). Muñoz explains that “queerness is often transmitted covertly” (versus as visible evidence) out of necessity and “instead [exists] as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere—while evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility” (p. 6). Reading with queer facultad—and la facultad itself—accesses the realm of ephemera, which resists, must elude, and is occluded by dominant systems of legibility. Indeed, ephemera is material yet “performatively polyvalent” rather than epistemologically fixed, hence the need for a non-ocular ability to see its traces (p. 6).

This brings me back to Anzaldúa’s definition of la facultad in Borderlands La Frontera as “an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings … behind which feelings reside/hide” (1987, p. 60). Anzaldúa associates la facultad with feeling because it taps into the affective layers of an object, people, events. She often uses distance and dimension—“depth”—to describe a structure of feeling that only a perceptual shift can access. As opposed to the act of surfacing, enacting la facultad involves a vertical “plunge” (p. 61). When applied to reading archives, la facultad still relies on the affective as a hermeneutic. Consequently, engaging archives with la facultad doesn’t fill in that which has been erased; rather, la facultad reanimates that which already exists ephemerally. My analysis of the USPHS photographs plunges further into what is seemingly absent.

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.Footnote 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.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Outside of the USPHS Disinfection Plant in El Paso, Texas. Pierce’s caption reads: “INTERNATIONAL BRIDGE, FRONT END OF EL PASO DISINFECTION STATION, AND MEXICANS WAITING TO BE DE-LOUSED.”

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Fig. 2
figure 2

Outside of the USPHS Disinfection Plant in El Paso, Texas. Pierce’s caption reads: “SIDE VIEW OF DISINFECTING PLANT AND YARD.”

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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.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Inside of the USPHS Disinfection Plant in El Paso, Texas. Pierce’s caption reads: “CLOTHING READY FOR DE-LOUSING BY STEAM.”

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Fig. 4
figure 4

Inside of the USPHS Disinfection Plant in El Paso, Texas. Pierce’s caption reads: “BATHS ON WOMEN’S SIDE OF PLANT, LOOKING FROM UNDRESSING ROOM.”

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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.Footnote 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).