On this day in labor history, the year was 1917.
That was the day Carmelita Torres led the Bath Riots at the El Paso/ Juarez border.
Mexican workers traveled daily across the Sante Fe Bridge from Juarez, Mexico into El Paso, Texas for work.
As a condition of entry, workers were required to strip naked and be sprayed with a toxic mixture of chemicals.
U.S. Health officials insisted they were stopping the spread of typhus through this type of delousing campaign.
They were just as motivated by racist typecasting of Mexicans as dirty.
David Dorado Romo, author of Ringside to a Revolution, tells the story of 17-year old Carmelita Torres.
Amid rumors that health workers secretly photographed and then distributed photos of the naked women as they were being sprayed, Carmelita crossed into El Paso everyday where she worked as a maid.
On this day, instead of stripping down, she refused fumigation and convinced the other women to demonstrate with her against this humiliating, daily procedure.
Within an hour, she and 200 other women had blocked all traffic coming into El Paso.
Newspaper reports claimed several thousand protesters by the end of the day.
The women marched to the disinfection camp, hoping to convince those undergoing “disinfection” to join them.
When health officials tried to disperse the crowd, they were met with rocks and bottles.
The women then laid down on the trolley car tracks to stop the delivery of more workers and wrestled with motormen for control of the cars.
The riots lasted for three days, but the spraying of Mexican workers with DDT and other toxic chemicals continued for more than 40 years.
February 21 - The First Female Telephone Operator
February 20 - Angelina Grimke is Born
February 19 - Philly Street Car Workers Spark General Strike
February 18 - Anti-Slavery Begins in America
February 17 - Standing Up By Sitting Down
February 16 - The Wisconsin Uprising Begins
February 15 - The Uprising of the 20,000 Comes to a Close
February 14 - Kansas City Laundresses Walk Off the Job
February 13 - Martial Law Declared to Crush the UAW
February 12 - The NAACP is Founded
February 11 - Cutting Corners on Safety at Sequoyah I
February 10 - Forty-Three Workers Buried Alive
February 9 - Organizing Bloody Harlan
February 8 - Butte Copper Miners Join the 1919 Strike Wave
February 7 - Strike at Cripple Creek
February 6 - Philly Garment Workers Win!
February 5 - The Fight for Craft Governance
February 4 - Solidarity on the Coast
February 3 - Anti-Trust Injunctions Used Against Labor
February 2 - The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
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