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KTAL RADIO 101.5 FM

KTAL Radio presents original radio play about El Paso Bath Riots

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At 7 p.m. Saturday Sept. 19, KTAL Radio (101.5 FM) of Las Cruces will present the original radio play “NO MÁS,” the story of Carmelita Torres and the El Paso bath riots of more than a century ago, KTAL announced in a news release.

In January 1917, “the mayor of El Paso and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service set up what they called The El Paso Disinfection Plant at the Santa Fe Bridge (between El Paso and Cuidad Juarez), allegedly to combat the disease typhus,” the news release said. “It required all immigrants coming from Juarez to file through the facility and strip naked, where they were doused with kerosene, gasoline, sulfuric acid and the notorious chemical Zyklon B, the toxic gas later used in the Nazi death camps. The workers, both men and women, were subjected to this treatment every day before they could enter El Paso for their daily jobs.

“Carmelita Torres, a young housekeeper from Juarez, refused to submit to this humiliating procedure and led more than 200 women in a sit-down action in front of the trolleys that shut down the city for three days.”

“Before I started doing research on the 1917 Bath Riots, I didn’t know what a ‘Greaser’ film was, playwright Meagan O’Toole-Pitts said. “I didn’t know that the filmmaker who made ‘The Birth of a Nation’ first made ‘Greaser’ films, which were films that depicted Mexican characters as immoral ‘bandits’ and villains. I didn’t know that one of our El Paso mayors once called people crossing the bridge, ‘dirty, lousy, destitute Mexicans’ in a telegram to Washington, D.C. I didn’t know Zyklon B was first used in the U. S., in El Paso. I didn’t know that until 1922, American women would lose their U. S. citizenship if they married a citizen of another country. (American men did not risk losing their citizenship, no matter who they chose to marry.)

“All of this I didn’t know,” O’Toole-Pitts said. “It was all eye-opening. Carmelita Torres was living in a world that was openly and brazenly racist. ‘Greaser’ is a racial slur that refers to a person of Mexican decent. ‘Greaser’ films were popular in the 1910s and shown in Nickelodeons throughout the country. I was astonished to learn how much racism and negative stereotypes would have been in her face, day in, day out. And on top of that, now she had to strip naked in front of American men and be deloused just to go to work every day? Why? She must’ve asked herself why. ‘Is it because they think I’m dirty?’ she must’ve thought. I can see why she decided one morning: Enough is enough. I can see myself getting just as angry and fed up, although I don’t know if I would’ve had her courage. She is a truly remarkable person in history, and I feel almost robbed that I did not learn about her sooner, that there is not a parade or holiday or statue in her honor. She’s a hero for the Mexican people and women.

“So, I felt compelled to give her a voice,” O’Toole-Pitts said. “First, I wrote a stage play and then another. But the pandemic forced me to rewrite again, this time a radio play. A radio play allowed me to conduct rehearsals remotely and offer the performance remotely, keeping the actors and audience safe. It took me about two months to write “NO MÁS,” the radio play. I completed it in April 2020. I wanted the play to be as historically accurate as possible.

“NO MÁS” will be performed by members of the Lustre Theatre Company of El Paso.

Contact O’Toole-Pitts at motoolepitts@gmail.com. Visit https://nomasep.com/ and www.facebook.com/lustretheatre.

KTAL Radio, NO MÁS

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