Pulling Up The Ladder
by digby
This must-read piece by David Neiwert gives some needed perspective to the stomach turning poll numbers showing that 70% of respondents want racial profiling, and the nearly as many of those who think the fact that it will end up harassing leg immigrants and citizens is just fine. It’s worth remembering that one of America’s defining features has always been its “exceptional” form of racism and xenophobia.
Neiwert uses the example of the Japanese internment to illustrate his point. I’ll use this:
For decades, U.S. health authorities used noxious, often toxic chemicals to delouse Mexicans seeking to cross the border into the United States. Before being allowed to cross, Mexicans had to bathe, strip nude for an inspection, undergo the lice treatment, and have their clothes treated in a steam dryer.
The treatment included gasoline baths and toxic fumigations (including DDT). The Bath Riots began when 17-year-old Carmelita Torres rallied 30 others in 1917 to refuse.
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.
U.S. and Mexican troops eventually quelled the riot, and young Torres was arrested. Though she’s been compared to Rosa Parks, Torres’ protest had little effect, Romo says.
The baths and fumigations (DDT and other insecticides were later used) continued for decades, long after the Mexican typhus scare ended.
It’s worse than that:
In Ringside Seat to a Revolution, author David Dorado Romo reveals some of his findings from the National Archives in Washington DC:
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.
The lice treatments in Texas are an extreme example, but still a hauntingly nostalgic picture of what many Mexicans still encounter today.
But as Neiwert points out, this cruel impulse is usually mitigated by the return to sanity of decent people who see the error of their ways when it’s demonstrated for them. That’s why the voices of good conscience must continue to speak out. That process doesn’t happen if they don’t.
Humans often tend to kick those members of society who are of a lower ethnic or racial caste or are on a lower socio-economic scale because they feel impotent to do anything to those who are the real cause of their angst and insecurity. (And it’s a special feature of right wing populism.) Our unique American spin on this is that the immigrant melting pot has also made this particular impulse a rite-of-passage for more established immigrants to prove their American bona fides. (And we always have blacks to throw to the jackals if the rubes get really restless.)
Update: Plus this